Arcane damage is insane in dungeons before 85.Follow

Now you know how us handful of die hard Frost magi felt during Wrath.

There isn't a core rotation. Fire is not a direct damage spec. Like some Locks and Cats Fire is really a DoT spec with some Direct Damage over top... (Direct Damage = Arcane)

My understanding is that you want:

Fire Orb - On CD
LB always up (Do not clip it though)
Scorch (To establish Critical Mass)
Fireball - Hope for Crits
Don't let Critical Mass Fall off

Pyro when prompted

Use Combustion Helper to see Optimal time to use Combustion.

Hope for crits, Save Mirrors for when the idiot tank stands in the fire - they'll buy you 15 seconds-ish.

Pop you Gem at ~15,000 mana down, burn till you can Evoke,

Don't "Scorch weave" anymore. Scorge is for movement or often interupted fights or keeping Critical Mass up (If the RNG hates you and you don't get a Pyro! proc)

*Prior to this patch you needed to scorge weave and could not FB spam (It was not mana-sustainable) That is no longer the case unless you are litterally doing nothing but FBFBFBFBFBFBFBFBFBF.... Which you will not be doing.

*Frotfire Bolt has a small dot that stacks to 3. I never found it very big and noticed that I couldn't pull the trigger on Combustion until it was up. That caused me to Tunnel Vision on the Combust/Helper Mod - and I decided to ditch it in favor of FB. My understanding is that, according to EJ - you can pick which ever one you like the animation for - because the difference in actual DPS is nil.

Edited, Feb 11th 2011 1:42pm by Borsuk

Reminds me of a talk I had with an Arcane Mage in a heroic earlier today (or yesterday, I guess). He was on my heels DPS-wise, though I beat him in damage done, but he was taunting me about not pulling my weight on trash fights (where stuff dies before Rake even has a chance to tick). I told him it was hard to push out big numbers when I couldn't just mash three buttons in a seemingly random order.

Don't worry, I've got an Arcane Mage, I'm allowed to mock people about such things. Plus, I wiped the floor with him on the bosses.

Is the rotation still AB until AM procs, or is it all about the AB spam these days?

Arcane's in a pretty terrible place right now. And the biggest annoyance is that all the problems with it were obvious from the very moment they announced the mastery.

Seriously. They chose a mastery that's not really interesting and makes the whole tree horribly reliant on their mana CDs (one of which requires them to not move as they channel for 6 seconds, which makes many raid and dungeon mechanics SUCK). Furthermore, you only get your full mastery bonus when at 100% mana. That's nice and all, but it means that the bonus still can't be too high. Why? Because if we were doing 200% damage at full mana, we'd be way too OP in PvP. And guilds could exploit Druids to make us even stronger.

As if those 2 things weren't bad enough, now we have to face the fact that our mastery isn't nearly strong enough even at full mana. We'd need another 40-50% to our dps to be competitive (meaning, equal with many classes but still less than fire). That means an increase to our base mastery of well over that amount.

And my biggest problem with Arcane? They took a 2-spell rotation (which already isn't super interesting) and made it way less so. Why? Because AB no longer buffs AM. >:( There's no reason to use AM but to cancel out your AB buff, so that you don't go OOM.

And the best part is that AM was supposed to be a Proc spell because the devs wanted it to be a spell we WANTED to cast whenever it came up. LOL, they failed hard.

The tree's great for leveling, or for any short fight where all you need to do is AB spam (and can always start at capped or high mana). Other than that... :'(

It's making me not want to level my Mage.

[EDIT]

I wanted to add something.


THIS could have been interesting. But THIS requires that we have ready access to abilities to increase our mana with frequency. We don't. And our dps is WAY too dependent on one spell that depends on us not getting hit, knocked back or having to move. God forbid you accidentally hit a button that cancels Evocation. Your dps just crashed, and there's no recovery.

It's so unforgiving and is no fun even when done well. >:(

Edited, Feb 22nd 2011 10:14pm by idiggory

Lol, I loved it. It wasn't a difficult rotation, but it required fast reflexes (especially when IV and heroism was up :D). And it made me feel like I was this overzealous mage who was slinging spells as fast as he possibly could, headless to the cost on his body or the world around him. :P

I would have liked some more to do, of course. But I still had a lot of fun as arcane. Now, meh. I never really liked Fire--too much depended on chance. The only thing I ever liked was Living Bomb. :P And Frost was a blast while leveling (Deep Freeze on bosses hilarious--20K crits well before I hit 80). But at endgame, even had it been really viable, I think I would have stayed as Arcane. I just wish they could have worked Abarr into our rotation (then and now), and maybe even gave us another spell

Seriously--Fire has: Fireball, Pyroblast!, Fire Blast, Frostfire Bolt, Scorch, Flame Orb, Dragon's Breath, Blastwave, Combustion, Living Bomb and Flamestrike.

Frost has: Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, Ice Lance, Frost Nova, Deep Freeze, Cone of Cold, Ring of Frost, Frostfire Orb, Water Elemental (w/ Freeze), Icy Veins

Arcane has... Arcane Blast, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, Arcane Explosion, Presence of Mind and Arcane Power and Time Warp/Mirror Image (which are used by all specs).

Seriously, wtf? And can't we get a spell that doesn't start with "Arcane?"

<----Bitter

[EDIT]

AB4AM wasn't that fun, no, but it also wasn't the rotation. ;) Or it was if you just didn't care about actually playing arcane. MBAM, especially after you got 2pc T10, required you to be quick on your toes if you wanted your top dps. When you need to react quickly to get that, things can get interesting with just 2 buttons. ;)

Plus, was Frost REALLY any different? :/ From what I recall, wasn't it mostly FB spam, with Ice Lance only bringing your dps up a tiny bit if you did it perfectly? And using Deep Freeze every 30 seconds? From what I recall, Insta-FBs weren't worth casting until they added FFB to it at the end of the expac. I had to do way more that that just managing my CDs. :P

Edited, Feb 23rd 2011 2:50am by idiggory

Now it's stupid. >.<

Part of the fun of Arcane was getting a MB proc and launching ludicrously fast AMs. Now, they're still fast, but it just doesn't feel the same.

And since our AB only buffs AB, it's way less fun to fire AM.

And the combination of those two means that we just never use AM unless we need to clear our AB stacks for mana conservation.

So, whenever we are at full mana (or high) all we do is spam AB. Because using anything else is a massive dps drop. That's not fun, and it doesn't feel like Wrath Arcane at all.

General Mage cycle:

Burn phase--Spam AB from 100-40%. Use Evocation. Use as super mana efficient rotation as possible so that your mana stays at/near 100% until you are can start your next burn phase (which should finish just as your next evocate comes up).

The mana conservation rotation changes according to your mana, spririt, raid buffs (and I suppose class, if Gnome or BE). I think the most efficient rotation (assuming all buffs) is ABspam234AM--that seems to lead to a loss of about 100 mana per second. But it's still RNG dependent. AB4AbarrAM1234 is apparently an acceptable alternative--you spam AB and always use AM procs when they come up. But if you reach 4 stacks of AB, you use Abarr to clear it.

Then you have your next burn phase, where you spam AB.

/sigh.

And the whole reason we have to do this is because of our stupid mastery. Instead of using Evocation to allow us to go wild, we have to use it to keep us at full so we can just throw wet tissue, but buffed, spells. :(

Not really. The "second and new" rotation is just a stripped down version of the first. And the entire spec plays WAY slower now.

To be fair, with the exception of Deep Freeze, we DO just frostbolt while IV is up. Our mastery makes it so that it's higher DPS to spam super fast Frostbolts with FoF up than consume them with BF or IL.