Arcane is getting a Mana Dump Talent or Spell. Interesting… Hopefully it doesn’t make our rotation clunky.
I have mixed feeling about this one. It is the old Arcane Power, but with Shaman Air Ascendance-like AoE nuke on cast (ranged though) and 2.5s cast attached. It is also effectively useable only with full mana, giving it an additional limitation.
Pros: Adds a burst AoE component to ability and ToTM became instant cast to compensate
Cons: 2.5 sec cast time sounds horrible for PVP, where Arcane Mages have lots of trouble with kicks as is. Now even their major CD would become kickable and 2.5 sec cast time gives enemies lots of time to react to it.
Solution: Reduce cast time to 1.5 seconds (like Void Eruption is for Shadow Priests) and / or add an ability to remove interrupt / silence effects applied to you like Arcane Surge suggested in one of my topics, so that you can deal with interrupts as Arcane Mage better.
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yeah the interrupts are going to be a problem. I don’t know why blizzard is adding long cast times to these spells. Arcanosphere is 4 secs and doesn’t benefit from haste.
Arcane Surge is mostly likely replacing Arcane Power in Dragonflight. The changes to Arcane Power rank 2 support this.
The cast time is fine even in PvP. In fact it’s our only setup now that Touch is instant. Use Mass Invisibility for CC or cast setup. We might be even getting Mass Polymorph and Dragon Breath. Talking about the cast time in vacuum is silly.
The damage is incredibly high and if it’s a projectile it will benefit from the damage buff it provides and Touch.
While ToTM did become instant, Arcane Power went from off GCD to 2.5s cast, so total time of casting to burst did increase. MI is conditional - if you have at least 1 dot on you, it would break instantly, so it is not enough. However, I do agree that initial burst does big damage and cast time is justified, just make it something like 1.5s and then it is reasonable.
Arcane power did what? They changed what?
knowing Blizz they probably wont let us cast this in Mass Invis, just like arcanosphere
Arcane Surge is replacing Arcane Power. Read the wowhead article.
The amount of damage the ability does warrants the long cast, if it was 1.5s it would be OP. To put it in perspective Arcanosphere does 120% of SP * 4 . Arcane Surge does 268% SP * 2 . The ability is incredibly hard hitting, and the cast time is more than justified for it, not to mention the fact that it uses your entire mana bar might mean it also guarantees a Clear Casting proc. Greater Pyro had almost double the cast time and was like the main gimmick for fire PVP in BFA.
The new Time Anomaly confirms this - “Time Anomaly: At any moment, you have a chance to gain Arcane Surge for 6 sec”. Which begs the question, does that mean every so often when Arcane Surge procs, it does its damage portion to the target as well?
I’m really not against big cast time spells as long as the reward is just as good.
I’m wondering if it will do damage when it procs with Time Anomaly but I’d guess it won’t. Seeing as Combustion and Icy Veins are the equivalent spells that proc for the other specs it would be strange to give Arcane so much more value out of its proc but…I’m hard coping that it will.
More cope: seeing that they’re adding in Evocation’s mana regen into Arcane Surge and allowing it to proc mana regen that way thru Time Anomaly, perhaps they are changing Evocation to do something else than what it currently does?
They’re making it a 2 minute cd again as well from what we can tell, misaligning it from Surge. No CDR datamined either, but the Arcane section was very thin and definitely not finished compared to the others.
I think Evocation was misaligned from Surge because of Siphon Storm potentially making its way into the Arcane Tree. Either that or perhaps Evocation heal is finding its way back or maybe even both. Like you said we’ll have to wait and see when the release the mage tree on the Alpha, which I hope is soon.
From the amount of datamined info we saw for mage relative to other classes I’m hoping we’ll see our trees on Thursday!
There is a difference - Arcanosphere can be cast hiding behind pillars and that justifies its cast time. Arcane Surge almost definitely would require LoS to hit, so is not useable in such a way. Greater Pyro is a good comparison, but getting kicked on Fire school for Fire Mage is not too big deal, he can still spam Poly, while Arcane Mage kicked on Arcane Surge would be left with Fire Blast and couple Frost spells and put into major disadvantage (depends on how many other school spells they would add to the general tree). So, reducing Arcane Surge cast time and / or giving an interrupt / silence removal tool would still be helpful.
If you are bursting someone I would like to think you already have some setup to guarantee LOS. Otherwise I don’t see a functional difference between then and now?
If you for some reason do not have any crowd control on the target, then if they LOS your burst it’s simply delayed for no real cost since you haven’t spent any CD yet.
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I would hope that Time Anomaly only grants the mana regen and damage increase from surge. If it also did the damage component, would it not also need to do the “spend all your mana” portion to determine how much damage to deal?
If so, if you’re already at minimal mana, the damage would be negligible. Or, if you’re 0.1 second away from finishing a cast, the mana drain could hit you right as the spell is finishing, causing it to fail because you have no mana until the regen kicks in.
And correct me if I’m wrong (I don’t PvP), but isn’t arcanosphere unaffected by haste as well? If that’s the case, and you’re trying to one-shot people in PvP with surge, then maybe stacking more haste is the way to go (assuming surge IS affected by haste).
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Mythlos is correct, kill targets are already meant to be cross CC’d in an Arena scenario regardless of cast times or class so nothing really changes. If Arcane Surge is a risky cast then its the job of the team you’re playing with to ensure that you can get it off. The reward (on paper) for such a cast definitely seems worth the work needed for it.
Additionally, with Rogue getting Gouge and Garrote Silence on top of Ring of Frost no longer having to compete with Chrono Shift means that Arcane Mages and their main comp are going to have more combined CC options available for that purpose.
Also as Desolation mentioned, Arcane Surge is most likely going to be affected by haste, which is the main stat we stack on PVP gear anyway. Looking at the top Mage of the ladder for 3v3 his Haste is 30% meaning a 2.5s cast becomes 1.9s and thats outside of Arena since his gear scales up in PVP meaning its even lower in an actually match.
Two words - trinket + kick. No matter how many cross CC you apply, this combo would break the burst attempt with Arcane Surge. While currently situation is similar with ToTM, 1.5 sec cast vs 2.5 sec cast does make a difference, as that is one less second to react - people often do not trinket immediately in cross-CC and spend about one second thinking whether it is needed. So, with ToTM they would have 0.2-0.5s (depending on your Haste) to kick it and with Arcane Surge they would have 0.9-1.5s, which is more than enough. And if Arcane already struggles in rated games with current casts, now imagine what would happen if the cast time to burst would get almost doubled.
I think Blizzard’s biggest mistake is that they give Arcane more and more long hard cast spells like Arcanosphere and Arcane Surge. They do tie big rewards to them, but as long as Arcane is defenseless against interrupts, these additions will not help much. For example, Arcanosphere addition did not help Arcane Mages to become competitive enough in rated PVP - it created some cheese one shot builds and some battleground fun and that is it. Arcane Surge might easily follow the same route - people will just get used to getting one person from cross-cc with trinket to kick it and ruin the burst attempt. As it has 90s CD, rotating 2-3 2 min trinkets for it would not be hard to do. It does not matter that if Arcane could complete the cast he would launch a 500% SP nuke… simply because against coordinated team more often than not that would not happen when needed or would happen when the healer / target got prepared and already popped a defensive CD.
As a result, to help Arcane in PVP, it needs tools to deal with interrupts and less hardcasting, not even more than currently.
… ok? Then wait 3s then do it anyway cause they just used their interrupt so you can freecast your entire burst. They can’t stop you for the whole trinket cooldown.
That’s the point. You aren’t setting up anything to actually burst. You cast this ability then you’re set for at least 6-7 GCDs with all the instants you can throw out between touch, barrage, and PoM ABs. Then chuck all the CC AMs you get for free while you at it.
Like I don’t understand your argument. You just want our entire burst to be instant like Combustion Fire. That’s fine. You can also play Fire.
Arcanosphere has the downside of being a channel, thus when you’re kicked it goes on CD so it feels awful to be kicked on it.
Arcane Surge is a cast so you wouldn’t need to wait out its CD if kicked. The only thing you would potentially lose out on is Touch of the Magi if you used it first before you used Arcane Surge and that’s only 45s, not 90. Like Mythlos said you’d just wait for the next go and they’d have no trinket and you’d have all of your CDs back. Also, you’d probably bait out kicks before your goes. People from every rank of Arena kick random abilities on the regular without any strategic thought, so throw a random Arcane Blast or two to get kicks out of the way.
The number of hard casted abilities will stay the same as now though, as Arcane Surge is being added, but in its place Touch of the Magi is now instant, meaning we have the same number of hard casted abilities as before.
I don’t find Arcane struggles as much with this as people think and I think too many people used it as a crutch as to why they can’t achieve high rating or succeed in PVP. Arcane’s bigger issue is more the lack of reward for the amount of risk taken. Arcane is by far the riskiest Mage spec to play in Arena, but it lacks the damage or utility of both Fire and Frost which are both much more forgiving to play in PVP. Arcane isn’t necessarily bad, its just not as OP as Fire atm and if you’re goal is to climb the ladder you pick the spec that’s the most OP.
That’s not to say that its not a weakness that Arcane is only a single school, and its 100% frustrating to keep getting interrupted for sure, but I don’t think this is what stops Arcane from seeing play on the ladder. If anything, it’s what stops Arcane from playing at a tournament level, which is far different from the ladder.
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