Playstyle & Rotation
General Rotation
For the very basics of Arcane Mage:
- 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.
- Use Arcane Surge + Shifting Power + Touch of the Magi on CD, it’s crucial that we use them on CD (if combat allows) so we can stay on the 1:30 burst surge and 45 sec touch of the magi window.
Opener
- Cast Evocation 4 seconds before the pull
- Cast Arcane Missiles (evocation gives us Clearcasting)
- Cast Arcane Orb (ONLY with high voltage)
- Cast Touch of the Magi if below 4 charges. If at 4 charges, then cast Arcane Barrage followed by touch of the Magi so our Arcane Barrage will benefit from Nether Precision into the Touch window.
- Continue to Cast Arcane Blast and Spend Arcane Missiles procs accordingly
- Cast touch of the magi (after 45 sec from pull) as soon as it’s ready
- Continue to cast Shifting Power
- Continue with filler rotation priority
Downtime Phase
During our downtime phase, or our “Conserve“ phase, we are mostly weaving Arcane Blast, Arcane Barrage or Arcane Missiles to consume Nether Precision and waiting for our CDS to return.
The priority of the phase is as follow:
- Arcane Missiles with Clearcasting (never overcap this)
- Arcane Barrage with Intuition Proc (this is the highest priority). Intuition has a very short timer, so make sure you are not caught off guard by this, cancel what you are doing and cast Arcane Barrage as soon as possible.
- Cast Arcane Barrage with at LEAST 18 stacks of Arcane Harmony
- Cast Arcane Barrage IF you have a way to regenerate Arcane Chargers (High Voltage / Arcane Orb available)
- Cast Arcane Blast until you are out of mana
- Cast Arcane Barrage if you are on the move (try to meet the conditions)
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 as it’s a 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
- Arcane Orb if you are below 3 arcane charges
- Avoid casting 0 Arcane Charges blast
- Cast arcane explosion if you have less than 3 arcane chargers
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.
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.
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.
Mythic + Advanced Tricks:
With playing spellslinger for all mythic + content, a large part of our gameplay is arcane barraging and recuperating those charges back through our arcane orbs or aether attunement,where we have a few situations that we can optimise further than our initial rotation.To take advantage of the constant stream of orbs that spellslinger is giving us, we can preemptively barrage if we get an orb proc since we know that it will refund our charges anyway. On top of this, our orb will give us a charge for every mob it hits, giving us a small window to fire off a barrage while the orb is travelling through the pack and have it instantly cap our arcane charges. You will need to be around 20 yards away depending on your haste stat, but this is a very difficult skill to pull off and takes practise to master. We can also take advantage of our aether attunement in a similar way, with our talent High Voltage giving us stacks of arcane charges from our missiles, we can barrage while our missiles are still in the air from aether attunement and get charges back for free
Arcane Barrage Conditions
Since arcane barrage received some changes (for the 6th time already), it’s easy to understand why you would lose track sometimes of when it’s the optimal time to press Arcane Barrage.
However, the mage discord (credit to Porom from the Alter Time discord) and theorycrafters came up with a simplified conditions list for the optimal time to press Arcane Barrage for both Spellslinger and Sunfury.
Spellslinger Single Target:
- You have Intuition
- If Arcane Tempo is about to expire
- If Touch of the Magi is off cooldown and you have 4x Arcane Charge
- You have High Voltage, Clearcasting, 4x Arcane Charge and 1x Nether Precision
- 18x stacks of Arcane Harmony or 12 stacks if you have High Voltage and either 1 or 0 Nether Precision
- Arcane Orb is off cooldown and 1x Nether Precision and no Clearcasting, or neither.
Spellslinger Funnel Additions:
- Arcane Orb is off cooldown and you have 4x Arcane Charge
- You have High Voltage, Clearcasting and 4x Arcane Charge
- Enemy is below 35% health
Spellslinger AoE:
- If you have 4x Arcane Charge
Sunfury Single Target:
- You have either Intuition or Glorious Incandescence
- If Touch of the Magi is off cooldown and you have 4x Arcane Charge
- Arcane Soul is up and you have less than 3x Arcane Charge
Sunfury Funnel Additions:
- Arcane Orb is off cooldown
- Enemy is below 35% health
- 18x stacks of Arcane Harmony or you have both High Voltage and Clearcasting
There’s a WA that being made by Porom to get Familiar with Arcane Barrage Conditions if you want to check it out: https://wago.io/AcHUF7O_G
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!