This ability already wasn’t incredibly viable for arcane mage. For PvP talents, you are already locked into mass invis and temporal shield 100% of the time. The 3rd PvP talent was most likely still going to be Arcane Empowerment for stronger missile damage/stacks or Arcanosphere. The glaring weakness of Arcanosphere was the fact that it’s on our only damaging school. One nice thing about it, though, was that it would still go off if you were kicked, at whatever power you had channeled it to. Now, this has been changed and it will no longer go off. So, thanks for the new PvP talent that requires a 4 second channel to do significant damage, otherwise just a small knockback and never worth picking. zzz. starburst for boomy prolly wont get nerfed all season tho
For those trying to figure out what Astranna was talking about:
While I haven’t actually tried it in pvp, I’m surprised it did not work this way initially. It did indeed sound like a bug.
You want to have an ability that can one-shot a whole group of players be uninterruptible???
I was just coming here to post about that. I don’t know if it was a bug per se but the way it used to work is that if the channel was interrupted, for whatever reason, the spell would still go off but would deal less damage scaling with the length of the channel.
I don’t necessarily think that was an inappropriate way for the spell to act. It makes a lot of sense for it to be that way when you think about it.
Plus, I don’t think the spell is nearly as powerful in practice as most people thought based on trying it against dummies in their class hall… Not only is it very clunky because of the long channel but it’s also a skill shot and has a medium long cooldown. It was also literally the only thing that gave Arcane any kind of edge in PvP so all the nerfs are not really warranted imo, although I am sure there will be more coming.
It doesn’t one shot an entire group of players and it also was never uninterruptible. As I stated, you can interrupt it, but it would still fire off at whatever power you channeled it to. This ability does not do good damage unless you get most or the entire channel off. It also doesn’t come anywhere near one-shotting a fully geared enemy player unless you start stacking modifiers. (Arcane Power, Rune of Power, Covenant/Conduit Buffs Etc.) Even so, it can also be stopped by any CC in the game, disorient, stun etc. Now, this spell is nearly impossible to reasonably use against players who are capable of realizing what ability you pressed and using any of the multiple stops they have to prevent your cast.
Compare this ability to the new Balance Druid PvP talent Starburst, which drops Stars on the ground your allies and even their PETS can grab. You run into enemy players with these stars and deal massive damage (15k+ crits) and it can hit all enemies in a short range, also knocking them up. Multiple of these stars are generated every starfall, and each star is dealing the amount of damage a normal fully-casted Arcanosphere without any other cooldowns used does.
Warriors getting execute buffed is ok. Arcanosphere gives minor damage if interrupted early. Rage
There isn’t a spell in this game that still goes off after being interrupted though? This change only makes counterplay meaningful. Also you can dump temp shield against a lot of comps so you’ll still have viable talent options
Right but there weren’t any channel and release spells either until Arcanosphere at least afaik. The way channeling works is that you deal damage periodically at even intervals throughout the channel time. With Arcanosphere you don’t do any damage until the channel ends and you release the spell (which you can do prematurely by interrupting the channel yourself if you chose to). In other words it’s really a charge up spell rather than a channel even though it’s labeled as such because there is no established language for that in tooltips. It seems to me that they tried to do something unique with this spell but are not backing down for some reason.
you realize that sphere is mechanically different from ‘spells’, right? it’s actually not a cast technically. more like an interaction channel.
and you’re still missing the point. if someone stops the interaction bar, the sphere is not only going to deal significantly less damage, but it will also miss the target you were tracking and aiming to hit.
arcanosphere is a total disaster so far.
i like the conception of a spell you need to aim, channel to cast, and goes off at interrupt
too much homogenization in world of esports
It’s great seeing Arcanosphere do good damage, but I don’t think I’ll keep using it. The knockback is horribly soft, not being able to start casting on the move works against Chrono Shift’s speed boost kiting, another Arcane spell to hard cast was the last thing Arcane PvP needed, and while I try to line up targets I can’t even see or tell if the knockback even did anything. The spell has potential to make the spec more interesting but it isn’t what the spec needed imo. Similarly, I don’t run Arcane Empowerment because it encourages more hard casts which Arcane Mages can’t afford to have interrupted.
Torment of the Weak is a better PvP talent than both of these, and caters more to my Barrage Bomb spec, so I’ll be going back to that.
I really dig the skill myself, seems fair to me since it shoots threw walls, fantastic in RBG. Small knock backs are great for interrupts, and we can now throw people off cliffs, how is that not awesome?
Nope. This ability is still amazing! I can actually compete as Arcane (the only thing I’ve played this entire expansion). As long as the damage isnt nerfed, I am happy.
When it comes to organized, rated PvP it isn’t a question of whether an ability is good on paper, it’s whether you will ever get the opportunity to use it. A 4 second channel is never going to be allowed to go off outside of very specific battleground situations where you can LoS and ambush other players with it. It’s way too niche to ever make Arcane the go to mage spec in PvP. Certainly not with its limitations in the survivability and mobility departments, no say nothing of the magic school lookout. Not when you’ve got Fire with none of those drawbacks.
Of course this is a assuming we’re talking about rated PvP, anything goes in random unrated content.
You pretty much have to use Arcanosphere while LoS’ed exclusively. I one-shot a druid orb carrier through a wall in the Temple map when he tried to escape to the graveyard. If I do happen to cast it out in the open, I will save my Mass Invis until ~2sec into the cast to hopefully elude any late interupts. It’s risky to begin with, but that’s the tradeoff for the big damage.
I’m pretty sure you can pop Arcane Power just after Arcanosphere releases and the damage multipliers of Arcane Power (and Rune of Power, if specced) will affect the Arcanosphere damage. If someone could confirm this, I think it would be helpful to people that are popping Arcane Power BEFORE channeling Arcanosphere.
The knockback could stand to be 2-5 more yards more powerful. I’m not saying it should be Thunderstorm powerful, but even 25-50% as strong as Thunderstorm would feel better.
Right, that’s the kind of scenario I was talking about but it’s entirely dependent of the terrain which makes it incredibly niche and unreliable since not a lot of BG maps have that kind of layout and even fewer arenas do. On top of that because it’s a skill shot and you can’t see your target you have to anticipate where they will be in order to land a hit which makes it infinitely more complex and gimmicky and further limits the situations where it can be used at least somewhat reliably i.e. when you know where someone will be.
P.S. I agree that the knockback is puny but I guess it was meant as more of a pseudo interrupt than a true KB because of the long range advantage. Though it would have been 10x funnier if it worked like an actual bowling ball hurtling down a lane (or the infamous AV bridge).
Tower fights in AV are way waaaay more interesting now LOL…
This change is dumb. If it’s not going to deal damage if interrupted mid-channel like literally any other channeling spell in the game which deals partial damage as channeled then make it a cast and let it scale with haste.
this is ridiucllous and the cast time needs to be reduced if this is the case. or they need to make it so there is a 5 sec CD if it doesnt go off. what a waste.
yes, modifiers applied after you cast it buff it. Also, playing around with Supernova. If you Supernova a second before Arcanosphere hits, you can T-Ball them 5 or so yards farther back than with just the sphere.
I just wish you could at least aim it slightly up or down. Its neat that it travels through literally everything, but being able to aim it down or up a ramp would be nice vs it just flying overtop the enemy’s head.