Ok, yeah yeah I know, the whole meme about how Forum suggestions tend to be awful, but many boss fights, and especially affixes this week, highlight how much Arcane struggles with interruptions during their Burst phase, and how one of the most important parts of your rotation may be almost useless in certain fights. Vol’kaal and Soulbound Goliath this week are excellent examples. Continuous effects that force an interruption to your rotation (Puddles on Vol’kaal, Roots on Soulbound (which I will admit can be blinked out of, but thats 2 globals wasted)), combined with an RNG interruption through Quaking.
Maybe some sort of change like this could help Arcane in an M+ and raid environment?
"Arcane Power:
For 15 sec, you deal 30% more spell damage and your spells cost 30% less mana.
For the duration of this buff, you become immune to Interrupt, Silence, Impairment and Loss of Control effects.
Effect disabled in Battlegrounds and Arenas."
What are other peoples thoughts? (Outside of just reworking the whole spec.)
1 Like
That would help.
But that said, arcane isn’t awful on Quaking week. Quaking can be easily avoided during the burn phase. Just wait for Quaking to pass before entering the burn.
Also, arcane has a big advantage in that its AOE rotation is not as affected by Quaking as the other specs. It’s all instant cast, so the only interruption would be if you have to get out of range to avoid others.
Personally, I’d rather see something like all mages getting Arcane Orb baseline.
7 Likes
Yes, but Arcane’s burst window is so small, that Quaking can affect it. And while you wait around for Quaking to pass, the boss may cast something else that will cause you to delay your window for even longer.
Arcane’s Aoe isn’t that good though, Arcane aoe+cleave is far below the other specs. Its not affected by Quaking, but you are forced to stand in melee range, where your Quaking has the potential to harm others in your group.
I was thinking, something like getting Arcane Orb or Nether Tempest baseline and making a new talent for that line would help Arcane a fair bit. There is little to do when its time to Aoe for Arcane. You sit in Melee, spam Explosion to 4 Stacks, cast a free Arcane Blast, then Barrage the lowest health target and repeat. Waiting on the Globals is probably the most frustrating part.
1 Like
There are some issues with this, namely that it would make mages stand still in quaking and force everyone else around them to move and it would have almost no effect in raids. As Myst said, arcane in aoe spec in mythic+ is fine, not outlaw rogue fine, but who is? It’s the single-target boss specced arcane mage that suffers in raids because of all the movement. Your change wouldn’t help that much with that. As for ST and quaking, you really just need to plan for it. If you mistime the quaking during a burn, you can simply pop POM earlier than normal (ie: not at the end of ap) and use those instants to cast during the quake.
Keestus had a good response on one of these threads about what needs to be done for arcane: make is less reliant on equipoise, buff cleave and make barrage hit harder. Myst is correct about making orb baseline which should have been done 2 expansions ago (I think the reason it’s not is they’re lazy about developing more arcane talents to replace it). I still think that the way aoe works should be reverted to Legion style where your explosion stacks with charges. No valid reason why that was changed has ever been given.
But at the very least, arcane needs something to keep it from being an “either-or” spec. As it stands you’re either ST and have meh at best aoe that’s unsustainable or you’re aoe specced and your ST suffers somewhere in the range of a 30-40% loss due to losing overpowered and equipoise traits. I’m not suggesting arcane should be tops at everything, but it shouldn’t be a one trick pony in an expansion where so many fights are cleave, spread cleave, massive movement and/or ST boss plus tons of adds.
4 Likes
It’s because Blizzard wanted to make clearcasting the main proc for arcane to dumb it down. Unfortunately, its introduction has had a horrible dominoes effect on the entire spec. Clearcasting is essentially arcane’s “hot streak”/“brain freeze,” which means it forces missiles to be a lot more like pyroblast/flurry. AM is castable at any time, yet not worth casting without the proc. The proc is designed to be consumed immediately just like hot steak, which means AM no longer scales with charges. It is also the same reason explosion doesn’t scale anymore and we have that awkward “cast arcane blast in melee” aoe rotation.
This is due to Blizzard’s contradictory talent/azerite design:
- Doesn’t want people respeccing for each fight
- Puts ST and AoE talents in the same row
- Doesn’t want people respeccing azerite
- Makes an arcane explosion trait which is useless in ST
- Wants Azerite traits to matter
- Also wants traits to not matter so people aren’t forced to sim
![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
- Doesn’t want cookie-cutter talent builds
- Promotes a cookie-cutter build by making 2 talents in different rows have amazing synergy which kills off the other choices (Rune+OP)
- Also makes certain talents useless in certain situations. Does Blizzard really expect people to not spec out of Reverberate in ST fights?
One of the big offenders is rune of power. It is a stackable %damage CD which combos with our OP-boosted AP. It can’t exist in that form without killing off the other choices. Then there is the issue of our unfocused talent rows and dead talents. I would fix it by shuffling some talents around.
- Move RoP to the 100 row (replacing Arcane Orb) and we’ve got ourselves a “CD” row (Stronger cd, random cd proc, extra cd).
- Move Nether Tempest, Supernova, and Arcane Orb to the same row and we have a “new ability” row with a choice of a DoT, infrequent hard-hitting burst ability, or more frequent rotational ability.
- Delete resonance, touch, and reverberate. (boring passives)
- Put charged up in a row with 2 new talents focused on arcane charge generation.
3 Likes
Arcane is probably the single most azerite dependent spec in the game and making st and aoe utterly dependent on very specific ones (ie: next to useless without them) does force you into cookie-cutter specs, but it’s actually worse as you’re forced into cookie-cutter specs that can do one or the other only. Frost for example benefits more from st builds on bosses and aoe builds in mythic+ but is still quite effective at either roll with either build. Arcane is that one-trick pony.
I have to disagree with the last part of your post though:
Moving RoP to the level 100 row would destroy the spec in it’s current iteration. Perhaps that’s a good thing if they plan on reworking it, but as of now it would be very bad. The vast majority of arcane’s damage is done stacking cds in the burn window and losing either RoP or OP would defeat that. If they did move RoP away, we would have to receive compensation somewhere else for the lost dps.
Arcane orb should still be baseline and not a talent.
Removing resonance would cripple our already mediocre aoe damage without adequate compensation. To a much lesser extent, reverberation is in the same boat.
TotM is boring and woefully unpredictable and could use a tweak, perhaps making it an on use cd rather than random. I get that defeats their anti-cd stacking philosophy but then again, arcane mage as a whole already does that.
CU is fine, it just needs to be removed from the gcd along with AP which itself needs to be buffed at least 1.5s to make up for the 15% loss from the gcd.
@Orcguy
To be completely fair AM is also nearly pointless with the proc. It’s damage is so low that the only real reason it’s used at all is to game the system to allow for a free non mana cast to keep your mana cycling at ~70% when you are running 3 Equipoise traits in your mana neutral cycle. The only time where AM does damage is in pvp. Pretty dumb system, would much rather Arcane to not have a burst phase and just had its damage work differently than it does now.