How To Improve As Arcane Mage — The War Within (11.1.5)

As an Arcane Mage, due to having filler spells, there is always something you could be casting. This means any time you are not casting something, you lose lots of damage. This is most often due to movement because the only obvious thing Arcane Mages can cast while moving is (ignoring talents) Arcane Barrage. However, you often do not want to use Arcane Barrage, because dropping your Arcane Charges is very often a mistake. Luckily, Arcane Mages have multiple ways to deal with movement.

The first one is not Arcane Mage specific, but it goes for all casters. Plan your movement. If you know that in 10 seconds, you need to be at a specific position, you should use the Global Cooldown of any instants that you use in your normal rotation to slowly move to that position. If you would normally cast Arcane Barrage anyway, during the Global Cooldown, you can move a little bit towards where you want to go. The same goes for other instant cast spells that apply the Global Cooldown, like Arcane Orb, Arcane Barrage, etc. On fights with a lot of movement, it is also advisable to hold onto Presence of Mind for movement instead of using it as part of your normal rotation.

The second one is quite obvious but often not optimized properly, and its Shimmer, Alter Time and Slipstream usage. Shimmer will not interrupt your cast and should thus always be used over interrupting your cast and manually moving, when possible. If a patch of fire spawns under your feet, you can simply Shimmer out of it instead of moving out of it. Alter time can be used right before big damage hits and then again right after taking the damage to avoid having to move to dodge the mechanic. Slipstream should be actively used to properly position yourself during any Arcane Missiles or Evocation cast.

The Burn Phase is a big portion of your damage as an Arcane Mage. Which means if you activate Touch of the Magi and Arcane Surge and promptly have to move a lot, or some mechanic causes the target to be out of range or take no damage, you will lose enormous amounts of damage. Make sure that you watch Boss Mod timers to ensure as few mechanics as possible overlap with your Burn Phase.

As a counterbalance to the above point, you also want to make sure you use your cooldowns as soon as possible. Not only are they a massive damage boost, but your cooldowns are also the primary method of managing your mana. If you sit on your cooldowns too long, you are very likely to run out of mana.

Managing the balance of using your cooldowns as soon as possible while ensuring you are not in any way interrupted during your cooldowns is one of the things setting apart great Arcane Mages from the rest.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize an Arcane Mage without using Raidbots to sim your own character, there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

Simming is now very easy, with no need to understand SimulationCraft syntax or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below, you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.