ZOMGWTFBBQARCANEGOTBUFFED
Please, Rip, make haste to the PTR.
Tell me this makes arcane viable again.
ARCANE IS BACK BABY!!!!
ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT I GET IT.
/exhausted
So you want to know, how’s arcane doing? How does it stack up? How’s it going.
Come one guys, it’s just a PTR. It doesn’t
OkholycrapPUTTHEPYROBLASTDOWN!
Now let’s… let’s all just calm down here. There’s no need to incinerate my flesh quite yet. Besides, Ice Block is off cooldown and it wouldn’t work anyways.
SHUTUPPUTYOURPRIESTALTAWAY.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Gather around.
You might want to sit down for this. The news is pretty huge.
You ready?
*Deep Breath*
Arcane and Fireball are equal.
Naturally there’s some fluctuation, as fire is still dependent on RNG and arcane is far less forgiving of screw ups, and you can go into all sorts of debate about which brings more utility, which has stronger AoE, and so forth. But the simple fact remains that Arcane and Fireball produce equivalent DPS.
Now don’t take this to mean that they are equal on every fight, or even every part of every fight. The two still have vastly different styles and skill sets. There’s still lots of factors to take into account, like whether you’ll get more mileage out of multi-target LB or more controlled, on demand damage.
If you are a true raiding min maxer, you will have to have an arcane spec AND a fireball spec to be good at every fight. For the rest of us… some fights you’ll be a little behind the fire mages, other fights you’ll be a little ahead.
And isn’t that exactly how it should be?
Essentially, it has come down to this: which do you like more?
You wanna be arcane? Go for it. You aren’t holding anyone back. You wanna stick with fireball? Rock on, you burning mage you.
I’m… really not sure what else to say here.
Congratulations mages, we now have two perfectly viable and equal end game raiding specs?
Congratulations Blizzard, you’ve managed to do what all thought impossible?
Congratulations cryomancers, there’s hope for you yet?
In any case, Merry Friday, amirite?
Looks like it’s time to fix Combustion now!
(And maybe frost)
Lovely news. I’m going back to arcane for one as soon as it comes live. The question is when? Do you have any inside information/qualified guessing about it?
Great news,
i am looking really forward to it. Since Arcane so much more hits my palystyle. I love it.
Thank you for reporting.
Picked up dual specs sometime last week and I love being able to change my spec for the fight at hand. Even without the arcane buffs if its a fighit that I can abuse shield procs then I go arcane. If its multitarget then fire all the way.
I was sad the other night though I went almost a whole minute without a hot streak proc on XT hard
Not really the news I was looking for. I was hoping that Arcane would be buffed to the point of making Mages equal to Warlocks. If it is just making it equal to Fire, then that tells me it still falls below Lock dps…so much for that.
Yay, afai can recall… 2.4.x was the last time they were like this… i’m probably wrong though
My Haste is around 688, like 19% reduction of casting time.
Arcane, and Frost are rocking. I wonder how this will effect my Arcane when the patch goes live. Hopefully through the roof.
ZOMG I am so happy!
Fire, it was nice to know ya, maybe we can still be friends, have mana biscuits some time… but arcane is coming back and I need you to to leave before she gets back. S’OK?
This is what I think we all wanted. Not a spec that blows all the others out of the water, no flavor-of-the-month spec. We just wanted a choice.
/cheer
Cool. Looks like Blizz didn’t fuck it up.
In b4 “Nerfed 4 pvp”, because I get the feeling that’s going to happen.
BEFORE THAT HAPPENS. Everyone get to the Mage Forums and create threads squealing with joy.
ZOMGZ DEEP BRETHZ RUN AWAY!
I doubt it will be nerfed for PvP. Unless I missed some updates Arcane’s buff came in the form of stacking ABlast 4x, increasing proc of MBar off of ABlast, and lower mana costs.
I don’t know about you guys, but I usually have a tough time getting a stack of 3 ABlasts in PvP, and being a bit more mana efficient doesn’t seem like a huge PvP buff to me. The way I see it the only possible call for nerf is if we start procing MBar too much.
Awesome! Frost is back baby!
Huh? WHAT? *grumble grumble*
What about FFB spec?
http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/wiki/SampleOutputPTR
Arcane mages are at the top of the dps pyramid. Yippee!