Am I alone in thinking that surge dropping RoP is flawed?
We just dump all our mana then you want us to dump it all again with rune?
Make it drop off Magi or Spark, anything else would make more sense.
Quality of life function duh. The mana portion of the tooltip is just for rpg razzle dazzle. You don’t actually run out of mana.
No you’re not alone. The entire mana aspect of the spec is flawed and a relic of a different time when mana was a proper resource for all casters. What does Arcane Surge do after it dumps all of your mana? It gives you a buff that regenerates it! Flawed circular logic at its best (worst). So what’s the point you ask? The only reason Arcane Surge drops your mana at all is for flavor and so that someone over at Blizzard can pat themselves on the back after deluding themselves that they’ve given Arcane a unique identity.
As for AS dropping RoP that’s another relic from when they made all primary Mage cooldowns auto drop RoP on cast. If you look at the talent node description for RoP it even still says “Arcane Power” not “Arcane Surge.” And if you will recall Arcane Power reduced the mana cost of your spells so having it drop RoP made sense.
This is just one of the many examples that perfectly illustrate how little effort was spent on the talent tree revamp for DF in general and even less on Mages in particular.
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Yes
You’re not playing arcane correctly if you’re dumping all your mana.
Try reading what surge does.
The only time I seem to run out of mana is during double lust. Other than that you get rune of power during ToM phase.
Agreed, there are just so many things that either don’t make sense or seem very rushed/uninspired - haste/crit nodes, 4% magic damage reduction (when would I even really notice this?), mass polymorph/slow (hey, one less thing to tune if the regular versions aren’t even used in PvE content!), required frost nodes to hit shifting power (why do I need 10% improved snares / 2frost novas as fire?), energized barriers (shouldn’t we be avoiding getting smacked?), and my personal favorite: Wildfire giving you crit during combustion (which doesn’t even convert to mastery since it’s a flat % increase). Gotta ship something, I guess.
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Because pvp is a game mode too
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Pour one out for the suckers that may be trying to play Incanter’s Flow with arcane. The QOL change that made Arcane Surge benefit from its own dropped rune resulted in it taking a 30% damage cut to even it out, but for anyone using IF, that was just a 30% drop and nothing else.
Also solo content, as often-mocked as it is. Granted, I personally don’t find some of those talents too useful there anyway (it feels like they were more to support Shatter back when it was on the class tree) but not every talent needs to translate to some kind of DPS increase. If anything, utility or “for fun” talents is what the whole point of class trees was for.
Yeah I thought about that after I posted it too that people doing solo content could possibly want more survivability.
PvP has its own dedicated talents. Also you must not PvP seriously if you think Frost Nova is anything other than a meme button in PvP. Doesn’t matter how much you buff it as long as it broken by damage it will never be an effective tool in either form of content. About the only thing it’s useful for is rooting mobs in open world content that you are trying to avoid or accidentally overpulled.
And let’s not forget Incantation of Swiftness still giving Arcane a lower benefit even though now all 3 specs have access to Greater Invisibility. Rushed is basically an understatement, they didn’t even bother to work on it at all and just literally copy and pasted haphazardly from SL.
PvP has 3 talents you choose from and still has its own build in both the general and the spec trees.
Its literallty a good way to peel and gain space to poly…I have about 1900 exp on mage.
False
It’s still a bad pathing problem. Those should be optional and one of the many flaws the Mage class tree has. [Frigid Winds] specially can sometimes be detrimental, for example on Sanguine weeks.
Right - I am just suggesting that these talents are (1) particularly uninteresting and (2) should at least provide some non-negligible benefit across both game modes…
If anything, I think the flaw is in having throughput talents at the bottom of the tree, not that optional stuff is “in the way” of getting there.
That the class tree is strangled by needing to take two capstones for DPS is a failure of their stated design.
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Most classes have it that way. As much as I’d rather have the class tree be just utility, defensives and mobility, it’s clear that’s not what they want for everyone.
Yeah, but at the same time, it’s one of the only things we’ve been told for certain about whatever mage class design is supposed to be, since we got so little response on beta feedback. 
If they changed their mind, they should at least communicate that.
THIS
Still need to figure it out.
Im so dry after the double lust that I cant even push the next mini-burn
The problem is we use Evo at the beginning while we are full Mana… and then its not even available when we actually need it
Totally disagree.
Nova is extremely important when you are trained
And equally unimportant if everyone else on your team isn’t and breaks it. And in a 1v1 scenario if you’re having to resort to Frost Nova you’ve already squandered several opportunities and have found yourself in an unfavorable situation against a better prepared opponent.