Playstyle & Rotation
General Rotation
This is something that we are still looking into since arcane is changing a lot during beta testing, so keep an eye out for this section being updated.
For the very basics:
- Always be Casting.
- Never sit on Clearcasting.
- Always Consume Clearcasting with 2 Blasts followed up by Barrage (unless burden of power of arcane soul procs).
- Cast barrage if you struggle with mana.
- Never cast Arcane Blast on 1 or 0 charges, always try to have a way to get charges back via arcane orb or via arcane missiles (with the high voltage talent).
- Ideally we want to consume Glorious Incandescence + Nether precision together for a small DPS increase, if it happens then nice, if not, then it’s not a big deal. It's not something we ACTIVELY try to force, it’s more of something that happens depending on our dynamic rotation.
- Pay attention to when arcane surge ends as it means we are about to enter our Arcane Surge Window, ideally we want to consume Clearcasting, so we can enter our arcane surge window with 2 Stacks of Nether Precision so we can consume them with Arcane Barrage empowered by nether precision 2X.
Opener
- Evocation 4 seconds before the pull.
- Precast Arcane Blast Followed by Arcane Orb (important to not prepull the boss or we reset arcane charges).
- Cast Arcane Missiles for Nether Precision (Evocation gives Clearcasting).
- Cast Arcane Surge, then Arcane Barrage, then Touch of the Magi. This is so our 4 charges barrage + nether precision buff will hit inside the touch of the magi window.
- Continue to fill with Arcane Blast and Missiles, whilst reacting to nether precision windows as 2x Blast into Barrage as Spellslinger.
Multi Target:
- Cast Arcane Blast during Touch of the Magi to proc Magi’s Spark
- Consume Clearcasting if you are on 3 (highest prio we never want to overcap)
- Clip Arcane Missiles on the GCD (don’t let it fully channel interrupt the channel with a queued Arcane Blast) UNLESS you have Aether Attunement proc then you want to let missiles fully channel it’s massive part of our AOE Damage
- Don’t sit on Shifting Power, it’s not only Damage in AOE it also helps us to sync our CDs in line up with their respectable timers 45 Seconds for our Touch of the Magi window and 1:15 for our Evocation and Arcane Surge Window
- Cast as many Arcane Barrage’s as possible during arcane soul (try to have them empowered by Nether Precision)
- Arcane Orb if you need to generate Charges
- Avoid casting 0 Arcane Charges blast
- Avoid casting Arcane Explosion (unless you have no way to generate charges via arcane orb or arcane missiles)
Playstyle
For both sunfury and spellslinger there isn’t a “fixed“ rotation, it’s more of a priority list.
Casting arcane blast on 0 charges is the biggest mistake you can make, you NEVER want to cast arcane blast on 0 charges.
Mana is something that can change depending on our time anomaly procs, so we can sometimes be a bit more conservative or a bit more aggressive with mana.
As mentioned earlier, the basic gameplay is building arcane charges with blast, orb and missiles and consume charges with arcane barrage on nether precision with Blast > Blast > Barrage.
The thing that changes more for sunfury is we have to pay more attention to our spheres and our burden of power procs, since it means we are going to press barrage way more with arcane soul and procs.
General Playstyle
I want to take a moment and discuss the new Nether Precision so we can understand it a bit better.
Since nether precision works with our arcane barrage as well now, it means we can double dip on nether precision and basically get 3 empowered spells on the cost of 2 stacks. Nether precision is giving us 2 stacks of our next arcane blast or barrage to be empowered.
However, we can queue our arcane barrage after the second arcane blast so both of our arcane blast and barrage that we queue will both benefit from Nether Precision. It’s going to look something like this:
- Clearcasting proc
- Arcane Missiles
- 2 Stacks of Nether Precision
- Arcane Blast (1 stack)
- Arcane Blast followed up by Arcane Barrage so our 2nd stack of nether precision both benefit from arcane blast and arcane barrage
This is something you have to practice and get used to, since it basically can benefit 3 spells at the cost of 2.
Remember that every time we get a clearcasting the following will always apply: Missiles > Blast > Blast and then Barrage every time, it will never change unless you get a Burden of Power proc or Arcane Soul Proc, which can be just dumped into barrage.
The basic idea behind arcane mage is to consume as much nether precision as possible on arcane blast followed up by arcane barrage, or arcane barrage with any of our interactive procs.
Advanced Arcane Barrage Section:
In this section I will discuss when you can or SHOULD press arcane barrage after the changes with nether precision and burden of power.
- The ideal situation would be to blast into barrage on the 6th stack of spellfire sphere once we have the burden of power buff we want to blast into barrage so we proc glorious incandescence, proc the meteors and refund charges. The ideal situation would be to try to line up nether precision last stack with our burden of power, so we can line them all together (it won’t happen all the time but we can try to force it with decision making when we prioritize missiles).
- During our arcane soul window (after our arcane surge ends) we want to spam barrages until we get 3 clearcasting stacks, then we use missiles and if we can, we use the last global in arcane soul on an empowered arcane barrage with nether precision. We never ever want to continue casting barrage during arcane soul once we have 3 clearcasting stacks.
- And the last condition is when you can or should cast arcane barrage is obviously when you run out of mana, our mana is very dependent on how many arcane surge procs we get from time anomaly, if you get unlucky you might have to be a bit more aggressive on arcane barrage to reset arcane charges.
- On AoE Situations you can press barrage if they are empowered by nether precision a bit more freely because we have more methods of generating arcane charges, especially during aether attunement our AoE missiles which gives us 4 charges instantly, we can also spec into double orb. So it means we can be extremely aggressive with arcane barrage on AoE which is the vast majority of our damage, but we want to combo barrage with nether precision after we consume clearcasting if possible.
TLDR - if you have a way to regen charges via arcane orb or arcane missiles (with high voltage talented) you are safe to press arcane barrage, otherwise only cast arcane barrage after arcane blast on the burden of power glorious incandescence or during arcane soul window or during any of the other conditions I named above.
Since Arcane Barrage conditions haven't really changed much in both Spellslinger and Sunfury situations, the above still stands.
Cooldown Usage
It's important we continue to use both arcane surge and touch of the magi on cooldown, since they both have a fixed CD of 1:30 and 45 second respectively, so it's important we use them as often as possible to line them up together.
Going into our Burst window we need to meet 3 conditions:
- Evocation is ready
- Surge is 10 seconds or less until it is ready
- Touch of the magi is 5 seconds from being ready
Once all these conditions are met we can go into our burst window.
Defensives
As an Arcane Mage, you have excellent survivability and mobility at your disposal with Mirror Image, Alter Time, 2x Shimmer, Ice Block, Greater Invis (which also increases your movement speed if talented), Prismatic Barrier and Mass Barrier.
Rotating our defensives properly can significantly increase our chance of living through high sources of incoming damage!