I love arcane. It is my favorite spec. However, for a long time now it has consistently been underperforming and falling behind the other two specs. The sad thing is it’s been this way for a long time without even a peep about it from Blizz. Blizz, are you there???
Arcane needs a serious buff to pull it up and make it a viable option over fire atm.
Personally, I think the easiest thing to do that would provide a nice buff to dps would be to cut the mana cost of all abilities by 10%. For arcane that translates almost 1 to 1 to damage.
Arcane has been consistently about 20 points behind the top classes on warcraftlogs. I’ve been watching it for weeks now and it’s stayed in the bottom.
Please! Buff arcane! I really want to play it but I literally am not allowed to by groups who only want the best.
Unfortunately all three specs have been performing pretty poorly, and have some pretty bad playstyles at the moment with so much of your damage tied into ROP windows and being extrememly heavily punished for movement or messing up those windows. It’s extremely unlikely they’re going to do anything in the way of a tuning pass between now and 10.0, but you never know what they’ll do once season 4 becomes a thing.
About the best you can hope for is that the new talent trees etc make things a bit better. Arcane suffers from realistically only having 2-3 spells in its kit for ST and Blizzard hates the idea of buffing it. It will be interesting to see what they do about mana in 10.0, but here’s hoping that all 3 specs are not only decent in terms of numbers but have a more fluid and fun playstyle.
I’d like it if they would revert our mastery back to the way it was between cata and WoD if they intend to keep this mana management tied to arcane. Mana being a very powerful resource at the time actually made that aspect of arcane interesting and rewarding, but now it’s not. It’s just there for cc procs and even then it’s pretty much just a nerf compared to how the procs used to be when it wasn’t tied to mana.
Atm, going into the testing phase for 10.0 I am only worried about the function of the specs before any damage buffs here and there. As for how they are now, I’ve honestly kind of just settled with how they are now. It’s not what anyone would want to hear, but it is what it is
I agree in regards to mana. It was fine as a resource some time ago, but it now seems only to exist as a means to proc CC and limit the potential of Arcane (as well as its rotation). I’m sure there are still a few who enjoy the mana management system, but I feel that removing it and giving Arcane a solid and more engaging rotation would get a lot more players onto it. Spec fantasy is one thing, but fun gameplay is more important.
The issue is that they kept adding new concepts to us without updating the old ones. I like the mana management, to be honest. But I’ve been playing arcane for over a decade, so it’s a core part of the fantasy for me.
Back then it was basically managing mana, arcane charges, and making use of the occasional proc. Now, we still have those mechanics but we’re given the ADDITIONAL jobs of managing cooldowns that don’t line up and watching stacks of a legendary (if you’ve gone the Kyrian-Harmony route) all on top of the fact that we need to stand still to do damage and we’re never allowed to do so. I personally enjoy the Kyrian-Harmony playstyle, but it’s a lot to keep track of sometimes.
Arcane used to be all about control. There wasn’t a rotation. We had phases. You did different things in different phases based on how much mana you had and where your cooldowns were. Think you’re good enough to manage low mana for a while? Stay burning longer. Not sure if a mechanic is gonna screw you? Swap from burning to conserving for a little. We had a lot of agency over what actions we took and when.
Now, because of all the mechanics we need to deal with, it’s gone back to basically just being a rotation. Mana management has become a joke. We’re never actually managing it. Either we have it or we don’t.
They need to do at least one of the following:
Reduce the number of resources we need to track
Remove mana from arcane as a resource (as they have with all other caster dps classes)
Line up our cooldowns
Reduce the number of cooldowns we need to use to be viable
Let us cast while moving (at least while we burst)
Baseline slipstream has been requested basically since it was added
A lot of suggestions have been made to allow us to cast while moving at a reduced speed while Arcane Power is active.
Double down on the mana management and give us more control over it
An example would be allowing us to maintain 3 arcane charges instead of 4 so that we can coast our dps a bit longer without going down to 0.
Having more abilities that actually interact with our mana pool or arcane charges could be HUGE for the spec if they can do it correctly.
I’m sure there are other options out there, but the sad truth is that no matter what Blizzard decides to do, we’re likely going to lose something. We have too much going on at this point and we need a bit of a pruning, and those types of changes usually involve people getting upset.
Arcane is by far in my honest opinion the most boring spec of mage. Spam arcane barrage and arcane missiles over and over is not fun. Fire and frost atleast as some fun game play, I’ve always been fire since legion off and on, but I get what your saying, all 3 specs needs to be tunes so that they are all relevant and do good damage.
This one spec above all has been going on for a very long time and blizzard can’t seem to grasp that all specs and all classes should be viable, they buff and nerf around pvp it seems like.
I think this would go a long way to making Arcane a more engaging spec, provided it is done right. Arcane could work quite well as a build/spend spec utilising Arcane Charges a little more, assuming the spec gets more than 2 spells that interact with AC. I know a lot of people don’t want to turn Arcane into a “caster rogue” but there are ways to utilise build/spend resources outside of just ‘build to 5, blow load’.
This is a big one. Again there are some that like the cooldown stacking, as it provides burst but I feel as though currently it’s just stacking multiple modifiers without any interaction. I’m not a fan of pure % damage modifiers, so CD stacking doesn’t float my boat. TotM fills its purpose for cleave/aoe (does need fixing though) but CDs like AP really need to interact with the spec more.
100%. I know Shimmer exists but it’s not the same, and still sucks for phases where you’re constantly moving little bits at a time (aka dodging swirlies). Baseline slipstream would go a long way, as would the other two suggestions you make. Long gone are the days of turreting.
I just hope that whatever they choose to do brings more variety and interaction to the spec. I don’t mean making it more complex, but spamming 1-2 buttons a whole fight isn’t super exciting and Arcane has so much potential to bring more to the rotation without bloat. At this point Arcane feels like a relic, outdated for 10 years.
Ironically, I find arcane to be the most interesting and fire to be the least interesting. Just goes to show that even within a single class we can all have very different ideas of what is and is not fun.
But arcane is 50% a relic of the past and 50% “let’s throw things at it until something sticks”. Unfortunately, the things that stick don’t really synergize well with each other. Of all the options I laid out for blizzard to look at, I’d be most interested to see them try to double down on mana management, but in a way that reworks a lot of the rest of the class. It’d let arcane stay unique among dps classes.
Give us more spells that interact with our mana pools / our charges. Gives us more ways to spend charges. Let us spend just one charge at a time. An ability that lets us spend one charge at a time could let us do steady damage at times when bursting isn’t appropriate and conserving may hurt the group. There are SO MANY things that blizzard could do and simply doesn’t.
Everything as it is works but it doesn’t feel good. I mean yeah, stupid high crits feel good, but without a way to guarantee the crit, you can be left feeling frustrated because your one big spell that you get every minute and a half did half as much damage as it could have. Both Frost and Fire have ways to ensure that big hits will be crits. Arcane does not. Therefore, arcane should NOT be the spec that pumps out one big hit a minute or so. It’s just not built that way.
Arcane fulfills an important class fantasy for me. Being on the “good” side or the “light” side is important for me. It is a story element I enjoy. For this reason I have had trouble playing warlocks as they don’t really feel “good” to me. The closest I can come to a “white mage” is an arcane mage. Arcane and Order are the opposites of necrotic magic and death. It even shows arcane on the pantheon chart that came out a while ago.
MY favorite is to also pair this with the Kyrian so I can have a “white mage” playing for the “angels”. But…I can’t really do any of this because of how poorly arcane is doing right now with NO help from Blizzard at all.
Please blizzard, buff arcane NOW. We desperately need it.
Arcane is weird when you say blizzard has no intention of buffing it. You’re not wrong, but they keep poking at it, but it gets worse every iteration. They tried to rework it in BFA. Then they did it again for SL and it was worse. The fact a fully charged AB is only 5k damage at my ilvl is just plane sad. I’m doing sub-par dps WHILE chewing through my mana lol. The biggest issue I see is Blizzard still doesn’t understand it’s a mana economy spec and they give no payoff for understanding how to play the economy. It looks like I’m supposed to be doing AP Rop burst windows with ridiculous trinkets and I might do something (but still no where close to other specs XD).
I guess we’re all supposed to play warlocks. Class balance looks like a joke when i hop on Warcraft logs
