Yeah it would definitely be better if they communicated a bit more. I’d have to guess that they don’t because they want us hanging around on the hope that a change is about to come. Maybe that’s too cynical lol.
Well even demonology got a “We’d prefer you not play demo” comment once upon a time. 
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They definitely prefer you play fire or frost. That much is clear.
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Tbf, I do like multispec play and that doesn’t necessarily affect me, but for those wanting to play arcane only it is a problem.
Yeah I’d like to try it out some day, but crafting another legendary isn’t all that appealing lol.
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This is what I don’t really understand. Blizzard is touting record profits, they’re a company with a very high reputation and yet they seem to be laying off staff left, right and centre.
If they paid someone $50k to be the balance guy for Arcane, that’s 278 subs over a 12 month period. Do they honestly think that 300 people haven’t left the game due to the shoddy balance?
Then what’s even the point of having 3 specs? If this is Blizzards attitude, they may as well just delete 66% of the specs from all pure dps, remove either Ele or Enh, Boom or Feral, Frost DK, Arms… For clarity, we’re not asking to be top (though going from the mechanics of Arcane it should be top on low-movement fights) we just want to be competitive.
I’d argue that Arcane to play well is actually more difficult than Fire. On paper it has the same number of spells as Fire but involves mana management, while Fire just has to blow it’s load every 60-70 seconds. I’d also point out that a lot of players, myself included, do not enjoy Fire and would rather play anything else.
Some of them do though, and Arcane is still bottom on those fights. Shriekwing and Hungering are low-movement, single target fights. They’re precisely the kind of fight that Arcane should be destroying. But nope, and it only gets worse when you add movement.
It’s there if you’re one of the best players in the world, and arguably they could produce better numbers with other specs. The problem is that the remaining 99.999% of people wanting to play Arcane are out of luck. Designing a spec around fewer than 100 players worldwide is a terrible, terrible decision.
It’s been 6 years since Arcane had a good run. It was amazingly fun to play in BrF, but since then it has progressively gotten worse with each expansion. Blizzard has known about all of the issues around Arcane, and I would hope that someone in a multi-billion-dollar company would know how to fix it. But nope, instead we just get told to change specs. If a smaller company tried that, they’d go bankrupt.
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This is absolutely correct.
People complaining about mana running out etc. are basically crying about a spec design they don’t enjoy or they can’t master. Arcane is literally damage per mana point.
Look at your top streaming Arcane mages. They pull like 54k+ AoE in mythic+ and do insanely good ST bursts on bosses in raids as well. These people are exceptionally good at the spec and great to learn from.