Developers’ notes: We’re redesigning Arcane Mage’s Apex Talent to provide a more exciting visual moment and a greater impact on your talent build and rotation. Arcane Pulse has also been redesigned to focus its identity as a significant area damage event and a way to quickly regain charges in AOE.
New Apex Talent: Prismatic Bolt
Rank 1: Arcane Barrage has a 1% chance per Arcane Salvo stack consumed to trigger Prismatic Bolt. Prismatic Bolt devastates the target with overwhelming energy, dealing Arcane damage to your target and reduced Arcane damage to nearby enemies. Damage reduced beyond 5 targets. Generates 4 Arcane Charges. Not affected by Arcane Blast talents or effects and does not scale its damage or mana cost with Arcane Charges.
Rank 2: Prismatic Bolt has a 50%/100% chance to grant Clearcasting. Arcane Missiles damage increased by 15%/30%.
Rank 3: Arcane Salvo grants an additional 1% chance to trigger Prismatic Bolt. Arcane Barrage damage increased by 15%.
Arcane Pulse has been redesigned – Cast time reduced to 2 seconds (was 2.25 seconds). Radius increased to 8 yards (was 2 yards). Now has a 15-second cooldown, generates 1 Arcane Charge for each enemy struck, and costs 10% of base mana. No longer has its cast time, radius, mana cost, or cast speed affected by Arcane Charges.
Expanded Mind has been updated – Casting Prismatic Bolt now grants 4 stacks of Arcane Salvo.
Impetus no longer affects Arcane Pulse.
Prodigious Savant no longer affects Arcane Pulse.
Touch of the Archmage has been removed.
I was not expecting them to take this direction at all so I am caught a little off guard but here are some of my initial thoughts. Removing Touch of the Archmage in favor of this Prismatic Bolt seems like a good change overall especially if it has a cool visual and hits hard. The change to Arcane Pulse is puzzling to say the least. Their answer to the spell being unusable due to its high mana cost was to give it a 15 second cooldown which is ridiculous if they don’t also significantly buff its damage in addition to no longer replacing Arcane Explosion. Doubling down on Arcane Salvo is a major disappointment. Giving us a tier set that focuses on Arcane Missiles while leaving them in a terrible state at baseline is also crazy to me.
Please sound off below as well so we can give them much needed feedback!
The Prismatic bolt looks good its like a beefed up barrage that does about 150k on single and 80k aoe, then with rank 2 and 3 100% chance to give clearcasting and 4 charges. plus the 20% more damage to missiles. I honestly like it. It just feels weird doing a 180 and forgetting orb now. Id like then to include both Orb and Missiles. I dont like dead talents. The set bonues are literally all missiles too with 2 set give you one extra missile…..which is odd lol
Hard to wrap my head around how this will work, are we hurtin for charges these days? Maybe some high voltage AM build or something? a good opener i suppose, but we still need salvo to make anything happen.
Arcane Pulse was already problematic to me simply by virtue of it REPLACING Arcane Explosion. Giving it a cooldown, especially one as long 15 seconds, makes me not want to take it all. If they insist on going this route they need to make it not replace Arcane Explosion anymore. I want on demand AoE of some sort. They also need to make talents that boost Pulse also boost Explosion since, the talent tree does allow builds that don’t take it. Explosion shouldn’t just be left out.
Based just on reading the patch notes, it feels like Arcane Pulse is now fighting for the role that Arcane Orb used to hold (something you cast occasionally to get charges back) and Arcane Orb is fighting for the role that Arcane Explosion used to hold (something you cast frequently in AoE) and Arcane Explosion is fighting for the role Arcane Pulse used to hold (nonexistant).
I’m still not entirely sure why Pulse needs to exist when Orb could have done exactly what they’re trying to do with it.
Because players have been asking for Arcane Explosion to be castable on the target for over two decades. But of course in typical Blizzard fashion when they did finally implement something like that it was DoA. Now the real question is was that due to incompetence or was it designed like that on purpose to show us that “you thought you wanted it but you really didn’t” and to shut us up. Either way it’s a sad indictment of how they operate these days.
Blizzard hasn’t known what to do with Arcane Explosion for any of those 2 decades. They never found the sweet spot between “too strong for a spammable AoE” and “too weak to use in the first place.” Players asked them to “give us the exact same ice cream, just in a waffle cone” but Blizzard decided to toss the ice cream and make a milkshake instead.
Which would be okay if it was a good milkshake…
In the meantime, the new Pulse looks like it’s going to have potential to be strong enough to use in single target fights (again). The problem with “big AoE cooldown” is if they don’t get it just right, it either becomes “big AoE cooldown” or “ignorable talent.”
I haven’t had time to go on the PTR to look at things (I will probably do that tomorrow) but I really hope they don’t end up destroying it if for no other reason than because I like the VFX for it. If they do end up axing it, which they have a penchant for, I hope they give its visual to Arcane Blast. Although RIP the melee who will get flashbanged by it if we get to constantly spam it.
I just got off the PTR, and I have to say Sunfury Arcane feels really good with the new changes. I would have to do some fine tuning with the builds, but things flow so much better and arcane missles feels good again to press. I’ll have to see some testing done on how arcane missles work with Spellslinger and the new tier sets.
Well Spellslinger doesn’t offer any Arcane Missile support so there won’t be much to test, lol. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls of the hero talent system. Sunfury is the AM spec and Spellslinger the Orb spec. Sadly, you can’t mix and match them because of how they were designed, something they doubled down on in Midnight much to my chagrin. They completely went back on their promise that hero specs would be about class fantasy expression and that the player wouldn’t feel like they were locked into one of the other because of performance.
Blizzard giving Prismatic Barrier two charges and removing it from Frost feels really odd. Why not all specs have double barriers?
Glacial Bulwark is now giving you one additional Ice Block charge and reducing the CD on it by 30 seconds. That is now, what, three or four talents to reduce the cooldown on Ice Block and it still doesn’t heal? lol.
Arcane having an additional Prismatic Barrier is a very welcomed change. I’m all for it. I will miss double frost barrier though.
I just don’t understand why they don’t just give us a stamina increase so that we’re on par with every other class. It has never made sense that different classes using the same armor type have wildly different base stats.
Although Frost is losing its second charge of the shield, making it exclusive to Arcane will finally give the spec a unique defensive tool, just like the other Mage specializations. For that reason, I see this change as a positive one.
With this adjustment, Fire will continue to have Cauterize, Frost will have two charges of Ice Block, and Arcane will have two charges of the shield.
I believe this will create a healthier defensive balance between the specializations. From that point on, Blizzard will be able to tune each spec’s defensive strength individually without any of them being clearly at a disadvantage compared to the others.
Agreed, though I still do think it was sort of a lazy reallocation - definitely opportunity for Arcane to have a cooler additional defensive, e.g. taking the body of one of your Mirror Images if you die with one active or something
I don’t like this suggestion at all. Right now I’ll use images on pull to protect me some as I go into burst. With a change like you suggest here it would completely change how you use it - ultimately you would wind up holding it until you’ve take a lot of damage and at risk of dying whereas now it used to help mitigate taking damage in the first place.
The healthiest option would be for them to homogenize the defensives. It’s bizarre to me that they haven’t figured out that it’s easier to balance our defensives if all 3 specs have the same ones.
Which is great but what does that mean for the orb build we’ve all been forced into? I mean they basically forced Spellslinger on us, now they’re effectively forcing us into Sunfury. Like why even have two options if one is going to be unplayable?
its impressive that bliz could rebuild arcane to be great, literally ruin it with nerfs, and then ruin it some more by changing the design because they realize they ruined it but are too low iq to just revert it back
Always preferred the missile builds, glad to see they’re going to be good again, but if Sunfury is going to be meta can we please get an option to hide the orbs when out of combat like frost mages got with ice sickles?
