Hello all! This thread contains feedback about announced changes for Arcane Mage and about some of their remaining issues both in PVE and PVP.
Feedback about announced changes:
- Reallocation of nodes in first part of tree did not address the main issue - Arcane Mages still are required to spend 9 talent points in first part of tree to even unlock all second gate parts. Fire and Frost for comparison can pick a path and spend 8, so Arcane Mages as a result play with 1 less talent point to spend than they should and that could be addressed.
Suggestion: Make Amplification baseline (it likely should be since it is literally a part of Arcane Missiles channel presented as a separate talent point investment), move Reverberate to the left to make it a path alternative to Concentrated Power to reach Arcane Familiar and put Consortium’s Bauble to the left of Arcing Cleave as a path alternative to Aethervision with Arcane Surge being unlocked directly from both Improved Clearcasting and Nether Precision. Such placement would allow to unlock all second gate for 8 points investment for both single-target builds (they can potentially skip Reverberate and Arcing Cleave) and AoE builds (they can potentially skip Consortium’s Bauble and either Reverberate or Concentrated Power). - Change to Enlightened to scale based on mana level makes its bonus more reliable and more present during fight. Good change here.
- Choice node between Arcane Tempo and Big Brained is odd, since former is both much more reliable and much more valuable. I supppose it was done to reduce number of buffs tracked, but even in such case Big Brained needs a buff to be competitive enough.
- Datamined Aether Conduit is a step in the wrong direction. People have issues with Aethervision since unlike former double dipping of Nether Precision Aethervision stacks with Nether Precision and it is beneficial to hold Aethervision till you spend next Clearcasting to stack it with next Nether Precision for maximum benefit and that both disrupts flow of Arcane and requires additional tracking. Aether Conduit won’t address that, it would just make it happen less frequently while stealing even more talent points from Arcane’s limited pool. Much more simple solution would be to make Aethervision behave like old Nether Precision double dip (or even revert to old double dip if you would want to) and not stack with Nether Precision (and you could buff Arcane Barrage or Aethervision’s bonus to compensate for loss of stacking) - that would allow to keep the former mechanic of Clearcasting → 2 Arcane Blasts with Nether Precision → Aethervision Arcane Barrage (since there would be no point to hold it as next Nether Precision won’t buff Aethervision affected Arcane Barrage) and make rotation much more intuitive and not require as much tracking. And Aether Conduit should be just not implemented - Arcane Mages are already unhappy to spend a talent point to enable “old double dipping” and they would be even more unhappy to spend 2 points for that.
Unaddressed issues:
- Arcane Mage has unaddressed issue of being too much reliant on RNG for competitive output and that issue would only increase in 11.1 with addition of RNG tier set on top of their own RNG. Orb Barrage, Leydrinker, Clearcasting, Aether Attunement requiring separate proc of Clearcasting to even be usable - on their own they might not cause much RNG reliance, but all together and especially with season 2 RNG tier set addition they both require too much tracking and have too much reliance on RNG - you can execute your rotation flawlessly and still deal less damage than other dps / Arcane Mages simply because RNG favoured them with procs and did not favour you. Arcane’s RNG reliance should be reduced and mitigated to address that.
Suggestions:
- Add form of “bad luck protection mechanism” to Orb Barrage and Leydrinker where spending X Arcane Charges / Y Nether Precision stacks without getting a proc would guarantee next spending of Arcane Charges / Nether Precision to trigger according effect. Such mechanism would not affect good and average RNG windows and would just help with bad RNG windows to make unlucky players more in line with more lucky ones.
- Add a choice node to High Voltage that would make Aether Attunement immediately activate Clearcasting when triggered and allow to spend it where and when player needs it and not when they get another stack of Clearcasting. This bonus is significant, but would require both talent point cost to be enabled and sacrificing the alternative capstone talent as a fair trade-off.
- High Voltage itself could be made less RNG reliant - even with its RNG protection mechanism it is still possible to get zero Arcane Charges from it with bad luck. To address that - consider just making it provide 2 Arcane Charges (close to current average value) over Arcane Missiles cast with increased amount of Charges generated from Aether Attunement (to preserve their synergy too).
- Arcane Mages also have unaddressed issues with their AoE rotation in addition to reliance on RNG for Orb Barrage. First issue is target cap of Arcane Barrage - it can be quite detrimental against larger packs and makes Arcane Mages fall behind both other classes and other Mage specs quite significally against them. Second issue is combination of Arcane Explosion requiring melee range, lots of swirly mechanics in Mythic+ and quite punishing death penalties there - if you are unlucky with Orb Barrage procs and need to use Arcane Explosion to generate Charges / deal AoE damage you as a squishy ranged class with zero Stamina boosting nodes need to run right inside the pack and make yourself subject to cleave and swirling mechanics just to continue dealing AoE damage. This requirement is too punishing and should be addressed too.
Suggestions:
- Add a new node in third gate that would either increase target cap of Arcane Barrage’s cleave or return Arcane Rebound from Legion (when Arcane Barrage hits 3+ targets it explodes for additional uncapped AoE damage proc). If you want to provide more build diversity these effects could even be presented as a choice node to allow players to pick the preferred option themselves.
- Add a separate node to the tree to make Arcane Explosion castable at a target enemy from range dealing damage to target and other enemies nearby. While it would give access to spammable ranged AoE ability it would still require a talent point investment as a trade-off (just like Splitting Ice for Frost Mages) and if needed could have an additional trade-off in form of lowered radius (like to 8 meters that is standard for ranged AoE abilities) or increased mana cost. Such node would allow to address Arcane’s AoE abilties range issue mentioned above, but would be optional, so that players who don’t need it or would not like the tradeoffs can just skip it and play in current manner if they would want to.
- Arcane also has unaddressed issue with spammable abilities purposes and priorities at 0 and 4 Arcane Charges. Just several examples - 0 charged Arcane Barrage as a single-target damage ability does less damage than AoE ability Arcane Explosion that also generates Arcane Charges. Moreover, Arcane Explosion as an AoE ability often does more dps while generating Arcane Charges than even intended single-target Charge generator Arcane Blast at 0 Arcane Charges. This bizarre priority can make it confusing for both old and new players, adds additional complexity where it is not needed and could be addressed too.
Suggestion: Tune base damage and scaling of each main Arcane spammable ability to match its intended purpose. For example:
Arcane Blast - is stationary, hardcasted and single-target focused, so at 0 Arcane Charges should deal more dps than both Arcane Barrage (instant cast and usable on the move) and Arcane Explosion (instant, usable on move, AoE). Easy way to implement that would be to make it have 1.5 sec base cast time, remove cast time reduction from Arcane Charges and tune its damage accordingly - with proper tuning that would allow it to deal according highest single-target damage output even at 0 Arcane Charges and would also make rebuiding Arcane Charges against single target feel less slow and clunky.
Arcane Barrage - being instant and mobile it should deal less dps than Arcane Blast at 0 Arcane Charges, but still more dps than AoE ability Arcane Explosion and more dps than both Arcane Blast and Arcane Explosion at 4 Arcane Charges (to account for it spending Arcane Charges). To implement that it simply needs bigger base damage (bigger than at least Arcane Explosion’s base damage) and if needed you can tune its scaling from Arcane Charges to compensate.
Arcane Explosion - being AoE ability and AoE Charge generator it should deal less dps against 1 target than both Arcane Barrage and Arcane Blast at 0 Arcane Charges, but more dps than any of them against 2 and more targets. Suggested changes for Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage already achieve this single-target priority and its AoE damage can just be tuned to be high enough baseline without requiring niche conditions like Static Cloud. - Arcane Mages also have identity issue in both PVE and PVP. In PVE - Fire Mage has mobility and passive cleave from Ignite, Frost Mage has passive slows and roots that can help with controlling the pack and Arcane Mage has… purple particles? In addition to that Arcane is also the squishiest Mage spec in PVE and its (Improved) Prismatic Barrier does not provide any survivability boost against physical damage / effects enemies unlike Cauterize and Cold Snap that help against all kinds of enemies. In PVP - why would you play Arcane Mage with single main spell school and tons of disruptable hardcasting if you can just play Frost or even Fire that don’t have these issues and also would even have more survivability than Arcane (especially after removal of Temporal Shield PVP talent)? There should be a specific reason to bring Arcane over Fire or Frost Mage both in PVE and PVP and the answer lies in its theme itself - as master of space / time / energy manipulation and an anti-caster specialization (based on effects like Prismatic Barrier / spammable Spellsteal etc) Arcane should bring unique utility in PVE (that is not accessible to other Mage specs) and specialize in fighting enemy casters in PVP (which would not overlap with anti-melee profile of Frost and mobility / cleave of Fire) to give it a unique niche both in PVE and PVP.
Suggestions:
- Add to Arcane talent tree or baseline spells a unique utility ability that matches their theme and is not accessible for Fire and Frost Mages. That could be for example Arcane Singularity - black hole type effect that would pull enemies in selected area to its center and slow them for X% for Y seconds. Such utility is thematic (black hole abilities are quite common for arcane / pure magic users in other games), useful both in PVE and PVP (to stack enemies for party’s AoE cleave both in PVE and PVP) and would likely even be competitive enough with pure throughput nodes in Arcane tree, since its utility would still help throughput values of both Arcane Mage and his / her allies. Such ability could also indirectly make tanks without AoE pull ability more competitive via having additional dps spec that can provide it for them if needed.
- Make Temporal Shield a baseline ability for Arcane Mages (as analogue to Fire’s Cauterize and Frost’s Cold Snap). Such change would bring survivability of Arcane Mages more in line with survivability of 2 other Mage specs both in PVE and PVP.
- Add unique Arcane only anti-caster oriented PVP talents that would improve this theme for them and give them a dedicated niche in PVP. There are many options - from Improved Counterspell that would apply short duration silence after using Counterspell like in earlier expansions to access to spell reflect / spellcasting disruption effects to capitalize on anti-caster theme. These additions might be powerful, but don’t forget that these are suggested as PVP talents, so Arcane Mages would have to sacrifice other / existing PVP talents to take them as a fair trade-off and picking any of them would still result in losing damage / survivability / utility from other PVP talents.
- Arcane Mages also have several undertuned or too niche PVP talents that could be looked at. These include:
Kleptomania - its channel slows, can be easily disrupted with locking Arcane’s main spell school and it prevents usage of regular Spellsteal, making it too punishing to take. Disruption and maybe even slow from channeling are fair to provide means of counterplay against it, but it likely should not block regular Spellsteal just like Mass Dispel does not block regular Dispel Magic for Priests. Consider turning it into a separate abilty that no longer replaces Spellsteal and if needed for balance you could increase its cooldown to compensate.
Master of Escape - does not provide much value compared to other PVP talents and its niche overlaps too much with Mass Invisibility. Could be adjusted with that in mind.
Suggestion: Make it also cause Greater Invisibility to remove X damage over time effects from Mage when cast, but reduce its cooldown reduction bonus to Greater Invisibility to compensate. Such change would give it its own niche of a tool against damage over time classes and comps in place of removed earlier Dampened Magic and can make it more generally useful.
If you have additional feedback about Arcane Mages in 11.1 and beyond - you can post it in the comments below. Thank you for reading!
Links to feedback post(s) about other Mage specializations:
Frost Mage - 11.1 Frost Mage Feedback Thread
Fire Mage - 11.1 Fire Mage Feedback Thread