Thanks for the post. I’ve love playing a mage and always strive to be on the top of the DPS charts. I’m always trying to squeak out as much dps as possible. Two questions though on your write-up…First on the blast / missle rotation. Do you spam blast until a missle barrage procs or blast till a full stack than cast missles, proc or not? Second, how do you utilize replenishment without spec’ing 43 deep into the frost tree to get “Enduring Winter”?

Why is replenishment up there? It’s a talent over 40 points down into the frost tree obtained by talenting Enduring Winter… No arcane mage is going to have it unless I’m missing something?

any advice for pre-80 builds designed to level a mage fast? Also any advice on free boss drops along the way would be great… My mage is currently 47 and leveling fast with the new LFG in place…

i look forward to your advice, great article, can’t wait to be 80!

(continued from above)
right now (47) i am 100% frost spec…is that bad? I already am constantly in danger of pulling aggro, especially if the tank is a few levels below me, and I enjoy the strategies/tactics of icing opponents in PvP and PvE….but if arcane is so über, should I switch over?

first comment thanks for the guide now i can maximize my dps and find the gear i need

great work agorg more of the same comming soon so tell yur friends to subscribe now and look for all the diff class articals to follow .. and if yur like tim , the best advice i can give is look at dys guild tab up top come join in the fun Dont be great Dominate

Thanks for the post. I was frost spec’d while leveling and still use frost for PvP because of the better control you get. I do use this arcane spec for PvE because of the incredible DPS numbers. I have 2 questions though. First on your rotation. Do you spam blast until missle barrage procs, or use blast till a full stack than missles whether barrage procs or not? Second, how do you use replenishment without spec’ing 43 into frost for Enduring Winter? Looking forward to more mage posts!

Why even take Arcane Barrage in the first place if you never use it in the spec? I grant that it can be situationally useful if you’re on a heavy movement fight, but I’ve found it’s better to just go for ABx4 –> AM even on movement. Just PoM an AB if you’re about to lose the stack and are still moving.

The extra point can go into magic absorption or even slow which might be more useful for kiting fights (of which there are a few already in ICC).

finally! an article for a mage. ive been waiting for a long time. out of all arcane mages on lightbringer, mine is ranked 43 for gear score. i find it really funny because you guys made a close copy of my character with the gear glphs and talent spec. right now i can consistantly pull 6-7k dps but at times it will jump to 10k even to 15k! with the OP blizzard of course. great article keep em coming!

Have a spec question. you state that we do not use Arcane Barrage at all, yet there is a talent point in it. I understand that it is still useful for those times you h ave to fire and run.
However you also have Torment the Weak which provides 12% dmg to snared targets and nothing to snare anyone with, would it not be better to take the point out of Arcane Barrage and put it into Slow?

Nice article, I’v just finnished my raid and pushed my poor litle gnome to its limits on the 4′th boss in ICC but only reached above 6k dps. I had hoped for a better specc in 3.3 but not, I dont even own in aoe anymore…(but hunters, 15k in my guild)

Ofc my gear is the issue here, still missing the last piece in T9 to get the 2:nd setbonus and atleast 700 sp compared to the char that above. But still, 4k dps is missing and that is alot

Perhaps I need to face the fact that I suck

/J

How come there are no points in Arcane Stability?

Having played my mage for nearly four years, I was to see that Dominate finally had a post about my favorite class. This guide, unfortunately, only scratches the surface. You did state yourself that you weren’t planning on going into mana management, but that is ALL that arcane dps is.

Anyone can hit Ablast x4 then missles, but that isn’t THE rotation. There is no rotation. The analogy I use when helping out the lower-dps mages in my guild is “Arcane is like driving a car, and your mana bar is the gas tank. The spells you cast are essentially the clutch, and you want to go as fast as possible (highest dps) but still not run out of gas before reaching the next gas station (evocate).”

This means that the amount of dps you are doing at any given moment in an encounter should be dependent on how much mana you have left and how long your evocate cooldown is. How do you trade more mana per second for more damage per second? More arcane blasts per “cycle” and fish for barrage procs.

There is a mage in my guild with full T9.25 and the best ilvl 245 offpieces. All he does is Ablast x4 then missles. His dps is decent – but 100% reliant on his gear, because he is making no decisions during the fight – he is basically a robot. My dps, in inferior gear (wish I had more time to raid!) is anywhere from 1100-1400 higher each fight. This isn’t to toot my own horn, but rather express that if you did exclusively what this guide said, then you would be geared for max dps, but in actuality, you would be very mediocre.

We did have a bit of a quandry when it comes to these build articles. In order to tell people everything about a class it would take a series of articles. With so many classes and builds to cover, we decided it would be best at first to get just the builds themselves up for everyone to see and let guys like Fireguard who have advanced expertise on the details of the mechanics fill in the subtelties in the thread for each build.

So, Fire, you can consider yourself an adjunct reporter for Dominate at this point. Obviously we need to do a complete write-up on mana conservation issues for mages, and we’ll put that on the list. There is so much to cover and so little time. You can always submit a complete write-up yourself for anything glaring that we’ve missed, such as the mana topic – just send it to editor@dominateyourserver.com and join our growing crew of contributing writers.

But your answer to our article is precisely what needs to happen for these builds. The more input our readers get from experts like Fireguard, the better off they will be.

what is the hit cap% with this build??
it should be 15% with 3/3 point in precision right?

i go with mage armour than molten armour because as you all know as arcane spec you burn through mana pretty quickly its all well having the crit but thats no use if you have no mana so i happily drop the 3% crit for help with mana regen so i can keep dps’in

Gear gives you 11.65% hit and the 3 from precision give you 14.65% you will get the other 3 from Misery or Improved Faerie Fire for a total of 17.65%. No missing for you!

Not sure if you’re trying to ignore 3.3 changes, but the recent reworking of the Black Magic enchant (250 haste for 10 seconds on a 35 second internal cooldown) puts it ahead of 63 spellpower. For this build alone I’m seeing a 30dps increase. Another 8-10 dps could be squeezed out of the Bejeweled Wizards Bracers, a fairly easily obtained craftable. These are fairly negligible increases and could be a result of fight parameters in the simulation used.

As far as talents, I’m kinda partial to using Incanter’s Absorption right now, even 1 point can mean a 2000dps difference on certain fights, especially when coupled with Frost Warding in the frost tree. Twin Valks and Jaraxxus are popular fights for Incanter’s to shine (thats why your mages are doing 12-14k on valks,) but Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and Gunship all have components that you can exploit for more dps out of that talent.

Like someone said above, I would consider pulling a point out of Magic Attunement or Student of the Mind to and drop it into Incanters or even Slow (really useful when kiting on Deathwhisper or Saurfang). If going the Incanters route then I’d also move my frost points from Ice Shards over to Frost Warding.

Again, these are personal play preferences but something to take into consideration.

If you NEVER use ABarr then why have the talent point? could just use Fire Blast and move the point… I also agree that IA is useful… use movement times to pop a Ward and absorb for more dps…

Now that I have all the hit I need I’ve dropped 1 pt from Precision and 2 points from Arcane Focus and added Ice Walker to boots for the minor gap. Allowed me to pick up Stability… just my $.02..

Have fun whatever you do!

Valence

DO i pop missles everytime they proc or after 4 stacks of arcane blast

I can now comment on this more fully since I am raiding on my mage and have spent some time asking around and testing various theories from master mages (hurray Lambo – Cix doesn’t read this so no shout)

I always wait for a 4 stack of AB before using the missile proc. This even applies to the fifth and later casts. Once upon a time, you needed to clear the AB stack with something else because the fifth and further casts were just too mana intensive. But now I never clip an Arcane Blast to use the Missile Barrage, just let your current AB cast finish and then hit MB. And even if MB procs on the first AB, I will wait until the 4 stack to turn it loose. AB is your main DPS generator, MB just pushes your DPS higher. By always using MB at a 4 stack of MB you increase the bump. and since mana shouldn’t be a huge issue you shouldn’t have to worry too much about the cost of AB.

On the move, you can use fire blast and arcane barrage instead of doing nothing, and I will sometimes use arcane barrage to clear Arcane blast in a pinch if I don’t have a MB proc up (think Marrowgar when bladestorm begins and you know you won’t be getting off another blast until your stacks fall off anyway) .

That’s it in a nutshell. Since I started giving Arcane Blast the very highest priority and only use MB after a 4 stack it pushed my DPS up about 1,000. More haste never hurts either. I put Quick Kings Amber in every yellow slot and Reckless Ametrine in red slots. With haste over 600 you can really cut down on the cast time for blast and you will see an instant boost in your DPS. Other mages may have other ideas, but that is what seems to be working best for me in my current gear on my toon Lawknowsdps on Kalecgos.

One last note, Law has only been 80 for about a month and mages are super easy to gear. It only took about two weeks to hit the all 232+ level gear, which is good enough to do over 4k DPS and grab a DPS slot in ICC if you have any clue what you’re doing at all.

I just recently started playing my mage again and for a while now have been frostfire. i respeced to arcane 57/3/11 last night and im still trying to get use to it. im just wondering is Molten Armor better with this spec or Mage Armor or does it just depend on the situation?

is slow in the arcane build nessecary for icc10 saurfang???

i was wandering why in the rotation u shouldnt spam instant cast spells like arcane barrage? u would think instant cast spells would just add to the dps. am i missing something important that im not seeing ?

Arcane Barrage burns a global cooldown, which burns at least one second of cast time for Blast. Since Arcane Blast and Missile Barrage are where the vast majority of your DPS is going to come from, anything that interrupts the flow of getting as many of those in as possible is going to drop your DPS. The one time that Abar is a great idea is when you are moving. You cant cast Blast or Channel MBar when moving, so fire blast and MBar are great in those situations.

So yes, MBar is a decent way to keep your DPS up, but only in situations where you can’t cast the big 2.

Thanks for a great post, have one suggestion on the specc though which I would like to discuss.
If we take only raid bosses into consideration (since this is where players are most conserned about max-output), the majority of the bosses arent snareable in that sentance which in my oppinion turns a rather blind eye on the Torment of the weak talent, so I feel like 3 talent points is rather wasted. Offcourse if the actuall mage is running more heroics or lower instances I would agree to the current build.

However, for the end-gaming mage, wouldn’t Incanter’s Absorbtion be a more viable talent? Most bosses have some sort of raid-dmging effect to it, wether it’s adds, AOE or direct random spells.
Tested on a dummy how much my dps would go down if say i renewed my Mana Shield every 30 seconds, the decrease was at about 3% total DPS. Taken that into consideration and let’s play with the a fact that a random spell hits me and my shield atleast once during one Mana Shield, hitting for 2000 damage. This would mean 200 more damage for 10sec wich is about 6-7% spell power increase for a decent/good geared mage.
Assuming this, I’d say Incanter’s Absorbtion would prove a much more viable talent in raids.