Arcane Salvo is annoying because of it’s break points in power and unpredictable nature.
Arcane salvo should feel good to use at any amount of stacks with more obviously being better but you shouldn’t feel punished using it early.
For example:
Intuituon: Upon reaching maximum stacks of Arcane Salvo, your next Arcane Barrage deals 25% increased damage.
Imo, this talent could just be removed or changed to just increase the damage of barrage per stack (but we already have that talent).
Then we have the talent:
Orb Barrage: Arcane Barrage has a 4% chance per stack of Arcane Salvo to launch an Arcane Orb in front of you at 100% effectiveness.
And while this talent does scale smoothly with Arcane Salvo stacks why not make it so that Arcane Barrage launch’s an Arcane Orb in front of you at 4% per stack of Arcane Salvo consumed.
This adds consistency for Arcane charge generation but the damage still scales with Salvo stacks.
Then there is the talent Focusing Crystal that gives missiles a 50% chance to generate an Arcane Salvo stack. Again making it be a fixed amount or some way to make it not a chance.
Spellslingers hero talent infused splinters causes your splinter damage to have a 25% chance to generate a splinter. Can be frustrating and unpredictable.
Lastly, Polished Focus refunds you 5 stacks of Arcane Salvo when used at 20 or more stacks of Arcane Salvo which again incentivizes you to only barrage at max stacks.
I don’t know what the fix for this would be or even if the mage community wants arcane salvo changed but I find arcane salvo to be a frustrating and prohibitive mechanic.
It’s tough to break away from a design that basically snowballs downward if you’re not constantly keeping up with the returns and the reward is doing the damage your spec should put out.
The design feels strange when you look at all the talent requirements, and then the burst abilities don’t really mesh intuitively with them.
I don’t know the answer either, i think it could be improved.
Oh people definitely want it changed or rather removed and have been saying that from the moment it was first announced. It’s a terrible mechanic and tying everything else in the spec with it causes unnecessary friction and leads to frustration. The problem is that they’ve integrated it so thoroughly with not only the spec tree but also both hero trees that they can’t simply remove it without yet another complete overhaul to the entire spec. If history is any indicator that means we will likely be stuck with Salvo for the remainder of the expansion but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work on an interim solution in the meantime, particularly something that reduces the unpredictable nature of Salvo stack generation.
I just want Orb Mastery gone and Missiles to be buffed back up so that it’s a viable spender in AoE situations. That would be a good start on a long path.
I’m not a big fan of arcane orb in general. I’m kinda surprised that the new pulse spell wasn’t a choice node with arcane orb. They seem to fill the same role.
Change orb barrage to a choice node that let’s it cast arcane pulse/explosion instead of orb (probably buffed damage to account for less damage).
There is nothing more annoying than having an orb fly out and hit something you don’t want to hit.
intuition
For intuition I think a remediation would be keep the buff cap at 20 but let salvo stacks go up to 30 or so; only spend 20 max at a time but make over-capping less of an annoyance and feel bad mechanic.
% chance on pretty much everything
Make it more deterministic, or completely deterministic, this is incredibly annoying and it’s just notfun to sometimes do damage or do no damage.
It’s annoying, it’s not exciting to get a proc, it’s just a relief.
I’m looking at the proposed arcane pulse changes coming in 12.1 and it looks like it could just fill the role of arcane orb.
I mean, it’s nice to be able to do the wii bowling mini game with orbs when you’re at range and all your targets aren’t grouped up but they are in a line. Like on mythic rotmire, how you can stand on the range stack and hit the range and melee adds.
But arcane pulse would be so much better for m+ imo. It would be cool if arcane pulse and arcane orb were a choice node but I wouldn’t be against straight replacing orb with pulse either. Though I’m sure there are some orb enjoyers out there.
This would be great. Especially for splinters granting salvo stacks.
But what purpose does intuition serve? It’s a buff to arcane barrage damage and incentives getting max salvo stacks. But does incentiving max salvo stacks make for good gameplay? To me it just feels like I’m delaying my cooldowns on pull and I feel punished if I have to barrage without max stacks.
I think arcane would be more enjoyable if it was removed and then arcane was tuned around it.
Exactly. There is a fine line between being happy for getting something and sad for not getting it.
For example, not getting an orb proc after a barrage when you have no orb charges left and needing to cast the slowest arcane blast does not feel good.
Having splinters push your salvo stack to 20 while mid arcane blast cast does not feel good. (It would feel good with your 30 max stack and you can only consume 20 suggestion though ).
Or, and hear me out, we just get rid of Salvo entirely and none of this will ever be a problem again! We already have Arcane Charges as a spec mechanic, we absolutely do not need Salvo as well. If they want to limit the amount of time we press Barrage there are other ways to do it not this gimmick.
I do heavily dislike Arcane Salvo as a mechanic, but what makes it really terrible are both Intuition and Polished Focus. Without those 2 talents, it’s suddenly a lot easier to play and less punishing as well. Those two are huge culprits of us running out of mana all the time in 12.0.
Of all the mechanics to recycle from previous expansions they had to choose freaking Arcane Harmony that nobody ever liked.
Completely agree. And what makes it so much worse is that the only treason those two talents exist at all is because they’re completely intellectually bankrupt and couldn’t think of any other way to fill out the talent tree besides adding yet more pointless damage multipliers that could have simply been baked in. And yes, the mana issues were a direct consequence of that poorly thought out process.
Spot on here. I never understood why they didn’t let us have Intuition has a CC proc reset, considering it’s tied into a spender, as it would streamline the process, just like pretty much every other spec that has procs like this.
My gripe with all of this is that we still have to not only fish for dmg but we also have to ramp in the process and heaven forbid we don’t get procs and we stand there just dumpstering our mana to finally hit max salvo stacks. I…….just don’t get it.
Mana as a DPS spec resource has quite literally never worked in the history of the game. A slowly regenerating resource like mana only works for healing specializations where it serves as an artificial throttle that prevents healing from being too strong and invalidating boss mechanics as well as completely taking away any player agency and decision making out of healing.
But for a DPS spec that has to constantly pump out damage in the fast paced modern version of the game having to deal with mana is absurd. That’s why every other DPS caster spec besides Arcane has another simple and straightforward resource that is easy to play around and intuitive. Essence, Madness, Astral Power, Maelstrom, Soul Shards, and so on.
The main reason Arcane has always been so awkward both to balance and play is precisely because they’ve always tried to shoehorn mana into it and it just doesn’t work. But they keep trying and this is the result.
I’ve played Arcane for 22 years and the only times it has felt good to play was when mana wasn’t an issue, like in Legion and TWW. Which is why it’s so frustrating that they took a huge step back in Midnight and not only completely upended the entire flow of the spec with the stupid Arcane Salvo but also managed to reintroduce mana issues as a direct result of that horrible mechanic that they’ve been pushing on us in one form or another since SL.
My only issue with mana right now is in aoe with arcane pulse. It costs to much to be able to spam and you end up running out of mana repeatedly before surge comes back.
Yeah, well, Pulse will have a 15s cooldown and not cost much mana at all anymore, so that part is solved. We’re also getting a lot more CC procs with Prismatic Bolt, which helps with mana economy quite a bit, but I still hate both talents that force us to barrage at max stacks. Old Intuition was so good, and they had to turn it into this bastardized version instead.
They tried arcane mage and was like, you know what’s REALLY fun? Hard casting arcane blast with 0 charges, man that’s just, the bees knees…
I don’t get it either, seems like decisions made in a vacuum.
TWW season 3 (I only really started then) it was all about how much could you get away with spamming barrage and still have charges, now it’s just so boring and feels like a punishment to use my skill that should feel good.
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