Ah I didnt know that the ilvl was higher in pve only do pvp haha
Well atm you can only play the 3. season t-set -sadly. So the s2 or s1 set which was better for non-glacial gameplay is out of choice.
I’ve literally played fire mage without combustion. And that’s not the craziest off meta thing I’ve done either lol.
I think most people are happy with the fantasy of arcane atm. What I think most of the grips are are around its unforgiving and at times frustrating playstlye along with aspects of the spells that dont fit or make sense. For example Temporal warp. If you don’t lust on pull, it can be a huge dps loss since its figured into our damage profile. Along with Evocation being used on pull. Or having to press 25 spells BEFORE you start doing damage. Hell I don’t mind a dmg modifier spell. But the current activities involved is a little absurd.
As long as I can spend more of my time doing damage, and have more control over my damage (less rng) I will be one happy mage.
2 Likes
Yup, too much ramp up time with all the cooldown stacking and too narrow and heavily scripted burst windows. You mess up one little thing and it’s like a house of cards.
To be fair they are cutting down some on the ramp up and button bloat but the burst windows are largely staying the same. I’ve always thought the spec would play much more smoothly and be more intuitive for players who are picking it up for the first time if it was reworked as a simple builder/spender spec but Blizz clearly disagree, lol.
I’m indifferent to the Radiant Spark change since I really didn’t mind it, although this and the CC change makes things 10x better if we’re to play Harmony since s1 Arcane was pretty cancer to me but I would be really, really happy if they removed Siphon Storm from the game.
2 Likes
You and everyone else, I have legitimately never seen anyone say they like it. Even RoP had its defenders but SS is just terrible gameplay. It’s basically Azshara’s trinket from BfA.
3 Likes
I don’t mind Siphon Storm a whole lot.
When it was introduced, it was an interesting concept. Evocation was the only way to fully regen your mana, and its cooldown was off-cycle from Arcane Power (I wanna say it was 2 minutes to APs 1.5?). This meant you really needed to play the “manage your mana” minigame.
But if you were good at that minigame, the concept of Siphon Storm (originally Brain Storm in BfA, I think) was an interesting one: Lose out on some of your mana stability to be able to hit harder. Classic Risk/Reward. Maybe it has an older origin, but that’s what I remember. Unfortunately BfA wasn’t great for Arcane (in my opinion), so I swapped to frost for that one.
The real problem now is that there really isn’t a “mana as a resource” minigame anymore. Without that minigame, the concept of “turn your conservation into raw power” just doesn’t make sense.
It was introduced in a different time - when it could have made some sense. But now, since we’re a cooldown-focused spec (instead of resource-focused) and there’s no benefit to offsetting cooldowns and evocate and Arcane Surge has the same cooldown, it just becomes part of the script.
I like the concept of Siphon Storm (and some of the older iterations of RoP, for that matter), but only when they exist within the context of their original design. In the past, mana had a very direct correlation to your damage. More mana = more damage. That is not the case anymore. More mana =/= More damage but Less mana = Less damage. Arcane has shifted a lot over the years, to the point where almost all of the mana-focused talents and abilities are archaic and underutilized because our cooldown script has effectively added a threshold to the benefits of mana.
tl;dr Siphon storm is a relic of the past (a past that I miss - insert oldmanyellsatcloud.jpg) and unless we start getting a heavier focus on “mana as a resource” again it really doesn’t feel great to use
And arcane suffers from long cast times on a bunch of toolset. I tried frost for a hot minute today and was like “oh it’s already cast…that’s crazy!” A ton of frost was instant and even the long casts from blizzard and frost bolt were quick. Arcane main damage dealer is blast which is long cast, surge is super long cast, Spark is long cast, if I remember right ToM used to be a long cast…and missile is channeled, a big piece of the ramp is the cast times. And if you get it out of order you just wasted 3 seconds of your 10 second burst window, nice!