Arcane help

I could use some help with my arcane mage. Pre-cata I was ok, but doing almost the same thing in cata, I can't get my dps past 11 or 12k it seems on a raid boss. My gear is pretty good so I can't figure out why I'm doing the same dps as when it wasn't so good. I've been going for int, crit and mastery as stats. I usually spam arcane blast till I'm at about 80% mana, then hit a mana gem, spam more till I'm at about 30%, then evo, spam it more till about 60% then arcane missle and barrage it till I get some mana back and repeat. I'm in mage armor the entire time. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Instead of going back down to 60% mana after Evocating, stay up at 90 to 95% mana and see if that helps. It should, because of the great mastery bonus.
Thanks, I'll try that. What's a good mastery percentage? I'm at about 14.75%
I do allright in raids averaging about 14k dps according to WoL. Arcane isn't the most powerfull to begin with. The reason we are barely as good as we were at end of wrath is because of the stat weights at 80. What we had were arcane mages stacked with 60% faster hit with a spell that barely cost much mana after we got a larger mana pool from all the sp to int buff. Throw in some mastery and we were op.

Now spells cost more, we go oom faster and everything isnt as awesome as it was pre cata.

As far as helpfull pointers, stack crit if you plan to go fire, its the worst stat for arcane by far. Currently i am stacking int > mastery > haste > crit. Once you get more int you have a larger pool and the more mana you will get per tick from mage armor making haste not too shabby.

During a boss encounter i will cast arcane blast 2-3 times (or once if i am unlcky and get a trinket proc), blow Arcane power and mana gem and arcane barrage down to 40% evocate, and use the normal 4 ab, am rotation till evocate is almost ready, then burn again and pop whatevers avail mana gem or ap. Mana Gem is not for mana if you are arcane with the Improved mana gem talent.


mastery is broken and junk dump it and get crit

if you have trinkets and enchants that proc int its going to gimp you
if you need to use your mana to burn its a gimp, untell its fixxed you should lose mastery