It had infinite range after the cast started, and it wasn’t latency or range leeway. Literally, you could begin casting the spell on a target in range and then they could blink away, get speed boots, etc and your arcane missiles would keep hitting them from 300 yards away. You could arcane missiles someone on a mount and it would follow them through the entire channel even though they were super far away at the end.
Hmm, that’s not my recollection at all. The damage kept applying no matter how far away they got. It just took longer to apply the damage because the missiles traveled further.
For what it’s worth, I don’t have any clear memories of this from vanilla, but I remember it not being a thing in BC.
So it was probably changed at some point in early BC.
I do believe Blizzard stated that they’d fix minor issue’s like this as it can be consider a bug and an exploit.
I remember having Arcane Missiles channeled on me while blinking away and trying to LoS it, but it still was being fired at me.
However, this could have been a “Bug” that they never fixed throughout the entire life of vanilla, and have now since deemed it a bug and thus “Fixed” it.
Pretty sure it wasn’t a bug. I was on Countdown to Classic podcast with original class designer Kevin Jordan talking about mages, and I asked him about this issue on there. In episode 96 at around 41:44 he starts talking about Arcane Missiles and how they had wanted to design the spell, but couldn’t due to technical limitations, so they made concessions about how it functioned because of the technical limitations, and one of those concessions was allowing it to keep following people.
I forgot until now that I asked him that question and got this response.
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OP, you should post this in the Beta forum for greater visibility. Better chance the devs will see it.
Hmm, it doesn’t let me create a new topic there for some reason.
Weird that you’re a Beta tester and can’t make a topic, and I’m not a Beta tester and can. But I made a thread and linked it to yours.
Thanks, I appreciate that! I’m also going to be asking this question in the AMA on the 20th unless I manage to get a response before then.
My memory is that it would eventually stop casting if they were running out of range but there was quite a bit of leeway
I definitely remember only getting a couple ticks off on fleeing opponents in bgs. I 100% do not remember it ever being ‘infinite’ range as long as you started to channel
This video is blended with a podcast and it seems like a dev is talking about arcane missiles at around 7min30sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8SPrJPk6yE
Some of the reasons are stated, but it wasn’t stated as being a bug
Kevin Jordan was interviewed by the “Countdown To Classic” podcast discussing classes and abilities.
Yeah, I was the guest in the mage call w/ Kevin Jordan on episode 96 of Countdown to Classic. The person you hear asking that question is me 
Kevin Jordan: “It was sort of a Frankenstein spell internally. Uh we didn’t have great tech so that to make it really seamless or to do all the design things that we wanted to do with it. You had to pay the mana cost up front and then it was really finicky and it would cancel a lot of the time you could lose a missile here or if you had to move you would cancel the whole spell and lose the rest of the whole investment. What we wanted was an ability to just turn this on and channel it and then every time a missile shot out you would pay for the mana cost.”
Interviewer: “Speaking of arcane missiles there’s something I’ve been wondering for a long time and I know my buddy ale has been wondering this for a long time too basically you know you could start casting arcane missiles and then people would run away and it would stay casting on them even if they line of sighted. Was that intentional? Was that intentionally changed later because of that? What’s the situation with that?”
Kevin Jordan: “That was essentially a concession we made because of the problematic nature of the internal tech. Like if we had been able to get the version we wanted, which was ya know every second a missile and pay for the mana cost of that one missile, we wouldn’t have done that, but because we had to pay for the entire thing up front (mana cost) and it was so finicky, and people could potentially just run away, we were like ah well lets just let this slide so that people can more frequently get value out of their arcane missiles yeah so…”
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Thanks for typing that up. I was going to do that but got distracted.
No problem, I thought it would be a good chunk of information to have for this post to give insight on dev mindset. Nice interview btw.
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Yeah, it’s definitely a worthwhile addition to the thread! Thanks for the compliment. I did my best. Josh asked me to do it like 5 minutes before I did it so I didn’t have any time to prepare at all. I’m glad people enjoyed it.
Pretty much. The only other use is the fact that you can push out at least one round of missiles while being meleed when a frostbolt or scorch wouldn’t deal any damage until the spell was completed.
Kevin essentially says it was a trade off for paying the entire mana cost up front and losing that mana on movement (on top of tech limitations forcing all mana to be used instead of per missile). So maybe we’ll get the useful version of missiles back.
They already reincorporated things related to tech limitations such as leeway, among other things.
If leeway wasn’t added you might be able to argue against missiles.
Technically, you could also push back spells with Arcane Missiles because it hit several times in rapid succession, but it was risky to do that vs other mages at least due to Counterspell. But, it was rare to use it for this purpose since you had Counterspell yourself, among other potential options.
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