Season of Discovery Arcane Mage DPS Guide

Besides their traditional high damage, Mage in general is full of tricks, having access to things such as Polymorph and Blink. In emergency situations you can now even heal with the new spell Regeneration and resurrect allies out of combat with consumable Scroll of Reintegration!

They also have great convenience tools, such as Teleport: Stormwind, Portal: Stormwind, Conjure Water, and Conjure Food.

Unfortunately, the lack of sustained slowing effects and reliance on long cast times makes Arcane a weak PvP option for Mage, although you can find some success against light pressure with self healing and the new damage to healing Temporal Beacon mechanic applied by your heals!

Strengths

• Lowest threat generation out of all Mage specs
• Less gear dependent than other specs due to lower Hit requirement
• Easy to change between pure Arcane damage and healer with just rune swaps

Weaknesses

• Mana issues on longer fights
• Lower damage potential than the other specs
• Reliance on high cast time spells makes success in PvP difficult

Arcane Mage in Season of Discovery is finally a viable DPS option due to the introduction of Arcane Blast, the new cooldown Living Flame and powerful passives Burnout or Enlightenment, courtesy of the new Rune system. They also have excellent area damage with Arcane Explosion, and benefit from great early talents such as Arcane Focus.

Missile Barrage plus Spell Power from Phase 2 and Advanced Warding plus Balefire Bolt from Phase 3 help round out the kit for the level 50 bracket.

Arcane Mage is one of the few specializations that can fully swap into a healer specialization with just a few glyph changes, while using the same talents, giving it unmatched versatility as a swing healer!

Through the addition of entirely new abilities and runes, the rotation, gearing options, and talent decisions for Arcane Mage have changed drastically with the coming of Season of Discovery. Browse the guides in the Table of Content at the top of this page to find all the information you'll need to master this new game mode!

Arcane Mages will still want to take Engineering, but with more of an emphasis on Tailoring rather than Mining. Tailoring is especially powerful in Season of Discovery due to special bind on pickup crafts such as Gneuro-Linked Arcano-Filament Monocle and Fractured Mind Pauldrons, of which we expect there will be more of in the future!

The main feature of Season of Discovery is the new Rune Discovery system, which allows you to discover and attach special abilities to your gear slots after finding them across the world. We list all of Mage's runes and where they can be located in the guide below.