Ok, I decided to try some Season 2, and messing around with stuff, did a bunch of delves and a handful of M+2s, and some LFR, trying to get reoriented and messing with talent builds and this beauty of a talent (Arcane Rebound) is basically a trade off between all other talents and itself. Because it’s locked behind Prodigious Savant (or whatever it’s called), means I should be stacking mastery???, which if I want to do any other cool build is a totally different set of gear and stat priority. First 5 rows of talents in the arcane tree offers zero choice than they make the bottom half of the tree just a total WTF fest. And TWO 2-talent holes in it as well, just AHHHH! WHAT, WHY?
Overall I have enjoyed the game play a bit more. My orb barrage feels with spellslinger are real and I like how arcane plays now more than before. Intuition is obviously too short a thing, and should be like 1.5 seconds longer.
I find my patience for running a 30-min Mythic dungeons for zero loot is gone. I think M+ Dungeons is the most fun end game, but the reward-to-time and RNG is just excruciating, so delves I do enjoy. But they handcuff delves behind stupid koffer keys to make them a thing you can’t even run endlessly, like again WHY? Either make Mythic dungeons a guaranteed roll on loot, or let me run delves endlessly for reward.
Anyway my time back in Azeroth this go may be limited. I think my sub ends sometime in April, (just looked…says 22 days) so whatever at that point. I just wish they would sink some brains into the systems they have and clean it up/streamline it, make it make sense.
I agree, Arcane Rebound’s placement in the talent tree is ridiculous. It should be where Static Cloud is now. The entire tree needs a complete overhaul and so does the whole spec but not tackling these low hanging fruit is just incredibly lazy and is one of the main reasons I am not renewing.
And it’s not just Arcane either, almost every spec has little things like that which could significantly improve it with minimal effort but they won’t even do that. The entire expansion feels like it has been completely abandoned and they’ve already moved on to the next one because they realized early on that TWW flopped hard. In the meantime where only going to get more and more recycled content and extended seasons to fill the, dare I say it, void until Midnight.
Prodigious Savant is a trap. At first it reads like a massive buff to mastery, but in actuality it’s a tiny bump to your mastery effectiveness. It’s a hugely under-tuned talent and does not meaningfully affect your stat weights. It’s also part of the reason why the bottom-right chunk of the tree sees zero play (also because Aether Attunement, Arcane Harmony, Arcane Bombardment, and Magi’s Spark are all EXTREMELY powerful and thus mandatory talents).
At most you can take one point in Savant for pure single-target builds.
I continually suggest that Blizzard just bake the current talent baseline for us and revamp the talent to be ‘You get 5% more mastery and 10% more mastery stat from all sources’ and just stick it higher in the tree to complete the stat increase cycle with Frost and Fire.
Arcane Rebound is cool on paper but in practice it’s horribly under-tuned.
The unfortunate truth is that Arcane is very talent locked at the moment until we see a serious retuning/revamping of our talents. We got some talents doing like ~10% damage increase and others doing ~0.5% increase. It’s absurd.
Rebound and Energy Reconstitution in particular have a lot of potential to fix our mass AoE problems, but they need to be seriously buffed.
If the combined it into one talent point for the same effect it could become viable, and then could give them some more flexibility within the tree for their goals
Kerathras, your stats are really low. I am shocked you can make arcane work at all. You need more than 30 percent haste and more than 40 percent mastery for arcane to even show any potential. Otherwise, arcane is going to blow.
Did you even look at my actual gear or just the stat count? I have barely been playing at all this season and I just have equipped whatever drops from the handful of delves I do whenever I log in for a few hours a week that has a higher ilvl. As I said I’ve decided to call it quits and my subscription is expiring so I see no point in trying to min max gear that’s going to be completely obsolete if and when I come back for the next major patch or Midnight.
Furthermore, meeting arbitrary stat caps doesn’t make or break a spec. All it can do is smooth out some of the rough edges. Arcane has a core of fundamentals issues that no amount of stat stacking can fix.
In pains me to see arcane explosion totally die, but I agree that would be nice. I think the concept was to use AE over AM on the right side, but it’s not even close.
Personally, I think AE should scale with arcane charges again. Ramping (and scaling) damage at the cost of ramping mana costs. Our AoE kit is already drowning in mana so we likely wouldn’t even notice the cost increase that much.
Then also changing Magi’s Spark to work on Blast or Explosion would alleviate the pain point of having to cast Arcane Blast in AoE situations.
I’m at the point now, I can’t even think of ways AE could work, as things are now. I use it with movement or to get a charge here and there.
It is uncapped, but I have doubts if it could be a staple. Perhaps instead of it being a charge builder, it could be something with strong damage and limited use a few in big pulls, like orb charges ?
That’s what they tried to do with Static Cloud without actually involving the Charge system directly but the balancing is horribad. The entire right side of the talent tree is sound conceptually but so far behind the left side numerically that it’s completely DoA.
It’s the same issue that Arcane has had for years: There was a (likely not fully intentional) change in design that rendered certain concepts / talents obsolete, however, the people responsible for balancing those things have yet to realize that there was a paradigm shift.
It took a long time to get rid of Rule of Threes because, when introduced (as a talent, not as an artifact trait), it made sense. But when the design changed, Rule of Threes did not, and the class designers were still designing for a spec that no longer existed.
I’m pretty sure that’s largely why it feels like the devs throw things at the wall until something sticks. The design of the class is different from the implementation of the class, and they’re struggling to decide which side needs to be reconciled.
Yup, a combination of the revolving door at Blizzard which has led to loss of institutional knowledge and devs who don’t actually play the specs they design and balance. I still remember (with trepidation) the guy who created Ultimate Penitence saying that he got the idea while testing a raid with the dev cheat engine enabled which lets them fly among other things. I genuinely think none of them even play the game without all of these guardrails in place, if they play at all.
This is an across-the-board issue but particularly poignant for Arcane which has more than its fair share of these obsolete talents that made sense once upon a time but no longer do. You don’t even have to be a veteran Arcane player to spot them either. Anyone who plays the spec for just a few hours or actually spends the time to look at the talent trees instead of just copy and pasting the meta build will immediately notice something is off. Over the years I’ve seen so many new Arcane players on these forums asking “why the hell does this talent work that way, it makes no sense.” It’s been a great source of frustration for years.
I’m continually frustrated by the overabundance of obviously DOA talents that a number of specs are plagued with. Cursory testing makes it obvious when a talent is useless. A lot of them just feel like they were phoned in recycled old content just so Blizzard could pad the talent trees so they could ship the game.
And like… look, I get it. Game development is hard - deadlines are tight, and content takes a LOT of time to make. Reinventing talents for ALL specs for Dragonflight was no doubt a massive undertaking.
But come on. We are nearing halfway point of the second expansion with talent trees and we still have garbage like Surging Urge and Presence of Mind in our tree. Meanwhile there are some specs like Restoration Druid that have an absolute feast of viable talent options to choose from.
I want to be clear that I celebrate the new talent trees. Its reveal for the DF announcement was probably the most hyped moment I had for an expansion reveal perhaps ever. I love having choices for playing my spec. But Blizzard needs to get serious about giving players talent choices if they are going to do this, because right now it feels like they are just abandoning the system as long as it’s ‘good enough’. I have no doubt they have metrics to keep track of what talents are being used and what aren’t. It should be OBVIOUS to them when a talent tree is poorly designed and lacking variety.
And this point here is exactly the heart of me starting this thread, we have a very cool talent in arcane rebound that could be highly impactful on the AOE game, that is seemingly thrown blindly onto the talent tree without a logical path to pick it, unless you want to sink the rest of the talent tree.
Some prime examples:
Surging Urge: If this said increase damage by 150% per arcane charge I still don’t think it would see much use, since we never use Arcane Surge to deal direct damage (if it did zero dmg, we would still take it), it’s just a dmg booster for all the other spells we cast.
Presence of Mind: A hold over from when it allowed us to cast “Any” spell instantly, now is a total sub to a single spell.
Energized Familiar: What even is this for?
Then the real issue perhaps is the double-point sinks on the left and right of the bottom of the tree (Arcane Debilitation and Prodigious Idiot Savant), which completely cripple any choice. Also, anyone notice we have 5 capstones???
If I was making recommendations to devs for a relook, I’d suggest starting by making about 30% of the talents just baseline functions of the associated spells (easy targets: Amplification, Arcing Cleave, slipstream, resonance). Focus talents branches on the scenarios (single target, AOE large groups, and AOE small groups), and give us some highly impactful capstones that compete for our attention based on playstyle and not just damage. Then let us shop around for the build we want going into a particular dungeon or raid or delve.
Arcane is a beautiful spec and some talents are worth taking in large part for the visual flare (please bring Tome in as talent, OMG I beg you!)
I had to give up prodigious savant. It wasn’t working out with all those arc missiles procs, incandescent procs, and intuition procs. Not to mention arcane soul if you chose Sunfury. I want to see a bigger buff to arcane barrage since they intend to make us focus on it. Also, please reimagine evocation. Mana concerns are just not there anymore. I like the buff on evocation, but it is a channel spell that keeps us from dpsing and the buff given doesn’t last long enough to make up for that lack of dps. Or at least it doesn’t feel like it does.
Not on its own, but arcane has damage multipliers that make it very effective, similar to fire, you’re not really doing alot of valuable damage outside your burst, so you’re not really giving up much.
We did once have arcane power ( a similar buff) instant, off the GCD. I believe the mentality to remove it was, it promoted the use of macros and wasn’t in line with how they wanted the game to be, likely the same reason they won’t make trinkets line up perfectly.
You’re spot on here but Blizzard says a lot of things, then does the complete opposite. CD stacking being a prime example. Arcane (amongst others) is all about cd stacking, something Blizz says they don’t want. Yet here arcane is, was and probably will always be unles they actually do a full redesign. I’m still unsure why AP was replaced with surge: instant cast that buffed damage off the gcd every 1:30 replaced with a 2.5 second cast (!) that does a small amount of damage and buffs your spells every 1:30. Like, why was this necessary?
