Since Norri’s frost thread has some good traction and feedback, I figured I would make a thread for Arcane as well.
The Midnight rework has some good ideas -particularly High Voltage and cleaving missiles, which are unfortunately horribly undertuned right now- but it isn’t terribly well received because it still has plenty of pain points. The current standout issues are:
Arcane orb and orb mastery
The idea of doubling down on Spellslinger’s “orb build” niche is actually pretty neat, as is trying to turn Arcane Orb into more than a mediocre band-aid for finding oneself at low charges. That said, the current implementation has had a disastrous impact on the rotation by causing us to remove Arcane Missiles from our bars entirely.
Without Arcane Missiles, the rotation is just boring because we don’t get enough orb charges or clearcasting procs with the Spellslinger orb build. We spend about 70% of the time casting our filler spell which is just not fun. This kind of rotation also runs into massive mana issues that play against the rest of the spec’s mechanics (more on this later). Beyond that, it feels extremely bad to be forced into talenting multiple Arcane Missile talents (including two of the Apex talents) only for that button to be completely forgotten.
A couple possible ways of bringing back Arcane Missiles would be either to tie the extra orbs from Orb Mastery to consuming CC with AM, rather than have Orb be the consumer, or to greatly increase the cooldown reduction and CC economy through the Spellslinger talents. Either way, we need something, anything, to make the rotation more engaging and less degenerate.
Arcane Pulse vs Arcane Blast
The ambiguity in using these two spells that the 12.0.5 patch notes mention does not exist, it was patched out a week ago in the hotfix that prevented Pulse from generating extra salvo stacks.
More broadly, Pulse still feels bad. It feels bad because the mana cost is immense, thus forcing us to cast at low charges more often. Also, it just does not add anything on top of Arcane Blast, it actively harms the spec’s prio damage niche, and it forces us to remove yet another iconic spell in Arcane Explosion from our bars. If we’re set on Arcane not having a prio niche, something more similar to Legion era Arcane Explosion with its extended range and gameplay tie-ins would be much less unsatisfying. The only thing that’s good about Pulse is its animation, so let’s just give that to Arcane Blast and move on.
Arcane Salvo, Intuition and Arcane Barrage
Back in War Within, the brief and horrific experiment with Aethervision ended because, to quote Blizzard’s own words, "The community has made it clear that Aethervision’s more prescriptive gameplay is not the direction they wish to see Arcane move in. " Intuition in its current form is even more prescriptive and therefore less well liked.
Beyond that, our ability to generate salvo stacks and Intuition procs is tied to mana, so the moment we are low on mana we can barrage less efficiently, thus generating fewer salvo stacks/restoring less mana, thus having to spend more time spamming fillers, thus worsening our mana problems, and the whole rotation grinds to a halt. If you’re unlucky enough, it does so before you even cast your second Touch of the Magi. Which is not fun.
I would like to just see this version if Intuition disappear, and have more power baked back into regular Arcane Barrage before any modifiers from Salvo. Or maybe just revert back to the TWW version of Intuition, it’s a perfectly straightforward proc to play around after all. Just something to make the rotation feel less static (notice a trend?).
Multiple mediocre or nonsensical talents
The spec tree is filled with these, despite being one of the trees with the fewest nodes in the game. In no particular order:
Mana Bomb: this talent is so bad that it’s basically dps neutral to pick over not spending the talent point. It just does not do anything, and if it were to do damage it would still be some random boring passive
Charged Missiles: this talent just does not work with how the rest of the toolkit is designed, it might as well be gone
Evocation: without siphon storm fueling the nuclear launch sequence for our cooldowns, this talent has no reason to exist
Overflowing Insight: all this does is make our mana woes worse for little benefit.
Orb Barrage: this is still numerically strong for orb builds, but it is a shadow of its former self. Please just tie it back to arcane charges rather than to Salvo stacks.