Consider this a bit of a guide to Arcane. Below are as many hints and tips as I could pull together in my sitting last night. I put together THIS spec last night after the raid. I grabbed the Arcane Blast glyph from the auction house. I let the tests commence.
Frost Fire Build results: 2200 DPS on one mana bar (this is blowing all cooldowns)
Shot rotation:
Activate macro that turns on Icy veins, combustion, trinket and Mirror Image.
Frostfire Bolt - Living Bomb - Frostfire Bolt - Fireblast - Frostfire Bolt - Frostfire Bolt - Living Bomb - repeat.
Throw in the free pyroblast whenever possible. This is the highest DPS shot rotation I have been able to work out (Dont stack scorch, it probably results in more DPS but I just dont work that way.)
Not too shabby. It can peak at 3k on Patchwerk with a warlock by my side.
Arcane test: 2600
Shot rotation:
Arcane Blast x3, Arcane Missiles (Or Missile Barrage which procs about half the time) and “Arcane Shatter” an Arcane Barrage alongside the final bolt. (this is tricky, I think I get it about half the time, but Im seeing the arcane barrage hit for up to 14k self-buffed for the cost of a global cooldown!)
I think I will stick with this spec for a while yet. With this damage boost off the cuff, once its optimized I expect to be regularly pulling 3k in a raid instead of 2.2k.
I got to give it a test run in Halls of Lightening heroic with some guildies – and my DPS was about 500 (that’s about 25%) higher than frostfire bolt build, and to evidence this – I was a clear 20% dps higher than the pally tank, when the last run I was only 5% in front of him (high damage AOE tanking is impressive!).
Arcane shot rotation tips:
This next section WAS going to be a follow up to the above, but its probably best fitting in here. Much of the base info, such as the shot rotation, is half-inched from Critical QQ. I consider him my instructor in such matters, and his experimentations have often had me respeccing to try new things out for myself. Much respect Sah /salute.
First things first, mana management.
In this spec you are going to have a massive mana pool. You are also going to have a number of tools at your disposal to keep you casting.
Your damage output and mana consumption vary directly with each other. The more damage you do, the faster you burn through your mana. Details included below will give some guidance to some mana regen techniques.
Spell Combo.
The most aggressive spell combo that I can see, is:
Arcane Blast x3, Arcane Missiles + Arcane Barrage (Technique dubbed Arcane Shatter by Euripides)
If you are not required to do max dps or your wanting to conserve mana, such as on long non-dps race boss fights (kael’thuzad for example?) you can reduce the mana burn by casting less arcane blasts. You do lose 20% damage bonus per arcane blast debuff stack you don’t put on, but each time you try to add to that stack the mana consumption gets huge.
From my own tests – I have managed to maintain almost 9 minutes of flat out aggressive casting – averaging 2500DPS on test. I had to slow my output when waiting for the last few seconds before being able to regenerate mana, but in a raid when you have mana tide totems, replenishment, shadow priest or a blessing of Wisdom – you will be able to hold out for longer with a good Mana regen technique.
Mana Regen Technique.
To sustain that length of aggressive casting, I needed to use all 3 mana gems, 2 mana potions (invisibility to drop from combat to start the pot timer cooldown) and I popped 4 evocations. Overall I done approximately 1.2 Million damage, that’s a good quarter of the health of most Naxx normal bosses. With some modifications to the technique I think it may just be viable to fight indefinitely – as long as you have a big enough supply of mana potions.
How to do it?
1) Mage armour:
I have a habit of always keeping mage armour up with the glyph of mage armour equipped– this provides 50% mana regen altogether. With this build the extra 30% mana regen whilst casting means that you are sat at 80% regen in combat (450 MP5 for me.)
2) Mana Gems
Make sure you have all 3 gems on you at all times – even if it means your having to stop casting mid fight to create a new stack of them, if it’s a long fight. Your mana pool will be so large, and your regen so good that you will regen the mana back during the gem creation cast time anyway, and if not, it wont dent your pool too badly – and will give you 12k+ of reserve mana.
3) Invisi-pot tactic.
When your evocation is on cooldown and your mana gem is on cooldown, feel free to pop a mana potion to get a chunk of mana back. Follow this up with invisibility to leave combat. This will start the potion cooldown timer – which I think is about 2 minutes.
Note: Invisibilitys cooldown is 5 minutes… it would have been possible to do this twice in that 9 minute period – which would have given me enough time to get a 5th evocation off. If I paused to make more mana gems so they were ready, the cycle would start over – I would have been able to coast to the next evocation, and popped another invisi-pot cycle.
4) Aggressive use of evocation.
You will spend most of your time coasting between 75% and 5% mana – as soon as your evocation has cooled down and you are below 25% mana – Pop it! You want that cooldown to be ticking as soon as possible. It has a 2 minute cooldown.
With a slight juggling of talent points, it is more than feasible to have mana absorption in certain encounters, which will keep you going longer.
Overall, it’s a matter of practice – and a good supply of mana potions. I will test this tonight, my aim is to hit 15 minutes of non stop casting (aside from casting evocation or popping invisibility to reset the mana potion cooldown.)
5) Icy Veins + Arcane Power rationing.
Icy Veins reduces the mana cost of spells during its duration by 20%. It also reduces cast time by 20% - overall this is a balance, but gives a burst of damage. In a fight where splash damage is flying, as Euripides recommends, you can use Icy Veins to “shield” your evocation so it doesn’t get interrupted.
Arcane Power gives a huge damage boost, but increases the mana cost significantly. If your running low, hold off on using this. In a DPS race fight the boss will go down within the time period you have before your riding too low in mana with no cooldowns available, so it shouldn’t make a big difference, but on a long fight where your riding close to OOM, its not worth popping as youll spend time doing no damage.
Maximising your damage output.
Ok, so that covers shot rotations, and keeping that blue bar with a useable % value. Now onto getting the most out of your abilities.
1) Torment the weak
In a lot of fights, this is a tricky thing to maintain – but you will have slow as a backup if no one else is snaring the target with frost effects or other abilities. When the enemy is snared, you gain 12% damage against the target. It’s certainly worth burning a global cooldown for every 15 seconds to get the target Slowed for this bonus damage.
2) Focus magic
I did not realize just how useful this spell was until the Halls of Lightening run. Unfortunately I was the only caster DPS, so I was a bit stumped where to put this, but my wife suggested her, and after doing so – it proved a wonderful spell. She is resto druid with a regrowth fetish, which has a ridiculously high crit rate – so whenever we are in a battle where plenty of healing is flying, I almost never seen the 3% crit bonus drop from me.
Since we had an aggressive and high geared pally tank, and a high geared healer, we were more often than not taking several groups at once, which really plied the healing out which resulted in a lot of crits. The impressive thing is, that the 2600+ DPS I pulled on this fight was without much AOE – I did a few test blizzards and arcane explosions, which done nice crit damage, but overall I single targeted the mobs and nuked them down fast.
3) Clearcast
This one is a bit trickier in the above shot rotation. When it procs, your next spell is free, and has a bonus 30% crit chance. If your quick enough, its best to use this for the highest mana spell you have – Arcane Missiles. (Or blizzard if its situationally advantageous)
In addition, it may be possible that an Arcane Barrage shatter can be pulled off that will benefit from this bonus. I do have a sneaking suspicion that casting anything consumes this buff, unlike the arcane blast debuff – which will likely be nerfed to do so in a future patch. I have seen Arcane Barrage land for over 14K damage though – self buffed – after a Missile Barrage proc, with each bolt having the ability to crit for over 6k damage (that’s 44k damage in under 2.5 seconds if you have all the missile bolts crit, and your lucky to get an Arcane Barrage off within the required time period of that spell.)
4) Missile Barrage at 3 Blasts.
Again, I may be mistaken, but my DPS did drop when not doing this. Make sure that when Missile Barrage procs – you don’t use it until you have all 3 arcane blasts up. The buff will wait for you. By firing it off with only one arcane blast buff (or none sometimes) I noticed a significant dip in my DPS purely because the Missile Barrage did not have the damage buff. It’s the same as a rogues combo points. They aint going anywhere, so don’t waste the energy trying to build another stack when the big damage comes from doing that 5 point eviscerate – here, its getting that 3 stack Missile and barrage combo (44k in 1.5 s under heroism and superman’s reflexes remember…). In addition, the Arcane Barrage would be wasted as without all that damage bonus stacked on its simply a glorified fire blast, so WAIT FOR THE STACKS. Missile barrage proc’s often enough.
Macros
There are only a few macros I use, although I can think of many more.
Nuke
My Nuke macro is one that simply activates all my cooldowns (except for POM) at once, so I can get huge burst damage every 2-3 minutes.
/Cast Arcane Power
/Cast Icy Veins
/Use Cannoneer’s fuselighter
/Cast Mirror Image
Theres a few more lines around that but I think the simple version above would work fine. This activates my Arcane Power, Icy Veins, any trinkets I have (I add them in when I equip them.) and Casts my mirror Image.
I am not sure if Mirror image benefits from all the other buffs you get like your water elemental does, but it means that I get it cast, since I always forget to use it otherwise, and it’s a nice couple of hundred DPS boost for the 15 seconds they are around.
Pom anything
Presence of mind does not have a lot of place in the shot rotation above, but there are a few utilities or situational spells that may benefit.
Simple macro:
/cast presence of mind
/cast
- Frostbolt.
In PVP this would snare (possible root) a target, and hopefully do a nice chunk of damage in the process. This lets you get some distance, whilst spamming Arcane Barrage at them with a 12% bonus damage.
- Polymorph
As little as crowd control is used nowadays, its coming back in the future. Having a button available for an instant polymorph can prove invaluable for that mis-timed sheeping, or when an add breaks loose in close proximity.
- Arcane Blast
Why not cut the cast time of your first arcane blast to 0? Gets the buff up, and gets you onto the next faster casting blast.
Icy Evocation
On some fights it may be more beneficial to hang onto your icy veins for your evocates to stop it getting interrupted. Its better to get the whole evocate, than that momentary burst to your DPS. A simple macro should solve this.
/Cast Icy Veins
/Cast Evocation
That’s the end of my little hints list, I shall post again with further test results, and any other goodies I gather.
Just for fun: Try doing an arcane shatter combo when under the effects of heroism and a missile barrage proc. I swear, the missile barrage cant take longer than about 1.5 seconds to complete – barely enough time to get lined up for the arcane barrage. I actually squealed in panic over TeamSpeak with the group when this happened. Twice. Missiles-Voomvoomvoomvoomvoom Aarrghh Barrage, blast blast blast Voomvoomvoomvoom aaargh! Barrage.
Suffice to say I also pulled aggro, but the add died in the next hit!
P.P.S – Blizzard! Sort the names out! It’s a nightmare trying to discuss Arcane Missiles, Missile Barrage and Arcane Barrage, without getting them mixed up and spending half an hour proofreading. (Yes, probably my own fault for such long ranty posts… that’s not the point! :p )
-V
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