11.1 Arcane Mage PVE Feedback

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
1

There have been several threads on the other mage specs, and now with the most recent arcane mage changes, I think it’s best to have one collated for Arcane as well. This will be regarding the most recent 11.1 PTR changes as of 1/15/2025.

**ADDENDUM:
I had mentioned that this may benefit sunfuy, but I don’t think it will. There are some direct nerfs to sunfury as well because of this that again make barraging more burdensome

  • By no longer being able to consume Nether Precision with barrage, we now will have to game Glorious incandescence and Aethervision. This again will just delay things, and worsen our AOE rotation.
  • In Arcane Soul, this is a direct nerf. We often overcap on Clear casting during this, and would use Arcane missiles to generate/consume the procs and generate nether precision. This is a large nerf to Arcane Soul as well with this and a 10% buff to barrage does not cover this change.

Arcane Barrage

The most recent change to Arcane Barrage remove it from Nether Precision. The goal of this was to remove complexity from barrage conditions, but I think this may have the opposite effect. Aether vision and NP is one of the few reasons that barrage was worth pressing given current tuning. Aethervision is a more convoluted way of double dipping requiring a separate buff tracker. Again, you had lightning in a bottle with the initial release with NP double dipping, and I implore you to revert it.

The most recent change removes Barrage from interacting with nether precision entirely, now having Aethervision be the barrage modifier. This has a few problems.

  • The only way to gain Aethervision is to cast Arcane blast after clear casting.

–This greatly affects our AOE. We are now casting 2 single target blasts after a proc to do our main AOE spender. Arcane was already now the more niche mage spec in M+, and this will likely push it further down and have more ramp time. As an already target capped spec, this will feel very bad
–This may make Sunfury better, as you were already doing this to proc burden of power. But this doesn’t feel any better.

  • Spellslinger Arcane is going to generate far less splinters in AOE

–This change will make it so casting missiles into a barrage in AOE will no longer create arcane splinters. Only Arcane Orb will generate splinters now without casting an arcane blast in AOE.
–If this change goes live I suspect Spellslinger Arcane will more or less be dead in M+ scenario. You’ll have significantly less orb resets, less CC procs, and less shard damage. Part of why you were able to generate so many orbs is sending missles and using the nether precisions on barrages to get more splinters.

  • Barrage still has tons of modifiers and will still likely need a weakaura to play around

– The amount of modifiers from orb resets, Aethervision resets, resonance, and now Aethervision granting one shard are all going to have to be weighted against other spells. Currently, there are enough modifiers to barrage. My biggest worry will be cases that barrage is too weak, and we go back to BFA turret arcane blast mage.

  • Arcing Cleave

– Arcing cleave is a talent in the first gate that is mandatory in any cleave scenario. It requires us to take all of our first gate talent points in any situation with more than 1 target. I don’t think this happens with any other spec. Other specs get their AOE included, and I think it should be baseline. It’s also target capped at 5, and could be expanded to 8 but that’s asking a lot.

Again. You had lightening in a bottle with double dipping NP. It was not over powered, it was a mechanic that has existed, and was still more intuitive than this.

My solution to the barrage problem, if you’re dead set on keeping aethervisionis to make it work with NP again, and just shorten Aethervision duration. It removes any decision on stacking buffs, and mimics the gameplay of double dipping. It also doesn’t remove/revamp Arcane’s AOE

Arcane Explosion

Arcane Explosion is a spell that has lacked any relevancy for this expansion. It was the primary AOE builder for the previous iterations, and is currently not worth casting. There are several talents that effect it, but are not worth taking.

I do think the damage needs to be subsantially increased. Currently, especially with aethervision, a weak arcane explosion just cant compete against an arcane blast that can refund charges down the line. I also wasn’t the biggest fan of spamming explosion in melee in dungeons, but it’s sad to see this spell have 0 utility out of speed clearing old content.

Capstone Talents

High Voltage, Concentration, Leysight/Leydrinker are all cpastone talents that have not been taken since it’s most recent rework. High Voltage was killed due to Aethervision granting charges, and Leysight/Leydrinker are undertuned. Concentration is completely meaningless as a talent. I hope that in 12.0, the capstone talents are revisited, as it is disappointing that so many of them are worse than gate 1 talents in terms of power.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very disheartened by these changes. Rather than changing the spec for the better, this change will likely make spellslinger arcane much worse, and the spec less healthy overall.

They had ways to change Barrage to make it reasonable, or go back to the way that everyone liked that was easy to play, but instead it’s more or less completely changed from the very fun PTR version and early TWW versions. Hopefully more changes will come.

4 Likes
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Arcane felt much more fun to play in Beta and early S1. The numbers needed adjusting, not the gameplay.

The mid-season changes to Arcane were very disruptive. Communication around this issue, going back to the original double-dip thread before launch, has been extremely dismissive.

Aethervision is not fun. Stop trying to make fetch happen

7 Likes
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Arcane had regressed from probably the most fun iteration we’ve ever had to what feels like a clunky mess.

Removing double dipping, adding aethervision, and now these Nether Precision changes just seems tonedeaf. Like the devs are either not listening to the very loud feedback or are making changes that are adversarial to us just to spite us for being passionate about a spec we love.

Another symptom of these changes is that Sunfury is going to be absolutely dumpstered when before it was only slightly behind Spellslinger.

4 Likes
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I think overall (if they’re dead set on keeping aethervision), the best way to make the gameplay satisfying and remove confusing gameplay, while keeping the current gameplay loop is to just make aethervision just 1 GCD or 1 second. Anything longer enables the stacking of multiple barrage multipliers, and having it expire the next global replicates the gameplay of double dippping but in an explained/intentional way. Having it ALSO generate shards would replicate the shard gen lost by double dipping

4 Likes
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I am unsure as to why Blizzard keeps modifying our rotation significantly. While some might not like the current state of the Arcane Mage, we are all used to the rotation at this point. Through removing the Nether Precision Arcane Barrage interaction, we now have significantly less AOE power along with a complete change to our rotation and spell priority list. Arcane Mage is, at best, AVERAGE in AOE, with an exception of a 40 stack spymasters stack. If we fall even further behind, Arcane won’t even be competitive. Please revert this change.

6 Likes
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The recent PTR changes re-introduces issues that were fixed and introduces new issues as well mostly pertaining to the Arcane AoE rotation for both Spellslinger and Sunfury.

Spellslinger: Most Splinter generation occurs by consuming Nether Precision, and now only Arcane Blast can consume Nether Precision. Adding Splinter generation to Aethervision is nice, but Aethervision depends on consuming Nether Precision. How exactly is Arcane supposed to generate Splinters in AoE?

These changes are not a problem for cleave or priority damage scenarios; they are only an issue in AoE scenarios, which is a concern in M+. Spellslinger depends on Spellfrost Teachings and Orb Barrage procs, which again depends on Splinter generation. If I were to backward-engineer why Arcane Barrage was changed to benefit from Nether Precision, then I believe it was to enable Splinter generation in AoE. This design made sense before the addition of Aethervision. Unless the intention is to cast Arcane Blast in AoE, something has to be changed.

Suggestions: Ultimately, these problems are caused by trying to accommodate Aethervision by warping everything else in the specialization around it. I would implore you to address Aethervision and its issues directly.

Sunfury: Sunfury depends entirely on generating Spellfire Spheres, which only occurs by casting Arcane Blast or Arcane Barrage. If there is no option to regenerate Arcane Charges, the only option is to keep casting Arcane Blast. This has been a persisting issue for Sunfury since the launch of The War Within.

Reverting the changes to Burden of Power and Glorious Incandescence means that it is now, once again, impossible to consume either without casting Arcane Blast in all scenarios. This is jarring during the Arcane Soul window and Orb Barrage proc chains.

Suggestions: Burden of Power could in addition cause Arcane Blast to deal X% of its damage to nearby enemies, reduced beyond Y targets. Allow for Arcane Explosion to generate Spellfire Spheres (if it hits at least one enemy).

3 Likes
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Please no.

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Is Arcane Explosion a spell that the developers envisions as a core AoE spell for Arcane? Historically this is true. However, ignoring its poor tuning, Arcane Explosion is greatly discouraged because of severe practical issues and lack of interaction with hero talents.

If Arcane Explosion is supposed to be a core spell for Arcane, it has to be castable at range. This change needs to happen for modern World of Warcraft. Melee and ranged specializations are treated differently by mechanics, which often makes Arcane Explosion impractical to use. I repeat that Arcane Explosion has to be castable at range.

As to why this has not happened yet, my best guess is that the current version of Arcane Explosion carries a fair amount of nostalgia. However, this is a poor reason now that it hamstrings the spell with modern dungeon and raid design in mind.

Simply tuning Arcane Explosion appropriately and/or adding interaction would make it a spell we want to cast, but it is pointless without first addressing its practical issues.

Suggestion: Make Arcane Missiles a baseline spell learned at level 10. Put Arcane Explosion at the top of the specialization tree where Arcane Missiles currently is as a choice node. One option is the current version of Arcane Explosion, and the other option is centered on the target.

I do not care if Arcane Explosions centered on the player are removed. However, since choice nodes exist and the Earthquake choice node for Elemental Shamans has set a precedent, it makes no sense Arcane Explosion cannot receive the same treatment.

5 Likes
9

I have been advocating for ranged Arcane Explosion in PTR / expansion feedback threads for almost 2 expansions and have no idea why they are so stubborn about keeping it melee range. Even assuming they think that it is “instant, spammable and AoE” so want to add a drawback of melee range to keep it in line with “spammable ranged, but casted” AoE spells the solution is simple - adding an optional talent that would make it ranged, since that would require a separate talent point cost that you could spend on something else as the “drawback”.

However, I don’t think that they should make Arcane Explosion Arcane only, since other Mage specs have use for it as well. Moreover, if Blizzard keeps all the nerfs to Fingers of Frost generation that they have applied on PTR even Frost might need to use it as an AoE damage ability since there could be simply nothing better AoE related to press between cooldown based abilties with Fingers of Frost generation that covered this niche being nerfed this much. As such, AE should stay a baseline ability and just get a talent option in Arcane tree to become ranged. If that would risk it being not picked much because of throughput loss to take it - it could have some throughput attached too. Maybe they can even just add it into existing Arcane Explosion related talent like Reverberate (with it becoming a separate talent again, so would not require sacrificing effect of Arcane Missiles to take), so that they would both provide such ranged option and make Reverberate more competitive simultaneously.

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Can we have the Mistweaver dev? At this point Arcane has been bad more seasons than it’s ever been good.

3 Likes
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I agree that arcane explosion needs an actual reason to be cast rather than just number tuning as well. I think that will take another full talent revamp, but fully support ranged AE and talents that make it fun to cast.

Also, again I feel like we’re being gaslit by the developers by saying Nether Precision has been the problem. It has never been the problem. Aethervision has always been the problem and we’ve given multiple months of feedback regarding this.

5 Likes
12

I don’t want any more reworks, I want back what worked and was fun. I hate Aethervision; I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!

6 Likes
13

The existence of Aethervision necessitates a major Arcane rework because it invalidates several talents and further exacerbates existing issues. Warping the specialization piecemeal to accommodate Aethervision, like the most recent PTR patch, will not work. Aethervision has to be addressed directly, either by majorly reworking Arcane or reverting to an earlier iteration.

Energy Reconstitution: This talent no longer makes sense with the recent PTR changes to Nether Precision. Without Nether Precision affecting Arcane Barrage, there is no way to saturate the proc. That said, it is not like this talent was selected in any optimal build before this, so further desensitizing it with this change is strange.

Static Cloud: Slightly underestimating, the tooltip of Static Cloud is a more convoluted way of writing “Arcane Explosion damage increased by 60%”. Even then, this talent is not selected as part of an optimal build for Arcane. Arcane Explosion has to be buffed by a stupendous number to overcome having zero interaction with any hero specialization.

Concentration: Besides being locked behind the very poor and expensive Prodigious Savant node, even when evaluated in isolation, Concentration is worthless. Saving mana is not a worthwhile reward because Arcane Barrage is now a much more prominent part of the Arcane rotation.

Reverberate: It is never worthwhile to cast Arcane Explosion. Therefore, Reverberate cannot compete with Amplification. I do not want to play a version of Arcane that takes Reverberate over Amplification. Aether Attunement is too much of a good feeling and visual effect to pass on Amplification, not to mention its numerous interactions with Arcane Debilitation, Arcane Harmony, and Magi’s Spark.

The only acceptable resolution to this choice node is making Amplification baseline.

Big Brained: This talent can never optimally be picked over Arcane Tempo as long as Aethervision ensures Arcane Barrage is cast frequently.

High Voltage: This talent can never optimally be picked as long as Aethervision ensures Arcane Barrage very infrequently causes Arcane to have less than 4 Arcane Charges.

6 Likes
14

In my book mage went from really damn cool at the start to just above average.

Fire changes look bad, arcane changes also look bad frost changes are so so, but more on the negative side for me overall…

I will not be touching arcane next patch, removing barrage from precision is such a major f up, that I wonder if the one behind it even knows how arcane works.

Unbelievable, pathetic.

Explosion is garbage, aethervision was not improved in a desirable way, and neither was precision, they just made everything worse.

All they needed to do was add a secondary proc for aether for explosion, so it wouldn’t be left in the dust even in AOE compared to blast, then they needed to make the aethervision and precision buffs exclusive so if you had aethervision up, your next barrage wouldn’t consume nether precision, but not outright make arcane barrage not consume it. Or make nether precision stack to 3, with aethervision you bet you’d be using barrage instead of blast, and you would re instate the blast blast barrage in st this way.

Talking about explosion, there is another issue with it, where is splinter and sunfire orb generation? Why is everything about blast even in AOE? You make everything work with blast, and nothing work with explosion, and then surprise, explosion is now garbage, who would have ever guessed such a thing.

Giving a secondary proc for aethervision with explosion would likely be the correct move for it, since unlike blast, explosion consumes clear casting. It wouldn’t work that well if it worked the same way as it did with explosion.

Same buff, but cc explosion would give your next barrage the same effect as it’s st counterpart. Instead of having to consume nether precision, cc explosion would give 1 stack directly

You’re trying to fix a class that was playing really good, and the more you fix it, the more you’re screwing up.

If that’s the case, stop wasting time and focus on specs that might actually need help. wtf is this clown show? This utter buffoonery.

Do you even test? Wtf is your internal testing team doing exactly?

If you’re gonna waste time doing changes that are making the spec worse to play, I’d rather you do nothing at all. Time is a limited resource, start using it with some consideration and intelligence.

4 Likes
15

In general, I appreciate that Blizzard has identified the Barrage conditionals as being too convoluted. The goal of simplifying them to something more similar to the release state of the spec is exactly the direction in which the spec should go.

Having said that, the changes proposed will cause more issues than they solve. The whole point of the pre-.5 rotation is that you had a well-defined point in time when to barrage. There was some opportunity to stack buffs going into that moment, but it was much more limited and generally just not worth it because of how narrow the window of time was.

Aethervision lasting 12 seconds will never replicate that behavior (unless it’s overwhelmingly strong) - we will always have other conditionals like Harmony stacks, or even reacting to TA procs (e.g., can I fit in a Barrage in this Arcane Surge proc, but not an Arcane Blast?). In fact, removing the double stacking of NP and AV might bring more importance to those other conditionals and make barrage use more convoluted, not less. Additionally, sometimes you only have one stack of AV rather than two, which will get in the way of triggering Splintering Sorcery.

The other much more fundamental problem is in any multi-target situation. NP benefiting Barrage greatly helped in aoe and cleave because now it makes sense to cycle clearcasting and NP stacks into more and stronger barrages (and as a side note - this is why in aoe the pre-.5 builds with High Voltage were more fun than the current ones with AV). If Barrage no longer benefits from NP, then that cycle is broken and we’re back to the DF-style rotation of praying for orb procs and spamming AE otherwise, except now AE doesn’t even interact at all with our hero trees.

Arcane is really complicated and unpredictable but the only two ideas I can think of to fix this are a) make barrage benefit from NP, or AV, but not both, while also reducing the duration of AV to a single GCD, and/or b) make AE interact with the hero trees, e.g. by generating Spellfire spheres and consuming NP to generate splinters.

4 Likes
16

I’m just a super casual and admittedly bad at the game, so I don’t know if my opinion is worth anything.

But as someone who actually liked Reverberate and didn’t know Arcane Explosion is apparently super worthless before I tried to look at theorycrafting stuff again, the change to make it share a row with Amplification really hurts to see. It’s going from a talent that I’m likely wasting a point which could come from anywhere, and is becoming one that very specifically costs me a 60% damage bonus from one of my core rotational spells.

It looks like it’s becoming a fool’s choice even to me. And if I feel like I can’t take it, then I don’t know why I’d even bother with Static Cloud in its old position.

It’s kind of a shame that a 10% max mana bonus is tied to Arcane Familiar, because I thought that little bauble was always somewhat unpopular on its own merits and I was surprised to see it placed so high up the tree that it’s nearly impossible to avoid. Reverberate may as well go there or something, since I figure anyone actively choosing to spec for Arcane Explosion is going to get mana refunds off of Arcane Barrage in AoE anyway.

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Testing this further on the PTR, even though we’re still waiting for preliminary sims (which per Porom, especially in AOE are are not looking good) I will say that Sunfury and Spellslinger AOE are a lot worse than I had anticipated

Sunfury

For Sunfury, Arcane Soul used to be a big AOE burst. This has been a pretty big nerf to it though. Not being able to really benefit off of the clear casts generated and leverage the NP with the barrages is more or less a 10% NERF overall to the arcane soul window (barrage got buffed 10%, but Nether precision grants 20%).

Casting missiles in AOE is also less incentivized, meaning you’ll get lest Aethervisions. If we are supposed to use Arcane Explosion in AOE, we won’t interact with Spellfire Spheres or Burden of Power or Glorious Incandescense at all.

We will be blasting more in AOE, and have more or less nerfed our AOE burst window. It isn’t fun though trying to line up AV and glorious incandescense, (which we will try to do).

Nerfing the already weaker hero spec is not good balancing, and is not how this should be done

Spellslinger

As before, the hero talent was designed around using barrage in AOE to generate splinters, to generate orbs, to generate more splinters.

With Aethervision, in AOE, we are now Required to use blast to generate splinters more or less. Just casting barrage without it will not generate any. Testing on dummies was not giving enough splinters to really mimic the current rotation. this means to get the same as current level of orb procs and feel the same damage wise you are required to cast Arcane Blast. This feels bad and will make us again worse off in any AOE. We are already target capped.

Also, if we are again encouraged to use Arcane Explosion, it does not work with any splinter generation, Aethervision generation, or anything else in our hero spec tree.

AOE with this change feels much, much worse. It already felt worse with Aethervision, but feels worse now.

Conclusion

Ideally reverting to 11.0 would be best, but at this point if Aethervision is here to stay, and Barrage is not going to work with Nether Precision any more both hero talents need reworking to function in AOE, as they both were designed with NP barrage in AOE to function and without it they do not interact at all. Any other type of rotation just won’t really work, as the other abilities do not interact with them in AOE in any meaningful way.

I also want to say, this isn’t just a tuning thing, but it feels bad to play in both hero talents and have your AOE largely be meaningless. It can be way overtuned, but be very poor play design and not fun to play. It can also be very fun and undertuned (see kyrian arcane in s1/s2 of shadowlands). Currently with this tuning and build, it is unfun and undertuned.

5 Likes
18

Arcane felt pretty bad on testing.

Tried multiple things. Blasting away clearcasting then barrage, Barrage above certain harmony stacks, tried to play with talents setups including the new (bad) talents and its complete despair.

Arcane had it figured out with Nether Precision double dipping but for some insane reason it was removed. All you did was blast twice and barrage. Why do you have to break something that works and it’s widely liked by players? Now spellslinger plays bad, sunfury is a meme.

It’s time to do something about it. We already lost multiple weeks of testing because the changes so far look like they are from 4chan /vg/ or chatgpt then it gets reverted a week later.

Haven’t tried it in aoe yet but people are saying aoe is especially bad.

You have multiple pages of feedback on your own forums where you asked for them yet every single post gets completely ignored. It looks pretty ignorant to come up with something that doesn’t even make sense and saying you are happy with it. What are you waiting for honestly? Does Max really have to make a video about it for you to acknowledge feedback? We are talking to a wall

3 Likes
19

The removal of nether precision from barrage has left the spec feeling incredibly shallow, locked into a very simply missiles, blast blast barrage gameplay loop with 0 deviation. Arcane soul could be in an even worse place based on what is optimal damage per execute time of only casting barrage (this will certainly be the case in execute). Aethervision stacking to 4 would at least allow some variance in gameplay, but as it stands, aethervision warps the entire spec around it in a way this is simply not fun for almost anybody.

3 Likes
20

With the removal of Nether precision affecting barrage, there will likely also be times where you don’t follow that pattern, simply press Arcane Blast as Barrage is overall weaker. It overall will be much more a turret-like and boring spec.

Barrage may even have more conditionals such has harmony stacks, % mana for enlightened, % mana for mana adept, tempo stacks, where we still have to use a calculator.

Again Aethervision warped this, the simple 11.0 double dip was potent enough to constrain all of the other variables.

Stacking aethervision up to 4 would exacerbate this further, adding more conditions to barrage. If it stacked to 4, there would simply again be a point where barrage would be worth pressing over a different one. Again as I’ve suggested prior, allowing it to function with Nether Precision again but shortening the duration to one global would replicate the 11.0 rotation without “reverting the double dip” more or less (wouldn’t fix splinter generation for slinger).

In terms of arcane soul, likely you will just only barrage, overcapping clearcasting as you can’t leverage the nether precisions anymore but that ultimately comes down to sims. Seems as if Sunfury though is down bad right now.

2 Likes