Season of Discovery Arcane Mage Healer Guide

Mages have traditionally dealt high damage with their slow, but powerful high cast time spells, supported by strong damage increasing talents while also having great utility with Frost Nova, Polymorph, and Blink, among other support spells.

They have great convenience tools, such as Teleport: Stormwind, Portal: Stormwind, Conjure Water, Conjure Food, and can now also resurrect with the new consumable Scroll of Reintegration.

Something Mage could never do in World of Warcraft is heal, and that is finally changing in Season of Discovery, with the new rune system bringing Regeneration, Mass Regeneration and the new Temporal Beacon mechanic!

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

• Arcane Healer has an easy time gearing as all caster stats are useful
• Easy to change between pure Arcane damage and healer with just rune swaps
• Highest DPS out of all healers by a large margin while still doing good healing if Temporal Beacon is well managed

Weaknesses

• High Mana issues in general, especially if Evocation is not available
• Damage is much lower than what a pure DPS would be able to do, especially in single target
• Direct heals are weak for their Mana cost and Temporal Beacon mechanic requires setup time

By combining Runes and Arcane damage, Mages in Season of Discovery are finally viable healers due to the introduction of Regeneration and Mass Regeneration! They also have excellent area damage with Arcane Explosion, and benefit from great early talents such as Arcane Focus.

Most of your healing comes from the Temporal Beacon mechanic, which causes a part of your damage to heal targets recently healed by Regeneration and Mass Regeneration, thus incentivizing you to deal damage in order to heal, which is a completely new mechanic in WoW Classic!

Most of that damage comes from Balefire Bolt, Arcane Blast and Missile Barrage procs, with the occasional Chronostatic Preservation for burst healing, passive Spell Power for larger critical strikes, and new Temporal Anomaly for area shields.

The combination of healing, damage, and powerful crowd control makes the new Arcane a jack of all trades, and the only healing specialization that can swap into a full DPS with just Rune swaps. As the same talents can be used for both healing and DPSing, Arcane Mages have unmatched versatility in the swing healer role.

As a completely new role for Mage, the rotation, gearing options, and talent decisions for the Healer Mage will be perfected and adjusted as we go through the content, so make sure to keep checking the guides in the Table of Content at the top of this page for updates over time!

Healer 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: