People who know some legacy mobs die in half a second and want to tag them? People who are collecting a bunch of mobs while running and don’t want to stop for the time it takes to cast arcane blast? You really can’t think of anyone who’d want access to an instant cast low damage spell?
From my experience, AM did a ton of damage with free cast, allowing you to pummel your enemies before they even reach you.
Arcane Barrage
Arcane Explosion
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I honestly don’t understand these guys talking about how they spammed it all the time and pulled a bunch of mobs with it. Even if the mobs could be one shot by it, the non-proc version of Arcane Missiles would cost a TON of mana. It always felt like a detriment for me to spam it in everyday play— (not counting the cheesy proc fishing gameplay that ended up becoming part of the min-max rotation lol).
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This is not sound game design. Forcing players to spam Arcane Explosion willy nilly is not fun nor is it viable with kiting.
Who is spamming Arcane Explosion? I’m getting enough Clearcasting procs that I never feel I have to fish for them. The most I’ll do is cast a couple extra Arcane Blasts.
The op could have formulated a better argument. Arcane barrage doesn’t even have a cooldown anymore.
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Joy thief? Not really, it just takes my fastest to apply attack and throws it out the window making it so that my arcane mage is now only able to attack a quarter of the time she did before. Now I don’t think I want to run her anymore as her attack time vs her survivability has been ganked.
While there is definitely some of that going on because the vast majority of WoW players simply don’t know how to play the game, there are also some players who realize that they’re not playing optimally but choose to do so anyway because it’s more fun for them. I personally don’t see anything wrong with that as long as they’re not unintentionally griefing other players with their bad performance, which happens very rarely. Not everyone takes the game very seriously and that’s fine.
I have been playing the game for almost 20 years now and I see comments like that all the time, especially at the start of an expansion and from players who aren’t mage mains. While not necessarily incorrect that’s just how it’s always been for mages in WoW. Mages are incredibly gear dependent and scale very well with higher item level, not just in terms of DPS but also with survivability because, unlike other classes that have access to self healing or damage reduction talents and cooldowns, mages actually rely on having a high health pool to survive because all of our defensives scale with health. The barriers are health percentage based and you need a lot of health to take full advantage of Alter Time.
Our high damage output is supposed to make up for these shortcomings, you know the whole glass cannon archetype, but sadly that’s just not there at the start of an expansion and it’s especially evident when you level and constantly lose power as you gain levels due to poor scaling as well as the fact that you’re largely playing solo in the open world and mages have just never excelled at that.
It wasn’t the visuals that I liked about arcane missiles, it was the ability to attack quickly enough to actually do some good, now I can only fire them off with an unclear set condition and am stuck with spells that have a pretty unhelpful casting time. And when I don’t even use blink and have never used it they changed many of my talents to support blink which I also found obnoxious. But I’m just a pve player and do not care for pvp, so being able to spam arcane missiles to whittle down mob health was both useful and to my mind logical as most of the time I play is either in a small group of friends or solo so it never bothered anybody that I would spam it. And I never had this so called problem of people getting upset with me drawing mobs with it, it was always the other way around with randos wandering through and stealing my mobs. I felt the mana drain was a necessary payoff for the spell being able to be used as it was and I never really had issues with running out of mana as I could kill most things with the spell before my mana ran out. Now I can’t even run through the Dalaran segment to get to the isle of dorn unless I convince someone to help with the final encounter.
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I agree that knowingly playing “sub-optimally” is fine, but I doubt that’s who’s asking Blizz to change to spec back. Pressing AM without Clearcasting never felt rewarding or even good.
Cata proc-only AM was the best change Blizz made to Arcane back in the day, and it just feels unnatural to cast AM without it. And AM was never used prior to having a proc added in Wrath because it both felt bad and was bad.
Really it just needs a better proc chance here. It’s 40% on any damage spell in Classic.
Yeah, I was really hoping they would do that by now as I said in my original reply in this thread.
Sadly, that was back in July.