Arcane – Can this be the reason no buffs?
Negative thinking: Blizzard does not care, Blizzard does not have the manpower to fix, Blizzard is too dumb to recognize the problem.
Positive thinking: Best case is that Blizzard knows that Arcane will scale well next tier gear with increased item levels. If they buff Arcane this tier, then next tier Arcane will be overpowered and they would have to nerf. I like to think positive, but I do not think this is the case, sadly.
Your thoughts?
They received two buffs, but blizzard just doesn’t care to attempt to balance all the specs every tier.
it seems that blizzard don’t make single change for spec as long as 1 of them is competitive.
They had layoff in the balance team and it shows now more then ever IMO.
I very much doubt it’s all that deliberate. I think the balance team is indeed pretty small right now, and if you subscribe to that belief then it’s hard to fault them for not looking at every single spec in a holistic way.
Pretty frustrating though, considering how big this game is. You’d think manpower wouldn’t be a problem for blizzard, of all people.
I’m sure the dev team cares, but a class overhaul during an expansion seems unlikely.
Do they though? Cause they haven’t shown it. In fact, they’ve kind of done the opposite with how they handled arcane barrage mana bug.
And I’m not defending that. Plenty of bugs go unfixed for long periods of time. The icicle bug in BFA comes to mind. I have no idea how much better Arcane will be with the covenant changes coming up, but I just don’t see a way around the movement problem.
As it stands, the only way to make a fight that would benefit arcane would be just straight patchwerk. The burn phase is just too long with how the game currently works.
I’d agree with that IF arcane hadn’t had issues for like 4 straight expansions. I understand you’re trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and be fair, but for me it’s a really hard sell when arcane has had major issues for like 8-9 years.
If they do they are doing a stellar job of demonstrating the opposite.
Yes, how long did that tooltip error go unfinished and then get nerfed from what it was supposed to be?
Which for a multi-billion dollar company just boggles the mind.
I doubt that it’s some conspiracy against arcane mages. I have no idea how arcane sims these days, but the problem isn’t with output…or at least I don’t think it is. The mechanics in the raid just don’t lend themselves to that playstyle. I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to play arcane on denathrius.
Like if I check the arcane parses on heroic sire, my dps as fire on that fight (which isn’t that great honestly), would be a top 100 arcane parse. I just don’t see how you fix that.
you give us back displacement from the last xpac and you give us more clearcasting procs for slipstream. I’ve recently started switching off shimmer to get more mobile dps, as for damage output on sire, I am typically top of our raid team because of the AOE, not much in the game beats arcane AOE right now and third phase doesn’t see as much mobility that arcane can’t handle, it’s the other bosses in nathria that are a struggle like sunking
the biggest reason no buffs have come to arcane is the damage thoroughput is there, not alot of top tier arcane mages though as it is an unpopular spec, the skill cap is incredibly high and any below average player will have dumpster dps as arcane, the biggest issue I have right now is they gave all of the utility from arcane to fire this xpac and none of the utility from fire to arcane.
I think they need something where presence of mind lets you cast everything on the move for like 10 seconds or something. Maybe give up shimmer for it. I don’t know lol. But you’re right, any mobility buffs will probably make the spec broken so you’d have to give up some dps for that.
Give up what DPS? There is no DPS to give up! Arcane is a turret spec that can’t even do well when allowed to remain a turret because for some reason it continues to rely on mana as its resource and any patchwerk type fight that permits that kind of play style is specifically tuned to require consistent DPS for a longer period of time than normal (because patchwerk bosses have more HP). In that situation Arcane simply runs out of steam and is forced into a conserve phase repeatedly which tanks the DPS especially if the boss dies before your cooldowns reset.
Arcane definitely needs a mobility buff but it also needs a complete overhaul so that it can be competitive in the modern raid environment where bosses have dozens of mechanics the vast majority of which require at least some degree of movement. With its reliance on mana Arcane is tuned for Classic bosses except we’re playing retail…
Playing Arcane in its current iteration in CN feels like you’re playing with one of those medieval cannonballs on a chain strapped not only to your leg but also to your hands given the glacial pace of casting AB without four charges. Atm the only situation well suited to Arcane’s kit is burst AoE which means the spec is only viable in M+ and even then only every other rotation when it’s Fortified week and mostly because the Prideful affix enables us to ignore mana on bosses (next season is sure to be much worse). Combine that with the fact that gearing via M+ is one of the worst ways to go about it this expansion and is it really any wonder no one plays the spec?
The whole thing is an unmitigated disaster and Blizzard’s only response is seemingly to just ignore it. That’s why people, myself included, are fed up (especially when you consider this is the 2nd expansion in a row of this treatment).
I am sorry but that’s just a foolish argument to make. Just because there are a handful of players who can pull this off, and btw can only do it on certain fights and only when all the stars align, doesn’t mean the spec should be balanced around them if 99% of the rest can’t even come close to those numbers. Blizzard shouldn’t be afraid to buff 99% of people who definitely need it just because in doing so they will make 1% of people overpowered. Those folks are going to be overpowered anyway because they play the game like it’s their job (and it often is). That won’t break the game, ignoring the plight of the average player can and will.
The closest thing we really have to a patchwerk fight would be sludgefist I guess and arcane isn’t bad there for heroic. It’s not as good as frost or fire, but it’s not miles behind. Then look at denathrius and the top arcane parses do a bit over half the dps that fire does on that fight. Mobility is the difference.
I agree that mana is annoying to play around which is why I don’t do it lol, but I just don’t agree that Blizzard is knowingly ignoring this. Whatever they changed from BFA to now didn’t work of course, but I doubt a spec overhaul is high on their priority list right now. Frost was sort of easy to fix. A straight buff to damage fixed up a lot of their issues. Arcane isn’t going to be nearly as simple.
Yes but they knew that Arcane wouldn’t be an easy fix, they’ve known for years now. I agree that they’re not trying to be malicious but it’s definitely intentional at this point. All they have to do to clear that up is a one sentence blue post saying that they know Arcane has problems and are looking into it but have no ETA yet. That’s it! That’s all it would take yet they haven’t done it. What does that tell you?
I don’t know how often they make those kinds of announcements. I don’t remember one when I was dying for a frost buff. If they had, I might not have changed cov and spec lol. We just don’t get that kind of communication anymore…for anything.
I’m sure they’re aware that the spec is underperforming. They must have access to more information than we do. Presumably (and hopefully) they’re working on 9.1 content and I just don’t think there’s much hope for a spec overhaul right now. They’re too busy butchering monks anyway lol.
I’m not suggesting there’s a cabal of hooded Blizzard devs sitting in a dungeon room on thrones of human bone cackling maniacally and tenting their fingers like Mr. Burns ("Eeeeeeexcelent, arcane is bad again, Smithers, let’s destroy frost next…) but boy it sure does seem like someone is VERY resistant to it.
I think it’s just a question of difficulty. Frost was an easy fix, more or less. I don’t know how many people or how much time they devote to each class once the numbers are available, but you’d think mage isn’t going to be anywhere near the top of the priority list. If it was as simple as a damage buff, they’d have done it already.
That’s entirely possible. What gets me is that they NEVER talk about it. No community posts, no articles, dev interviews, etc.