Buff Arcane Mage
8 Likes
arcane mage should be the spec with double shield charges imo, far less instant casts.
Also make missiles while moving Baseline not a talent.
6 Likes
It doesn’t just need buffs, it needs a redesign. Or an undesign? Just go back to TWW, it was at least functional back then.
7 Likes
I don’t think a buff is gonna be enough, maybe I’m alone on this but the design is just bad.
- Having to pool Arcane Salvo feels bad.
- The delay on the spells makes it so you end overcapping all the time, it feels bad.
- Arcane Missiles, THE MOST ICONIC ability is not even pressed, EVER. It feels bad.
- Completely unable to do damage on the move without Shimmer. It feels bad.
- Very squishy compared to Frost. It feels bad.
- Arcane Orb positioning requirements are annoying as hell. It feels bad.
I don’t know, man, Arcane felt so good in TWW just zooming around while barraging a flurry of purple missiles to everyone… The only thing I wouldn’t want back is Arcane Missiles clipping, let’s us fully channel for once.
tldr: Make Missiles Great Again.
8 Likes
Yeah, the delay on Arcane Salvo feels dumb and having splinters gives you delayed stacks is also lame because you’re always overcapping.
If arcane blast had a travel time then you could see that you hit 20 during your cast and send barrage at the end of the cast and still get your arcane salvo from the blast but you don’t right now.
But there is just so much about arcane that doesn’t flow, isn’t smooth, and it feels like you’re always fighting against the spec to try to play it.
Even arcane charges sucks. Whenever you get stuck casting pulse or blast with no or low charges it feels bad.
Imo, arcane needs a redesign. It’s not worth slapping patches on arcane to make it work.
you don’t understand how much i HATE arcane salvo mechanics. no thought was put into it. I always find myself having way too many clearcasting stacks because I’m waiting for my arcane salvo to get up to 20.
this too. I feel extremely sluggish when I’m not on 4 arcane charges. and the oom problem is bad so sometimes you are awkwardly throwing out all your charges and casting with low charges while your mana comes back
So the top spec to play right now it seems with arcane is to basically never press magic missiles only press arcane orb and arcane barrage….
Does anybody know is this is correct? im copying some of these builds and its just so weird
It is correct. Missiles just aren’t strong right now. Blizzard spent a lot of time making talents that interact with missiles but didn’t bother to make them strong enough to cast.
So yes. We don’t cast missiles. We cast lots of orbs. A lot of comments have been made about how bad it feels. Feel free to add more!
This has been the most abysmal experiences playing an Arcane mage I have ever experienced.
In typical Blizzard fashion:
New expansion drops.
Arcane receives changes.
The changes are enough that the spec is definitely not the same as it was the expansion before.
The changes were not enough that the entire spec was “reworked” (or given the attention a rework usually gets).
Players are unhappy that a bunch of semi-random new mechanics were simply tacked on to the existing mess.
Blizzard does nothing.
Players continue to complain.
Eventually, Blizzard will decide to double down on their new mechanics.
They won’t, however, remove the old vestiges of the mechanics they replaced. We’ll simply also have those as well.
Feels so weird to play arcane and play a spec that never presses missiles while you are forced to take talents that buff missiles in order to talent into the best spec.
They really need to clean up the talent tree…. It sounds like to me they need to actually just change the talent tree slightly remove that end node for the current OP spec and buff missiles.
Also the strangest thing ever is putting moving with missiles on a choice node with a dps\burst button…. who thought this was a good idea! arcane is so immobile missiles and moving should be baseline.
1 Like
Homestly, I think it’s better if they don’t. Not until a rework at least, because the gameplay is atrocious.
Arcane and Fire have always been my favorite, now we’re pigeonholed into Frost.
Mage active defensives are not impactful enough.
Arcane and Fire don’t even fall under blizzards definition of viable
Not a single mage spec can compete for a top end spot in M+.
It definitely doesn’t feel good - especially after how far missiles came last expansion.
And really, I think they need to delete Orb Mastery and buff missiles to compensate. I don’t see a world in which Blizzard is capable of maintaining two playstyles within a spec that they historically have struggled to maintain one playstyle for.
Honestly it hasn’t come up much since missiles don’t get cast right now. If they switch up our balance, I don’t actually think that Presence of Mind will be taken terribly often because although yes, it is burst, it really isn’t a lot of burst (in PvE).
Mage has some of the most powerful defensive cooldowns in the game. Full stop.
We can completely mitigate a significant amount of incoming damage.
We can immune big hits or bad dots while also having the ability to completely brush off damage that dealt 99.9% of our health to us. We can break casts so that they don’t even happen.
The abilities themselves are wildly powerful. The issue isn’t that they aren’t impactful. The issues are that we run out of them too quickly and that, if we make a mistake, we’re punished very heavily.
Because we wear cloth, have low health baseline, and have no passive defensives in our kit, it feels like we’re expected to be using defensives constantly. The reason they might not feel impactful is because we feel obligated to use them almost on cooldown just to stay alive.
I don’t know what Blizzard considers “viable” to be because I don’t believe they’ve ever defined that for us, but there’s evidence of Arcane and Fire completing solo content, Mythic raid, and M+ up to at least 16s (which is where the new achievement needs us to be). It might not be easy, but they can do it.
Viable effectively means “capable” or “capable of working or functioning.” So unless you have a different definition, the fact that Arcane and Fire have completed high level content means the are viable.
It doesn’t mean they’re good… But they’re capable of completing the content. To be clear, I absolutely think both specs need attention, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t viable.
We never needed passives - unless you’re adding something to our actives. Nobody thinks we need more passives.
I didn’t say we needed them either. I wouldn’t be opposed to some interesting passive defensive options, but it’s not something I’m campaigning for. It’s not a “we need this” issue, it’s a factor into why we feel squishy. It’s pretty much always been this way.
People call them passives - but I still look at them as activated abilities (greater invis dr, mirror image dr) -mass barrier was a great utility - they NERFED our active abilities and gas us into telling us they’re better.
It’s just not true.
Mage has 3 passive defensives:
- Cauterize
- Temporal Realignment
- Arcane Warding
Anyone who says otherwise is wrong (unless I forgot something). The whole point of a “passive” defensive is that you don’t have to think about it. Barrier, invis, images, ice block, and alter time all require me to consciously press a button explicitly to defend myself.
Yes, they nerfed a lot of our existing defensives, but on a button-to-button comparison, our big defensives are generally better than what other classes have to offer. The downside is that the rate at which we’re taking damage is faster than the rate at which we’re able to defend oursleves.
This is the first expansion in a long time where people will call for a defensive and I simply have nothing left to press.
Having a hard time understanding what you’re saying.
This is the first expansion in a long time where people will call for a defensive and I simply have nothing left to press.
That’s a problem - we’re not looking for passives we want our control back.
Other classes have passives, that’s their identity .. Warlock, DK specs for example.
The community has been arguing that the issue isn’t simply “Mage lost defensives." It’s that Midnight changed survivability systems in a way that hurt Mage more than other specs, because Mage has been dependent on layered prevention and control.
That was our identity
Survivability was “avoidance-based,” not “endurance-based."
We survive by avoiding damage, Warlock/DK (for example) survive by huge HP pools, stamina scaling, leech and self-healing, that is their identity, and even after Blizzard pruned them, they weren’t nearly as impacted as mage has been - therefore Warlock can make the same mistakes and recover afterward - mage often cannot.
Mage lost the foundation of its defense model
Warlocks and DKs only lost extras (sorry for picking on you)
So even if Blizzard numerically balanced active defensives as you say “better” .. Mage is still worse because gameplay pressure shifted toward sustained durability.
Yes or just change it so arcane missiles recharges orbs faster or something.