Arcane Mage DPS Guide — 12.1

Patch 12.1 is here, with Season 2 starting soon! Below, we have some quick links to dedicated hubs covering everything the new Season has to offer!

As with every new major patch, there is lots of new content to explore. Beyond all of the new Season changes, the patch also comes with the new Lairs system, which is a new group-based activity, housing improvements, and more! For a full overview, check our 12.1 Patch Hub below.

New Patch Content

Patch 12.1 Overview

Check out our 12.1 Patch Hub for all the information you may need on new content, new gameplay systems, and more!

Midnight Patch 12.1 Guide

In 12.1, Arcane gets a lot of mechanical changes. The Apex Talent has been replaced entirely, Arcane Pulse is a completely different spell, Orb Mastery is reworked, and the class tree picks up some defensive changes and improvements.

Touch of the Archmage has been removed and replaced with a new Apex Talent, Prismatic Bolt:

• Prismatic Bolt: Arcane Barrage gains a 1% chance per Arcane Salvo stack consumed to replace your next Arcane Blast with a Prismatic Bolt. It damages your target and nearby enemies, with reduced damage beyond 5 targets, and generates 4 Arcane Charges. It does not scale its damage or mana cost with Arcane Charges, and is not affected by anything that modifies Arcane Blast. You can hold the proc for up to a minute.
• Prismatic Bolt: Prismatic Bolt has a 50%/100% chance to grant Clearcasting, and Arcane Missiles damage is increased by 15%/30%.
• Prismatic Bolt: Adds another 1% chance per Arcane Salvo stack consumed, bringing it to 2% per stack in total, and increases Arcane Barrage damage by 15%.

Fully invested, an Arcane Barrage spending 20 stacks of Arcane Salvo has a 40% chance to hand you a Prismatic Bolt, (up to 25 stacks -> 50% as Sunfury) making this is a relatively frequent proc rather than a rare one. The 4 Arcane Charges being refunded greatly improves the ability to get back to 4 Arcane Charges after dumping to 0, allowing you to save on other methods of charge generation for when Prismatic Bolt does not proc.

Prismatic Bolt itself also does very high damage, which the rotation greatly revolves around. Make sure to check out the updated Rotation Page for how to play around it.

Arcane Pulse has been reworked:

• 2 second cast time, 8 yard radius, and a 15 second cooldown.
• It generates 1 Arcane Charge per enemy struck.
• Arcane Charges no longer affect it.
• Impetus and Prodigious Savant no longer affect it.

This turns Arcane Pulse from an AoE filler into a cooldown, and it undoes the 12.0.5 change that lined its cast time up with Arcane Blast. Generating a charge per target means a single cast can take you from empty to 4 Arcane Charges in AoE, which is a big deal both for opening on a pack and for rebuilding after a Arcane Barrage. The trade-off is that Arcane Explosion goes back to filling the gaps between Pulses, so AoE means being in melee range more often again.

Orb Mastery has been redesigned. Arcane Orb now always launches 2 additional orbs at 50% effectiveness, and it no longer requires or consumes Clearcasting. Previously it consumed a Clearcasting proc to launch 2 extra orbs at full strength.

Orb Mastery no longer competing with Arcane Missiles over Clearcasting means all builds now use Arcane Missiles again as its spender, instead of Orb-based builds existing. The new Tier Set (see below) further emphasizes this.

Expanded Mind has been adjusted for the new Apex Talent: Prismatic Bolt grants 4 Arcane Salvo stacks, while Arcane Orb now grants 1 stack instead of 2.

Season 2 comes with a new Tier Set:

• Mage Arcane 12.1 Class Set 2pc: Arcane Missiles fires one additional wave and deals 20% increased damage.
• Mage Arcane 12.1 Class Set 4pc: Each Arcane Missiles wave increases the damage of your next Arcane Blast, Arcane Pulse or Prismatic Bolt by 5%, stacking up to 40%.

Both bonuses lean hard on Arcane Missiles, which makes Clearcasting worth considerably more than it is now. That lines up with the rest of the patch, since Rank 2 of the Apex Talent hands out Clearcasting and Orb Mastery no longer consumes it. Getting to 40% and then spending it on a big hit is the obvious thing to aim for, but how the stacks are best spent in practice is something we will cover on the Rotation page.

Spellslinger got some tuning changes:

• Polished Focus now refunds 3 Arcane Salvo stacks when you Barrage at 20 or more stacks (was 5).
• Splintering Orbs's damage bonus to Arcane Orb increased to 50% (was 10%).

Sunfury got the bigger rework, mostly around Spheres and Mana Cascade:

• Spellfire Spheres base generation reduced from 12% to 6%, and Rondurmancy no longer raises the maximum to 5 Spheres. Instead it adds 6% of generation back (12% in total) and gives every Sphere an additional 1% spell damage.
• Savor the Moment now extends Arcane Surge by 0.8 seconds per Sphere (was 0.4), up to a maximum of 2.4 seconds (was 2). Since you are back to a three-Sphere maximum, three Spheres reach the full extension.
• Ashes of Inspiration has been redesigned. It no longer grants Lesser Time Warp when your Arcane Phoenix expires, instead, every spell the Phoenix casts grants a Mana Cascade stack, and Exceptional spells grant two.
• Mana Cascade's 10 stack cap has been removed, and Arcane Pulse and Prismatic Bolt now generate stacks as well.
• Memory of Al'ar no longer doubles Mana Cascade generation during Arcane Surge.
• Glorious Incandescence summons a Meteorite per 5 Arcane Salvo stacks consumed (was 6).

Overall, Arcane became slightly sturdier in 12.1, but the overall defensive profile does not move much. Most importantly, Arcane gets a second Prismatic Barrier charge, which helps a lot with dealing with relatively low but more frequent damage. Expand the section below for the full defensive and utility changes.

Between the new Apex Talent, the Arcane Pulse redesign and the tier set, both the best Talents and the rotation change quite a bit, so make sure to check out our Talents, Rotation and Gear pages for the details.

Click for the Season 1 Changes

Arcane spent Season 1 getting tuned in small steps, with only one mechanical change along the way:

• Season 1 launch: Arcane Blast damage increased by 25% and Arcane Barrage by 15%, while Arcing Cleave dropped to 40% (was 60%) and Spellslinger was toned down through Splintering Orbs (10%, was 25%) and Controlled Instincts (40%, was 60%).
• Patch 12.0.5: Arcane Pulse was brought in line with Arcane Blast, going to a 2.25 second base cast time reduced by 8% per Arcane Charge. Patch 12.1 reverses this again.
• May 26th tuning: all damage increased by 5% and Arcane Missiles by a further 10%, with Sunfury buffed through Burden of Power to close the gap to Spellslinger.
• June 30th tuning: all ability damage increased by 3%.
• Patch 12.0.7: no direct Arcane changes, but Omnium Folio and Sporefused gear shifted our Talents and BiS a little.

Midnight has arrived, and Arcane Mage has received a substantial rework affecting both the Mage class tree and the Arcane spec itself. At its core, Arcane is still about high burst and mana management, but the way it does this is quite different. Arcane had many of its different buffs consolidated into a single new resource: Arcane Salvo, to reduce the amount of different resources and buffs to track.

Midnight introduced a new type of talent, called Apex Talent. It shows up at the bottom of your talent tree, and has four ranks. It functions similar to other talents, costing talent points like usual.

For Arcane, we get the following Apex Talent:

• Touch of the Archmage: Touch of the Magi increases the damage your target receives from you by 15%.
• Touch of the Archmage: Arcane Charges further increase the damage of Arcane Blast, Arcane Pulse, and Arcane Barrage. Also increases Arcane Missiles damage. Has 2 ranks. Note: This always counts, not just during Touch of the Magi.
• Touch of the Archmage: When Touch of the Magi explodes, it leaves behind a pulsing rune on its target, dealing 75% of its damage over 6 seconds to nearby enemies. This damage is increased by 50% on the initial Touch of the Magi target.

Spellslinger has not received major changes, but more targeted tuning due to the changes to the spec tree. Anything previously referring to a buff affecting Arcane Barrage has been changed to use the new Arcane Salvo buff. And Splintering Sorcery now just procs directly from Arcane Blast and Arcane Pulse instead of Nether Precision due to its removal.

Sunfury has received relatively few changes, mostly focusing on reducing buff tracking. Primarily, Burden of Power has been simplified so that it just makes Arcane Blast and Arcane Pulse passively do more damage, instead of being a core proc we played around. The same goes for Glorious Incandescence, which used to be a core proc to play around. It now drops Meteors when you consume Arcane Salvo which simply do damage, instead of interacting with any of Arcane's resources.

One of the primary changes is the removal of many different buffs, like Arcane Harmony, Intuition (changed to be passive instead of a proc), Arcane Tempo (also now passive instead of a proc), etc, into a singular buff: Arcane Salvo. Arcane Salvo is a stacking damage buff to Arcane Barrage, stacked via Arcane Missiles by default, but many talents interact with it to either generate it via other spells, like Expanded Mind giving Arcane Blast and Arcane Pulse the ability to generate it as well, or Orb Barrage increasing the chance to proc based on Salvo stacks instead of Arcane Charges.

What all of this means, is that instead of tracking multiple different buffs, almost all of your rotation decisions will be based around Arcane Salvo, your Arcane Charges, and your mana level. The only remaining exception is Clearcasting, which still plays a critical part in the rotation like before, being the only way to cast Arcane Missiles.

In practice with the way things are tuned, the spec becomes about generating the maximum Arcane Salvo stacks as quickly as possible, and then immediately spending them to start building them up again.

One final meaningful change is the introduction of Arcane Pulse, which is a new ranged AoE ability. It functions very similar to Arcane Blast, since the damage and mana scales with Arcane Charges, except it does AoE damage. It does not fully replace Arcane Explosion, as you can use both, but in most circumstances in practice it does become your main filler ability in AoE scenarios. Since this is ranged, this is a great quality of life improvement, as it means you will no longer need to be in melee to do AoE damage.

• Mage defensives have been consolidated and simplified:
  
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  • Prismatic Barrier is now even stronger. When fully talented into all supported talents it now provides more absorption (30% max HP), and even more magic damage taken and debuff duration reduction. It also has a lower global cooldown, allowing you to go back to DPSing quicker.
  • Greater Invisibility and Mirror Image no longer reduce damage taken — they are now purely utility spells.
  • Mass Barrier has been removed.
  • Temporal Realignment has been added, which allows you to self-heal after dropping to low health, at the cost of some manual control over Alter Time. Alter Time is normally mostly used for dealing with high burst damage, but via Temporal Realignment, it can also be useful for healing yourself up when you get low health from chip damage.
• Mage Mobility has been slightly reduced and has a few tradeoffs to make now:
  
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  • Shimmer now has only 1 charge base (was 2) and a 30 second cooldown (was 25) baseline. You can gain back the lost charge, but it is now a trade-off between Reflection and the extra charge.
  • Blink can now be improved via talents: Spatial Manipulation grants an extra charge, Improved Blink reduces its cooldown.
  • Ice Floes has been removed.
• Various utility talents have been nerfed or changed into choice-nodes:
  
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  • Shifting Power has been removed entirely.
  • Blast Wave has been removed from baseline (only accessible via Sunfury talent, but very situational).
  • Ice Nova and Cone of Cold are now mutually exclusive.
  • Mass Polymorph and Ring of Frost are now mutually exclusive.
  • Counterspell now interrupts for 7 seconds (was 5).