This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Arcane's fun. The -40% threat talent does help tremendously with all our cooldowns. It's a good thing 4pc T10 is hooked into Mirror Image because 18% damage for 30 seconds is going to be silly when stacked with everything else at the beginning of the fight.I'm also glad the Arcane spec now has some form of raid utility in 3.3. The 3% party/raid damage that Ret Pallies and BM hunters use to have is nice for heroics.
The most favorite fight for me as an arcane mage is the Twin Val'kyr fight. My mage is specced into Incanter's Absorption, and since the essences from the portals absorb damage from the Val'kyr, I end up seeing my DPS being well over 11k. In my most recent fight, I was at 12.7k.
Tl;dr raiding as an Arcane Mage:Pop all cooldowns, 112112112112112...
http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=us.windrunner.mathi%C3%A6sThats my mage, for credibility reasons.ABx4->Missile Barrage spam is only 2%~ less DPS than AB spam at a fourth of the mana consumption... Arcane isn't like it was in BC. Just AB spamming in ANY SITUATION OTHER THAN AT THE END OF A FIGHT is a DPS loss due to having to Evocate, etc later. If you use the ABx4->MBAM rotation, you should be able to last 4minutes without having to Evocate, and only have to sit through a few ticks of Evocate to finish the fight, and depending on luck, you may not need to Evocate at all. If you had done those burn cycles of AB spam, you would've Evocated twice--between 10 and 14 seconds of downtime. You're trading 2% higher DPS for avg of 12 seconds downtime. The only time this is worth it is when that 12seconds of downtime is about equivalent to 1% of total time... when a fight is 20 minutes long.The above information is accurate according to any and all mage simulations, such as Vontre's MageGraf and Rawr.Mage