Addition of Arcane Rebound is a good change.
However, removal of reliable Arcane Charge refund option from Spellslingers is not so good. Maybe Aethervision removal is for the better, but there should be more reliable options for Arcane Charge refund that 5% chance per ability and ~2 Arcane Charges per Arcane Missiles, especially since Arcane is already so (or even too) RNG based. Perhaps a choice node with Intuition that would make Arcane Barrage refund Arcane Charges spent every X seconds / when reaching Y stacks of buff could be it? That would allow people who like Intuition to play with it and people who don’t like RNG based refund to get a more reliable option. To match throughput increase of Intuititon this alternative could also simply increase damage of Arcane Barrage by X% without attaching it to any buffs, so that fiasco with stacking refund buff with Nether Precision / other Arcane Barrage modifiers would not happen again.
It may be worthwhile now to note that Intuition has an annoying bug. If you try to cast Arcane Barrage with Intuition active and the Arcane Barrage procs another Intuition, then the Arcane Barrage does not benefit from the first Intuition nor the second one. This bug leaves you at 0 Arcane Charges. This happens infrequently, but is very annoying when it does happen.
This bug has existed since Intuition was introduced as the 11.0 tier set bonus. I did not bother to report it anymore for 11.1 because the 11.0 tier set bonus was going away, but now that Intuition is coming baseline, it is time to fix this bug.
Furthermore, from preliminary play testing I feel that 20% increased Arcane Barrage damage does not feel substantial for an effect that only has a 5% chance to proc. I would like it if either is buffed but not both.
I will always advocate making Arcane Debilitation and Prodigious Savant into 1-point nodes. Neither of these is interesting. This is now even more painful that the Prodigious Savant side is becoming more competitive. However, I am afraid that Arcane Debilitation and Time Loop are way too powerful (particularly with the new tiet set bonus) for Prodigious Savant to be considered.
Arcane Explosion still needs help to be a viable spell for Sunfury since it does generate Spellfire Spheres. The simplest would be to allow for exactly that.
This feedback is in regards to the PTR as of 1/23/2025
Aethervision
I am happy to see Aethervision go overall, as it’s duration and generation was a hamper and limiter for arcane gameplay wise. I would love to go back to the double dip. Something does bother me though, and it’s why Blizzard thought we’d like Aethervision in the first place. I’m glad they finally revealed the logic
- *Developers’ notes: We appreciate your feedback and patience as we continue to iterate on our 11.1 changes for Arcane Mage. The community has made it clear that Aethervision’s more prescriptive gameplay is not the direction they wish to see Arcane move in, so we’ve opted to retire it. We’ll continue to monitor feedback and discussion around the complexity of Barrage conditionals and make changes if we deem it necessary. *
Reading this, it seems the only reason they thought we liked the double dip game play was the rotation, and didn’t (and maybe still don’t) understand why it worked. For spellslinger, it generated an extra splinter for each combo, which allowed you to get more orbs, so you didn’t mind dropping to lower charges, and was very mobile with high voltage. And for Sunfury, it varied the rotation as an extra incentive for barrage and less overall blasts. The strict AM->AB->AB->ABarr was never the fun part, the extra things the dip enabled was what made it fun.
Although it’s interesting to see the logic behind aethervision, I do find it sad that the developers couldn’t see why or the ramifications of why it wouldn’t play the same.
In terms of rammifications, I do think Spellslinger is more or less dead in single target now, as without Aethervision you have no impetus to barrage without an Intuition proc (as the double dip isn’t returning). This can be arranged with tuning though, perhaps through increasing shard generation or other means.
Intuition/Gate 1
I’m not a fan of having Intuition in Aethervision’s place, especially after Arcing Cleave. I will always be against being forced to take 9 points in gate 1, as all of the talents are more or less mandatory. Intuition is likely a sizable gain in single target, and being forced to take Arcing cleave feels bad.
My solution would be to swap Intuition and Arcing cleave. That way you could take Intuition in ST scenarios and pick up cleave in actual cleave scenarios.
Alternatively, just make amplification baseline and just have there be 8 nodes if making Arcing cleave baseline is not in the wheelhouse. This would also solve the being forced to spend 9 points in an 8 point gate requirement.
Arcane Explosion
I am glad to see Arcane Explosion get buffed, but I’m afraid it still won’t be used outside of maybe spellslinger AOE filler.
Even if it does more damage it still does not intertact with our hero talents at all. It doesn’t generate splinters or increment spellfire spheres. With Blast and Barrage both doing those, even if you buff the damage substantially I’m not sure if explosion will have a relevant place in AOE. Sims will say, but even if it is worth it damage wise, it still won’t be satisfying to press.
Solution would be to make it generate a splinter if AE hits more than 3 targets, or increment a spellfire sphere if it hits more than 3 targets. This would eliminate spamming it in between packs or prepull, and would make it a choice between AOE or priority damage.
Leydrinker (and by extension Arcane Debilitation and Prodigious Savant)
I do like the new Leydrinker. CC is much better than the previous proc, the visual is nice and the damage is improved.
My only concern is how many talent points it takes to get there.
Prodigious Savant and Arcane Debilitation are very expensive nodes and are not interesting. Arcane debilitation is powerful, Savant is not. Being 2 point nodes means it’s very difficult to justify taking Leydrinker in any scenario.
My solution to this would be to make them 1 point each, even if tuning them accordingly down.
Arcane Reverb
This is a very cool talent, but very undertuned. I’m glad concentration is gone, but for how far you have to go to get it (and through a 2 point node as underwhelming as prodigious savant) I think it should be far more powerful.
Solution: Could be a gate 2 talent, or make Prodigious Savant a 1 talent point node.
Conclusion
Overall I am glad to see Aethervision go. I’m sad to not see the double dip come back, but I am glad to see our feedback listened to. Some of the changes are very positive, but there are still some things to be improved. Numberwise we’ll have to see how the APL and sims go, but I am hopeful.
That being said, this is still not as good as launch Arcane. Bringing back the double dip on nether precision, a feature that exists in many other spell instances in game still to this day but was singled out on this one case, will still be the best version that we had.
Must say, I find the whole drama with Aethervision and the mage community very fascinating.
At first, there was NP double dipping, which the community liked, because it added some perscriptive gameplay to the spec, allowing mages to skill differentiate.
Then blizz said they didn’t like NP double dipping due to obfuscated/unclear game mechanics (fair imho), and nuked it, but then the community complained that they wanted it for the gameplay, so blizz added AV, to ‘sort of’ implement NP double dipping (‘sort of’ in the prescriptive ‘blast-blast-barrage’ way), and to give some gameplay back.
But then the community complained again due to theoretical min-max complexity of optimizing AV/NP stacking ABr usage.
So blizz ends up nuking AV, and mages rejoiced!
The net and final result of all the drama then being that double dipping got removed from the gameplay with no real replacement, which is what they started with in the first place.
The other thing i find confusing, is mages keep complaining about how they don’t like RNG, but then praise a 5% RNG proc in Inspiration, which replaced a somewhat predictable way to generate arcane charges while also weaving in barrage into the gameplay. Not to mention, inspiration is basically the tier bonus anyway, so its not even like something new is being added, and the mages are cheering? 
Must say, mages are one of the only classes i know that will whine to get themselves nerfed to exactly where they were before they started whining, and then claim a win lol
5% proc rate is not enough.
I guess it’s nice to have something to react to, and this doesn’t invalidate high voltage and should be less intrusive for the gameplay, but it need to proc a bit more
5% proc seems like something that will happen once in a blue moon instead of being an important part of the rotation but aside that I actually think I like this, need to test it, but having some variability in the rotation with a proc is nice.
There is a problem I can think of thought since the proc is at random, what if you get it while you have 0 arcane charges? Do you just send regardless? I doubt that will feel good, you could build up stacks, but since it’s only 6 seconds you might not have the time
Not very impressed with fire or frost changes though, I just don’t like the direction they wanna go with them. Mostly for fire, for frost there were a few good changes
The complaint was legitimate.
The arcane in recent years has suffered from the amount of things given to him to accumulate and achieve large predictable burst damage.
Double dipping did not allow this, because the window of use was very small. Aethervision, on the other hand, is here to become another damage boost just like several others we already have to deal with.
If the option was to have Aethervision, it would be better not to have any of that, hence the celebration.
Arcane is a specialization that does not have simple gameplay. Its rotation is easy to understand, but its execution is very complicated.
I say this because the arcane is very fragile and depends on a high knowledge of fighting to avoid damage, as it has few ways to heal itself. This requires excellent positioning and also high mobility.
Taking away the arcane’s mobility by linking it to skills like Arcane Blast leaves it very fragile and with few alternatives to deal good damage. This is why it’s always good when the focus is more on Arcane Missiles and Arcane Barrage.
No one is happy about not having a replacement. We want double dipping back, not Aethervision, not some other convoluted mechanism. Double dipping solved all of the intense complexity while leaving room for moderate amounts of complexity and complimented our entire toolkit.
Blizzard not replacing Aethervision with double dipping is cause for a riot imo.
Saying they made AV to replicate the double dipping gameplay is like saying Blizzard reverted UA to the affliction spender again, but still made it so you can only have one application on one mob at a time. Yeah, it spends a soul shard, but it’s really not the same thing
We’re not happy that the gameplay hasn’t been changed back to what it was prior, as again. We’ll have to see what the new APL and rotation looks like.
There are lots of not-explained mechanics in game. I’m not sure if feral snap-shotting is directly noted in game anywhere despite being a huge chunk of their damage, or if the fact frostbolt/glacial spike can fit directly between the 1st and 2nd projectile of flurry to make the combo, but those are all core damage mechanics that are not directly explained and have been made as core mechanics. Spell queue double dipping has been, (and still is) in the game in many instances, and had been in arcane for a long time, but that arguments been well treaded.
We’re not back to where we were at launch but it’s hopefully better than what was planned, which was a dumpster fire with the previous PTR changes.
Yea… i feel like they understand this since it clearly informed the new duration constraint on Inspiration (6 secs? i think) as a way to reduce potential optimization complexity
Ngl, Im surprised they didn’t first put a duration cap on AV and try that first. Seems like that would have the same impact of reducing potential optimization complexity? Sure… wont solve the problem completely, but perhaps there is a solution before outright nuking AV?
May I suggest you guys use #PortalStrike when you riot? Wanna see mages in dornogal spamming portals everywhere 
In all honesty, I have a mage friend who keeps wanting double dip back and I tell him the same thing;
I don’t think double dipping is coming back.
Lets be honest, their issue with double dipping is valid. Leveraging “undocumented” game mechanics in order to play optimally, with the performance delta for not doing so being so statistically significant, does not create a healthy design space. It should not be encouraged, let alone relied upon so heavily for optimal play.
Now yes, in practice, double dipping does exist mechanically in the game elsewhere, but id argue never as blatantly as it existed for arcane mages, where using it was fundamental to the performative gameplay of the spec. iirc it was even in all the guides as part of ‘must use every time’ rotation etc
Add to that the fact that they are already prob salty for having to bring it back temporarily for a bit, and then replace it with AV, and now all this? They already put in so much effor to get rid of it… i just don’t think its coming back. Maybe it could, but it feels dirty
My mage friend rages when i say this, icy neck veins popping and all. So yea, I do feel ya.
I do think something needs to fill the gameplay gap if nothing else.
Yea true, though i dont think AV was their attempt to encapsulate ‘the full might majesty and depth of how double dipping impacted the feel of arcane’, nuances and all (as an aside, i do think you arcane mages do fetishize double dipping gameplay a bit too much 
, but hey, i dont judge)
I think AV was their limited attempt to just capture the rhythm/casting cadence of the ‘blast-blast-barrage’ part, plus also to maybe incentivize more barrage use. Im pretty sure the whole thing where it became a headache to fully optimize for the 0.1th percentile was unintended, but thats the danger of playing with buffs for a spec that’s core gameplay relies on multiplier stacking 
It was literally used in the shadowland’s Kyrian Arcane rotation for every radiant spark combo lol.
Further testings about arcane:
Arcing Cleave
- talent location of this is very weird. this is the only path towards Intuition that is a must-have, but from Intuition you can only path towards AoE stuff and Slipstream (which should be baseline and not a talent). Reading other replies, easy and mostly effective fix would be swapping Intuition and Arcing Cleave
Arcane Debilitation
- 2-point gateway nodes this late in the tree feel bad. the effect is nice but it just feels bad looking at it
Prodigious Savant
- even with softcapped mastery, this one feels pretty weak especially considering its a 2-point node, technically severly limiting picking anything below it
New Barrage gameplay
Atm it feels very very bad that NP doesn’t double dip from Barrage queued after Arcane Blast. It’s not about its power or anything, it’s just genuinely adding extra complication and stress about it for no real reason. It would help with lowrolling luck on clearcasting and Intuition, there is really no reason to not be able to double dip the last stack of nether precision. Scrapping Aethervision is super welcome but current gameplay still suffers. There is nothing more intuitive than knowing that it’s a good time to send Barrage whenever we are getting clearcasting. It would also significantly improve gameplay in AoE or multitarget cleave
Additionally:
So many dead talents:
- Presence of Mind (not enough talent points)
- Surging Urge (weak)
- Static Cloud (weak)
- the entire Leydrinker triangle (there could be potential with the buffs but gateway costing 2 points at depth 7 is wild)
Yea… they got rid of that too heh
I see them trying to reduce the places in the game such ‘undocumented mechanics’ occur when they can.
Adding them back in? Esp after attempting to fix it with actual design?
That would be hard to swallow, no?
They didn’t remove it because of double dipping, they removed it because Missiles had incredible anti-synergy with it. Radiant Spark was part of Arcane for 4-5 years.
I mean, they didn’t get rid of Radiant Spark because of double dipping. We actually didn’t even double dip in Dragon Flight due to Harmonic Echo cleave with radiant spark, and they removed it after as they didn’t like how it made Arcane a “launch sequence,” but that’s besides the point.
There are still lots of mechanics that aren’t mentioned anywhere in the game, like snapshotting dots for feral, certain buffs snapshotting on players, and even though they are very class/spec specific and you’d need to read a wowhead guide (and for feral likely need a weakaura/plater profile) to fully maximize that part of the class. They aren’t necessary to play to a casual extent, much like double dipping wasn’t. Having a spell queued up at the end of a cast isn’t complicated gameplay (as you really should be doing that anyway).
They’ve made changes and gone back on bad design decisions before. Blinking into ice-lance in legion was degenerate in alpha, and they made it into winter’s chill.
Things like scorch into double pyro using travel time aren’t intuitive either, but are core to fire.
Each spec has things that are very unintuitive, and are more or less things either the devs are fine with leaving in, or have adapted (like frost’s damage being often calculated on hit rather than on cast for shatter combos). This instance of spell queueing/double dip would not be unreasonable to change back to especially as it wasn’t unhealthy for the spec.
That being said, I don’t think they’ll bring double dipping back even though I think they should for gameplay’s sake.
Moment of Clarity snapshotting Thrash isn’t explained anywhere.
There’s a really simple solution that Blizzard can implement to fix this problem.
Document it.
Update the text on Nether Precision to add a line that says “When one charge of Nether Precision remains, casting Arcane Barrage immediately following Arcane Blast will cause both the Arcane Blast and the Arcane Barrage to receive the benefits of Nether Precision”.
If they’re feeling ambitious / uncertain about other double-dip abilities, add similar lines in for every ability that can double-dip as they discover them.
Boom. No more problems not being documented. Heck it doesn’t even require much of a change - literally just a text update.
Tons of in-game mechanics are not explained, including double dipping existing in many other specs toolkits which they specifically exploit. Double dipping also still exist for Arcane, as well as every other spec in the game that has a cast time ability and an instant ability. This is just how WoW works. Where is the explainer for pandemic? How about how mastery points work? Where is the how-to for combat log analysis so everyone can become an expert on how auras work? It is a ridiculous stance given that external websites do literally all of this for Bliizzard, while they do next to nothing in support of their stated goal.
How many class abilities have a tooltip that is contradicted by how the spell actually works? The reality is that Blizzard arbitrarily enforced this crusade against unexplained game mechanics with Nether Precision. And not to be misunderstood here, there are options for how to approach this differently - but why? Why use an unknown like Aethervision when players are telling the developers exactly what they want.
Ultimately, double dipping is what TWW Arcane was completely designed around - it’s tragically hilarious that the developers don’t realize this. All of our feedback during beta was inclusive of that interaction, the cool new talents and abilities we got were, in some cases, wholly dependent on double dipping. They should readd it because it is the right thing to do with how they have designed the spec, they should also reconsider their crusade as it is something players mostly do not care about. We care that the game is polished, tuned well, that there are minimal bugs, and, more than anything else, is fun. Double dipping made the spec feel polished, intuitive, and fun. Blizzard should revert the double dip removal because it is what players want.
Is there a way to recreate what double dipping accomplished if Blizzard’s intent on not restoring it, without causing rotational frustrations like with Aethervision?