I don’t want to effortpost this but I want to lead off by saying it is, from my perspective, way too soon to drop a major rotation changing patch like this. That may not have been the intent, but that is what happened. It has not nearly been long enough for me to be tired of my spec and yearning for some shakeup.
Aethervision feels like it was intended to replace double-dipping Nether Precision by incentivizing Arcane Blast → Arcane Blast → Arcane Barrage as a clean combo. In real gameplay it rarely works out like this because of all our other procs and considerations. Firstly, if we have Clearcasting, which is very often, it’s more valuable to hold the Barrage until we Clearcast again, so it gains Nether Precision benefit. This itself puts us in a wonky state where our next 2 NP are spent on Barrage and Arcane Blast, leaving us with 1 stack of Aethervision. This happens more often than not. Secondly, we are incentivized to cast Barrage immediately for Intuition or Glorious Incandecance procs, which further offsets our Aethervision stacks. The result is a rotation that is constantly juggling Aethervision stacks and casting spells in odd, unpredictable sequences that are a headache to continually track and manage.
On top of this, changing Burden of Power to not affect Barrage adds additional difficulty and frustration, as it now requires a different reaction of casting Arcane Blast → Barrage instead of just Barrage. This has proven a difficult adjustment to make.
This spec was extremely fun to play before 11.0.5 patch and had what felt like a reasonable level of challenge on par with other classes and specs I enjoy playing. Now it’s messy and feels less rewarding. The addition of yet another Barrage proc, with extremely high frequency, has made everything harder to manage and less rewarding to execute. I also find it sort of galling that all of this was done to remove double-dipping Nether Precision, because as a player, I didn’t really have to think about it all that much to be effective - the rotation was more focused on just capitalizing on Barrage procs however possible, and the realities of real combat and forced movement played into that. It feels like we are even more turret based than before, which is a major loss in actual on-the-ground effectiveness.
One final note, I leveled this character specifically to play Sunfury Arcane. I don’t appreciate Spellslinger edging it out in overall effectiveness out of nowhere from a surprise hotfix, it is way too early for these kinds of swings. I literally just got a 639 Mythic track weapon for my character. With Frost spec also being broken due to bugs, I am considering just swapping to my Evoker alt. That is… incredibly off-putting and very poor timing.
Addendum: I also just want to elaborate, half the reason I rolled Sunfury Arcane is because of how awesome it looks. When I saw mages running around with the Spellfire Spheres above their heads and summoning meteors early on, I knew this was something I wanted to play. The combination just feels right and the visual and sound effects look amazing and have incredible impact and presence. I made this post because Sunfury Arcane is one of the coolest things I have ever seen WoW do, and that really adds to the frustration with these updates. I wouldn’t care as much if this spec weren’t so sick looking and awesome.