Tailoring specializationFollow

1) Yes, your confusion is understandable. Arcane-Fire is a very effective raiding build, you do a lot of damage with it. For your rotation, I'd change it up to ABx3, Scorch until the buff is at 2 seconds, then ABx3, AM when clearcasting.

2) I've had awesome results with 40/0/21 just playing as I would a Frost Mage, eg Frostbolt spam. I can get my Frostbolts, when raid buffed, to hit on average for 1600, critting around 3800, occasionaly getting up to 5000. Frost provides an effective super macro, especially with a troll; you can still use it though if you're another race, just no berserking. All it is is arcane power, trinket, icy veins, and berserking. Very effective in a boss fight like Shade where aggro is a non issue. I love Frost, and in terms of damage, let's put it this way. We have a tank that's nearly impossible to pull aggro off of. Fighting Prince, I was almost able to eclipse his threat; I invised to drop it, and started fresh. By the end of the fight, I was second on the threat meter. That's up against a warlock that always (narrowly, I might add) beats me for damage. Gruul's Lair, I can pull 900 DPS.

3) It's up to you. As I said I love Frost, I find it much more viable, even with a 40/0/21 build to go soloing, pvping, etc.

4) If you have a large mana pool, it can be. A lot of my gems are used to hit the Frost spell hit cap (126); Were I Arcane, those gems wouldn't be their as Arcane's cap is only 76. It's POSSIBLE, but you'd need a lot of intellect and discipline with those Arcane Blasts.

I wouldn't say go Frost, I'd do a lot of research into it. Do what you want, but keep in mind this is from a lot of work done. Don't expect to get numbers like that; I also use flasks, elixers of frost power, wizard oil, food...anything that can give me +Spell Damage.

Alright ^^ thank you both for the advices!

With the sets, badge loot, and honor epics, gear is pretty easy to get. Just go with what you find more fun for yourself. Fire will be higher DPS. But this doesn't matter as much anymore when you starting out. If your the type of person that wants to bring everything they can to the raid and help out as much as possible then go fire and spec 40/21/0 untill you get more spell damage.

But if frost just seems more fun for you or you like grinding and PVPing with frost then hit up the 40/0/21 spec and have at it. There's really no wrong answer anymore. You'll get the gear to make each spec work. It all comes down to what you like as a player and what will make the game more enjoyable for you.



btw, 40/21/0 isn't a acrane spec with some fire spells. It's a fire spec with arcane buffs for you fire spells. You can play around in heroics and such with AB and AM but in raids the scorch/fireball rotation will work better with your mana pool and DPS.

While leveling I went with a 2/47/12 build, and I really liked it. When I hit 70 and decided it was time to start being a bit more serious, I found that the 40/21/0 spec would be better for me. Now I feel like a boob for not using it all the time. However, as my gear gets better, I wonder what the magic spell damage number is when empowered fireball becomes worth it. It will be sad and happy, because I'll be doing more damage, but I won't be able to PoM Pyro folks out in the world any longer.

Wow, I thought it was going to be closer to 1000. I think I'm pretty well over that number right now. Probably at 875 or so, I'll have to do some additioning.

Thanks Poldaran. I actually considered just PMing you about this, again.

Actually if you do the math on the two, Empowered Fireball gives about 120 spell damage at 800 damage while Mind Mastery would require 480 Int to give the same bonus, which is doable. But if you look beyond that at other talents, they put you ahead at that point. Before then, the difference tends to be too great for the Fire talents to overtake the rest of the arcane ones.

Srsly, you guys need to tell me how that goes. Just rementioning it in case you all missed it in the OOT thread.

A WWS report to go along with it would also be awesome.

Attumen is really easy once you get him down. The hardest part of learning him is learning that you have to clear quickly and there is no time to dally. Also, bunch up behind him when he combines and decurse at least yourself and the tank when he does his curse(only yourself and the tank if you want to hack the meters, though I wouldn't recommend that when you're learning it...don't bother decursing healers though).

The shadow priest part is helpful but not 100% necessary, but based on your spell damage, then yes, you'd probably see better results from the 40/21/0(or 40/18/3).