Arcane Missiles Needs A Fix

Even with a bunch of talents designed to make Arcane Missiles more impactful (Aether Attunement, High Voltage AND Arcane Harmony), Arcane Missiles is still being clipped 75% of the time. As of right now, it exists solely to provide Nether Precision. This is just silly. Missiles is a fun ability and the main source of mobility in our kit. It needs tuning to be more impactful. Maybe make increase the value of each Harmony stack but decrease the max stacks?

6 Likes

This must be the first Arcane Missiles thread that isn’t just someone complaining because it can only be cast while you have a Clearcasting proc now. If this was Reddit I would give you a platinum award! :raised_hands::joy:

I absolutely agree. The unintended consequence of Nether Precision was the truncating of AMs meta. Just like the unintended consequence of making TotM a cooldown instead of a random proc turned the spec into a cooldown stacking monstrosity.

I honestly don’t see a solution to this conundrum for as long as NP continues to exist in its current form. That said I refuse to ever clip my missiles and sometimes even cast them back-to-back completely munching the NP procs and pretend that I am reliving the Arcane glory days of Legion when you could turn into a living gatling gun and unload 3 back-to-back CC AMs into a target to devastating effect. Of course I understand that this isn’t optional and even a DPS loss but, as you said, spamming AMs is fun and this is a game after all, the point of which is having fun!

In my view they’ve only made the spec worse since Legion in every way possible and the few times we’ve gotten good “changes” they weren’t really changes at all but just the bringing back of parts of the Legion Arcane toolkit like Orb Barrage (aka Mantle of the First Kirin Tor) and now the casting of AMs only while you have a CC proc. Except now it’s worse for a number of reasons not the least of which is the much lower proc rate of CC and, yes, the inherent conflict between CC and NP which was never resolved.

The best short term solution I can think of is for NP to make each tick of AM damage apply a debuff on the target that increases the damage it takes from other spells exponentially so that you can spam them while still retaining the essence of NP. Ultimately though, I think it might just be better for NP to go. It was an interesting experiment but I think it largely failed to achieve its goals and has done more harm than good to the overall feel of the spec.

2 Likes

100% agree with this.

I’m still stuck on their decision to both nerf the damage multiplier and increase stacks needed for it going into df.

It may have worked out TWO YEARS LATER for tww, but now the damage for am is so bad that clipping ends up being a bigger boost. Even if they did revert it back to the way it was in sl, I don’t the situation will change, because the base damage for missiles is still bad.

They habitually nerf an ability’s baseline damage because it’s overperforming for some reason, like a tier set bonus or an interaction with a trinket or something along those lines, and then forget to bump it back up to what it was after those external factors are no longer in place. Every class and spec in the game probably has at least a few abilities like that at any one given time, lol.

1 Like

When you play Devoker and you cast mass disintegrate, when the main target dies the disintegrate stays on the other 2 targets. When you use mass arcane missiles when the main target dies it shuts off for the other targets as well. They need to fix that.

1 Like

This is so annoying, totally agree.