Arcane is very challenging in M+, and I like that about it, but I feel like the challenge should be rewarded. Right now, judging by mythicstats, arcane is 3rd last “F” tier in dps for M+. I feel like a little tweak is warranted.
My suggestion is to increase the 10% chance per Arcane Charge from Orb Barrage. This both addresses the problem and improves unsatisfying gameplay of doing a full ramp and getting no procs
Thank you for considering
Id be happy in m+ if i had cooldowns for every trash pull. With evocation and arcane surge i can compete on trash pulls with ret pallies and demo locks. Without cooldowns i get destroyed.
It would be cool if arcane barriage reduced the cooldown of shifting power. Some way to get more uses of shifting power between pulls so that you can use your full rotation every pull.
The reward to the challenge is beating other dps when normally you would get smoked, and someone saying oh it’s nice to finally see a good mage. If you’re playing in the zone and making minimal mistakes you notice it on the meters. Dodging mechanics using defensives knowing dam well its helping your healer. Always lining up cooldowns for each pack just comes with experience and repetitiveness of doing the dungeons over and over. That voice in your head that makes you go ok that was a mistake I shouldn’t have used them then I’ll remember next time, or why did I just do that i was playing greedy now I have to run back from a death and my overall has dropped significantly. Lining up defensives with pulls is half the pre planning in doing dps so you aren’t so worried about getting killed while also doing your burst rotation. Always remembering to use time warp again after 5 minutes. Unless you’re doing 25+ keys with a coordinated group arcane puts out more than enough damage
I didn’t do a lot of M+ this season and I run almost exclusively with a guild group, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.
Arcane feels better (to me) in M+ this expansion overall than it has in most of the previous expansions. I used to feel next to useless on anything that wasn’t a tyrannical boss fight - which could easily be a player issue, so take that as you will - but now I feel like I can actually contribute to a group on any week.
That said, I don’t think that Orb Barrage is a good long-term solution for Arcane’s AoE situation. It’s a fun gimmick, but it feels like we have too much riding on whether or not it procs.
When barrage doesn’t proc, we don’t do enough damage to be competitive. When it does proc, we can compete with other DPS at the expense of what is, unfortunately, dull gameplay. Suggestions have been made in other threads to increase the proc chance of Orb Barrage, but if it ever becomes a 100% chance (or if you get really lucky and it procs a lot) the rotation is… one button.
If you have a 100% proc chance (either through dev changes or absurd luck), if you get to 4 charges and there are at least 4 enemies in front of you, the only spells you cast are your cooldowns and arcane barrage - the proc does everything else for you. I find that the pulls where I get 12 consecutive procs are the least fun pulls because I’m really not doing anything. The game is playing itself, I just put a sticker with my name on it.
The “low representation” problem may be less about “the spec isn’t good” than it is “the spec isn’t fun.” Arcane is listed as the 2nd highest potential dps in heroic raid, but it’s the 5th least represented. Clearly it can dish out the numbers, but it doesn’t seem that players enjoy the way it plays. I’d wager M+ is a similar way.
So going into season 4, yes, we could definitely use some love, but I’d rather they spend some time trying to give arcane a more reliable - and more realistic - rotation.
My experience up to +28/29s(untimed 29s sadly) has been that
Your AoE is supremely RNG; if you proc an orb on every pack you will do great damage; but most of the time you will do less damage and less priority than specs like Shadow Priests and Fire Mage.
It’s quite unfornate.
I agree with your recommendations to increase the proc change of Orb Barrage; it’s a little strange that they buffed us in ST but at the start of this patch (10.2.0) nerfed our AoE (nerfed Resonance).
I wonder if they thought arcane was going to be OP, and then simply forgot about this nerf after it turned out it was not.
I’m largely talking about this range, and played at a high level. Dungeons are so easy below 24 that any spec and any comp can time them with ease if people know what they’re doing.
I think it’s important for a spec like this to do well when played at a high level because it gives people who are learning the spec motivation to actually learn it.
I agree that it is way too proc based. For a spec that’s supposed to require a lot of skill, it seems like we have to rely on way too much luck. Clearcasting droughts can fell bad as well.
Another idea is what if Resonance was moved somewhere else in the tree, where it wasn’t always taken for raid (where arcane doesn’t have a problem with damage).
Perhaps it could be switched with Arcane Bombardment and then un-nerfed. This wouldn’t be a big change but it would help a little without buffing raid
The other possible suggestion I have is that arcane harmony is hard to get to in the talent tree because so much of an arcane mage’s damage is based on the other capstones – siphon storm, orb barrage, and harmonic echo.
Arcane is great in raids right now. not top damage, but very solid.
Too bad you put in 10x the work some other classes do to get the damage tho.
I haven’t done M+ basically since I quit half way through SL and not at all in DF so I can’t speak with authority on the topic like I could back when I did it seriously but the issues with M+ as a game mode are really what’s to blame here, not necessarily one spec or another though of course that’s also a factor.
The fact is that group composition trumps everything else and if you have a coordinated group with a tank that pulls not according to his own whims but with the DPS’s cooldowns in mind it’s going to be a drastically different experience even if you’re running the exact same key.
That said, it is more difficult for a tank to adjust to Arcane’s toolkit, than say a Fire Mage or a DH, and more difficult for an Arcane Mage to consistently bring the same numbers every pull because of RNG and the higher skill level.
Yeah doing dungeons is extra challenging. I would say I lose most of my damage because I’m mid-burst but then see I need to kick something, so I’m interrupting my burst to put focus on it and then kick, or dragon’s breath/blast wave/etc. I’ve accepted this part about pugging as Arcane.
The other really challenging bit is when tanks chain at a bad rhythm for CD’s, or even worse, when they pull a large pack of small mobs so there isn’t anything that will survive the touch of the magi duration. But as a challenging and at this point very obscure spec, tanks just won’t know what the cd’s even are or pretty much anything about arcane. I had a tank recently ask me if we had dragon’s breath! hah
This is good but it’s a band-aid on a bullet wound. The real issue for arcane’s aoe is that AE, the “main source” of aoe, doesn’t do jack squat. It has to be buffed significantly but not so significantly that it becomes a loss to barrage or orb-barrage. In addition, arcane suffers greatly in m+ because we’re still forced into all or nothing talents. We either go full ST and do almost no aoe, or take full aoe talents and lose significant st. Sure all specs have this or that choices, but it seems like arcane is the most either/or in-game right now. Using the elephant in the room example of ret, they have a st or aoe talent set, but somehow still seem to do extremely well on both.
I just leveled a mage so thought I’d read the mage forums for some insight and coming across this always makes me chuckle.
When I make a new alt I’ll check out their forums and literally every single class forum has this exact line. Every single class and spec according to their forum puts in 10x the work of other classes for the same damage.
Can only speak from personal experience. I only play ranged toons for the most part and arcane is a lot more work than demo lock, balance druid, spriest, and BM hunter.
I don’t know what spec you leveled as, but if it was arcane, don’t make the mistake of thinking that endgame is anything like leveling. Arcane is so overtuned and braindead to level that it creates an extremely false sense of reality for what it really entails. While “10x” is an obvious over exaggeration, you certainly DO put in quite a bit more effort for arcane than with just about any other dps spec and the results often do not pay off in the ways one would think.
Like most people here I have alts, some of them ranged, and I can categorically promise lock and shadow priest are much easier. Not even going to get into melee or hunters.
TLDR while people often exaggerate things, arcane is definitely noticeably more work than most for often less payout.
I’m not making a comment on if/how hard arcane or any mage spec is to play. Just the entertainment value of the forums.
I main this monk and the monk forums are full of this over the years. So many buttons, 10x the work for subpar performance, etc.
I have a DK and it’s the same there, especially for unholy.
I have a shaman that is primarily elemental but I have done a fair amount of enhance in DF and it’s the same thing there, especially elemental. Too many procs to track, too many buttons, icefury adds too much complication, “10x the work for subpar return”, etc.
I haven’t played them in DF but I have a Druid and rogue I used to play many years ago so every now and then I’m on those class forums but it’s pretty rare. Same thing, outlaw and feral especially. Specs to complicated, spinning plates, need to do 10x the work compared to other classes.
Now I have this mage.
So it’s just funny to read them all.
The arcane rotation isnt that difficult.
The difficult part is knowing when to use your cooldowns. Using it on a small pull, before an intermission or heavy movement phases, outside of an increase damage phase (first boss eb), or too early/late can cause your dps to plumit.
Once you know when to use the rotation, it becomes easier. The rotation itself is pretty brainless imo.
I PLAY just about every spec out there to some degree. I’m not great at many but I have experimented and I can say, as far as I’ve seen, Arcane is the hardest because of this and movement with said cooldowns
I would also say the randomness of procs is a bit more complicated than many specs out there like BM and ret pally for example. I would say ret is much simpler than arcane in general
I didn’t say it was difficult, just that you put in more work compared to other classes.
Orb Barrage is just…one of the most boring capstone talents I’ve ever seen. At this point I’d rather they replace it with something else - it really sucks having your main AoE talent be 1) Completely passive 2) RNG and 3) When it activates, it makes things LESS engaging, not more (as another poster mentioned, if it procs frequently it turns your AoE rotation into a single button).