Arcane VS Frost

[muffinman51432 0]

Hey guys I just started playing WoW again after quitting at the end of WoTLK. I got my mage to 110 and have 855 level gear. I was lucky enough to get my frost legendary bracers the first chest and stuck with frost for a while. I recently tried arcane and feel my DPS is a little higher although simcraft says frost still puts it higher (by about 10k). Which would you recommend for a noob casual that does mythics and raid finder.

[Drtain 74]

Arcane is a more forgiving rotation (i think so personally) and isn't very over complicated just don't burn all your mana.

[demonardvark 556]

*cough fire master race cough*

But i agree of the two arcane is a bit easier to jump into. You basically just have your spam everything phase and don't spam everything phase. Now with specific legendary items frost gets almost boringly easy to play but that requires to get lucky. While I would recommend arcane for raiding I would sort of suggest personally fire for world questing and dungeons. It just has really fast quick snap burst, brutal aoe, and once you get it down its very simple. Most world quests take me less than a minute to do. Arcane requires a little setup time and a lot of standing still. 

so arcane raid def, but may want to play with fire for wq

[Tehril 12]

Currently in Nighthold frost is a little bit stronger than arcane, however the power gap is very slight, and the top spec does change based on the fights. 

 

I personally very much enjoy frost, once you get your 2+4pc a lot of the bad RNG streaks tend to disappear, allowing you to do more than mash Frostbolts wishing for some other button to press. It also provides some good utility to mythic+ groups in the ability to apply a massive slow to everything in the pack, allowing for easy kiting from the tank. Arcane and fire do have slows, but a fire must burn his hot streaks on Flamestrikes which is not always ideal, likewise an arcane mage has to not only talent into his AoE slow, but can only do so when he casts Barrage, which resets his charges, which is not always ideal. Also we can talent into a 65% slow, and get an 85% slow on flurries.

 

Frost is also a lot less legendary reliant to really start breaking out the big numbers, and you've already got one of the best legendaries available to the spec. So half that battle is over. For those of you wishing to argue with this assessment, look at the top legendaries used for the closest thing to a Patchwerk we have in Nighthold, Krosus. Arcanes top 20 is almost entirely the legs/lust ring, whereas frost is a hodge podge of almost every legendary available to the spec. And as always with fire there's all of 1 guy in the top 20 without the bracers.

[bmay91 0]

I'm a 901 frost mage, fortunately have both the wrist and hands legendaries, pretty well geared, and have gotten the rotation down quite well.

That being said, I can tell ya that it does get boring sometimes, and I have started delving into Arcane. I can't do much in it yet, however, as I don't have any decent legendaries for it. The Arcane burst's damage doesn't seem like it'll be far off from my frost's, once I get the right gear; however, I think Frost is more sustained dps in a long fight. Arcane's abilities are definently a new adventure though, and I highly recommend either one.

Edited May 29, 2017 by bmay91

[Crazymage 0]

Which will do better after the changes in the 7.2.5 patch?

[Woofikins 3]

 If you're just doing mythic dungeons and LFR, play what you want. Majority of people aren't going to care what your dps is since all that content is pretty much on farm mode. 

 

However i will say this... arcane can be decent, but basically requires you to have a mana legendary (primarily the kilt of the rune master) in order to smooth things out when your evocation isn't up.  It is pretty fun to play though imo. A rune of power into arcane explosion spam is a massive amount of damage. But like i said, the spec revolves around mana management and without a legendary to help with that you might have a sinking feeling. I find the spec very flexible, allowing you to swap between single target, aoe, and popup priority targets on the fly. 

Frost is what i mainly play (frost w/ arcane off spec, both 52+ with 920 artifacts). I find frost to be the more forgiving spec. All you have to do is not munch your procs and you'll do decent damage. Also frost is not reliant on legendary items for core gameplay aspects like arcane is. They will give you a damage boost (luckily you have the bracers which are pretty good), but not having a particular legendary isn't going to kill you. Frost aoe is alright.  You have blizzard and frozen orb, after that you have ice lance 2 target cleave (and cone of cold/ frost nova). With a few targets stacked you can get multiple frozen orbs out on 1 trash pack. Overall the aoe is just ok though. It's mostly fuel for your cleave spells though. 1-2 targets is where frost shines most of all though (which is about every boss fight)

 

Tldr; just play what you enjoy

[Vayra 12]

On 31-5-2017 at 8:34 AM, Crazymage said:

Which will do better after the changes in the 7.2.5 patch?

Arcane has been pretty stable throughout Legion but has massively improved in playstyle when they reworked the class I believe in 7.1.5. The 7.2.5 patch brought no - yes indeed zero - changes to Arcane, underlining its high stability in DPS and how it scales throughout ilevels.

I main Arcane Mage, and I have honestly never had as much fun with a Mage spec as this. Back in TBC and Vanilla was my pre-Legion (raid/endgame/hardcore) experience and basically Arcane Mage in Legion has ticked all the boxes that vanilla Arcane lacked.

Notable points with Arcane:

- High mobility. Between Blink/Shimmer and Displacement + good timing you can chain four blinks. You can cast Barrage and gain 70% movespeed at will. Arcane Mage also has a spammable instant cast (huge) AoE with Arcane Explosion, easily the strongest on-the-move castable spam you can get on a Mage between all specs.

- Top sustained AoE of all Mage Specs. While Fire can burst well, Arcane can burst even more brutally but just has it on a longer (1m50sec) cooldown with Arcane Power. But generally, Arcane sustained AoE is top of the line even compared to any other class except maybe Hunters and Locks. A big part of this is the ease of use: spammable, on the move, and 360 degree 14-yard range. Arcane Mage keeps 100% mobility doing full AoE spam. This gets even stronger when you pair it with Blood Elf because of the AoE silence racial you get. Blink in, AoE interrupt/silence, displace out, or stay in and spam hard. It gives you the security you need while staying so close to melee range.

- Ease of use and learning curve. Yes, Arcane has a relatively simple concept and playstyle. Extracting top dps from the spec however is another story entirely and makes the skill cap pretty high. I have yet to meet an Arcane Mage that pushed out more than myself, but then again, we are quite a rare spec compared to the other two.

- Kilt. Kilt. Kilt. Must have legendary. When you get a Kilt, you'll never worry again about 'having to use an extra conserve cycle' because those cycles also extend the time you can burst because 4 charges > barrage = 12% mana back. Every. Single. Time. Without Kilt, Arcane is extremely hard to push dps with because there are too many conserve phases to avoid running OOM.

- Rotation is never fixed. It depends entirely on your gear setup and talent setup as well. There are many ways to increase the value of your mana pool to allow for more spells, but once you get mana conserving legendaries (like Kilt) you can also consider talent swaps. The big irony with Arcane: now with the ToS set and the new class Ring, the top build/talent setups actually remove buttons from your bar and change them to passive bonuses from talents. The more geared you get, the simpler the rotation gets, while the dps potential skyrockets.

- General playstyle with Arcane is highly different on each boss fight and how difficult it is compared to the raid team you bring to it. The duration of the entire fight, and knowing roughly how long it is, is of huge influence to your playstyle - you are faced with choices such as when and how much/long to conserve mana, how fast to burn to your first Evocation, and when to enter your burst phase with Arcane Power. Lining that up with trinket procs like Nefarious Pact along the way, while still getting as many 'cycles' off, is the key to Arcane DPS.

 

Hope this gets people some good insights on Arcane, and looking forward to seeing some more competition :) Also, there is the fun of playing an undervalued spec, for some reason we are much less popular than the other specs but still super (raid) viable without real drawbacks.

Edited June 29, 2017 by Vayra