Arcane mage buff ideas

Classes Mage
1

Add whatever you think might be better to improve my thoughts/suggestions. I’ve got a few I’ll throw out for the balance team. I know Blizz wants to wait for people to have more gear, but if these buffs cause Arcane to be OP and #1 ranged dps on the game… well you could just as easily undo these buffs or scale them down. Otherwise the arcane mage playerbase (and other low tier specs) will just be lost to re-rolls… or like me and on the verge of quitting the game.

  1. Change Clearcasting from 1% per 250 mana spent to 1.5% per 250 mana spent. One of our best damage dealers is RNG and at best has a 30% chance to proc if we’re being dumb with mana… which we cannot afford to be (would be 36%, but that info is in my p.s. below). If we could have more reliable/less RNG damage we’d be able to compete with other specs. 1.5% chance per 250 mana would be a nice little buff to our damage and at best if we’re being dumb with mana (which we can’t do consistently) would be a 41.25 to 45% (56% if my below “bug” is fixed and can only really be done 1 maybe 2x pre-pull cause otherwise we’re literally doin nothing) chance to proc . Nothing too crazy IMO because it’s still less than a 50% RNG chance. It would make haste better for our spec in pve and make our conserve phase have more sustained damage as well.

  2. Buff the base damage of Arcane Blast. Currently at around 200~ ilvl without bursting or any buffs besides Arcane Intellect my non-crit 4 Arcane Charged Arcane Blasts hit for about 3,000 damage. That’s not horrible, but considering I have to spend 1.4~ seconds and about 10% of my mana to cast it, that’s not too great. A nice little % damage boost to the base damage would be good IMO. 10-20%. Do not touch the mana cost of it though. That’d be a straight up nerf to clearcasting procs. Especially without the % chance being buffed.

  3. Rework some talents. I’ll give a few examples of bad/good ones. I don’t want to go over all of them. I’m not trying to make arcane busted. Take these as suggestions and with a grain of salt. Not everything needs to be amazing.

Tier 1:
-Rule of 3: This stinks. No one uses this and it’s lame as heck compared to Amplification.
-Arcane Familiar: This is alright and gives you more “burst” on a long boss fight, but nothing overwhelmingly good. Maybe a few more casts of Arcane Blast.
-Amplification is great and should stay as is. It adds 30% more damage to an ability that already feels good to press.

Tier 2: I actually don’t hate this talent tier right now. Slipstream is about the only never picked talent that could use some work. Not sure what could be done here other than replacing it.

Tier 3: Not a bad tier. The only “buff” that could happen would be focus magic being undispellable. Maybe increase the crit chance to 10%?

Tier 4: Also not horrible. Has a cleave and single target option. We don’t really use Nether tempest and that could see some love.

Tier 5:
-Arcane Orb is good the way it is. I wouldn’t change it.
-Supernova is absolute garbo. Does less damage than Orb (single and multi target), doesn’t give charges, and has a 5 second longer CD.
-Reverberate needs to be a 100% chance to give more charges. The RNG makes it not viable at all. It would only be useful if it was 100% because then you could actually use it as intended and save globals and build charges quickly on cleave fights. The RNG of the current 50% chance makes it so you’d be wasting charges and make getting charges awkward. Like 1charge, 2 charge, 2 charge. Okay now we’ve got 4 and a 5th one that’s wasted. Or 2 charges, 1 charge, 2 charge. You get what I’m saying? It’s just not reliable and not worth taking over orb.

Tier 6: Another not-so-bad tier. I don’t really have much feedback here. The only “Weak” one as of now is Time Anomaly, but I don’t know what to do for this to make it an option. I’d say leave it be or change it to something else completely. If you mess around with this one it could get broken really fast.

And it’d be cool if radiant spark was moved to something other than arcane spell school - strictly talking pvp right now. I mean it can already be dispelled, but its also on our major spell school that holds all of our spells besides 3(?) that aren’t talents. Also if Radiant spark worked with Touch of the Magi. In december TotM was changed to not work with % dmg increases. IDK why, but even if it did benefit from Radiant Spark I don’t know that it’d be busted. Maybe it would be? Not sure.

That’s about all I have for you :slight_smile: Please feel free to comment with any of your own ideas/suggestions/feedback.

P.S. Fix Conjure Mana Gem to proc Cearcasting. Based on the tooltip for Clearcasting it only requires you to spend mana for it to proc. It doesn’t say we have to be doing damage or in combat. Conjure mana gem is our highest mana cost ability (9000) and it doesn’t give clearcasting procs like it should according to the Clearcasting tooltip.

EDIT: These are just some rough ideas to increase our average DPS and remove some RNG from the Arcane spec. Hopefully bringing us up in the ranks and not laughed at by others when we’re playing Arcane. Yes I know some people can make it look good, but even the best Arcane mage’s aren’t coming close to the best Fire mage (the same with those poor frost mages). It doesn’t feel good to have 1/2 of our damage be random rng procs. It’s cool if the random rng is a nice spike in damage here and there, but shouldn’t be the other half of our top damage. Because if that RNG proc doesn’t show up then our DPS is just terrible. Kind of hard to fix with arcane having so few spells to work with for damage. Arcane was probably the most fun/best for me back in cata/mop when you had stuff from each spec to work with. I don’t know if I’d want a complete rework, but our damage is limited by going oom or rng from procs that aren’t a very high proc chance unless we’re ooming ourselves. Either way… we need some love.

9 Likes
2

TotM gives 3 stacks of Clearcasting

5 Likes
3

No thanks, keep arcane in the gutter <3

4

Yeah, I think Blizzard really only semi-looks at Arcane between xpacs. Usually they add a few nice changes and then fix things that aren’t broke and we end up with a pretty neutral/below average spec overall. All the good stuff and ideas go to Fire and Frost. Arcane is for the lukewarm leftover ideas.

5

just plain dmg buff like they did with frost mage… simple… we need like 12 to 15% ish to be viable

6

I’d like Arcane missiles to do more damage. It’s such a fun spell to use.

1 Like
7

that might be a little busted.

8

What about allowing arcane mages to cast while moving during arcane power? Too much?

3 Likes
9

Make Arcane Power allow Arcane Barrage to be cast without consuming any Arcane Charges for its duration.

Add splash damage to Arcane Familiar’s Arcane Assault ability and increase the maximum amount of mana Arcane Familiar provides.
Alternatively alter Arcane Familiar to be a talent that gives your damaging spells a chance to summon an Arcane Familiar to your side that increases your maximum mana, attacks your foes and can be launched at and detonated on your current enemy target. Limit of up to 3 Arcane Familiars can be active at one time.

Passive talent - Arcane Barrage causes your next Arcane Missiles to also fire at the same targets your last Arcane Barrage hit.

Make Slipstream a baseline passive for Arcane.

2 Likes
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Row 1 “Missiles”:

Rule of Threes - Arcane Missiles is shortened to fire 3 missiles, but each missile’s damage is increased by 50%.
Arcane Familiar - Summon a familiar which has a 25% chance per Arcane Charge to duplicate your Arcane Missile and Arcane Barrage strikes.

Row 2 “Movement”:

Slipstream - Removed, made an innate bonus during clearcasting.
Displacement - Replaces Slipstream. Teleports you back to where you last Blinked from, or your Alter Time’s cast location if you have not Blinked in the last 10 seconds. 30 Second cooldown.

Row 4 “Touch of the Magi”:

Supernova replaces Resonance.
Supernova - TotM will create a Supernova on the target just before expiring, (this additional damage is applied to TotM.) Supernova otherwise unchanged.

Nether Tempest - Unchanged, but is additive with Touch of the Magi.
Tempest of the Magi - TotM duration increased to 12 seconds, applies an additional stack of Nether Tempest to the target, and refreshes any Nether Tempests on the target to 4 Charges.

Row 6 “AoE”:

Resonance - Unchanged, but is in Supernova’s place.

Row 7 “Ordering the disordered order spec”:

Enlightened - Every 15000 mana you spend, you have a 100% chance to gain Clearcasting, making your next Arcane Missiles or Arcane Explosion free and channel 20% faster. (Up from 250 mana per 1% chance.)

This is just some random stuff i just made up, been playing Arcane since cata.
Making the spec more reliable would be nice, since the entire idea behind Arcane-school magic is you’re not going to want to make critical mana buns that explode. The idea is to tailor your rotation reactively around mechanics; not reactively around your own procs.

3 Likes
11

I don’t think it would be all that busted. The spec is feast or famine and relies on strong TotM phases to do competitive DPS. Right now, arcane fishes for procs in their opener for this specific reason, and that’s undeniably a worse playstyle than simply having it all the time and tuning around having it.

It’s not just about strength. It’s about feeling like something people want to play.

1 Like
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It would make arcane insane and probably broken in pvp. That could be a problem. Idk what it’d do to them in pve without it being tested, but clearcasting missiles are pretty good damage… and 3 garaunteed procs every 45 seconds might be too nutty, but maybe not. I do think it’d be cool of them to reduce the rng from clearcasting. It’s one of our 2 main damage source and is really flawed in its very low rng chance to proc. That’s why I proposed the clearcasting proc buff from 1% to 1.5% per 250 mana. It would still be RNG, but a 50% buff. Seems like a lot, but at our most mana costly phases it would still be less than a 50% proc chance.

13

Couple ideas here. Get rid of the timer on Clearcasting and let Arcane bank charges.

Also redesign Nether Tempest to be a toggle ability similar to legion outlaw’s AoE toggle. Have it double missiles mana cost but have 10-15% chance per arcane charge to fire a missile at another nearby enemy for 60% of the damage. Can proc off itself with diminishing returns.

1 Like
14

interesting concepts. thank you for the feedback!

16

Make Slipstream baseline. Replace it with Displacement. Change Master of Time to grant you Prismatic Barrier when you return to your original location.

Increase the duration of Clearcasting to 30 seconds.

7 Likes
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I feel like a lot of people are pitching the slipstream idea and I don’t hate it, it would definitely feel good to have more mobility. We have to hard cast and channel a lot in a game that uses a lot of move into/out of mechanics. If it did happen I’d like to the displacement come back for sure. Even non mages liked arcane mages having that. It was a cool little thing we could do. Not sure about the barrier. I’m kind of sick of the barrier meta after the barrier legendary. It might be too strong in pvp.

18

make arcane work like it did in legion, it was a better play style with more movement while you dos’d… easy fix. And… as far as utility goes, Warlocks have a mass slow right now, and arcane mages have to apply a slow but can only do it to 1 mob. How is this fair when arcane mages use to have a mass slow?

2 Likes
20

you can apply it to multiple targets, but it takes multiple gcds. there is a pvp talent that lets it spread to people near by the main dude. so I guess that’s cool? haha

21

Something like Open Palm Strikes did for Monks in BfA. Your arcane missile have a chance to proc charges. Or, they could also make Supernova proc 1-3 random charges and get rid of that untargetable orb.

22

Boosting clearcast generation feels like a solid change. In the interest of total neutrality however, I’m troubled by clearcasting as it exists. There are times you get really lucky and it borders on overpowered, depending how well your burst is (RoP+AP+ToTM+enchants) and other time’s its not. Tweaking this value could potentially give players the impression that its too powerful. I would relegate clearcasting changes into a space where we need abilities that can pull up charges on demand OR scenarios in which clearcast charges are predictably generated. Similar to Ro3 you could have something where every time you get 4 arc charges you get 1 clearcast charge, and/or hitting 4 targets with barrage generates 2 stacks, etc. Fire has ways to manipulate how often their effects proc, frost can nova (up to 2 times with talent), arc has zero abilities to modify this.

Arcane blast damage has been significantly reduced in SL. There was a time when casting nonstop AB’s with 4 charges was catastrophic damage, and it cost catastrophic mana so this was an absolutely fair exchange of mana - dmg output, but who knows why they nerfed it so criminally. Topping off the nerf with the mastery nerf made AB into nothing but a filler spell to use when you have nothing else better - and literally everything else is better. If a system were implemented where spending charges was more worthwhile rather than reckless, AB would solidify its position as an important charge generation ability, but as it sits now, barrage is too wasteful to ever use if you’re smart and thus, AB in its low damage and low utility state keep it in a very low place. Higher damage might fix it, but perhaps utility would fix it even more.

Talent thoughts I agree with. Ro3 needs a rework, familiar needs some extra mechanical effect besides 10% mana. A single AB at 4 charges already costs 11% of your mana, so at most this is giving you 1 extra ab, and a weak one at that.

Across other talents, there’s a disparity between what each tier USED to represent and then having spells that don’t seem to fit its purpose at all. i.e. tier 1 is about mana management, but amplification doesn’t seem to fit the theme. Tier 6 is about charge generation, but supernova also doesn’t fit the theme. Etcetera.

There are a lot more ideas I would suggest about having internal synergy with spells and abilities that the other specs have (among a plethora of things), but these are all a good start for things to start with, for arcane.