12.1 Arcane Mage Feedback

In Development Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek Public Test Realm
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Apex Talent Changes:

Definitely a step in the right direction as the old Touch of the Archmage had many problems and the secondary rune could easily be wasted. Prismatic Bolt is a solid replacement and has the cool new VFX model players have been asking for on ALL of our Arcane spells.

However, there is far too much proc variance and the rotation does not feel smooth as a result. Prismatic Bolt having only a 50% chance to proc at max Arcane Salvo stacks feels bad especially considering how long it can take to get them if there are not enough Clearcasting (which only have a 10% baseline proc chance) or Overpowered Missiles (which only has a 25% chance to proc whenever Clearcasting procs) procs. The ideal scenario of Overpowered Missiles into a Prismatic Bolt into Overpowered Missiles again feels fantastic but the worst case scenario of having to cast Arcane Blast 13 times to max out Arcane Salvo stacks only to not get a Prismatic Bolt and continue the Clearcasting dry streaks feels absolutely awful. Consider making Prismatic Bolt a guaranteed proc at max stacks of Arcane Salvo even if it means lowering its damage.

Arcane Pulse Changes:

I am very confused about the direction you chose to go in with these changes. Arcane Pulse was unsustainable before because of its high mana cost and your solution was to give it a cooldown instead of lowering the mana cost. Considering that it still replaces Arcane Explosion, Arcane Orb also has a cooldown, and Arcane Missiles rely on a proc and substantial talent investment to become an AoE ability, this leaves Arcane with no on demand spammable AoE ability which is not a good place to be in. Consider simply reducing the mana cost of Arcane Pulse and leaving it as a spammable ability or alternatively leave it as a cooldown but substantially increase its power and also make it so that it no longer replaces Arcane Explosion.

Improved Prismatic Barrier:

Giving Prismatic Barrier a second charge will definitely help Arcane’s survivability but it does not go nearly far enough. Consider adding an additional perk to the talent making it so that bleeds cannot be applied on the mage as long as the barrier holds, at least in PvE.

P.S. Please strongly consider giving all Arcane abilities updated VFX to match Arcane Surge, Arcane Pulse, and Prismatic Bolt. All other Arcane abilities have not been updated since Legion and Arcane Orb has never been updated even though it was first introduced all the way back at the start of WoD more than a dozen years ago.

5 Likes
12.1 Arcane Mage Changes
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I’m going to have to very strongly disagree with a few points here.

The variance on prismatic bolt is really important. Without it, we would drift into overly prescriptive gameplay, this is exactly what we screamed about with aethervision. Having a static cast sequence that we go through each time we fill charges/harmony would get boring within about 12 minutes. Going barrage–>missiles–>prismatic bolt (missiles–>blast if extra CC) → blast to 25 and repeat ad nauseam would just be the spellslinger debacle we have on live. Not knowing whether you will have bolt up or not when you barrage adds a lot of decision making with how we mange the 4 set bonus and missiles casts, and could actually be quite interesting if tuned correctly.

The strange looking changes to arcane pulse were fairly fun and enganging in AOE when I decided to try testing while completely ignoring intuition (please delete), and trying to feel out how a rotation trying to max out barrage casts as much as possible felt (suprisingly good). blasting, and going ms–> bolt–>barrage if up, ms–>pulse–>barrage second prio, and various orb shenanigans when neither was free felt surprisingly engaging and fun. We can missiles into barrage when an orb is off cooldown, as we don’t waste a 4 set bonus, but must either missiles–>blast–>barage, or hold missiles with no pulse or orb. I personally enjoyed the decision making and optimization of this part of the rotation. Arcane pulse feels like it has surprising potential (surprising as the change looks quite stupid on paper) if the supporting talents and tuning allow for it.

What doesn’t work

The two talents that frustrated me the most were intuition and overpowered missiles.

Intuition actively fights almost every other talent in the rotation, and also provides overly prescriptive gameplay. I understand we need a forceful please barrage now but the talent is irredeemably miserable. Trying to determine whether or not I should be holding missiles based on whether or not I will be wasting too much salvo with it is fundamentally not fun, and it also fights heavily with overpowered missiles. This talent needs to be deleted entirely and replaced with another barrage driver. Proccing overpowered missiles at medium salvo stacks (such as 15) makes a feels bad no matter what you do scenario.

High voltage is too inconsistent with the new 4 piece set. I was often hitting missiles and getting only 1 charge. Using high voltage as a charge generator in single target with the current 4 piece bonus constantly leaves you wasting 4 piece procs on blasts that are cast below 4 arcane charges, as even going barrage–>orb–>missiles–>blast can leave you blasting at 3 charges. This means that it is not possible to ever use high voltage to generate charges without potentially having sub optimal 4 piece uses. High voltage needs a bad luck protection to guarantee at least 2 charges are generated on a fully channeled missile cast.

I could not for the life of me figure out how charged missiles is supposed to work in a rotation. I ignored the tuning and just focused on the talent itself, and it just clashes with everything else from overpowered missiles to the 4 set bonus to intuition, even if it weren’t hilariously undertuned. Given that the set bonus is focused around missiles, the missile nodes in the tree should be well thought out and fun to play with.

Mana bomb makes no sense, still. We almost never surge with any mana, the talent is just a little silly and we will never play around this.

Spellslinger with orb mastery does not feel good. Either having the 4 piece buff orb damage, or reworking orb mastery to not consume clearcasting, but instead have missile waves reduce arcane orb cooldown (and maybe buff its damage) feel like they could work. As it stands, it’s difficult to understand what slinger is really trying to do as orb and missiles both have a ton of support and are fighting over very limited clearcasting procs, which are under even further competition from prismatic bolt.

The mana talents (evocation and mana adept). We don’t really need them, and they serve little purpose.

Arcane still feels like it lacks in identity. With our cleave profile nerfed heavily from TWW, our execute removed, our funnel greatly reduce, and our burst nerfed, I’m not sure what our niche is actually supposed to be, particularly for sunfury where we don’t have uncapped AOE orb builds. What is the hypothetical fight that would make somebody think, gee, an arcane mage would be good here! We are either generically overtuned, or useless everywhere.

What does work

Prismatic bolt is a hard hitting and satisfying ability that is truly worthy of a capstone talent. It also takes helps reduce the issue of how long TOTM locks us into damaging a target with the lingering damage. The cast time is a little unpleasant in length at low haste values, but the ability itself adds a lot of depth to the rotation, while simultaneously being fairly intuitive.

The 4 piece set bonus adds back the decision making we need during filler rotation, but is easier to track than nether precision was without addons as most people can count to 1 in their head.

Arcane pulse works when used alongside prismatic bolt and arcane orb in AOE when barraging asap at 4 arcane charges instead of trying to cap salvo. Delete/rework intuition?

2 charge barrier with 8 second lingering barrier goes hard for defensives. Like, really strong. Having this not be baseline to arcane makes a very large gap between spellslinger and sunfury however. This should either be generic baseline, or the SS defensives would need a large buff to bring the 2 hero talents in line.

Final thoughts, rework intuition?

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Clearly we have a fundamental disagreement here. What you call “overly prescriptive” I see as a smooth and intuitive rotation. Having a certain degree of variance with procs can be a good thing but not when the RNG stacks with itself like it does in Arcane. With Arcane you have to rely on one proc (Clearcasting) to generate another proc (Overpowered Missiles) to then hopefully generate yet another proc (Prismatic Bolt). Failure anywhere in that chain of procs can result in a miserable time doing nothing but endlessly spamming Arcane Blast and that’s the antithesis of fun or engaging gameplay.

If everything wasn’t tied to the awful Arcane Salvo, a gimmick masquerading as a core spec mechanic, then a certain amount of proc variance would be fine but as things stand now it just leads to needless frustration and a bad luck streak can truly tank your DPS into oblivion. If you don’t want prescriptive gameplay you can’t have a stacking mechanic like Arcane Salvo at the core of the spec. And since it looks like they’re going to keep it, much to the chagrin of everyone, we need to have a more scripted rotation to avoid the potential of truly atrocious RNG.

4 Likes
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They should make baseline clearcasting proc rate 12.5%, up from 10%. Would feel a lot better. 25% more procs.

As for the annoyances with Intuition and Arcane Barrage, brought up by Linvail, here’s my suggestion: simply make it so that Intuition grants +1.25% (multiplicative) damage per Arcane Salvo stack, up to 20 stacks (for a max of +25% (x) damage to your Arcane Barrage at 20+ Salvo stacks – this would be done to be friendly to Spellslinger since it only can get 20 stacks of Salvo unlike Sunfury which can get 25). This scales the talent with each Salvo stack, instead of leaving it at a binary “either have max stacks or don’t profit from this talent at all” as it currently is.

Keeping the current design punishes poor players and rewards the best of players who diligently only Barrage at 25 stacks. And while that might be fine, I guess, based on the game’s culture (even though personally I hate this approach – like geez, just make the spec less punishing and easier to pick up by anyone imo plz), it does cramp the spec for top-end players. We know we only ever want to Barrage at 25 stacks, so we end up with some lame gameplay loops such as 11 Arcane Blasts in a row. It’s not the most fun.

IMO, make the change I suggested to Intuition, and also make it so that Clearcasting has a 25% baseline increased proc chance. If you need to tune down the dmg of Missiles by 5% or something to compensate, I get it. But make it 12.5% chance to proc per spellcast that costs mana, up from 10%. Thx.

The devs LITERALLY just need to be better designers. They lack such inspiration and passion, it seems.

1 Like
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Good, this is how games are supposed to work by nature.

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I have to disagree with you here. I think this misunderstands what Intuition currently does. By rewarding barrage at max Salvo stacks, Intuition acts as an anchor. Players can intuitively understand when they should barrage, regardless of if they are new or experienced.

Changing it to a progressively increasing damage buff per stack does not automatically mean players are free to barrage whenever they want. It only makes the optimal breakpoint less obvious and makes the spec harder to play. That optimal breakpoint could change depending on mana level, target count, whether you are inside a burst window, and other procs.

Even experienced players would probably need to figure that out with sims. It would only widen the gap between average and high-end players.

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That’s a very generous way of putting it. The devs are not rewarding players for casting Barrage at max stacks, they’re instead forcing you to by literally tying every relevant talent and spec mechanic to max Salvo stacks. That was their answer to people inexplicably obsessing over the optimal time to cast Barrage in TWW to the point they felt they needed a specialized WeakAura for it. But of course it didn’t simplify things as much as only make the entire rotation completely scripted and boring. You always cast at max stacks no matter what, with the only exception being when an Overpowered Missiles proc throws everything off.

They might as well have just given Barrage a cooldown and baked in all that extra power without forcing the players to rely on a stacking mechanic generated at vastly different rates by half a dozen different abilities. It’s exactly what they did with Arcane Pulse by slapping a cooldown on it instead of trying to fix all the other issues it had. Just the latest example of lazy design choices. I was genuinely flabbergasted when they announced the Prismatic Bolt but that was clearly a one off and in no way a sign that they’re going to be implementing in-depth changes that the spec sorely needs.

1 Like
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I think overall the arcane changes are solid. The main places I would like to see further changes are:

Prismatic Bolt RNG in cooldowns - Having RNG attached to this ability is good in that the filler rotation becomes dynamic, however the damage variance between getting multiple prismatic bolt procs in a surge vs none is way too high. Consider making the first barrage in surge grant prismatic bolt somehow, maybe touch of the magi grant prismatic bolt or increasing the proc chance at max salvo stacks to 100% in cooldowns only

Defensive Changes are too weak - Double barrier for arcane is a step in the right direction, and finally restores arcane having a unique defensive niche vs the other two specs (cauterize, double block) that was removed when Greater Invis was moved to the mage tree (and DR was removed in Midnight). Without a low cooldown wall, mage will never be tanky enough for high m+ keys. Consider attaching a DR effect to one of mage’s baseline cooldowns, such as alter time. Taking ~20% reduced damage during alter time would allow mages to survive rot as every other class in the game is able to, and would still leave mage as one of the most squishy classes in the game.

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How does it become dynamic? As long as Arcane Salvo exists in its current state you’re always going to cast Barrage at max stacks and half the time you’ll get Prismatic Bolt and be happy and the other half of the time you won’t and your DPS will tank. There is absolutely no reason for Prismatic Bolt to not have a 100% chance to proc at max Salvo stacks, absolutely none. If anything the Clearcasting proc following a Prismatic Bolt cast should be RNG, not the Bolt. Better yet, do away with all the RNG and let both be guaranteed and tune damage accordingly.

1 Like
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I am not a mage player, but want to add to the RNG discussion point.

If one of your main abilities has RNG attached to it, it should not be considered a main ability.

For example, please bear with me as these are not mage examples, but two examples in healer specs:

When the Apex Talent, Stormstream Totem for Restoration Shamans was first introduced, a group of players, myself included, kept making daily posts on how if the Apex Talent is supposed to be a core ability in the spec, it should not be an RNG ability with no player control. It took days of posting and it costed the final point of the Apex Tree for Shamans to get a way to proc a Stormstream Totem manually.

Discipline Priests have also been hit by that RNG bug that Blizzard seems to love to hand out. Shadow Mend, while I acknowledge is a normal talent, and Void Shield were the two biggest offenders for main abilities that were reliant on RNG, while Shadowmend was the larger of the two offenders.

It has become apparent that Blizzard needs to stop trying to inject classes with RNG and simply leave it to other aspects of the game like Trinkets, Rings, and Neck pieces. That said, I wish all mages the best of luck on getting the changes that y’all need/want!

4 Likes
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Because if prismatic bolt was guaranteed, your filler rotation (at least for SS) would be barrage at 20 salvo → prismatic bolt → arcane missiles → repeat. A static rotation like this is the exact problem aethervision introduced.

Reacting to whether or not you get a prismatic bolt makes the rotation dynamic in that you need to find other ways to get 4 charges / 20 salvo when you don’t get a proc. This is not a bad thing.

However I’ll reiterate that the RNG during cooldowns as the spec currently works is not good, being able to do a full surge without any prismatic bolt procs feels terrible.

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No one is going to be playing SS next season because of the tier set which focuses on AM and SS has no support for AM, only SF does.

Well that’s where the problem is, I personally felt that Aethervision was never a problem and could not understand why people were complaining then or now.

How is it not a bad thing? It’s a terrible thing because the only other way you’re referring to is AB spam. Idk about you but for me personally there is absolutely nothing engaging about spamming your filler spell a dozen times in a row for a stacking buff and then praying for a proc at the end of all that. Hell, even the devs said in their opening line on the PTR notes that they didn’t want us to endlessly spam filler spells or have dead buttons, yet that’s exactly what’s going to happen as a result of these changes: more AB spam and never using AO in favor of AM (the reverse of what we had in S1).

Completely agree but horrible proc RNG is equally frustrating outside of cooldowns which is where we spend 80% of our time.

1 Like
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It’s the complete opposite of this, the damage bonus for Barraging at the wrong stack count is lower than the correct stack count and the spec is more punished by having to move because you’re less able to use Barrage for mobility because the punishment for keeping up damage is greater than it would be if Intuition didn’t exist in its current form.

Intuition only serves to remove flexibility from Arcane and makes the spec less fun to play.

1 Like
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Talents such as Intuition (from the specialization tree) and Polished Focus (from Spellslinger) create a logic that goes against the core flow of the rotation. They should interact synergistically with the system, but instead they tie their value exclusively to reaching maximum resource stacks.

Arcane Salvo already functions as a progressive damage scaling system, so it would be expected that talents consistently follow the same philosophy.

In this sense, the Force of Will talent demonstrates a much healthier direction. It does not depend on a perfect stack state, but rather on the continuous consumption of Arcane Salvo, which fits the specialization’s rhythm and reduces rotational friction.

Therefore, the suggestion is simple: if Intuition and Polished Focus are to be kept, they should be adjusted to function similarly to Force of Will, interacting with progressive stack consumption rather than relying exclusively on maximum stacks.

This would preserve the identity of the talents while better aligning the entire Arcane Mage framework with its core system, making gameplay more fluid, coherent, and less punishing.

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I would like less casino in my spec, thank you, especially to something that does such a large amount of damage. If we keep introducing these many layers of RNG to Arcane, it’ll just become purple Frost instead. Revert Intuition to 11.3 version and we have good RNG and a solid rotation already, so we’re free to make Prismatic Bolt more deterministic, at least during cooldowns if they’re so dead set on adding variance.

7 Likes
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Buffing Arcane Missiles would honestly help a lot.

5 Likes
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Yeah, like I said in my OP it’s crazy that they chose to steer us all to using AM but only because the new set tier is focused on AM and buffs it but the spell is not touched at baseline. They’ve done with before both for mage specs and other classes and it never feels good. An ability needs to be solid on its own without a tier bonus to prop it up.

1 Like
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this is not necessarily true btw, ss and sf are at worst equal on the current ptr. the extra salvo stacks ss gets synergizes quite well with prismatic bolt.

agree casino spec bad. but tbh variance outside of surge just doesn’t matter that much, it will even out

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It may not matter too much in overall output but it’s soul crushing and makes the spec torture to play.

1 Like
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Yeah, but gameplay suffers all the same. This kind of stuff is better to stay consistent for Arcane since it was always the more predictable of the 3. Variance has always existed, and it’s been big before, but that was more to do with crits on big hitters when Barrage used to be a nuke with proper setup. I’d rather that variance not come from gameplay elements like procs and resources.