What is TotM?
Touch of the Magi.
Arcane Orb could give CC procs…
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This response is unrelated to the post
But could you imagine for a moment what it would be like, if we as arcane mages could casually discuss whether or not killing people in 8 seconds was “too slow” and it was just more efficient to kill people in 5 seconds - just like xaryu talks about in this video
https://youtu.be/GLTzhFDfHLg?t=457
Is there like, a part of you that recognizes that this casual conversation is absolutely and completely 100% absurd and that there’s something really wrong with the fact that it even exists. Or is it just me cause I’m a pleb?
I’ll be honest outside of maybe doing like a 2-3% dps increase to Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast and a slight increase to the percentage change of getting a clear cast I think most the the kit for arcane is in a great spot.
As Night Fae I never have any mana issues. Even when I have no mana I can still scrape some dps through until I get my evocation back or my night fae ability to force it back. With Slipstream and Night Fae soulshape I have almost no mobility problems. If I know I have to move soon ill just fish for a quick clear casting proc then walk around. Plus even with no clear cast proc I can throw out a quick arcane orb and Presence of Mind 3 times in a row and build up some clear casts. Honestly compared to BFA arcane is mobile AF.
I suppose it would be neat to have a more single target focused build. I feel like even our single target talents are just AoE talents with slight ST. Replacing Nether Tempest and Supernova with more ST talents would really make the class pop. Would give us the option on pure ST, Cleave, and AoE.
We do need a slight dmg increase to compete with fire since they just demolish things but my single biggest issue with arcane is the lack of CC.
If they took away fireblast and gave us Dragons Breathe i’d be 100% happy with the class even with no dmg increases.
I could CC people in pvp and CC adds in mythic+ to save the team. Overall damage I deal in a mythic+ is usually on par with any other class. But the lack of crowd control completely cuts our teams survivability.
TL;DR GIVE ARCANE AND FROST DRAGONS BREATHE ITS ALL WE REALLY NEED.
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General
All damage increased by 5%.
- Notes: Arcane’s damage ceiling should be higher given the complexity of the rotation.
Passives
Clearcasting - For each 250 mana you spend, you have a 1% chance to gain Clearcasting, making your next Arcane Missiles (Delete: or Arcane Explosion) free and channel 20% faster. Arcane Missiles fires 1 additional missile. Clearcasting lasts for 30 seconds, up from 15.
- Notes: Removed Arcane Explosion from Clearcasting to provide flexibility as to when to use Clearcasting procs during AoE situations. Extended the duration to 30 seconds to accommodate situations where you accumulate Clearcasting to align with damage cooldown usage, only to be forced to use early due to fight mechanics.
Spells
Arcane Blast - Blasts the target with energy, dealing 824 Arcane damage. Each Arcane Charge increases damage by 75% and mana cost by 100%, and reduces cast time by 8%. Generates 1 Arcane Charge. Each time your Arcane Blast fails to generate Clearcasting, it gains a stacking 10% chance to generate Clearcasting. Effect ends when you gain Clearcasting from Arcane Blast.
- Notes: Similar to Fireball’s bad luck protection for critical strikes, this will help alleviate inconsistency issues in generating Clearcasting (e.g. burning through all your mana without a single proc).
Talents
Level 15
Rule of Threes - When you gain your third Arcane Charge, the cost of your next Arcane Blast (Delete: or Arcane Missiles) is reduced by 100% and deals 75% increased damage.
- Notes: A damage boost for situations where Arcane Missiles isn’t as useful (e.g. Torghast).
Arcane Familiar - Summon a Familiar that (Delete: attacks your enemies) duplicates your spells, dealing 2% of your damage dealt, and increases your maximum mana by 10% for 1 hour.
- Notes: A damage boost to make it more relevant as a general-use talent.
Level 25
Master of Time - Reduces the cooldown of Alter Time by 30 sec. (Delete: Alter Time resets the cooldown of Blink.) Gain Prismatic Barrier when you return to your original location.
- Notes: Similar to Fire’s Blazing Soul talent for a more defensive alternative.
Slipstream - Removed, and is now a baseline passive. Replaced with Displacement.
- Notes: This will improve Arcane’s mobility to make up for the lack of instant cast spells that form part of Fire and Frost rotations.
Displacement - Teleports you back to where you last Blinked from and resets the cooldown on Blink. Only usable within 10 sec of Blinking. 30 second cooldown.
- Notes: This will give a meaningful choice between having 2 charges of Shimmer or being able to return to your original location and have the cooldown of Blink reset.
Level 35
Nether Tempest - Places a Nether Tempest on the target which deals X Arcane Damage over 12 seconds to the target and nearby enemies within 30 (up from 10) yards. Limit 1 target. (Delete: Deals reduced damage to secondary target.) Damage is increased by 75% per Arcane Charge.
- Notes: Increased the range and removed the damage restriction on secondary targets to make it useful as a general purpose AoE talent on spread enemies to differentiate it from the other talents in its row.
Level 45
Reverberate - If Arcane Explosion hits at least 3 targets, it has a 50% chance to generate an extra Arcane Charge and deal 50% increased damage.
- Notes: A damage increase for AoE situations.
Arcane Orb - Removed, and is now a baseline spell. Replaced with Obliteration.
- Notes: This talent is too ubiquitous to not be made baseline.
Obliteration - Arcane Orb no longer passes through enemies. Instead, it explodes on the first enemy it hits dealing 100% increased damage to that enemy. Generates Clearcasting.
- Notes: Turned Arcane Orb into a single-target spell that deals increased damage and guarantees a Clearcasting proc to further mitigate bad luck in that regard.
PvP Talents
Arcane Empowerment - (Delete: Clearcasting can now stack 2 additional times, as 3 stacks is already baseline). You have an additional .5% chance to gain Clearcasting for each 250 mana you spend. Clearcasting increases the damage of Arcane Missiles by 5% per stack. (Delete: Clearcasting no longer reduces the mana cost of Arcane Explosion, as this has already been removed from a previous suggested change.)
- Notes: Improved the chances of gaining Clearcasting in PvP situations in order to be able to accumulate Clearcasting more quickly in the high-paced nature of the current PvP meta.
Arcane Veil - Veils your corporeal body, preventing you from being silenced or interrupted for 8 seconds. 1 min cooldown.
- Notes: Arcane desperately needs silence and interrupt protection, as Arcane is effectively its only spell school for both damage and crowd control.
8 Likes
I love these, especially veil. I’m torn a bit on orb only cause in SOME circumstances, the dmg it can do to multiple targets is quite extensive. Obliteration seems to change it from an aoe to st spell, additionally only getting (i would assume) just 1 arc charge from it? Now if it were a shift from linear movement to smaller aoe, such as the explosion being (for example) 2yards and dealing equivalent dmg to all targets in that tiny space, I can see some tactical applications immediately. AB changes I have to think more about. I play bg’s exclusively and there are some moments where the enemy DH, hunter or monk will auto-target me if I’m anywhere near a team fight, relegating me to mostly instant casts, where AB is exclusively PoM or not at all. In these scenarios, clearcast is a godsend and I would assume it would proc less in that scenario. Perhaps there can be a change to your pvp talent ideas that would mitigate that by generating procs of clearcast defensively? Everything else, great ideas!
You would gain 1 Arcane Charge from use, and 1 Arcane Charge from contact, for a total of 2 Arcane Charges. It would do 100% increased damage, so the same damage as if it hit 2 targets. I thought about it doing AoE damage in a small area, but I think it’s better to differentiate it from Reverberate and Supernova.
The adjustment to Arcane Empowerment is a 50% increase in chance to gain Clearcasting, which is fairly strong. I’m not sure a way of gaining Clearcast defensively would work, as you should be rewarded for better positioning and use of crowd control by having more opportunity to attack.
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I was thinking about this a lot last night. The way I see it there are two really big problems with this spec that have gotten pretty frustrating for me personally in raids.
First off, mobility. Yes, Slipstream is an option. I recognize that. But it’s an option that doesn’t give you a CHOICE to use it. You’re waiting on a Clearcasting proc which may or may not align with times where you need to move, or you’re using it on Evocation which is way too long of a cooldown to tie to mobility. Similar can be said for Shimmer. It absolutely gives mobility, but two charges on a 25 sec cooldown for imprecise movement that breaks on terrain is brutal. Couple these things with the fact that our options to do controlled mobile damage are problematic in different ways (Arcane Barrage has a cooldown and absolutely tanks our damage for Blast after we stop moving, Arcane Explosion has an extremely short range, Presence of Mind has a long cooldown and you can’t preserve the charges for when you have to move again a few seconds later, and Fire Blast has no spec interaction, low damage, and a long cooldown), and we’re put in a very rough position on high mobility fights. A controlled option to be able to do consistent but lower damage while moving would go a long way to reducing the woes of the spec. What that option should look like, I’m personally struggling to define. Perhaps a toggle-while-castable ability that allows you to move while casting Arcane Blast, but all damage dealt by it while active is reduced by something like 30% (or whatever the tuning needs to look like to be sane). This would give us the choice to be able to keep casting while moving for segments where you have to move repeatedly or for a long distance, or to not do it at all for quick moves and still reduce our damage because we’re just plain not casting.
The second one is Haste, which loosely ties into the mobility aspect above, but doesn’t precisely. It’s totally fine to not scale well with a given stat, different classes should have different gearing requirements. Arcane doesn’t scale well with Haste. Again, fine. But. I see a couple distinct problems with it as is. First off, because of the high mobility requirements in Castle Nathria, there are situations where frequent movement occur (Sire Denathrius sticks out as a particularly bad case of this) and not having Haste is extremely impactful to our ability to do damage. Now, there’s a fair argument that Haste is available (in fact, for three equipment slots, if you’re fully geared from Castle Nathria and nowhere else, Haste is a mandatory stat). However, this feeds into the other problem: Arcane Mages are actively penalized for using Haste. Unlike every other damage spec in the game, Mana management is critical for Arcane. This shouldn’t be news for anyone familiar with the spec, but as a refresher for those who aren’t as familiar, Arcane functions on a flow of Burn and Conserve phases. During the Burn phase, you expend Mana as quickly as possible to pump out high damage, then cast Evocation to refill your Mana, before switching to Conserve at ~60-70% Mana. During the Conserve phase, you build Arcane Charges, then use Arcane Barrage to expend them and regenerate a small amount of Mana (6%, since the recent hotfix). Now, the problem with Haste gear is that while it does increase damage per second, it only meaningfully does so during the Burn phase, where it increases your burst potential by putting out more individual spells during the Burn. However, this comes at a significant cost, because this makes your Burn phase shorter due to Mana being expended at a higher rate, which puts you in the Conserve phase for a longer period of time. Another side-effect of this is that once we’re in the Conserve phase, faster casting via Haste negatively impacts our raw ability to regenerate Mana because we simply outstrip our regeneration by casting too fast. Also, critically, by gearing for Haste we’re potentially impacting ourselves even more negatively by some of the secondary stat budget which would be used on Mastery for that Haste, which reduces the damage gained by Arcane Charges AND (much more importantly) reduces our Mana regeneration further, which makes the Conserve phase far more tricky. With that explanation, what can be done about it? First off, tie Evocation’s cooldown to Haste. This would, in my opinion, help significantly because it’d increase our Burn phase frequency correspondingly with an increase in Haste, and it would decouple the Evocation cycle from the Arcane Power cycle even further. Second, consider giving Arcane increased Mana regeneration based on Haste, the same way that Energy and Focus do the same. Arcane’s resource spending patterns better align with those of Energy and Focus users than other Mana-using DPS classes, and it’s likely time to take that into account. Flavor it as a passive where Arcane has better control over the flow of time (we already have some of those, and you can reference it back to Elisande trivially). Importantly, make this stack with the regeneration from Mastery, not replace it, because a replacement would invert the problem by making per-Blast damage significantly lower due to players needing to seek out stat budget for Haste aggressively for greater damage consistency.
If you’ve made it this far and read my ideas, agree with them or not, thank you. I know this is a pretty big wall of text. That said, I think it would go a long way to level the playing field and make the spec less frustrating in a high-mobility tier that has felt absolutely brutal due to the intensely turret-focused nature of the playstyle it provides.
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I don’t mean to sound rude but there is so much wrong with this, idk where to begin. Everyone acknowledges that Slipstream is great, the problem is it should be baseline, not a talent. I don’t understand why you bring up soulshape at all… no one is talking about mobility in terms of being able to cover distance quickly, the problem is being able to move while dealing damage. Banking CC procs would be great if (1) the duration of the buff was long enough to allow for it and (2) if it actually had a reliable proc rate not the abysmal one we have now. Arcane Orb and PoM have very specific roles in the rotation and neither is meant to be used as you describe and you’re losing a lot of their value if you do. In terms of mobility Arcane is almost exactly where it was in BfA which is to say nowhere. Try playing a Fire mage or either of the two Hunter specs (yes two, not a typo, Survival is a meme at this point) it will be very instructive as to what real mobility looks like.
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The entire “Arcane” concept is broken. Justification for this trainwreck was that Arcs should not be able to spam ever damage increasing spell casts without any penalty, so some Dev decided, “gee, let’s run them out of mana and make them wait for a long time, trying to dps, while running from various mechanics, with these long spell cast times. That will keep them from becoming OP monsters”.
That worked so well that Arcane Mages have remained mediocre, at best, while the other two classes enjoy infinite mana.
THis problem is amplified by the other really bad decision made by the Devs: The reaalllllyyyyy looooooong Arcane cast times and the need to stand still while casting. No melee has this problem and, since more and more of the mechanics make you stop your glacially long spell cast to run from, or into, something, no wonder our damage is mediocre. This problem affects the other specs, true, but they get infinite mana to balance it.
In fact the whole “ranged class” concept is flawed, especially in questing and leveling: there are no ranged fights in so many cases since the mobs jump, fly, teleport, or charge into your face while you are reduced to the Parthian strategy of running, kiting, running, kiting, while a melee just bashes away, thus reducing your overall damage by a bunch.
Quite frankly I do not think the Developers are up to the task of fixing Arcane. It’s not like they have to run for reelection if they fail to improve a spec, so what is the penalty for ignoring it? Nada.
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I can appreciate the frustration you’re having here (I mean, I clearly am too or I wouldn’t have posted that wall of text above), but being aggressive toward them and questioning their motives isn’t going to encourage them or convince them. Do you have some constructive feedback on how they could improve the situation? That’s the best thing we could all be doing here and the whole point of the thread. The fact is, there ARE ways to improve the situation, it’s just a delicate balancing act between trying to make things interesting and fun, and trying to not make all the different classes and specs homogeneous, all the while trying to have some semblance of numeric balance, and all three of those things are independently hard to do.
The problem with constructive criticism is that they only ever listen to it in between expansions, specifically during the Beta. Arcane has been fundamentally flawed for over a decade and the only thing that has made it work since the WotLK days was Aluneth and the Legion legendaries. It took that kind of tremendous power to make the spec viable and we haven’t seen anything close to that since, not in BfA and certainly not now in SL (soulbinds/conduits are a joke compared to artifacts/relics and the SL legendaries are pale imitations of their Legion counterparts).
In the meantime, over the years, we have leveled all the constructive criticism we could muster at them and then some but the vast majority of it seems to consistently fall on deaf ears. It boils down to the fact that Arcane needs a comprehensive, deep-dive rework that separates it from the antiquated mana system and turns it into a modern builder/spender specs. In other words much like what was done for Shadow this expansion.
Unfortunately, they have shown time and time again that they are simply not willing to put in that amount of effort into fixing Arcane and until they do I am afraid it will continue to languish as a mediocre spec, albeit one with incredible untapped potential.
So yeah… the frustration is understandable and frankly a long time coming.
TLDR: No half measures are going to fix what’s broken with Arcane.
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Yes, this! For the love of all that is holy, void, and fel do something about that! It’s maddening in the extreme.
Haste isn’t a bad stat. At higher-end gear levels, it is on par with crit and vers. Additionally, sims tend to undervalue haste. Raid mechanic delays will allow for mana regen to make up for the additional casts, and being able to get casts off quicker can minimize having to cancel casts do to movement.
Further clarification to this. I thought of one potential way to deal with the movement problem, which is to redesign Slipstream a bit. I don’t know if the tech is there to support it, but my premise for it would be to change the talent so that any spell can be cast while moving, unconditionally, but you lose up to 50% of the damage of the spell, based on the percentage of the cast time spent actually moving. Make this scale such that moving for 100% of the cast is 50% damage reduction, 50% movement is 25% damage reduction, and so forth. This would give us a controlled option for movement which doesn’t rely on a long cooldown or a proc, as a 3rd option in a movement-oriented talent tier. When you’re turreting, you’re still doing full damage. Repositioning wouldn’t be remotely near as devastating to damage output.
A key point I don’t think I called out is that in addition to our resource spending habits, we’re also unique among DPS casters in that we are the only spec that has neither baseline controlled damage over time without a cooldown (Touch of the Magi and Nether Tempest don’t qualify here), nor a ranged spammable ability that can be used on the move. Arcane Explosion is the closest that we have, but the 10 yard range is already problematic for us due to the significant damage risks in standing in melee range as a cloth class, and fight mechanics largely have us standing outside its effective range.
Well considering I do usually 90 percentile+ parses in most fights and I do really well in Mythic+ I beg to differ on everything you said. I still manage to deal damage while moving and I realize there is some dmg lost and sometimes moving results in CDs not being utilized properly I can still make up for it most the time.
Arcane is flawed but its not as bad as people make it out to be. Its just a spec you have to plan your positioning and know the timings of boss fights well for. Im fine with how slipstream is.
Also you haven’t even cleared heroic on your arcane mage. So sorry if I don’t take your word for whats wrong with how I’m playing. Like im not amazing. But I’ve got a lot of time put into Arcane. I know at least enough to say the mobility isn’t the biggest issue with the spec. Knowing the fights well enough and planning your CDs around the fights is a lot more important then you having to stop dpsing for a second while you move to do mechanics. Getting your CD rotation finished up is the significant game changer for your overall dps then the in-between arcane blasts and missiles.
Yeah because I haven’t done anything on my Arcane mage since clearing normal CN the day it came out because the spec is useless in there on any higher difficulty than that. You can certainly make it work if you go through a lot of pains to do it but you will still do worse than Fire by a substantial margin even if you play perfectly. Good for you for sticking it out but I am not going to go through that struggle and waste my guild’s time because Blizzard can’t make heads or tails of Arcane. And this is coming from someone who has mained an Arcane mage since Vanilla. Well in SL they finally made me hang up my hat.
P.S. Are you a necromancer? Love that “21 days later” line above your post. LOL
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Arcane doesn’t have crippling mobility issues. While it has a lot of useless talents, it is just under-tuned by around 5%. Arcane just needs a higher damage ceiling, and some buffs to Clearcasting generation and duration.
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I don’t get to the forums often.
Well I happen to like how Arcane plays. For me this feels way better then BFA and a bit better then Legion (even though some legion things were better). A few changes would be fine as I put in my first post in the thread but for the most part I’m doing the same if not more dps as the Fire Mages I run into that are at the same gear level or more then I am. So for me the addition of a CC like Dragons Breathe would make me pretty much happy with the spec.
The nice thing about Arcane now is having something up for almost every occasion. Since I pug most my +15s for the week the ability to pop something during any situation really helps to make up for bad pulls and to push certain mobs through.