Arcane Changes Feedback (5/29/24)

[Brainard-area-52]

Hey Blizzard,

Sorry I’m late on the feedback (work got busy). Here is my feedback for the recent Arcane + Spellslinger changes.

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Overall Feedback

This week brought some very nice changes to Arcane Splinters in the form of scaling with Mastery and proc’ing Arcane Echo (along with some likely deserved nerfs to the base Splinter damage).

I did some math on the Clearcasting proc rate compared to current; I don’t think we’re at target yet with these changes. The Spellfrost Teachings change, while interesting, are not balanced at all between Frost and Arcane (see below; much stronger for Frost than for Arcane). Lastly, please look into the issues listed below regarding Chrono-Shift, Siphon Storm, Arcane Harmony and our talenting options for AoE.

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Arcane Changes from 5/29/24

Inspired Intellect

@Linxy

• New Talent: Inspired Intellect – Arcane Intellect grants you an additional 3% Intellect. Choice node with Time Anomaly.

• Feedback: A lot of people have been complaining about Time Anomaly. I don’t think it’s that bad of a talent personally. Adding an easier alternative is fine, and I think this fits the bill squarely. Overall ambivalent to this talent; I do hope Time Anomaly ends up doing more damage so I get to play that talent.

Leydrinker

@Linxy

Leydrinker proc chance reduced to 10% (was 15%).

• Feedback: This didn’t sound like a strong talent to begin with, but I guess it was over-performing by ~33%? I guess maybe with Arcane Harmony and Sunfury in execution range with 5 targets, I could significantly increase your Arcane Barrage damage, but that seems like a rather niche scenario.

Clearcasting Proc Stuff

@Linxy

• Arcane Surge is now guaranteed to generate Clearcasting.
  • Developer’s note: Arcane Surge was a reliable source of Clearcasting that Arcane Mages lost with the removal of mana-based Clearcasting procs. We’re making Arcane Surge proc Clearcasting baseline to ensure you’re rolling into your burns with some more Clearcasting availability.
• Arcane Blast now has a 5% increased chance to generate Clearcasting.
  • Developer’s note: Clearcasting availability has marginally decreased in pure single target scenarios. We’re buffing up Arcane Blast’s chance to proc Clearcasting to compensate.

• Feedback: Thanks for looking into this. I was really worried about Arcane Surge in particular. I know you’ve mentioned several times that according to your internal testing Clearcasting proc rate is almost similar with Arcane Blast having a 15% CC proc rate and Arcane Missiles having a 10% CC proc rate, but this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Looking at some math:

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• Currently (Dragonflight): 27.5% CC proc rate per Arcane Blast, 0% per CC Arcane Missiles
  • Proc ratio: 10000 Arcane Blasts grants 2750 CC Arcane Missiles
    Roughly 1 CC proc per 7.56 seconds w/ 0% haste

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• Beta TWW: 15% CC proc rate per Arcane Blast, 10% per CC Arcane Missiles
  • Proc ratio: 1000 Arcane Blasts grants 150 CC Arcane Missiles which grants another 15 CC Arcane Missiles (165 CC total)
    Roughly 1 CC proc per 11.27 seconds w/ 0% haste (~33% reduction in proc rate from current)

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• Brainard’s Proposed Change: 22.5% CC proc rate per Arcane Blast, 15% per CC Arcane Missiles (50% buff in proc rate to make up for 33% reduction)
  • Proc ratio: 100000 Arcane Blasts grants 22500 CC Arcane Missiles which grants another 3375 CC Arcane Missiles (25875 CC total)
    Roughly 1 CC proc per 7.91 seconds w/ 0% haste (~5% reduction in proc rate from current)

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Maybe I’m missing something here (and it’s tough to say because I can’t test this because no alpha access), but it still feels like we have very low CC proc rate. Once Beta comes out I’ll try this out and give some actual hard numbers/comparison w/ live so we can put this discuss to rest.

Aether Attunement

@Linxy

• Aether Attunement has been redesigned – Every 3 times you consume Clearcasting, you gain Aether Attunement.
• Aether Attunement primary target damage increase reduced to 100% (was 150%).
• Aether Attunement secondary target damage increase reduced to 50% (was 100%).

• Feedback: This is fine (tuning is balance dependent). Design-wise, I was actually wondering if you would be willing to create a talent where Arcane Missile always cleaves to 5 targets (for reduced damage, like say it only cleaves 20% of damage). This would have big synergy in AoE with the Arcane Harmony build, where you would cleave 1 Arcane Missiles onto 3 targets and immediately get to 20 stacks of Arcane Harmony and throw an Arcane Barrage, followed by Arcane Orb, then another Arcane Missiles that cleaves to 5 targets, Arcane Barrage again with 20 stacks, Arcane Orb again, etc. This would still respect the value of Arcane Mage’s burstiness, but it would shift it to Arcane Harmony/Arcane Barrage (from Arcane Missiles in AoE), which I think fits the theme better for Arcane (remember those giga-Arcane Barrage crits from Shadowlands?) Up to you on this one Blizzard, I just hope Arcane Harmony ends up being played at some point during TWW.

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Spellslinger Changes from 5/29/24

Arcane Splinter

@Linxy

• Fixed an issue that prevented Frost and Arcane Splinters from interacting with damage bonuses and proc effects such as Touch of the Magi.
• Arcane Splinter damage reduced by 50%.
• Embedded Arcane Splinter damage reduced by 50%.

• Feedback: Thank you for making Arcane Splinters scale with Mastery and Arcane Echo, I was worried we were going to run into a Windwalker Monk situation with poor scaling late into the expansion. The nerfs the Arcane Splinters were expected, with Shifting Power cast during Arcane Surge doing 2905.6% Spell Power giving it would fire 16 Splinters prior to these nerfs seemed steep to me (although I don’t have hard numbers to compare to other specs at this point). On a thematic perspective, something that has been discussed in the mage discord was switching the single-target generation from Nether Precision consumption to Arcane Missiles focus, since firing lots of Arcane Missiles seems to fit the theme of “Spell-Slinger” more than firing a few hard-hitting Arcane Blasts empowered by Nether Precision. It would also create the possibility where during Arcane Surge you could get lucky with Splinterstorm proc’ing Clearcasting a bunch of time, giving you permanent mobility during Arcane Surge (something Arcane struggles with during its cooldowns, unlike Fire mage). Here’s an idea that I was thinking for how to implement this:
  • Current: When you consume Nether Precision conjure 2 Arcane Splinters that fire at your target.
  • Suggested Change: Every 2 Arcane Missiles fires 1 Arcane Splinter at your current target. Every 4 Arcane Charges spent fires 2 Arcane Splinters at your current target (similar as current with Arcane Barrage).
    • For Arcane Missiles: 4 Splinters per AM on Single target, 20 Splinters per AM w/ Aether Attunement on 5T
    • For Arcane Barrage: 2 Splinters per 4-charge Arcane Barrage

Spellfrost Teachings

@Linxy

Spellfrost Teachings has been redesigned – Direct damage from Splinters has a 3% chance to reset the cooldown of Arcane Orb/Frozen Orb and increase all damage dealt by your Arcane Orbs/Frozen Orbs by 50% for 10 seconds.

• Feedback: This talent is quite problematic because the power gain from Arcane relative to Frost from this talent is quite imbalanced. As an example, comparing top Arcane vs. Frost logs on Volcoross (ST fight example), Arcane consumed ~35 Nether Precision while Frost consumed ~110 Winter’s Chill buffs, meaning with the Spellslinger tree Frost would generate ~3 times the number of Splinters. Pairing this with the fact that Arcane Orb does 109.2% Spell Power per target while Frozen Orb does 288% Spell Power per target AND generates Fingers of Frost procs, this talent means Frost gets ~3 times more resets than Arcane with an already ~3 times stronger Orb. I think this should be either buffed significantly for the Arcane side or changed for the Arcane side to have a different effect. One idea that was tossed around was having the proc rate of Orb Barrage be increased during Touch of the Magi windows. I think this would fit the theme of “firing off a slew of Orbs” like you mentioned in your Alpha update post.

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Suggested Changes

Improved Arcane Missiles, Crackling Energy, Chrono-Shift and Presence of Mind

• Feedback: Yeah we’re here again (for the hundredth time). Improved Arcane Missiles and Crackling Energy are still terrible talents that are very uninspired but increase your DPS by so much that they are unfortunately mandatory in all scenarios. I would like for these talents to be removed and replaced with Chrono-Shift (replacing Improved Arcane Missiles) and Presence of Mind (replacing Crackling Energy). I would love to be able to play with Chrono-Shift for the first time in 2 years, and I would also love to have Presence of Mind not compete with Wizened Wit so you can tune Wizened Wit however you want without worrying about making it kill PoM’s choice

AoE Build Problem

• Feedback: When you make a single target build with the current tree, you have a lot of options for different talents to pick and the tree feels very open at this time. I’m not seeing the same thing for AoE builds, where I’m forced to lose 3 of the 4: Charged Orb, Arcane Tempo, Leydrinker and Illuminated Thoughts. This feels really bad. One solution would be to just make some of these talents (i.e. Arcing Cleave) baseline; I’ll leave you to decide what to do about this

Siphon Storm

• Feedback: I’m actually going to suggest nerfing this talent further here. Something like decreasing the damage buff from 2% per stack down to 1% (or maybe even 0.5%). It’s hard to tell what you want to do with this talent because you’re not commenting on this, but it seems like you don’t want to add a choice node to Siphon Storm. If that’s the case, then would you mind nerfing Siphon storm (severely) just to make sure it isn’t a mandatory pick coming into next expansion like it is currently? As of now, not taking Siphon Storm is ~10% DPS loss on ST… You can always just buff our baseline damage to compensate for this nerf if needed too. I just don’t want to be forced into this talent again for another 2 years.

Arcane Harmony

• Feedback: Could we have this talent cap at some multiplier of 8? Now that we can only fire Clearcasting Arcane Missiles and Amplification is a mandatory node, it seems silly to keep this at 20 stacks. Hell, make it 40 stacks for 2.5% damage per stack for all I care, just please make this some multiplier of 8. Also, I would really appreciate some increased crit chance on this given how important it is to crit on Arcane Harmony Arcane Barrages (as well learned from Shadowlands Kyrian Arcane).

[Veriston-frostmourne]

Insightful feedback definitely agree with the aoe build having problems

[Kerathras-dalaran (Kerathras)]

My biggest takeaway, not just from this update but in general looking at what they’ve been doing on the Alpha so far, is that they’re being waaay too cautious with procs and constantly pulling back when they said at the outset that they wanted to make procs more impactful. I just don’t get it.

The other thing that has me confounded is this constant rearranging of talent nodes and moving around the links in a really haphazard manner that for the most part makes absolutely no sense. It’s like they throw darts at a board or roll the dice to see where talent nodes will go.

For example, they have all the Arcane Orb talents at the top left of the tree but Orb Barrage, which is the Arcane Orb capstone talent, all the way on bottom right gated behind row after row of completely unrelated talents. At the end of the day it’s not that big a deal, I am sure we will find ways to make it work as we always have, but it just seems so amateurish and, frankly, a touch incompetent. I understand giving them some leeway to experiment and test out what works best but this is just… messy.