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)
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.
- Always cast Arcane Blast followed up with Arcane Barrage if you have Burden of Power, since Nether Precision and Burden of Power Double dips.
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.
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!