We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Arcane Mage in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Arcane Mage!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Preservation Evoker
Arcane Mage
Assassination Rogue
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Mage Tier Set
Why You Should Play Arcane Mage in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Arcane Mage has always been synonymous with burst damage and the quintessential glass cannon, though in Dragonflight mages can be quite tanky if we know when to expect damage. Arcane packs a real wallop in a short amount of time; once Siphon Storm, Arcane Surge, and Rune of Power are up, Radiant Spark Vulnerability is ramped, and you Arcane Barrage>Touch of the Magi there is a period of 12s where you just cannot be matched in damage output. It does take some prep work to get to this point though and has definitely given Arcane a community impression that Arcane is harder than it is.
Arcane Mage has historically been very underrepresented in high end gameplay until Dragonflight. Not only did Arcane find it’s niche in Shadowlands as a burst funnel spec with high priority target damage with free cleave, it also was given a ton of utility. While Arcane was tuned to be a powerhouse at the launch of Dragonflight, it has since fallen behind in tuning. With the most recent tuning round which gave Arcane a sizable buff and quality of life increase (and decrease), I believe Arcane will be strong when it’s most important in the new raid tier and in pvp, but I fear it will continue to fall behind frost and fire in dungeons and aoe intensive raid fights.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Arcane Mage in Dragonflight Season 2
Arcane Mage Utility for Dragonflight
In Dragonflight, the addition of the Class tree has opened a lot of class-wide utility up for all specs of mage. In particular, Dragon’s Breath and Blast Wave have made Arcane and Frost much stronger in mythic+ utility wise. In general it is hard to go wrong with this much utility available. This is also ignoring some of the quality of life utility we have like and Conjure Refreshment. Arcane also has a leg up over Frost and Fire with Supernova which is located in a point in the Arcane spec tree where it is completely off-limits without taking a dps hit, so it is generally only taken in pvp.
This is also bolstered even further by the amount of our rotation that we spend benefitting from multiple effects that provide movement while casting: Slipstream, Ice Floes/Shimmer, as well as tools that give us a few easy instant casts with Presence of Mind and Ice Nova. We also have a strong sprint spell with Invisibility buffed by Incantation of Swiftness!
Arcane Mage’s Defensive toolkit
When damage patterns are predictable, Arcane’s barrier spell gets an extra umph from Prismatic Barrier that Fire and Frost trade for Cauterize and Cold Snap. Between 25s Prismatic Barrier, 4m Ice Block, 2m Mirror Image, 50s Alter Time, and 2m Greater Invisibility, and all of this is sped up by Shifting Power. There’s no shortage of cooldowns to reduce incoming damage, however only Alter Time recovers health and only if you you’re healthy when you use it originally. It is also the case that Alter Time is the only defensive listed above that is off the global cooldown, this can occasionally feel disruptive with Arcane’s already cluttered burst sequence.
It is worth noting that Mages in general do suffer on continuous damage encounters and rely on healers and tertiary stats more in those situations. Overall Arcane’s defensives toolkit feels very strong though!
Priority Burst Damage
Arcane’s is the last bastion of burst among Mage specs. These situations arise very often in raiding, just looking at Vault of the Incarnates: Sennarth big spider add, Dathea platform adds, and Raszageth shields/adds. It’s actually a mystery to me that guilds put Mages on the boss instead of adds for Broodmother. Largely in the past this was a niche that Arcane competed against Fire in, however with Fire’s main cooldown being notably weaker than previous expansions and the spec requiring uptime to continuously deal it’s damage it now competes against Frost in it’s strengths and weaknesses. Arcane is now in a class of its own for Mages which makes it much more likely that it will be seen in high end raiding.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Arcane Mage in Dragonflight Season 2
I’m Charging My Laser…
The burst takes too long to happen for most people’s taste. Recap here! Between Rune of Power, Radiant Spark, and Arcane Surge you have roughly 30s to execute your opening burst; add in the 4pc bonus for Aberrus (which just got a +6s duration increase) and you have 48s; at this point your miniburst is up and you burst again! All in all you spend about 60s of every 78s either setting up burst or bursting, and that’s with lust; without it’s a bit slower which is another topic we’ll talk about shortly. This not only makes it very difficult to slot in utility and defensives, it also is another step away from burst profiles for Mages.
Part of the problem is Shifting Power which speeds up the rotation and gives Arcane little downtime to work with when setting up for Touch of the Magi with Radiant Spark. Some times it just feels like there isn’t enough GCDs in the day!
Arcane Mage LFG
Arcane’s damage spells all have a similar weakness when it comes to large groups of mobs, target capping on the strongest abilities and low damage tuning on the abilities that are uncapped. Some of our hardest hitting multitarget abilities are capped at 5 targets Arcane Barrage, Arcane Surge, and Harmonic Echo, or 8 targets Arcane Echo, simply uncapping one or more of these would go a long way. It would also be easy if our uncapped abilities, Arcane Explosion and Nether Tempest could simply deal more damage to make up the weakness of Arcane’s overall in dungeons. It would certainly be more fun to uncap Arcane Barrage though!
Is anybody out there?
Dev communication has been notoriously absent for Mages over the years. It is not that no one is working on things, Arcane has received a couple of key bug fixes, this includes the Arcane Barrage cleave logic change making it less of a liability when mob model sizes were abnormal. They also fixed Ice Floes being consumed by Arcane Echo, Shifting Power not working on Radiant Spark, and Nether Tempest going on the wrong target when targets were stacked. All of these were appreciated a ton by the community and myself!
However, after 178 days without a tuning change and Arcane slipping behind other specs over the tier, Arcane finally got some PTR notes with numbers in them! While the overall impact of these is a pretty solid buff in single target, the AOE impact is very minimal and the mechanical changes were a give and take. Additional Radiant Spark time is again, very appreciated! This opens up part of the burst ramp to being a bit more user friendly when it comes to slotting in a dispel or defensive.
Juxtaposed to the RS qol positive, lengthening the Touch of the Magi window is a loss overall. While more Touch of the Magi time is certainly more damage in an encounter where those seconds don’t decide the difference in outcome, the fact of the matter is there are far more points where you need that explosion to go off sooner to deal competent damage or to actually satisfy the demands of the encounter. Let me illustrate it like this: Touch of the Magi was 8s originally in Shadowlands, they added 2s to it in Dragonflight, now 2 more. In Sepulcher of the First Ones, our 4pc set gave us 4s more Touch time and we used to take off the set bonus to deal more damage on encounters like Anduin where timing mattered more than “more”. It would have been a lot better to add to the amount of damage Touch of the Magi stored rather than lengthen it.
And none of that does anything to address the key problems Arcane Mage has right now:
- Temporal Warp is likely going to be a major issue for Mages in general, but for Arcane specifically since we are so reliant on lust on pull for cooldown stacking. If a fight does not have lust on pull Arcane is going to hurt. The alternative talent Time Anomaly is notably weaker. Please just put Temporal Warp on its own button!
- Time Anomaly is thematically ??? and still feels so weak compared to Shadowlands. Meteor is clunky as hell rotationally. These capstones need help or replacement.
- Mages are crying out for some kind of health recovery option.
- Siphon Storm is too strong relative to other capstones which doesn’t allow any other utility to be taken in the spec tree except Presence of Mind; there is zero choice.
- The other non-Radiant Spark capstones need some buffs, but also some attention to design; the capstone talents for Arcane contain some of its weakest talents and it really says something that the most popular build right now doesnt even use a third capstone talent.
- GCD bloat is a real problem, Mage defensives all requiring premeditation really should come with Barrier spells being oGCD.
- Also Arcane’s 4pc set bonus next tier is still antithetical to Arcane’s design.
Mage’s really need love, not a band-aid; we got the least attention during Dragonflight beta and now we’ve also got the least post-launch support. We function but we’re not fun.
About the Author
Hello, I’m Porom a Mage player in <Divergence>. I have been playing WoW on and off since release and am an active staff member in the Altered-Time discord. I have played at the top end in the earlier expansions of WoW but now I prefer to keep my raiding time short and efficient. I stream my guild’s raids and some dungeons every now and again over at twitch. You can also find me in the Arcane Dream discord.
For more information on playing Arcane Mage, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Arcane Mage Guide
