Another year, another spec

I'm doing it again, but this time it wont last.

First, a very brief history of Zupa the mage to put things into context.

WoW is launched, I start playing, soon realise Horde dominate Alliance in all the fun stuff, and so I roll an undead mage.

I levelled as fire, went arcane fire for pvp for a bit, then graduated to raiding. Raiding MC basically required mages to spec frost or spend a lot of time getting resisted by great big firey monsters, and so frost I became... And frost I stayed for a very long time. Then came TBC and in order to do the most damage for the raid I specced fire again.

Well now its WotLK, and raiding is still a long way off. I have decided to give a proper Arcane spec a whirl. Now an arcane spec is something I always wanted to try, but felt I didn't have the gear to back it up. No two pieces of t5 or whatever it was to get the arcane blast set bonus meant I stuck with fire.

Well those days are over, and while my gear still doesn't support an arcane spec to the extent I would like, I seem to get by just fine. The inspiration for this latest respec was none other than Tachyon over at frostnova.ch. He has a nice 3 part series devoted to the arcane spec in WotLK, going into some nice juicy theory crafting which I love, and a bit of an analysis of spell rotations for various situations.

I have to say I'm really enjoying it most of the time.

The most fun tends to be stacking a triple arcane blast debuff and proccing missile barrage, then popping my arcane power and trinket and blasting away with some rapid fire boosted arcane missles. I have been to the Nexus and Utgarte Keep with this spec and have managed to hold my own just fine.

I do, however, miss my shatter combos. You cant use arcane blast to start a shatter combo because it doesn't have any travel time, and thus there is no way to squeeze an ice lance in before it hits. Using a frostbolt or fireball instead is a bit of a nerf to your DPS, so for the most part I haven't been using icelance. I even shifted it off my ready-to-use keybinds over to the deep dark right hand corner, where spells are put out to pasture.

I also miss DoTs. DoTs are fun by their nature, and dots are fun because they entail setting people on fire.

I wonder if I should start chasing the set bonus. Probably not worth the considerable effort for level 70 set items, but it would be nice.

So until the dawn of frostfire, which happens in a few levels, I will at long last be an arcane mage.