I really wish the Intuition proc lasted longer—first and foremost. But if we never get an extended duration for some reason, could we at least make it so that Arcane Barrage casts with the Intuition proc don’t consume Arcane Harmony stacks?
Free Arcane Barrages feel great in general, but Intuition would be a lot less unwieldy if Barrage was truly free—fully juiced up with Arcane Harmony stacks. Right now, for me at least, it’s a love-hate relationship. I enjoy the free Barrage and Arcane Charges refresh, but it’s just too random with no payoff. You can’t hold onto the proc while you build up Arcane Harmony stacks because it’s too short. And again, it procs so randomly—like at the start of your rotation before you’ve even used Arcane Missiles.
It just feels like free damage with no real thought behind it—just, “Here, have an Arcane Charge refresh. We’re taking those Arcane Harmony stacks though.” Kind of mindless 'PRESS ME, PRESS ME!!" type of gameplay.
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I use a weakaura to track clearcasting and only light up when I have 2 or more stacks - that way I can easily bank a stack. Anytime I get Intuition I have just enough time to fire off a full missiles and then finish with Intuition empowered Barrage.
My main problem with Intuition is the lack of control we have over it. I have to cross my fingers for an Intuition proc during my Magi window.
My suggestion is to increase the Intuition window just a tad so it’s not quite so extreme (like to 5 seconds), and then change Presence of Mind to instead grant Intuition on-demand instead of instant cast Arcane Blast (which absolutely nobody cares about).
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This is one of my biggest issues with arcane currently. They’ve kept harmony but the “rotation” now promotes using immediate barrage procs which means you’ll rarely come close to 20 stacks.
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Intuition feels ok but misses the mark for Arcane’s playstyle. Arcane should be methodical and calculated. Procs like Intuition or Glorious Incandescence feel good, but they should not feel like a wedge cramming itself into the middle of- and messing up Arcane’s flow. My request would make the spec feel leagues better for me personally. I’m sure there’s other issues people have, but Intuition is probably the most glaring one.
Playing Sunfury Arcane and having the much longer (12 seconds) proc for Glorious Incandescence gives us a really nice window to squeeze in as many Arcane Missiles casts/Arcane Harmony charges as we can before we have to press Barrage.
So yeah. Either let us have a something close to a 12 second Intuition proc duration similar to Glorious Incandescence —or— (assuming they keep the 3 second duration) make my Intuition Barrages completely free. As in, Inuition Barrages are empowered by however many Arcane Harmony stacks you’re at before casting but also do not consume the stacks either.
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I would like to see something more fun. A 3 second buff feels like something I have to press, now. I don’t find that very fun.
There are also so many short-duration buffs that we really didn’t need another one.
I liked the idea that instead of getting a buff, it instead just auto-fired a free barrage. that way it wouldn’t have its own buff or force a GCD usage. It could be unaffected by (and not consume) other buffs and just be tuned separately. That would be fun and I would be surprised if anyone complained
Yeah, I struggle with the thought of Intuition. I think they have the right idea, and it does serve its purpose, but it certainly needs iteration.
You seem to be looking at it through the lends of Sunfury Arcane, however spell slinger is also a consideration, and by nature it is a spamming hero class.
With two sources of Aether attunement, we do have tools to quickly regain harmony stacks, but that is a seasonal perk, so something needs to give.
I can’t see them adding conditions to it, but maybe they could move it away from barrage, and into another spell, perhaps a free empowered orb? Just spit balling, might also be a bad idea, but I would love to keep the ability to generate charges quickly on spell slinger.
I actually play Spellslinger most often. I just brought up Sunfury to use Glorious Incandescence as an example.
I would play Sunfury more if it wasn’t just outright tuned worse than Spellslinger and if they let me turn off or change the way the terrible orbs look. But that’s a whole other topic 
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A boosted up chunky Arcane Orb proc (that you press/activate) would feel so much better in place of Barrage for Intuition. It would still need to give us 4 Arcane Charges though. That’s essentially what Spellslinger Frost has. I’d love that way more.
I want to add on that note that I don’t love the talent Orb Barrage. I hate how it randomly fires Arcane Orbs off. It’s a lot of visual noise, and you have to always be mindful to keep your character looking directly at the enemy to make sure the Orb is aimed correctly.
It doesn’t help that Orb Barrage sims so much better than the other Orb talent “Charged Orb”. So you’re literally forced to take the RNG Orb talent over the 2 charges one you can control. I honestly wish these two talents (Charged Orb and Orb Barrage) were on a choice node. They’d have to buff Charged Orb’s damage increase from 15% to something higher probably like 20% to 30% for it to be an actual choice.
Charged orb is the go to M+ talent.
Sure but it’s very close with Energized Familiar. Energized is beating Charged for me on single target and still very close on AoE. I change between them occasionally but prefer more single target with Energized.
Right but you’re choosing that… Above you’re making it seem that charged orb isn’t viable due to sims. But charged orb is the go to talent for M+ as it allows us to barrage more. So you CAN choose charged orb as it is stronger in M+. You’re choosing not to due to choice.
I just don’t really notice I’m starved of arcane charges. I feel like I’m constantly drowning in them actually. Furthermore, Arcane Orb’s baseline damage isn’t high enough for 15% extra damage to matter on it. Which is basically my whole point. The spell itself is really just a resource generator with no punch. It’s annoying and not as fun as they wanted it to be. Just how I feel about it. I also already said I swap between them. Wowhead is not the Bible. Players are and should be encouraged to do their own simulations and experimentations.
And for the record I wasn’t trying to make Charged Orb sound unviable. I was pointing out the massive chasm in power between Charged Orb and Orb Barrage. Orb Barrage, the RNG talent that is extremely annoying to play around for me is massively outperforming Charged Orb which is the talent which gives you flat damage and 2 charges. So much so that I can leave Charged Orb behind for Energized Familiar if I so choose, but I absolutely can never take off Orb Barrage or I lose a ton of DPS. My point. I find it annoying when RNG styled talents are numerically (much) better than controlled ones. Especially in a spec like Arcane.
I think you can play with charged orb right now, I’ve been testing it and getting good damage. I’m usually like 10 ilvl below the rest of the people in my group so far this season while I catch up (I was not really thinking I would play before the buff) and I am keeping up with it. I think it might be an either/or with spellslinger procs depending on the key level
Right. I wasn’t trying to tell anyone here how to play. I was more so talking about the balance and tuning of each talent individually, and what could be changed for the spec in order to make it just generally feel better to play. Just throwing random ideas around, and pointing out areas the spec feels bad to actually play with. Nothing crazy serious. I’m not making a guide here or anything lol.
On a further note, Spellslinger does have better overall numbers tuning right now than Sunfury. But in my experiments, I found that funnily enough, even though Orb Barrage is so heavily impactful for DPS on Spellslinger (even way more so than Charged Orb which I established above)— Sunfury can (and I would venture to say should) completely drop both Charged Orb and Orb Barrage, and instead take the talents Energized Familiar and Time Loop. Going to show again just how weak Arcane Orb is tuning-wise, and how without Spellslinger enhancing it, the spell feels like nothing more than an arcane charges generator.
Either of the Orb talents might still be better in high target fights maybe… but I haven’t tested extensively for that. And with the lower tuning generally for Sunfury, it’s harder to tell exactly where things fit. I think Glorious Incandescence does a lot of the heavy lifting here for arcane charge generation as opposed to requiring and relying on Arcane Orbs for that.
Again, Spellslinger is performing better for overall DPS via current tuning, do not get it twisted. But ironically enough, I’ve actually found that in shorter fights Sunfury can feel more explosive and bursty, ending engagements more quickly than Spellslinger which relies on the Splinter mechanic.
If only Sunfury was tuned better, and they changed the way the damned Spellfire Spheres looked, gave us cosmetic choices for them, or let us turn them off, I’d be 10 times happier.
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We won’t because they purposely made it 3 seconds since they couldn’t figure out any other way to keep people from trying to stubbornly stack Arcane Barrage damage multipliers which they’ve been on a crusade to do virtually since the start of the expansion with predictably laughable results and even though they’re the ones that have been enforcing that playstyle since SL to begin with. Intuition is just the latest iteration of that madness.
No, we need to simply do away with Arcane Harmony altogether because it’s yet another outdated talent from a bygone era that no longer makes sense, if it ever did at all (its initial version was one of the weakest legendary items in Legion). Same with essentially all the Arcane Barrage damage multipliers and instead transfer that power to the spell itself at the baseline level so that Arcane Barrage actually feels impactful.
Yes they do which is why we need to move away from the way it works currently and instead make it so that hitting the button itself feel rewarding without having to pair it with half a dozen other buffs or wait for procs. However, doing so basically requires a complete redesign of the way Arcane currently works and we aren’t likely to see that happen anytime soon if ever.
To me, the most logical and straightforward way to achieve this is to simply make it so that casting ABarr at four Arcane Charges is always the to go to in any circumstance, not just in AoE. Of course it would be better if we had a separate dedicated ST Charge spender but apparently that’s too much to ask for. And while we’re at it ABarr shouldn’t have a cap on how many targets it can hit and/or something like Arcane Rebound should be a baseline feature or a much more powerful and easily accessible talent.
I would love for someone to tell me why any of these shouldn’t happen or to explain why it won’t make the spec feel x10 better and smoother to play…
I guess it’s a slight difference of opinion about Arcane Harmony here for me. I enjoy stacking and spending those stacks to amp up Arcane Barrage in some capacity. I like having to actually use my brain instead of slamming glowy proc buttons as soon as they appear (which is what current Intuition wants us to do). I don’t mind that style of gameplay, but we already have Frost and Fire for that. It feels so juicy to get Aether Attunement on a large pack and your Arcane Harmony stacks blast up to 20 instantly.
Arcane Harmony shouldn’t ever make it feel like Arcane Barrage absolutely requires 20 stacks to do meaningful damage every single time though. I like the idea of Arcane Harmony as a boost to an already powerful on its own spell.
It does seem as though much of the overall damage for Arcane has been shifted into Arcane Barrage and Arcane Missiles rendering Arcane Blast as a more of a filler rather than a burn phase “blaster” like it once was. I’m not necessarily against this, but for the amount of mana that full arcane charges Arcane Blast uses, you’d think it would do more DPS overall. I wouldn’t want Arcane Blast to dominate the rotation though to the point it’s all you press. I’m sure they’re delicately avoiding that kind of rotation.
I also find Nether Precision somewhat interesting at least to play around because it gives me a directive and a payoff. You Arcane Missiles for Arcane Harmony Charges, and are given 2 Nether Precision “buffs” to spend on Arcane Barrage— or Arcane Blast if Arcane Harmony isn’t at a high enough stack count yet. So there’s more thought here too than slam your keyboard.
I just don’t really know if the main issue at hand is Arcane Harmony. I don’t really see the issue with players stacking up their modifiers to pay that off with big damage. That’s basically the whole point of the game. The issue for me right now is the way they seem to be trying to rein the spec in, which just feels like they forced a ball and chain on us.
Maybe Arcane Harmony could be made into a choice node with another talent to avoid the mechanic for players that don’t like it, rather than outright removing it from the class. I feel like removing the last vestiges of complexity from Arcane is probably not the right direction for the spec.
Honestly, spending Clearcasting already gets us a 20% damage amp to Barrage. I feel like Harmony is kind of redundant.
My biggest issue - and I will keep banging this drum - is that we are overly reliant on Arcing Cleave + Resonance for damage. Logs show consistently that Arcane does decently on 3-5 target fights (i.e. Vexie and Stix), but suffers badly on pure single target and falls behind on mass AoE.
Hmm Arcane Harmony definitely isn’t redundant. It certainly provides an increase to DPS overall. Maybe you meant design-wise to the spec on the whole though. I feel like there’s a world where it could be tuned so that it’s actually a choice against something else for people that absolutely do not want to play Harmony.
Arcane does very well on AoE this is true on the basis that you are max arcane charges essentially the entire engagement. In single target, building arcane charges is a bit slower, in turn making the entire rotation feel slower. This reveals how weak Arcane Blast can feel which is something I touched on above.
I’m not sure exactly where the power would go if they took some of it out of Arcing Cleave and Resonance. As soon as you do that, you’re just on a teeter-totter now between whether you want Arcane to have higher impact in single target or AoE situations generally. It feels like Arcane’s entire kit now cleaves and funnels to multiple targets passively without much of a choice in the tree.
I could see them removing some of those talent’s power and just suping up the damage of Arcane Blast, Arcane Barrage, and Arcane Missiles on the baseline maybe. And perhaps that’s what you’re getting at? Unless you have other ideas.
As an aside—I swear if they buff Arcane Explosion talents to overtake Arcing Cleave/Resonance I will riot. I absolutely hate running into melee to Arcane Explosion.
I made a large post earlier detailing suggestions I have. We have talents that can be good for our AoE toolkit if they were properly tuned: Energy Reconstitution, Arcane Rebound, and Leydrinker. The problem with so much power in our cleave is that any tuning fixes to Barrage for Single Target is likely to push our cleave damage too high - not without having to do something silly like double the value of Harmony.
I feel they need to improve the baseline damage of Blast, Barrage, and Missiles, and then tone down some of the proc damage of Barrage - especially on Resonance. Honestly Resonance can probably be flat out removed and have Rebound take its place.
Regardless, something needs to change. Arcane is still underperforming on single target.
I figured that was the direction you were going with that—and I actually do agree. I think Arcane has been designed into a hyper mythic+ spec and is having a weird identity crisis right now.
Redistributing damage into Arcane Blast, Arcane Barrage, and Arcane Missiles baseline seems like a good direction. And I find it so funny that the talents you mentioned (Energy Reconstitution, Arcane Rebound, and Leydrinker) are in the class tree at all. Not that I don’t like them, or that I want them gone or anything. Just the fact that that entire portion of the tree is so absolutely dead and… well redundant when you can just take the better versions of them.
I think the tree is so all over the place that people are not wrong for thinking Arcane spec might really just need a redesign again. It feels like a mess.
I guess the other option would be to buff our single target to decent levels and let our cleave be extremely strong. I would be okay with this too. But it’s a shame we still have a bunch of completely dead talents. Man, it seems like such an easy win for example to have Presence of Mind be a button to give us Intuition on-demand. Why do they think a nearly once-a-minute instant Arcane Blast is worth anything??
I’m also OCD and I BADLY want Arcane to get a ‘Increases your mastery by 5%. You get 10% more mastery from stats.’ talent since Fire and Frost get one.