Arcane Mage feedback thread

In Development Midnight: Revelations Public Test Realm
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I lost the text for the original 12.0.5 thread but not much has changed so this will mostly be a rehash of the points raised there. Before I go into detail, I want to commend you for the non-disruptive tuning of the spec this season. I truly believe this is an excellent approach because in its current state, Arcane is designed so badly and is so unfun that I agree with keeping it in its current unplayable state.

With that out of the way, the major issues (and boy there are many of them) that basically everyone in the community agrees on are the following:

Arcane Salvo and Arcane Barrage

Arcane was considered a very fun spec for the entirety of War Within, with the exception of the end of Season 1 thanks to the introduction of Aethervision. To quote your own words: We appreciate your feedback and patience as we continue to iterate on our 11.1 changes for Arcane Mage. The community has made it clear that Aethervision’s more prescriptive gameplay is not the direction they wish to see Arcane move in, so we’ve opted to retire it.

So what do you do going into Midnight? You introduce Arcane Salvo and Polished Focus, butcher Intuition (why is it not just the TWW version??? It was great!), and end up with the most prescriptive gameplay you possibly could. And not only is the gameplay incredibly prescriptive and boring, utilizing Arcane Salvo correctly sometimes just runs you out of mana (more on this below) and stops your rotation in its tracks. From what little I got to try in prepatch Sunfury soooort of gets around this with its higher CC generation and High Voltage procs, but even that is not enough to make the spec remotely as fun as TWW S3 Sunfury (which was very simplistic as well).

Clearcasting, Arcane Missiles, and Orb Mastery

AM being grossly under-tuned (as in between 5 and 30% behind depending on target count, with the larger gap being in aoe) means our only viable build removes one of four rotational buttons off our action bars, and spends every CC proc with Orb. In principle turning Orb into a strong damaging proc is an interesting idea, but the execution has been atrocious.

First, we get comparatively few procs because the CC proc rate and orb cooldown reduction are too limited for Spellslinger. Second, we have so few rotational buttons to begin with that we end up spending 60-70% of our time spamming a single filler spell. Third, it feels awful to have to spend five talent points (Arcane Missiles, Concentrated Power, Amplification, and 2x Apex points) that do nothing at all. Fourth, Orb has trouble hitting sometimes (e.g. if our target is floating), completely undermining the spec’s ability to function. I’m all for Spellslinger doing orb things and Sunfury doing missile things, but this implementation is harmful and unfun.

Apex Talent design

The rank 2 and 3 talent points do nothing for one of our builds, which feels horrible. The rank 4 point is completely opposite to how the spec should function, and how the first rank works: I am a burst spec and my damage comes in totm windows (rank 1), so give me damage within that totm window, not afterwards (rank 4).

Resource constraints and Arcane Pulse

The current design causes Arcane to run out of mana often, particularly when playing Arcane Pulse courtesy of its insane mana cost. If we run out of mana we can’t generate and spend salvo as effectively, which means we can’t get clearcasting procs and barrage casts as effectively, which means we end up having mana problems, and the rotation just comes to a screeching halt.

Hero tree tuning

Sunfury is unplayable. Its ST damage after the buffs is several % behind Spellslinger’s sheer mediocrity. It’s aoe damage is on par with tanks. This is caused by the catastrophic tuning pass you did back in December, which removed ~40% of Sunfury’s dps. Revert many of those nerfs, but in particular, the Glorious Incandescence nerf. If my salvo can stack up to 25, then I should proc a meteorite every 5 stacks consumed, not 6. It makes no sense that the first 24 salvo stacks I proc would be more valuable than the 25th.

Defensives

I discussed this more in the class tree thread, but the three specs having such a wild diversity in personals, and therefore in their ability to survive mechanics, is dysfunctional. Arcane currently does not have the toolkit to live remotely challenging content - whether that be mid-tier Mythic bosses like Paladins, or mid-tier keys. In addition, Spellslinger provides basically zero defensive benefit because of the insane nerf to Mirror Images that we took going into Midnight.

Unfun or non functional talents

Despite having one of the lowest number of talent nodes among spec trees in the game, the tree is littered with talents that just do not make any sense, or that either were made significantly worse coming from TWW, or that have been introduced without a purpose. In particular:

Orb barrage - tying the proc to salvo stacks instead of charges is depressing. The gambling part of orb barrage procs was one of the most fun parts of arcane, and now instead it’s just some passive proc I do not care about

Evocation - this talent is just worse than Mana adept at returning mana and does not provide any benefit otherwise. The loss of siphon storm completely removed its usefulness

Arcane Echo - this talent has been worthless and undertuned since TWW. Incidentally, if it were tuned well enough, it would make a decent replacement for the last rank of the Apex talent

Overflowing Insight - if this talent were tuned highly enough to be playable, it would also make our resource and rotational problems worse.

Charged Missiles - this talent just does not work with the whole buff stacking barrage damage thing that the tree is attempting to promote. Honestly there is no fixing this talent, just remove it

Mana Bomb - as my Arcane Surge comes off cooldown I will almost always be low on mana, therefore this talent does nothing. And yet it’s been in the tree since TWW

This spec has no vision to it. You need to decide whether Arcane is going to be some builder/spender thing around a stacking barrage buff, in which case allow it to neglect mana and copy SL Kyrian or TWW arcane, or if it’s going to be a burn/conserve spec where barrage is a tool to manage mana, in which case reintroduce some form of nuclear launch cooldowns a-la Legion, Dragonflight, or Venthyr Arcane. Maybe even go either/or with the Hero trees, but commit to something. Currently the spec tries to do both and succeeds at neither, and the problem starts from Arcane Salvo and its attached talents. Fix it.

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Give us back active damage reduction!

50% of Mythic boss kills end with the Arcane Mage dead before the boss!

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Frost had Cold Snap. Fire had Cauterize. Arcane had Greater Invisibility.

Then Fire and Frost also got GInvis. So Arcane got something else to compensate, right?

No! Arcane got nothing!

Now GInvis has no damage reduction for anyone, but Fire and Frost still keep their original defensives. What exactly is greater about Greater Invisibility anymore?

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Talents & Abilities

  • Arcane Missiles is our very first talent point and we never cast it.

  • Frost Mages can hide their Icicles. Sunfury Arcane can’t hide Spellfire Spheres which have no gameplay tie-in, they’re purely visual clutter.

  • The Sunfury Arcane Phoenix is orange even though a purple version already exists in the game files. It’s right there, Blizzard.

    What IS the intended identity for Arcane other than “more fragile than its alternatives without a compensating upside”?

:poop:!! BUFF ARCANE SINGLE TARGET DAMAGE !! :poop:

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I agree, arcane is in a really unfortunate state. If it was high damage people would enjoy it and call it a glass cannon but it’s not even that at the moment.

I think immediately it needs a defensive pass.

Whether they implement something from the other specs, or give it back a damage reduction on mirror images and/or greater invis. It needs at least one more thing to be playable at the high levels without being called out as a troll.

Additionally in the short term, it needs to cast Arcane Missiles.

Whether this is by bringing sunfury up and letting those hero talents cast it or buffing the spell up to par in spellslinger.

In single target/cleave we need to cast Arcane Missiles.

I’ve had several people, in my guild and raids not believe me when I don’t cast it or even need it on my bar this season.

It’s the most satisfying button in the class, but I’m not allowed to press it.

This has been the most succinct description of what arcane needs I’ve seen so far.

Yeah, this would be a bit of a rework but it’s not reinventing the wheel at least.

Look at the gameplay people have loved in arcane. Personally I don’t mind if I have a slower time where I’m conserving mana, as long as I’m thinking ahead on when I’m going to spend it and it feels nuclear when that happens. Hell, builder spender can work as well as long as it’s fun. AoE Missiles last xpac has to be one of the best spells I’ve seen in this game.

Most of all, do something :crossed_fingers:

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Blizzard, you have shown me that you are incapable of turning over a new leaf and delivering a complete and well-crafted product. The lack of development support and response to feedback shows a criminal underfunding of developers and community managers. The bugs show a complete disregard for QA and polish. The lawyer speak we get from the Game Director and the little community manager communication, complimented with the little action in support of those platitudes, shows clear disrespect to the playerbase and communities dedicated to this game.

You guys have, with Midnight, completely reversed the course you were on between Dragonflight and The War Within.

For Arcane specifically, the feedback is there in other threads, Reddit, Wowhead and discord. The playerbase has been echoing the sentiments of this thread’s feedback for the entirety of Midnight’s alpha, beta, and post-launch period. For the game more broadly, I suggest everyone just quit this game, the company is clearly too greedy to hire enough competent developers to actually support a finished product. This is evident in every area of the game today.

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Man, it’s so sad they threw everything we had from TWW away. TWW had the most fun versions of Arcane, bar the Aethervision fiasco. It’s really disheartening that they got rid of everything good and left us stuck with Salvo and this terrible version of Intuition.

The only good thing I have to say about Arcane Pulse is that it has a very cool animation. Other than that, I hate everything about it, but especially the absurdly high mana cost.

I also like that Spellslinger is more orb focused, but they way it’s been done is very problematic.

Hey, don’t forget they also nerfed Reactive Barrier by 50% on both fronts.

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You have succinctly put all my thoughts exactly Messier 1000%.

I think the sorest point of the new arcane, is arcane salvo creating these competing mechanics. We have mana, cooldowns, arcane charges, salvo and salvo just fights mana, ABarr and arcane charges the whole time? What is even the point of arcane charges if we are forced to play around salvo?

For them saying they wanted to simplify gameplay but then trying to manage salvo during your burst window as arcane sunfury is all over the place with the randomness of CC procs. The spec just really does not need this frustrating mechanic get rid of salvo please.

And tying main salvo generation to missiles? A random proc which will stop generation if the target dies? Wild.

Adding on as well that arcane sunfury’s hero talent “pyrocosm” is apparently bugged cause it NEVER triggers CC and the meteors that fall from this talents are pointless for damage.

Meteors being a main part of the arcane sunfury kit, but then miss moving targets, nullifying their procs. Having no impact on damage.

Visual gripe here but it seems lazy for hero specs being all about fantasy only to serve the fire experience when arcane and frost spellslinger get different visuals and we have the same clunky orange meteor blob. Why not change it to the defunct phoenix flames spell and make it arcane themed? Or just change the mechanic so we glow with power and our next missiles fires spellfire missiles?

I have never felt so out of love with the spec than i have this expansion and i have played arcane literally every expansion even when it was bad numerically but it has never felt so clunky and disheartening to play.

My one positive note is the spell effect of arcane pulse is pretty.

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As an arcane one trick player of the last several years, I have to say that our spec is in the worst place it has been in since I started playing.

In mythic raid, I feel like I’m made of paper. I have to constantly ask for external healing CDs just because I run out of buttons to press. All I have are barrier and ice cold. That’s it. Alter time is half of a defensive as it doesn’t give any DR. We desperately need a new button to press: Fire gets cauterize and frost gets cold snap, but arcane gets… nothing. If you check the death statistics, 50% of mythic fights with arcane mages in them end with the mage dead - we are the squishiest spec in the game.

Not only that, but we are also one of the worst specs DPS-wise. Not only are the fights in the current tier bad for arcane’s profile (I feel like none of the adds this tier live long enough for a full touch window), but our damage in general is just low. We could desperately use a buff to all our damage - especially arcane missiles. We never touch the button. Most people don’t even bind it anymore. This leaves half of the spec tree and one of our hero talent trees dead in the water. I’m not sure how much of a buff missiles needs, but it needs something.

I’m holding out hope that we didn’t get touched in the recent tuning because they have some sort of rework on the way, but it’s hard to justify paying a sub for the game when the spec you play is at the bottom of the DPS charts and falls over to unavoidable damage.

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I played arcane for over 10 years and TWW destroyed it for me really but I was never motivated to switch specs until this expansion and Frost is so much better.

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I would just like to add to these comments about Arcane’s survivability and damage output that I am not, nor have I ever been, a great player. Not a great player in general, and not a great player with Arcane specifically, though I’ve definitely gotten better with time. What drew me to Arcane back in the first place, and has made it my main character since the beginning of Shadowlands, is the fact that it seemed interesting. It wasn’t a class where you could afford to make a lot of mistakes. While that was quite punishing, it was also a spec where you could, for lack of a better word, feel the difference in what you were doing when you were doing it right. Almost like after you’ve learned to type and you can feel when you hit a wrong letter well before you’d see it. When you cast a spell, it was going to spend effects gained from previous spells, and it was going to generate effects for future spells. Everything you did matters, and the order you did it in mattered. That was an incredibly cool feeling.

I understand that with the goal of simplifying classes, there was going to be a certain reining in of the conditions that made failure so easy as Arcane, but that’s not what happened exactly. It wasn’t reined it, it wasn’t carefully pruned, it wasn’t adjusted. It was cored out and left hollow. Where before i mentioned feeling the difference when you were doing it right, the only feeling there is now is tedium. Boredom. It is so mind-numbing at times that if you are someone who is used to a dynamic gameplay, you easily find yourself after the 7th or 8th arcane blast in a row forgetting that you can stop just pushing that one button, and for a joyous 2 gcds instead cast 1 arcane barrage and, if you have a clearcasting proc and an orb charge, 1 arcane orb. Then it’s back to those arcane blasts though. I have never had such an easy time daydreaming during raid or mythic+, and it’s not because the fights are easier, mostly it’s because the most complicated part of my rotation now is being entertained enough to keep my focus on what I’m doing.

Basically, the spec is useless competitively and even more sadly, devoid of anything that would make it fun as a tradeoff.

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please revert every thought u had about arcane for midnight snd just give us tww arcane back please please please we didnt need to reinvent the wheel when we were already driving a luxury car what a mistake

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Yeah, Arcane was already pretty simple by then that it would fit the new gameplay goals nicely. Revert to TWW and just maybe do away with Harmony/Salvo and everything else is great. Maybe also return random orbs to Spellslinger, idk.

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Blizzard have once again demonstrated that they are either genuinely incompetent or actively malicious because I can think of no other reason that they would completely and utterly gut the entire spec again.

Personally I am starting to believe this is due to one or multiple specific devs being really upset we absolutely hated their Aethervision rubbish and have decided to actively punish us for not playing the game exactly the way they wanted us to.

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I really hope the current state of arcane isn’t some sick joke at the expense of the players because we didn’t like some things about the previous iteration of the spec.

But at this point I’d believe anything, it’s so bad.

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Midnight Arcane made me drop my main of 11 straight years. I want TWW Arcane back and I am not willing to compromise AT ALL on this.

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I think this is the core issue for me. They wanted to give us something to do outside cooldowns/ more options— players asked for it — but now we’re stuck asking for it to be removed. I admit, it sounded cool, and was fun week one..

Arcane was always meant to funnel; the entire tree is built around that. Of course they won’t buff single‑target, because doing so reduces Pulse’s value. And if we can’t have both, I’d rather drop Pulse entirely.

That was a different world, without execute, I don’t think it would be apples to apples.

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Exactly my thoughts. If they wanted Salvo to be such a gameplay defining mechanic, just move it to the bottom of the tree and make it actually replace Arcane charges. Or make Salvo a feature of one of the hero-specs for that matter.

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The things is that we didn’t need Arcane Pulse. We had a good AoE rotation before with the Barrage refunders that they were very adamant on removing for some reason. Arcane Pulse is just Arcane Blast but AoE and we would’ve been just fine without it. In fact, it being optimal doesn’t feel very good due to the absurd amount of mana it spends. The only good thing it has going for it is a cool animation.

Yes, but I do believe the spec would’ve been better without the execute niche. It had two niches: funnel and execute, but I liked funnel a lot better. Being in a situation without either, like ST and above 35% health, felt very bad. I’d much rather we shine in funnel and forget the execute niche, but they wanted to get rid of both at the same time and brick the rest of the rotation and tuning.

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The Spellslinger Polished Focus talent says the following: “Casting Arcane Barrage while at 20 or more Arcane Salvo stacks refunds 5 Arcane Salvo stacks.”

The problem is that Spellslinger can only accumulate up to 20 Arcane Salvo stacks. This talent is so poorly designed that even its tooltip makes no sense.

So apparently the mysterious “or more” is meant for the mage who discovered some secret arcane dimension where numbers work differently.

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It’s probably the same arcane mage that can benefit from Frost Conditioning.

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Perhaps it’s like with pet battles where they stopped adding new content so they could incentivize people to not interact with pet battles as much and then use the lack of interaction as an excuse to abandon it even more overtly. Make Arcane suck so people play more Frost and less Arcane, and then later they’ll hit us with “due to the lack of popularity of Arcane as a DPS spec, we’ve decided that rather than try to breathe life into it, we are going to rebuild it from the ground up as a healer (or support) spec due to how popular that was in SoD!” The survey people mentioned getting about potential new specializations makes a lot more sense now…