Why does arcane have to juggle buffs and procs to even make use of our dang 4 piece set bonus? Tier bonuses just used to work, that was it. Buff here, buff there, but now it is a juggling act.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to get an arcane artillery proc and not have any clearcasting procs to follow up with it. It is so incredibly frustrating and defeating when you work so hard to get the buff, only to have it fall off because no clearcasting was proc’d to enhance those missiles.
Even more so difficult when being trained by demon hunters, arms warriors and rogues.
A simple change, which I would so heartily welcome would be for arcane artillery proc to be treated as a clearcasting proc already.
It’s indeed such a simple and commonsense suggestion (that has been suggested many times already) which makes you wonder why they didn’t think of it themselves. Or why the tier set bonuses revolve around consuming the Clearcasting proc rather than simply generating it. It’s things like that which make me wonder just who do they have in charge of designing new things for mages because they clearly don’t play a mage.
I think we’re all feeling the same pain. The RNG around clearcasting generation sucks. I’ve had raid boss fights where I don’t get a proc at all in the full 20 second window…and the 10% dmg buff just drops off. This is all while I cast as frequently as possible…of course as soon as it drops off, I get a CC like next spell…of course. There are a couple other threads sharing much the same sentiment, but I hear you and you’re right, some simple tuning would be enough to take it from “frustrating” to “fun”.
There are a few things they could do to address it for sure. Your suggestion or even making Arcane Artillery generate a Clearcasting proc would be an easy fix.
Another one that would help is making Concentration refund a Clearcasting proc instead of not consuming it since the way it works now doesn’t interact with the tier set.
And let’s not forget that the Arcane Battery buff could really use a hefty duration increase. It really is a shame it is so clunky because this tier set is actually fun in AoE to see a myriad missiles fired at the same time.
Daily reminder the mage dev does not look at feedback, which is why we still have chrono-shift, improved prismatic barrier, rule of threes, foresight and supernova where they currently are (and thus never picked in PvE)
Although I agree with your point, you waste your time.
To be able to ignore concentration in balancing the tier set. Because the charge isn’t technically consumed it doesn’t receive the bonus when it procs. At least that’s what they were probably thinking.
I believe Concentration was updated to now work with Nether Precision, which means they could have applied the same fix to the tier bonus. My guess would be that the people responsible for making fixes and the people responsible for making new content are not the same people and don’t always communicate. The “fix it” people are 2 seasons behind on mage bugs, so it’s not likely that both of those dev teams were aware of the upcoming work and fixes.
When it comes to the maintenance buff, I don’t even look at it. It’s just not worth the pain. It’s a nice buff, but I’d prefer to not be reminded of the fact that it exists.
Also I just want to add that I think chrono shift is a good talent, but its placement and overall competition with the rest of the tree is the problem. It’s good, but it’s not throughput, so it’ll never be taken as long as there’s a throughput option to take instead.
The juggling is surreal, like dang. Most of the time the 4pc doesn’t even align with mob pulls because they die too fast before getting that sweet third clearcasting proc. Technically takes four to proc it but who’s counting… lots of anxiety with this tier set.
Here’s a hot take: make the baseline Arcane Missiles behave like the Clearcast ones do now and make the Clearcasting proc turn them into Greater Arcane Missiles instead which would be the same as the Arcane Battery proc. That way if you get a CC proc you’d always want to use it on AM even in AoE and only use it with AE when the mobs are almost dead and won’t survive the full channel of AM.
No way they’d ever do that considering it took this long to make Arcane Explosion do something other than just not cost mana with Clearcasting. The echoed explosion is a very nice touch and also unlikely to change considering we already cast it way less in AoE due to Orb Barrage.
Tier bonus is still gimped and requires excessive maintenance. Was doing a dungeon earlier, and:
2 piece bonus is 20 seconds duration.
4 piece bonus is 30 seconds.
Concentration buff does not count a clearcasting proc, so you just wasted and dropped your 2 piece bonus.
Congrats, you proc’d arcane artillery, but have no clearcasting procs to use and your 2 piece bonus just fell off.
For the love of Odin, increase our 2 piece maintenance buff to 30 seconds and have Artillery fire off as if you already have a clearcasting proc. So crummy. Who designed this set?
It’s less the set and more that clearcasting has had this rng problem since it was brought back in bfa. Any time arcane cares about clearcasting it sucks to play.
If they want to keep clearcasting around, the spec should have a way to guarantee proc it like the venthyr covenant ability so we arent stuck praying for procs when the opportunity is right.
And yea they don’t read these forums so we are shouting into the void, these problems have been discussed for years with no action to address them, so don’t expect much.
There’s nothing like watching your 2 piece proc fall off as you’re casting arcane missiles that isn’t cc buffed because you don’t want to waste the 4 piece buff just to have cc missiles proc right after because you spent 10k more mana than explosion.
On a side note, even though I know you should basically have a refreshed 2 piece buff before going into a burn to guarantee 10% damage the whole time but sometimes you just have to rip your cool downs without holding them too much longer and waiting for cc. Well if you’re out of range and explosion won’t hit your target to munch a radiant spark stack it’s an easy way to just explosion out of range just to save 10% damage damage while still being able to finish the ramp
A time limited buff, that is used to trigger a time limited spell that is triggered by a time limited RNG proc, that would be Robin Goodfellow but he’s known as Puck.