Fire/arc build
The Fire/Arc build 18/53/0 has got a lot of attention lately. Curiosity got the better of me, and I respeced to compare it to my normal pve spec: frostfire.
The specs are pretty similar. Replace your frostfire glyph with the fireball one. Rotation: (Living bomb, Scorch x2,) fireball/pyro.
One big thing with this spec is that you will need hit. A lot of it. More than you want to admit. Or you will never crit. Okay, gonna stop rhyming now. Seriously though, the hit cap for a fire/arc spec is 446. With a boomkin or SP it goes down to 368. Add a draenei to that and the cap becomes 342. In other words, don’t play with this spec if you lack the hit gear for it.
There’s also the matter of Focus Magic. Who do you cast it on? It’s a tricky question that boils down to if you want to boost offense or defense.
- Offense? Put it on another crit caster like an ffb mage or an elemental shaman.
- Defense? Cast it on a holy pala or a disc priest.
From my experience, I did notice a small increase in dps, but also a higher mana consumption. Never so much that you went oom or it was a problem to regen, but I still feel the need to put it out there. It might become significant after 3.1.
March 25, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Hi there! Welcome to the blog world. I’m still new at this myself. On topic, is there enough gear out there to get the hit necessary to raid fireball spec? At the moment I’m still 67 and in Outland, but I’m planning ahead. I’m Horde and will have no draenei and likely no boomkin either. Then again, I do plan to try out FFB and Arcane to see how I like them, and I may decide one of them is too awesome to go back to plain fire.
March 25, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Hey, thanks for commenting.
Fire/Arc is definitively an endgame spec. As in you’ve done some 25 man raids and had some luck with loot drops. The amount of hit needed is only attainable after that. Before that, you’re gonna sacrifice too much much spelldamage for hit to be worth it. In early raiding, arcane is a good choice because you need very little hit (3% from Arcane Focus and 3% from Precision equals 6% hit from talents alone).
If you want a more mana conservative spec, FFB is great.