11-01-2009, 08:34 AM
Quote:Because fire isn't the highest dps spec, barring gimmicks? (yes, AoE for an entire fight is a gimmick, I'm looking at you Anub).
Anub heroic we go FFB, not fire, for blizzard damage synergies.
Skan, help a brother out here:P
Well, okay.
Yes, Arcane is the best damage spec with two fairly significant limitations that basically don't come into play at all in Trial of the Grand Crusader. Firstly, Arcane requires you to be relatively immobile. That's trivial. It also requires that fights be relatively short, which, compared to previous raid tiers, ToGC fights definitely are. Personally I went from about 7.5k to 9k on Beasts from going Fire->Arcane, so yeah, I saw an improvement, to say the least.
Gormok's great for Arcane. I mean yes, you can LB both the snobold and the boss, but there should never be more than one or two snobolds up anyway, and the snobolds don't get hit by the explosion, which reduces the 1-global value of the spell by quite a bit (the explosion constitutes about one-third of a living bomb's damage). Not only that, but the ability of Arcane to basically carry its damage ramps across units means that ranged can perform add duty without performance loss, which is huge. The highest Fire numbers come from mages that stick to Gormok and just drop Bombs on Snobolds, which is fine but realistically they're just stealing their numbers from other classes picking up their slack on the adds.
Moreover, other aspects of the fight are great for Arcane too. The numerous interruptions give Arcane the ability to evocate repeatedly at no DPS cost, which Fire can't reasonably take advantage of. Not only that, Arcane's burstier nature, with multiple short cooldowns, is much better when you can have cooldowns recharge on dead time.
As for other fights, Jaraxxus is obviously an arcane mage's playground, since you can pop a cooldown basically every other time you steal Nether Power and in your straight Fireball spec you can basically hit whatever trinket you got and Combustion maybe twice. DPS isn't entirely relevant on FC, but I like Arcane as the spec for that too. Without conventional aggro tables, there's really no reason not to pop everything right off the bat and do 20k dps for 20 seconds on the first target.
Valks is one of those obvious gimmicks. I think if we all fought it the way Blizzard expected us to fight it, basically individually Ikaruga'ing it up on the floor, Fire would win on account of Ignite double-dips and its superior mobility. But pretty much everybody uses some variant of a strategy where some people intercept orbs and some people stand still, and Arcane mages gain a lot from standing still. On our last kill I did 16k DPS and I mistimed a bunch of things and dodged a couple of stray orbs to boot. Now, regardless of class, putting your best players on orb catching is the best strategy, but mages go ahead of any other ranged in terms of who I personally would want standing still first.
I was a slow adopter to Arcane, really. I stuck with Fire through the first couple clears of Trial of the Grand Crusader, but then a guildmate brought a fairly mediocre geared mage alt to a ToC-10 and put up some interesting numbers, so I decided to experiment a little. It took a run to pick up all the minor playstyle shifts, but it really was better once that happened.