Sure, wait right here and keep hitting refresh😃
As nice as it would be, we do still need a little bit of randomness in the kit. I love having consistency and I love having control over my rotation, but if there aren’t some truly random effects that make you look at the current state of your character then there’s really no skillcap in terms of gameplay.
Not that I expect to reach those caps. In fact, I hope I don’t ever hit the ceiling on gameplay as a “casual-core” player. But if everything happens exactly the same way every single time, your throughput will come down to buff procs (like Impetus) and crits.
That said, the way spellsphere generation works (by counting to 6 and granting a barrage that gives 4 charges) is really satisfying and super predictable. It feels really good to play.
Based on what I’ve seen, I think it’s going to take a lot more than this to nerf Sunfury to the point where it isn’t viable.
I’m talking about both. The hard aoe caps apply regardless of the hero talents. Any moment the meta starts pulling more than 5 mobs the spec will fall behind in damage to fire and frost, not to mention the other broken OP specs like assassination/outlaw/ret/frostDK, etc.
Arcane also has an awful profile for M+. For one, you only do meaningful AoE damage on packs of mobs with Touch of Magi up, a 45 sec cd, and then pray said mob does not die early before the detonation goes off. And even then it’s doing under the main aoe specs.
Arcane has no real good sustained AOE damage, the most valuable damage profile for M+.
So it’s being held by its high single target damage to bring value on bosses, but if that gets nerfed the spec sinks down the ratings for M+.
And then you come here and complain about arcane and damage and wonder why no one with a brain takes you seriously 
When have I ever complained about damage? I couldn’t care less about it, I don’t even run a damage meter addon. My complaints have always been about the mechanics of the spec, never about its performance. Also for the record, the abuse of spellqueueing to double dip is definitely a hill I am willing to die on because it’s very obvious not intended gameplay. And it looks like the devs are finally catching on to y’all’s antics in that regard and cracking down on it. I am sorry if it will hurt your feeling because it will lower you DPS a smidge but it’s always been just a gimmick and you can’t be surprised or upset when they decide to pull the plug on it. If anything it should have happened a long time ago.
The fact is nobody would care about the spell queing removal if the spec had its fun rotation back without the arcane blast spam like it used to in beta.
Just increase the clearcasting procs, buff arcane orb for single target throughput, and make barrage strong enough to always be cast at 4 charges without having to wait for nether precision and an arcane missiles proc to be worthwhile to cast.
If you could cast arcane barrage, missiles, and orb more often instead of arcane blast and generate charges more quickly, people would not care about spell queueing.
Increase the amount of abilities used in a single target rotation.
Then fix arcane explosion to not be an awful ability in aoe and make it generate 2 charges instead of 1, and clearcasting should guarantee that arcane missiles cleave targets.
Nerf numbers as necessary, but what’s important is that the rotations are enjoyable.
Currently, they are not.
Try playing a spellslinger arcane mage, there is too often a starvation of clearcasting procs and very often I have to burn my entire mana bar fishing for a clearcasting proc.
That’s just bad design.
3 Likes
I will be here!
Just pick an easier class, Arcane is good as is
I’m gonna simplify all of this. If you want to do decent damage as arcane just play around nether precision.
The other buffs help and the more you can play around them the better, but if you can get NP down efficiently you’re doing well.
Then, there’s Sunfury for doing really good dps – the current borrowed power. Just make sure you use your burden of power buff and read all the descriptions. If you’re having fun with it you’ll start doing good damage!
Update: Been running some of my first few heroics. Still awful. Generally below tank and sometimes healer. Spike insanely high when I can use magi and surge at the same time, but its the AoE that is just killing me. Single target seems good.
I completely agree. Arcane has always had to resort to using these gimmicky interactions and overly relying on abusing certain mechanics like spell queuing precisely because the spec is weak at baseline. That’s true across the board but especially for Arcane which has always been in a weird spot first with mana management and then with TotM and the cooldown stacking meta that emerged as a result.
I’m super new to Arcane but I kinda obsessively watched a bunch of guides today and tbh when people go into deep detail it just makes it more confusing.
Basically you want to always make sure you have 4 arcane charges that boost damage.
Open with evocate, arcane surge and touch. Press missiles when it lights up. Whenever you missiles Arcane blast twice after. Press barrage when it lights up. That’s a good primer.
If you have your own nameplate with resources turned on it’ll show you buffs like nether precision you get after a missiles proc that you want to use on blasts.
It can seem daunting at first but take it little by little. Keep up 4 Arcane charges. Press the buttons that light up. Consume nether precision with blast. You can go more into detail later.
1 Like
Arcane does also very much suffer from the “I needed that to live longer” problem. A lot of our power comes from our cooldowns, and our minor cooldown is a debuff. So if you put Touch of the Magi on something and it dies… Well… That’s the end of that (curse you, touch of death!). As DPS start to get stronger and stronger, arcane will start looking weaker if you’re not doing harder content (which you can’t because it doesn’t exist yet).
At the very least it sounds like you’re getting the hang of bursting, which is where most of our damage is. AoE without cooldowns has always been a bit a little janky - especially right now. Based on what I’ve seen, Spellslinger switches to an AoE rotation at 2 or 3 enemies based on talents, but Sunfury rocks the same single target rotation until you’ve got 5 enemies or more in the pack.
In theory, the concept of AoE for Arcane is almost the opposite of what you do in Single Target. In ST, you want to build 4 charges and stay at 4 charges, only spending them when you can get them back right away. In AoE, you want to dump your 4 charges as soon as possible (with some hope that you can get them back as quickly as possible). Knowing what can get your charges back quickly (Arcane Orb, Orb Barrage, Glorious Incandescence, Arcane Soul, High Voltage) will help you get where you need to be.
Arcane does also absolutely need to keep track of some things that the UI doesn’t give us by default. I’m sure there are some good weakauras out there (I made a bunch of low-quality ones for myself once I figured out the basics) that can really help you get your feet off the ground. At the very least, for AoE, having something that lets you know when your Arcane Charges are capped out will help you know when it’s time to cast barrage.
Once you get the hang of the ebb and flow of the charges, then you can start worrying about the procs that buff certain abilities in AoE.
I just want to give a quick simplified version of the spec because I think it can seem complicated if you try to learn everything all at once for it.
Note this is for SF as I it is currently the best and will still stay the best even with changes.
First the basic rotation and what order to learn it in.
- Press Blast 6 time to get Burden of Power buff then cast Blast a 7th time and spam Barrage while casting to que a Barrage right after. (You should stay at 4 arcane charge the entire time when doing this, also use WA to track Spellfire Spheres buff [spell =449400] makes it easier to count.
- When you get clear casting use Arcane Missile.
Thats all the rotation really is when you don’t have cds up to get like 90% single taget dps. Adding in the cds its just
- Cast Evocation
- Cast Missiles
- If at less than 4 arcane charges cast orb
- Cast Arcane Surge
- Spam macro that cast Arcane Barrage then Touch of the Magi
-/castsequence reset=10 Arcane Barrage, Touch of the Magi, Touch of the Magi
Then just press shifting power when none of your cds are up and use the Touch macro when touch is up in-between big cds.
That handles most of single target only thing left really is arcane Soul which you can just spam Barrage when up.
For AOE stuff doesn’t live long enough for SF Arcane to properly do dmg so just do Spellslinger basic rotation of get up to 4 charges and press Barrage and throw in a missiles if you have it. cd usage is the same as single target.
I will admit you almost need a WA to track some of the stuff b/c the base UI does not have a good method of tracking this stuff. You can also just get a Mage UI from Wago.
1 Like