Just in case someone in Blizz Development is like “I wonder what players think”, I offer a couple things to help Arcane not be the slug of S4. We went from S tier to C tier pretty fast…and some of us just never switch specs…fire is lookin good “hot” by the way. All my suggestions are strait numbers focused:
Increase Clearcasting Proc rate (+10-15% would be nice, 20% would be fantastic)
Increase Arcane Tier 2-piece set bonus to 30 seconds (up from 20 seconds)
Increase Nether Tempest damage by 300-500%
Increase all damage by 5% (baseline boost)
Increase Missile Damage by 20%
Increase Arcane Orb Damage by 20-30%
Increase Arcane Barrage Damage by 5%
Why? Well, because right now, we play our little hearts out and are a full 150K DPS or more below the Warlock, or Pally in the group and it feels “UGH” Of the lists I’ve looked at, Arcane sits in the second to last position for DPS rankings, but for the record, I didn’t have to look at the charts because I already “live” that life in the game, and for a pure DPS class, it sucks.
S4 Arcane mages the world over thank you for your time and consideration.
It’s been mentioned by others before but I think treating the artillery proc as an automatic CC would make a world of difference, I hate fishing for a cc in the middle of a pack while I watch the timer run down and the pack dies or you can’t fit the artillery into your magi window. Really hurts. Juggling those cool downs while also doing afflicted and incorporeal is just miserable. I just hate how much I love arcane because it really is fun but a few small changes that wouldn’t break the game would be nice, especially for pugging
The number of times I’ve had to consume an Artillery proc without a CC proc because it was going to fall off makes me want to pull my hair out! The idea of AoE AMs is fantastic but as usual Blizzard’s implementation leaves much to be desired.
And it’s only getting worse in TWW where the talent version will require a whopping 5 CCs consumed to trigger it! Tying everything to CCs procs because we simply don’t have any other procs as Arcane feels awful since they’re in turn tied to mana consumed rather than a flat % and we don’t spend much mana in AoE.
At this point I wonder whether it won’t be better to just make Artillery into a medium length cooldown like Presence of Mind or Charged Up.
The worst part is that to use the AoE Missiles, we consume the stacks of Arcane Battery, losing the 10% damage, which is quite dumb imo. There shouldn’t be stacking damage buff tied to this anymore since people disliked the 2pc set from the beginning and were only interested in the 4pc.
Well, because right now, we play our little hearts out and are a full 150K DPS or more below the Warlock, or Pally, or Outlaw Rogue or Hunter or Demon Hunter in the group