If you’ve been playing World of Warcraft Dragonflight from the very beginning or at least following the trends, you must have heard Arcane Mage is the best possible DPS spec you can play for competitive PvE. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case as Arcane Mage has heavily fallen off over the course of expansion.
When Dragonflight first launched on Nov. 28, 2022, and the season officially started on Dec. 13, 2022, it was all about Arcane Mages. Although having a demanding rotation, they could dish out incredible amounts of damage in Mythic+ dungeons and Vault of Incarnates, and no other DPS class—except for Rogues and Demon Hunters—could match. In fact, Arcane Mage was a top-of-the-pack DPS for the first five weeks of season one, including both single-target fights and AoE fights as you can see for yourself in weeks one, two, three, four, and five of Warcraft logs.
But suddenly, during week six of Dragonflight season one, the king was dethroned and Devastation Evokers took over the top of the DPS charts, and Arcane Mages haven’t recovered to this day. In the following weeks of the season, Arcane Mage fell off even harder and according to Warcraft logs from week 17, they are now a bottom-of-the-barrel DPS spec.
While you may think this must be a result of consecutive and heavy nerfs to the spec, the real reason Arcane Mages are struggling to stay relevant is actually buffs to other DPS specs that came via hotfixes and Patches 10.0.5 and 10.0.7. In addition to that, the other two Mage specs, Fire and Frost, received significant buffs and are currently in a better spot than Arcane Mages. Essentially, Arcane Mages haven’t gotten worse, but other classes and specs simply got better.
Patch 10.1 is on the horizon and we’re slowly approaching the release date on May 2, but other than minor tweaks to Arcane Mage in PvP combat, the spec will stay unchanged. Blizzard, however, promised more balancing changes at the beginning of the season and if Arcane Mage remains a mid to low-tier spec, you can expect buffs.
