There are a lot of ideas you could do to make having 4 arc charges more useful, but then you’d have to incentivize spending them. Chaos bolt is a good comparison, it does incredible damage. On its own, people might say its overpowered, but everyone will agree that the resource cost of chaos bolt is fair. “at least they have a limitation to such power” this is the theme.
All combo point systems, resource gains in general like insanity, holy power, runes, astral power, focus, rage etc ALL function on a similar model. You have abilities that deal a lot of damage, but are limited to resource gain and spent from resource gain. This gives the combat ebb and flow which is essential for a fair pvp experience. If someone can kill you at the start of the battle its less fun, so ebb and flow mechanics slow down the pace of a game and add predictable fluctuations in combat. Predicable is a key word, because countering requires you to understand a classes resource mechanics in order to combat them effectively. You want to avoid an spriest at full insanity in death angel mode, but be more aggressive if they’re low on insanity, etc.
Arc mages were initially designed to fit the very same model. You accrued charges, did devastating damage and barrage was a high damage finisher. Due to some mechanical error, it was just not appropriate to drop barrage because spamming ab and other spells were more effective, and this mechanic has been tweaked over and over through the expansions with extra barrage dmg on low health targets, extra/reduced AB cost, quicker/slower cast times, cleave damage, etc. For whatever reason, they just gave up on it I guess?
The problem therefore seems to be elusive. I have a hunch it has to do with spells. We don’t have enough spells to cast. How many different abilities can a warlock choose to spend his soul shards on? How many different spells can a warrior use with rage? How many spells can a paladin use with holy power? These all tie into spell versatility - one spell is for cleave, one is for cc, one is for survival, one is for evasion, one is for self healing, etc etc etc. We don’t have many options for charges. Its just… barrage. Now, you have the boost in spell damage from high charges, but this is trivial at best. With 20% mastery you’ll be doing 9% extra spell damage with AB. This is the difference between a 2200 arcane blast or a 2400 arcane blast approximately. Not really worthwhile. Oh and what about mastery helping your finisher or incentivizing barrage? Not working, since mastery is drastically reduced with barrage… it increases your barrage damage by 4%. This borders on pathetic. The highest benefit of mastery is that missiles is boosted by 15% as well as “all other arcane spells”. Please let me know what this is talking about, because I haven’t the foggiest idea. Once again, very few spells for us to spend arc charges… I guess arc explosion? But who on earth counts arc explosion into their damage rotation.
But getting back to the ebb and flow mechanic, we seriously don’t have it. Instead we have a totally unique ebb and flow mechanic that functions “internally” to arc mages which is our mana. This can be considered a good thing, you control your own power, be it extra weak or extra strong. But do we really? Because I forgot to mention, proc generation is also tied into our ebb and flow. This gives us a totally unique dual-layered ebb and flow system, which by all accounts is a complete and total failure. I want you to take another class, any other class, say a warlock for example and tell them that from now on, chaos bolt can only be cast if they have a proc. And then use soul shards to control how much damage it does. The warlocks would completely flip out. They would despise such a change… they want to generate soul shards and spend them on their spell, why would they want to rely on RNG permitting them to use the resources that they’re working to build up! Its redonkulous. The dual layered ebb and flow system presents a problem because even if you DO gather up arc charges, you might not always be able to spend them when you want and this is a problem.
The rng system creates its own set of problems, as if there weren’t enough of them already. It gives the lotto winners such a hit of dopamine that they get caught under the illusion that the system is good, while the people who consistently lose the lottery recognize that its bad. That’s why some arc mages are like “oh yea clearcast procs just fine I get them all the time! Its awesome” and other mages are like, um no its not. Its like trying to convince your 45 year old uncle who’s been gambling since he was 15 why gambling is bad, but he says “yea but remember that time I hit the pick 4 and won like $5,000! Its totally worth it!” The same kinda situation is happening with the loot system and why no one can agree that the loot system is good or bad.
If arc were redesigned across the board to have a proper ebb and flow system, then they could boost the damage of our finishers and we’d have proper burst, even outside of cds. The extra damage would be fair because it would cost arc charges. Also, our burst cd, arcane power, should not just give us raw power but boost our mechanics for us (just like fire does) and boost clearcast generation. Its interesting to think about it, but at one point, arcane DID have a mechanic to boost its mechanics. It was PoM. Using pom gave you instant arc charges which tied into our whole mechanic playstyle. But since arc charges usefulness has been ‘watered down’, pom has become one of our weaker cd’s, just 2 instant arcane blasts and nothing more. On a tier of spell priority - every other spell in our whole spellbook is more useful than pom. Remember when it affected all spells? Instant polymorph was pretty useful. As we sit right now, our spell kit does not entirely fit our function or mechanics. No spell you cast actually provides you with a significant benefit, theres no ramp up besides clearcasting and theres no synergy between abilities benefiting other abilities. We have not evolved into this new mobility era with everyone else. Arc is in a weird, weird place right now.