You don’t drop Orb Barrage and Prodigious for the Harmony build. You drop Siphon and Radiant Spark. The trade here is more Barrage damage and more consistent CC procs in exchange for Siphon since Radiant is pretty meh in dungeons.
Personally find this playstyle far more appealing and fun. I am doing less ST damage in exchange for more AOE, and that’s fine by me.
When I say THE harmony build, I mean the meta one listed in most guides and played in shadowlands into DF. Your build seems interesting, I may give it a try but, I can’t see a world that you don’t need boss damage, unless you’re a mile ahead on the trash to makeup time and at best barrage is capped at 5 targets. The 4 pc isn’t that strong to make it any different then it was before.
Ok, how about improved arcane missiles (x2) are we adding that? I’m gonna have a struggle to get my talents to work and get me to harmony and orb…I’ll have to play around a bit.
I haven’t touched Harmony since I quit halfway through SL. Battery does have a clearly synergy with Harmony (when you have enough mobs being hit by the buffed AMs to generate the 20 stacks in one cast) but the talents Harmony is gated behind make me want to puke. Also using ABarr in ST even when it’s buffed with both Harmony and Bombardment is painful because of the glacial pace of generating charges that comes after. It just seems like too much hassle when you can get even more DPS by just spamming AB at 4 charges like a maniac.
You only use the harmony on ST at the beginning of touch in cds and only if you have double orb out of them. Under 35% I barrage at the end of touch.
You dont lose much boss damage really. You catch up during execute. At least from what I see.
Concentration isnt bad either really. You can make use of the proc at 2ppm to get 2 free CCs on ST, and on AoE you typically can use it on a random blast if theres a prio and you want battery.
I do think the CC node should just be 1pt and concentration should maybe work on AE too.
Oh I know, but that’s just it. For me the whole point of jumping through all of those hoops to empower your ABarr is so you can see than nice thicc & juicy ABarr crit at the end. But why bother when even if you go all in you’re still hardly going to use the spell anyway? You’ll go from barely using it at all to maybe using it a dozen times in an entire boss fight. It just defeats the whole purpose.
At the end of the day ABarr is just not going to see much play in ST until there is a reliable way to quickly and consistently generate Charges in ST. The only way for that to happen is a complete paradigm shift where AB stops being your entire ST rotation and becomes a filler and builder like AE is in AoE. That’s what I was talking about earlier. I want AB to have both it’s cast time and damage drastically reduced and transfer all of that damage that normally comes from spamming AB at 4 charges back into the Arcane Charge system so that the new default is cast AB to get 4 charges then dump them with an ABarr (or ideally a new dedicated ST spender) and then do it all over again in a seamless playback loop.
ESO, for all it’s faults, just introduced a class called the Arcanist that plays in exactly this way and it’s been a runaway hit. Blizzard need to borrow a page from ZOS’ book in this case.
To be clear I only run this in dungeons. Most boss fights have secondary target mechanics and if they don’t that’s fine.
Got 4-piece finally today and I’m struggling with it do far. I need a way to track when it’s up.
I do have to say, for fun factor, coming into a new pack with it in the Que and hitting ToM, then throwing a million missiles into the fray is pretty awesome! I changed my talents around so missiles has the +20% dmg and that makes a big diff. In boss fights when your surge is up and all your cooldowns, missiles are hitting for like 100K each, which is also pretty cool. I did not go Harmony, because I just can’t track that many things.
I finally got it after the raid last night and did a m+ and it’s taking me a while to get used to it.
I’m a hot mess right now. Basically completely re-did my talents to favor Arcane Missiles and trying Harmony capstone with very mixed results. I dropped all the talents on the left side of the tree (including evocation) and it’s really weird. Harmony is ok, but the stupid talent in front of it runs counter to the 4-piece, making it more difficult to execute. I grabbed a Weak Aura to help track when the missile barrage is up and that helps a lot. I struggling right now.
BUMP - this really needs to be a talent. It’s extremely visually pleasing and, in terms of gameplay, makes Arcane much more enjoyable in AoE scenarios.
Choice node with mana gem or something.
It is such an amazing talent. I second your bump.