Please consider reducing the cast time of Arcane Surge in 12.1. While this feedback comes primarily from a PvP perspective, PvE would also benefit from the change.
Arcane Mage is heavily reliant on a single spell school, making it especially vulnerable to interrupts and disruption. Because Arcane Surge has such a long cast time, there are many PvP matches where it’s simply unrealistic to ever get the spell off against competent opponents. As the spec’s defining offensive cooldown, it feels unnecessarily restrictive when it can be shut down so consistently before it ever has an impact.
Reducing the cast time would improve reliability without fundamentally changing the spell’s power or identity. It would create more opportunities for Arcane Mages to execute their intended gameplay while still allowing opponents meaningful counterplay through positioning, crowd control, and interrupts. In PvE, the change would also make the cooldown feel smoother and less punishing to use during movement-heavy encounters.
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I’ve said this since they (unnecessarily) added it. It’s beyond obnoxious to have casts over 2 seconds in the modern era of “move every 1.5 seconds or die” dungeons and raids. Or, if they’re going to keep it that slow, it needs to have its damage increased tenfold.
Frost mage has to channel ray of frost, they are not going to reduce the cast time of arcane surge.
In single target combat what has more instant cast spells frost or arcane. Isnt it still frost?
If frost is more mobile then wouldnt it make sense to allow arcane to do its burst easier? Also ray of frost does all the damage but arcane surge is more about buffing yourself so you can then do damage afterwards so i dont think its comparable.
Arcane Surge simply does too much. It drains our mana pool. It deals cleave damage (dealing more the more mana you drain). It gives us a damage increase. It gives us mana regen. As Spellslinger it gives us immediate splinters AND increases our chance for more splinters. As Sunfury it gives Blast Wave on blink, more stacks of Mana Cascade, and our Phoenix (which by extension gives us Arcane Soul).
That’s a lot of things to cram into one ability - especially one that only has 3 talents in the spec tree. In order to make it feel like a big spell (which it is for our kit), they gave it a big cast time.
Unfortunately, most of the time casting surge doesn’t feel like I’m casting a big spell. Especially considering the buff it replaced was instant. My main issue is the damage component is astronomically low. I’m no star player, but on Rotmire this week it accounted for less than 1% of the damage I dealt. Compare that to the Frost mage who leads our raid group whose Ray of Frost dealt almost 13% of his damage.
How many other classes have an ability where the primary component of the ability is to buff yourself and it isn’t instant cast? How about ones that aren’t instant but only take a second? It feels incredibly awkward to spend 2 seconds casting a buff - the same awkwardness that made players dislike Arcane’s mana management and Evocation’s role in that.
If Blizzard wants to justify the long cast time on Surge, it simply needs to deal significantly more damage. Otherwise the damage component should be removed and it should be Instant Cast like Arcane Power was. Could even replace the Mana Bomb talent with “Arcane surge is instant cast but no longer deals damage” and I would honestly consider putting a point in the node.
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I think the worst problem with Arcane Surge is the fake damage it supposedly does. It should feel like a powerful hit, but even with the terribly tuned and terribly designed Mana Bomb, the hit itself isn’t really felt by anybody. The damage based on mana spent also never really made much sense since aside from the initial cast at the start of combat, it’ll almost always be when the Mage is on low mana (less of a problem now that mana isn’t really a problem on the PTR). We used to always have Evocation due to Siphon Storm, but even that offered a layer of redundancy on the mana recovery front, so while Arcane Surge recovering our mana is good for our rotation, the damage it does never made much sense being as low as it is.
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While I agree that the cast time is too long, especially considering Arcane Power used to be instant, I don’t see how they could reduce the cast time without also truncating the animation and the whole point of replacing Arcane Power with Arcane Surge was to give us a visually impactful major cooldown. Of course all of that falls flat because while it does look flashy the damage is far from impactful particularly for something with such a long cooldown and cast time. That said, I don’t see how they can buff the damage in a meaningful way given how much ancillary benefits it gives in addition to its damage component. It would be particularly problematic in PvP because it would essentially become a one shot ability.
It’s just yet another example of how nothing in Arcane’s toolkit makes sense and feels like a hodgepodge of competing ideas lacking synergy that got piled on over the years without any effort to properly integrate them into the spec.
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Quite a big difference between the damage of a channeled spell and a spell that is literally the base for our entire burst phase and hits like a bowl of flung jello.
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