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Hello fellow arcane mages. I was bummed for a while to see quickening gone, but I'm now over it and pretty hyped by the upcoming changes. I've been reading a lot about the new talents, stat changes and possible rotation coming up, and I wanted to share my thoughts and discuss about it with you guys.

First of all, There is no legendaries involved in the following rotation and I'm gonna use the build which I assume might be standard in NH Raid environment 2223131:
Amplification, Slipstream, Rune of Power, Resonance/Charged Up, Chrono shift, Erosion (or Unstable Magic), Overpowered

Update (23/01): I step away from Charged up for the moment and prefer Resonance. Nighthold has a lot of adds fights and even in single target I find Resonance to perform better for myself. However I think Charged up shines with The mystic Kilt.

But what I really want to talk about it the rotation. Here is what I came up with

Rotation 1.0 (01/09) Rotation 1.1 (13/01) Rotation 1.2 (23/01 Update)

So what's going on here ?
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1) Maximizing Arcane missiles Potential with Rune of Power
Arcanosaur, an Arcane mage from the US forum, got my attention with a talk about maximizing arcane missiles potential. Basically before, I used to mindlessly dump my spells regardless of the number of Arcane missiles charges I had in bank. But now with the talent Amplification, our missiles are much more valuable. I found out that "only" casting those during Rune of Power (wait for ToTm Proc?) yield awesome results. I now bank my missile for my next Rop and it feels quite nice. I also now use Arcane barrage -> Charged up Combo during my 3rd Rune of power for even increased dps

2) 1 minute cooldowns
Presence of mind and Mark of Aluneth are two important spells that don't align naturally with our burst windows. We can simplify this problematic by simply delaying those spells to hit with Arcane power and not worry about it. But in the long run we might simply lose casts of those two spells and lose a huge dps potential. This happens on a ~4:15min fight for example: Time for 4 Mark of Aluneth & Presence of Mind, but time only for 2 Arcane power.
In my opinion, in those cases we should use Mark of Aluneth on cooldown, keep Presence of mind aligned with arcane power, but during the last moments of the encounter, use Presence of mind early cooldown to finish our burst.

3) Legendaries & Set

2Pc Set Bonus &/or Rhonin's Bracers: You probably won't need to enter a mini-conserve phase after your second burn, since the procs will give you enough free spell to stall for that Evocation Cooldown. note: Rhonin's Bracers has received both direct (down to 18% proc chance) and indirect nerf, since we don't use Supernova and Nether tempest. With the 2pc this legendary item might become better

4Pc Set Bonus: I think we can debate a lot about this one. It's a tricky situation, my only assumption is that it will be good with the Legendary Hat Gravity Spiral. If you don't have it however, the cooldown reduction will never put evocation available before Arcane power, so I can't see much use to it atm.

Shard: Just use the 2nd timewarp during the 2nd Arcane power

Kilt: You're gonna be able to extend your burn phase by a lot with the Arcane barrage-Charged up Combo. During Conserve phase you can keep burning to 15-25% mana before using Arcane barrage

New Gravity Spiral hat: You gain an extra burn phase right after the first one. This might become even crazier with the 4 pc set bonus, resulting in a "never ending burn phase" meaning you will never have to cast arcane blast at 1, 2 or 3 arcane charges nor cast arcane barrage to clear in order to regen mana. There is a good amount of theory crafting material with this one.

Hello,

I just have a very stupid question..
Why are you using the two instants AB like that ? I mean AM, AB, AM, AB.
I just wonder why are you not using immediatly after arcane power the two charges of instant AB, then AB as much as possible without caping AM during arcane power ?
What's the impact on the GCD ?

I believe it's to store maximum AM charges for mini conserve phase, without munching procs.

I do find your rotations intriguing, but I want to personally withhold any judgement, critiques, or general thoughts on these until they go live tomorrow (Jan 10). I know that I'll be going through a bunch of rotations that I've seen, and a few that I trialed during the PTR, and have seen Nelfy do as well for M+ variants. It's good to get the conversation going though.

I even heard someone bring up a thought about using Overpowered in a different manner. Instead of opening with a hard burn, just burn without AP and then when you hit around 35-40% mana, turn it on and push burn so that your evo is more aligned with AP. It's intriguing, but I doubt it'll be feasible in the live game.

As for your PoM AB's during AM > AB style, I too find it useful. Like with most cases, when you have a channeled/casted abililty followed up immediately with an instant cast, it just somewhat feels right. If you know what I mean. Almost like you're not really losing a GCD to an insta-cast spell, even though you are. Like when you cast Ice Lance as a frost mage back to back, it feels awkward at times since you've got the GCD inbetween and it doesnt really feel like things are instant any longer. Whereas casting it right after a full cast/channel it feels like it fits properly. However, outside of of feeling aesthetics, I do know that if done right, PoM w/ AB fillers can increase dps output in the right style. Again, that was during PTR and things are off as far as keypresses and the like.

Either way, soon enough we'll be able to test our speculative rotations and really say whether or not something feels proper and provides results, or is just an intriguing musing. I know that I'll be updating my own guide with details as I test them, but I'll be checking through the forum to see others' thoughts on the rotations and playstyles. ^_^

Thank you for the post ^_^

*I'm stealing your relative coloring styles for the spells tho! I think it makes notable points pop a bit more. TY for the inspiration on that end.

Do you know what the stat prio will be for arcane?

I do not claim to know as of just yet, but I think it's going to be based on what build you're going for. Mastery will still always be a nice primary, but your secondary will probably be either crit or haste depending what you're building towards.

I can see myself going Master > Crit=>Haste > Versatility honestly. Like, I'm not interested in temporal flux much, altho I may dabble with it. I think TF would be haste heavy to increase your speed overall. Whereas my desired build will be around a slow but steady attack pattern with overpowered bursts. so crit is probably going to be more desirable slightly over haste. Still want some haste, but won't be focusing on it.

We'll see soon enough tho ^_^

Mastery is easily the worst stat from most simming I've found. Haste has a soft cap around 17.5%, picks up again a few percent after that. After getting that amount of haste, my sim directs me to crit and versatility. I do have ring, so haste is probably a little devalued because I have multiple heroes.

Mastery performing poor makes sense. Numerous people have complained about not being able to burn our mana on ptr. With the four piece, or mana regen legendaries, this is even further exaggerated.

Mastery is easily the worst stat from most simming I've found. Haste has a soft cap around 17.5%, picks up again a few percent after that. After getting that amount of haste, my sim directs me to crit and versatility. I do have ring, so haste is probably a little devalued because I have multiple heroes.

Mastery performing poor makes sense. Numerous people have complained about not being able to burn our mana on ptr. With the four piece, or mana regen legendaries, this is even further exaggerated.

I think this is heavily true of people with maybe kilt + bracers, along with the 2 piece set bonus - or at least some combination of those three things.

For many/most of us without perfect legendaries it seems like Mastery will still have a ton of value.

I should have phrased what I said better. Mastery is important, but I believe it has a much earlier fall off than it did on live. My current ptr stats are 10271 crit, 6525 haste, 6956 mastery, 2823 vers, and my weights vers>crit>mastery>haste. All of this is after dumping mastery from the 11,000 I was running on 7.1 when I first began simming. So it appears to me as though mastery is going to become less influential, a lot earlier than it used to relative to 7.1. I think this is important, because 7.1 arcane was literally a mastery stack exhibit, until you got near 50%, or had bracer/kilt/ring. It is not the same in my experience and sims on ptr.

I don't have perfect legendaries- I have ring/belt. If I take belt off, and put on an 880 belt (haste/vers), mastery jumps no meaningful amount in weight. I should also note, my intial test found the same thing, and that was a week before I got ring (I had belt/boots).

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that mastery "seems" good for anyone. Trouble burning mana, a 2 piece which will indirectly give us a larger mana pool, and a 4 piece which will lower our cool down on evo, all seem to suggest mana will be less of an issue. Then on top of this, with quickening gone, there is no gaming quickening and allowing mastery to regen our mana. This means we will barrage a lot more, thereby spending a lot more time at lower arcane charges. None of these things make mastery sound appealing to me, when you consider in 7.1 it was much more powerful.

Hey so wanted to check one thing - in 7.1 at least, I've been going rune of power, arcane power, mark of aluneth. I figured mark was worth powering up with my buffs, but have I been doing it wrong? Why wouldnt I want to buff mark?

Also heard some rumblings of mirror image being usable over une this patch which I would love, any truth to it or just hope?

It is the explosion at the end of MoA that you want buffed, the initial ticks are of less importance. The actual cast of MoA does not snapshot the buffs when it was cast, so powering it up first like you are doing is really just wasting a gcd or two inside rop and AP.

As for the mirror images, I can't say anything for certain, even if they were to gain the effects of arcane power I don't know if it would work out well as the cd's don't line up very well at all. Whereas Overpowered and RoP will always be able to line up. Unless mirrors just do some crazy damage, I can't see them being viable.

@Covery @x1xruex1x About that Missiles->AB->Missiles->AB rotation during the AP Phase: I have the Rhonin's bracers, so by doing that I'm fishing for procs (free AB), and also like x1xruex1x said, I like most the feeling of casting instants right after channeled spells, even if it does nothing special. like Gurudox said, I don't want to munch procs but at the same time I want to keep as many charges as possible for the hybrid burn/conserve phase, so I think 2 missiles charges used during AP might be a cool middle ground.

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About stats priority I think there is still a lot to be determined. At the moment, Mastery doesn't shines on sims simply because with our now very poor cast time (no more quickening), and no way to stall enough for an extra burn phase, we don't need a big mana pool nor mana regen anymore. With OverPowered, the biggest amount of our DPS comes from Arcane power, that's why crit sims so high.

However I believe that End-game arcane mage might be very different. In fact I think that stacking mastery might still be very relevant with the 4pc nh set, the new legendary hat Gravity Spiral and talenting into Temporal Flux (We are talking Raid environment here) Simply put, the objective will be to never use Arcane barrage to clear Arcane charges in order to regen mana (we will keep using it in conjunction with Charged up for dps purposes).

At this poinst Mastery will become great (larger mana pool, mana regen), also since we don't want to cast anything at 1, 2 or 3 arcanes charges we will fully benefit of the passive Mastery: Savant

I spent some time theorycrafting what would be an infinite burn rotation with the 4Pc set bonus, and Hat. I put this on a time line in order to better visualize the overall picture:



Timing is quite arbitrary, but I believe that we'll be able to extend our burn phases by a lot with multiple missiles procs (2pc set, artifact relics), legendary items (like Mystic kilt or Rhonin), and a good amount of Mastery

Awesome work on the infinite burn, Vhella! It really makes me wish I didn't have the terrible trio of Sephuz, Prydaz and Norgannon's But hey, only better chances that I'll get a Gravity Spiral or Kilt next, right?

My day 1 experience:

Did a bunch of simming, research here. I went with talents=2123131 because it (resonance) simmed the best, and was the best in practice. I did some testing with MI too, for the case of priority dps. I didn't fumble with any other talents minus simming. As for gear, I've dumped mastery, found ruby + chest to be very bad, using arcano and an 870 haste stat stick, looking to get a vers or crit one this week from Helya.

As for rotation, I found almost no changes from stand burn and conserve. I literally just did
AB/Lust
ABx3
MOA
ROP/AP
AM > AB
with around 2 seconds or slightly more left on AP, POM then ABx2
ROP
AM>AB

Then evo, and do a rop burn to 60%. Standard conserve here: abx4>Abarr, moa on cd (don't delay too much for rop), ROP with 2-3 AM charges, and make sure to have a rop for AM without delaying insanely. Burn once evo/rop is up, evo into a mini burn etc.

Legendaries: cord/ring

I found abx2 or abx3 into barrage way too low in damage to commit to consistently. I stuck with abx4>abarr and adjusting if mana seemed a little low or high. This gave me the closest to my simdps.

Just a warning, as others have said, Arcane APLs need work. Here are some examples (you can always view this yourself in the Sample Sequence Table):

1:36.731 init_burn e rune_of_power Fluffy_Pillow 141790.1/1482512: 10% mana arcane_charge(4), arcane_missiles, cord_of_infinity
1:38.062 init_burn f start_burn_phase Fluffy_Pillow 172797.9/1482512: 12% mana arcane_charge(4), arcane_missiles, rune_of_power, cord_of_infinity
1:38.062 cooldowns Y arcane_power Fluffy_Pillow 172797.9/1482512: 12% mana arcane_charge(4), arcane_missiles, rune_of_power, cord_of_infinity

RoP + AP @ 10% mana? Ouch.

2:15.965 burn Q evocation Fluffy_Pillow 112559.4/1482512: 8% mana blood_fury, arcane_charge(4), rune_of_power, cord_of_infinity, nightwell_arcanum

Evocating with Orc Racial and RoP? Always bad.

Anyways OP is on to something. Our CDs are all over the place with Overpowered and nothing really syncs up. AP and Evo 1.5min CDs, RoP 40s, MoA 1min, PoM 1min, CU 40s. PoM and MoA desync pretty quickly. And Overpowered makes it so that we're not mana starved after AP. Meaning there is 0 value in syncing Evo and AP.

Always have a RoP for AP. Always have a RoP for MoA. Always 4xAC ABarr into CU. Outside of this, just use your abilities on CD, but pair them when it makes sense. e.g. PoM or CU is about to be up at the same time as next AP+RoP cycle.

I'm using the same talent setup as OP as well. Amp is really good, CU > Resonance (ABarr is like 4% of our dmg, CU saves ramp up time and gets us a free ABarr), Erosion is the obvious choice for flat 8% increase. If I had ANY of the mana saving legos, I'd be trying other stuff, but I do not.

Quick Question
I actually have 3 Relics with +Sec to Arcane Power, do i "waste" the Time to set down my 2nd Rune after the 1st expires? Or do i Burn for the 5 sec or so without Rune and just use the Rest of Arcane Power before setting the 2nd down?

Don't waste your AP casting RoP. Wait until AP is over, cast another RoP if you will get full effect before your out of mana. If your gonna clip RoP with Evo, save it for your little burn after evo.

RE: Comment regarding 'wasting' time on casting second RoP during AP.

Make sure you're at max range, or as close to it as possible.
MoA->RoP1->AP.
Bank a missiles charge.
(filler)
Cast missiles at ~2s left on rune.
By the time the channel has finished, cast RoP2.

First third of missiles cast will hit under RoP1 and final third will hit under RoP2. You'll miss a few in the middle but it'll be worth it for the final few seconds of RoP2 + AP.

Imo.

I have a question for Vhella.
I really love your opener with MoA precast and using CU to immediatly enter burn phase.
The only things that is bothering me, is the stacks of Erosion.

Should we just ignore it ?

Updated my new rotation 1.1 in the first post.
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@Doty Well this is a good point, also MoA gives you one stack of Erosion per tick, so with this Opener your first Arcane blast will usually hit at 3-4 stacks which is still decent in my opinion.

@Jhazz the idea is cool but I think you're gonna lose a ton of dps doing this.
1) you lose precious cast time during AP (almost one Arcane Blast), your most powerful buff time
2) you can't guarantee that you will have enough arcane missiles for your second rune of power (which is imo the best way to use your RoP) resulting in a dps loss on this second RoP
3) When my Rop finishes i have like 2.5-3 sec left on my Arcane power, I'd rather casts spells during this window

You are using Charged up as important part of the rotation and I quite like it, but I think Resonance will become better when second target appears and as in Nighthold many fights will involve adds that probably will be better than CU.