Arcane is still better than Fire (at least?). I only beat Arcane on meters if we wipe just before they were going to burst again.
I can hear why it’s mechanically frustrating (despise the spec personally) but it truly isn’t bad numerically, and has the burst niche that used to be Fire’s. We’re now a weird Ignite / dot spec.
Ultimately we’re all strange masochists for sticking by our specs so valiantly. I try arcane or frost and nope out immediately; doesn’t feel remotely right. I imagine the same goes for everyone else trying Fire lol
The issue is evocation and it’s dps counterpart. They are supposed to keep the mana flow going, but it turns you into a burst spec. It’s awkward and counterproductive. As far as I’d imagine a mage, they have certain spells that replenish mana…not…rely upon them as burst for max dps. I also don’t like they changed a couple staple talents into pvp talents. Arcane was fun since you could move after arcane blast and kite in PvE. Now I play exactly as I would as a frost mage except I have these burst windows. Which are convenient for world PvE, but it sorta plays bad now. I’m RnG’ing harder than ele ever did for multi-target. Lore wise, arcane battle caster should be methodical jack of all trades with a very high skill cap with rotation varying depending upon situation. There was a power in shadowlands called [Disciplinary Command] - that made you cast frost-fire-arcane for dps boost that should be baseline in arcane or something similar. Arcane the last couple of expansions has been poorly designed, DF was far worse as anything could disrupt the rotation and tank it’s often mediocre DPS. Nobody should be able to interrupt spell lock arcane and disrupt it’s dps into nothing land. An Arcane battle caster is master of all. Locking out arcane should dip dps, but not lock it out entirely like it would a specialist fire mage or specialist frost mage. Fire mages have it’s place for extended multi-target burn scenarios, frost for maximum control and perhaps have the edge in 2-3-4 target cleave, but arcane really needs to be the best spec in mixed scenarios if you have the skill to play it maximally. Ideally, lore wise and otherwise, an arcane battle mage has varying spell rotations for all situations.
Quote from Arkinov:
No one is going to take you seriously if you’re judging it based on outdated low level content…
Yes, that’s the WHOLE truth. No one takes Mages seriously.
Say, by chance. Do you have an OFFICIAL link to all Killing Blow Charts by class for say, the past month, year? How about decade.
Wonder where any Mage is on that chart.
And to clarify, that’s “Killing Blows”, not Honor Kills, or PvP Damage, or PvE anything.
And while you are at it, can you get the chart by class that has the “Wrecking Ball” Achievement from PvP.
Yes, you are ABSOLUTELY right, no one takes Mages SERIOUSLY.
This is not true. I used it all the time while questing in dragonflight, it was THE way to kill things without much fuss.
Otherwise you’re having to do a ramp and build up arcane charges etc. One magic missile cast was enough to take mobs down to about 10-15% and then you could cast a single arcane blast and finish them off.
That was absolutely a quality of life thing, which is now gone
I’ve figured out the reason for this. When simming the numbers look OK but there isn’t enough downtime to be accurate.
Arcane is like fire with SKB because you need to keep up stacks in between pulls in M+ of stuff like clearcasting and arcane tempo. If these expire (like while the maze in mists is figured out, or when the tank says “wait here” and then does a big LOS pull) ALL of those buffs drop off. So it’s full shambles for what should be a big pull … you have your cd’s up but no arcane tempo, no clearcasting stacks.
If there were a way to maintain arcane tempo and clearcasting outside of combat then we would actually see the numbers the sims show us regularly in the logs.
But as it is now, these procs expiring quickly is why Arcane suffers so badly in M+
Side note: if you play arcane DO NOT invite assa rogue. Only one of you will be able to function optimally since they need the group to leave combat long enough to stealth, and arcane needs the tank to essentially chain-pull
You are forced to jumpstart with evocation and arcane surge. My main complaint is the high degree RnG, which is contrary to the theme. Also, since they shifted philosophy from an easy spec to dps with in shadowlands into DF… Not that frost was ever a difficult spec by any means. Arcane should be the most involved to play and the most difficult to lock out as it isn’t a mage that specializes into frost or fire.
That literally never happened unless you’re misremembering killing the mobs around the area you first arrive at on the Waking Shore which were specifically designed to be easily handled by someone who had little to no gear since the majority of the playerbase quit Shadowlands early. Plus there is always bugged scaling at the start of a new expansion when you do more damage the lower your level is. Questing and leveling in the open world makes up an incredibly small percentage of your time spent playing an MMO and QoL that’s only useful for that is all but meaningless in the endgame. While I agree that taking away QoL, however minor, never feels great you have to take into account that these changes aren’t made in a vacuum and there is additional reasoning behind them.
You can believe me or not but it was the most useful spell for world content, by far.
I get that wow is essentially a lobby game but plenty of people only do stuff like questing, exploring, etc. I don’t understand your attachment to this issue … having missiles be castable without clearcasting has no balancing issues in M+, and is only a QoL increase for casual players.
Arcane doesn’t really have any ready damage for fighting world mobs. Arcane blast at 0 charges does what, 35k damage? Arcane orb will pull the world in terms of world content. Barrage doesn’t have any power unless it is buffed. The whole thing about arcane is building buffs up to then spend, all of the real damage comes from procs.
missiles was the ONE spell that didn’t need procs to do barely-passable damage.
on other specs there are tons of buttons that do decent damage out of the gate, arcane has NONE
Lmaooo! No I don’t. I haven’t been playing this game seriously in years, if anything I am a casual myself. Of course “casual” is a term open to interpretation but if all you’re doing is leveling and open world content you’re not really engaging with 90% of content and not really playing the game at all. How many alts can you level before you get burned out? Hell, even if you didn’t get burned out there is a cap on how many you can have. The game can’t be tailored to fit the needs of everyone and it most definitely shouldn’t cater to the extremes on either end of the spectrum.
It’s not a question of believing you, I played the entire expansion as a mage and I know for a fact that what you’re saying simply isn’t true. When the Emerald Dream opened you couldn’t burn down a mob there with even 5 back-to-back regular AMs let alone 1 like you claim. You could certainly finish off a mob with a regular AM cast but burning it down solely with non CC AMs is ridiculous to even suggest not to mention virtually untenable because you’d be running out of mana after every mob you killed not to mention that it would take much, much longer than spamming 4 charge ABs. I am not saying you’re being willfully disingenuous but you’re definitely misremembering or otherwise misrepresenting your experience.
My only counterpoint is that making arcane missiles only castable with a proc seems to have fixed a fair number of the clearcasting / slipstream interactions that were buggy. But honestly that’s more on Blizzard’s inability to fix the issue and has nothing to do with balancing.
Blizzard’s argument for making Arcane Missiles only castable with clearcasting was that it would allow them to balance the spell better. But they haven’t done that. If we’re still playing in a world where it is “technically optimal” (even by a fraction of a percentage point) to clip the channel on missiles, they’ve failed to uphold their end of the bargain.
Aside from my really weak counterargument, there’s no real reason why Blizzard can’t allow us to cast missiles whenever we want - especially given that they didn’t even give us the balance they promised in the first place.
I think one of the real problems is that our talent tree doesn’t really offer “easy” alternatives for world content. It’s basically “45 seconds bursts” or “nothing” and it doesn’t feel good. When I was doing world content, I’d often use Touch of the Magi just to get the charges. That way I’ve got some big blasts that I can use as long as I can stay relatively in-combat.
There could easily be some choice nodes in the tree that offer things like free-cast missiles or more reliable charge generation. Not every talent node or choice needs to be high-end competitive. Even a choice node on Touch of the Magi that offers the old Charged Up on a 20 second or so cooldown instead could help a bit.
At 4 charges. But casting the first 3 takes forever.
Agreed. IMO they should design the classes well and not mess with them as much. Sometimes I feel like they’re just doing random stuff because it’s “new” and some people think new is always better.
Exactly
Yeah I found that too … but I also found missiles were almost as fast, with no CD. Heck, often missiles would bring the mob down so much, and it had just reached me, that I would just right-click it to bop it with my staff to finish it off
The arcane spec is probably the worst world content spec in the game
Mage in general is the worst class for open world and solo content because we have all the weaknesses associated with being a glass cannon but almost none of the benefits. Our burst output, while considerable, is not enough to justice our lack of self healing and defensives outside of Alter Time. On top of that any mob that requires kiting is usually immune to slows or snares making that core part of our toolkit useless. Mages suffer greatly from being one of the original classes and therefore continue to be held back by outdated core mechanics that were relevant at the time, two decades ago, but that no longer make sense in the modern game. Anyone who has played an Evoker after having played a Mage or vice versa can attest to that.
This is absolutely true but in all fairness the difference now has been substantially reduced so that the clipping, while “technically optimal” still, is basically unnecessary. That disparity shouldn’t exist at all and you should always be excited to use a proc when it activates but let’s not pretend that nothing has changed at all because things are significantly better now than they were before. It’s just that, in typical Blizzard fashion, they simply didn’t go far enough and part of the reason for that are additional talent interactions like Aether Attunement although I personally don’t believe they necessitate holding back in buffing AMs. Clearly, the devs disagree.
Lets be real, Blizzard failed on most of their goals for tuning this xpac. They said tanks were supposed to have evened-out damage, yet white swings are 1-shotting tanks over and over. And they said they were going to buff arcane missiles with the clearcasting change but that didn’t happen either.
I wish they were more careful in their class changes and tuning. I play a few musical instruments and one of the joys of them is learning how to be better over time, over the years.
the rotation for arcane has changed what, 3x this season? Instead of the joy of learning mastery in the spec it feels like I’m picking up a variant of similar instruments. Like it went from bass, to guitar, to ukulele.
The result, beyond being less satisfying for players, is that the blizzard team itself cannot balance all of their specs. I hear the term “slow is fast” in keys all the time. I feel like Blizzard should take a page out of that book and learn that maybe changing the whole spec every season, or 3x in a season, just leads to more work for them and less satisfaction to the players.
They should just pick how a class should fundamentally work, and then add a few things on top of it per xpac/seasonally. One or two new powers is enough to make a class feel fresh
I agree, they just don’t seem to be able to help themselves and can never leave well enough alone. Unfortunately, part of the reason for that is the ever revolving door at Blizzard and new folks wanting to make their mark and justify their paychecks. That’s why there is never any continuity or a sense of direction. And of course Blizzard have never been able to properly balance any of their games so that every time there is a tuning patch the pendulum always swings wildly. Arcane has been at the receiving end of those wild changes forever because they just can’t make up their mind on what they want the spec to be, although to be fair there has never really been any player consensus either. The closest we’ve gotten is agreeing that this ain’t it, lol.
They really did arcane dirty. It’s less fun to play, and less effective.
“spam barrage” on the tail end of a sunfury arcane surge isn’t an exciting dps moment, it just serves to illustrate how little damage barrage actually does.
We get absolutely clowned on in pvp too. A simple weakaura that blows a foghorn noise when arcane surge is cast is all you need to win against an arcane mage.
