Continuing the discussion from Undermine(d) Development Notes:
This hurts me. I’ve played arcane since early legion, I have dozens of arcane mages. I’ve completely lost interest in the spec after where they’ve taken it.
Is the community happy with arcane gameplay? Maybe I’m the only one unhappy.
I agree.
Also, what the heck does this mean?:
Arcane
(2) Set Bonus: Your damaging spells have a small chance to hit a Jackpot! granting you Clearcasting and 8% increased spell damage for 12 seconds. Casting Touch of the Magi always hits a Jackpot!
(4) Set Bonus: When you hit a Jackpot!, you also gain Aether Attunement at 100% effectiveness.
Aether Attunement at 100% effectiveness. Isn’t already 100%? Fires primary target at 100% spell damage and secondary targets at 50%. So, do they mean both primary and secondary targets are at 100%? Which is, very very meh.
Hopefully, they just buff Aether by 100% during it’s use. So our single target Aether is chef’s Kiss.
If I had to wager a guess, it’s because they aren’t sure if “100% effectiveness” is going to be balanced, so they’re leaving the numbers in there explicitly so that in a future update they can more easily change it to say
When you hit a Jackpot!, you also gain Aether Attunement at 75% effectiveness
which I would interpret to mean “75% bonus single target damage and 37.5% bonus aoe damage”
But regarding the Dev’s being okay with arcane’s gameplay, I’m not confident they’ve been looking at how people feel about Aethervision. Things were great before they added it and, from what I can tell, most of the people posting here think it feels clunky (regardless of how they feel about the problem it was trying to solve).
This means that we will gain the effect of the talent with its full power.
People have largely stopped playing Arcane. The forums are filled with people complaining about Arcane. It doesn’t seem like they’re paying attention to feedback.
They say their goal is to simply Barrage yet they only touch Sunfury which isn’t played, and add complexity back in, not remove it.
What they REALLY need to do is revert the 10% nerfs to barrage and blast, and extend the duration of clearcasting and arcane tempo, so that the mini burn can be more meaningful and it’s not so punishing when the tank waits for the healer to get mana etc in M+
If I’m reading the numbers correctly, it’s still the most represented in M+ for the three mage specs.
Frost has more representation (by quite a bit) in raid, and PvP I don’t care about (sorry, PvPers).
It could be that arcane had a lot of representation in M+ early in the season, but there are still more runs with an arcane mage than frost.
Doesn’t change the fact that the Devs are still choosing to turn a blind eye to our problems instead of fixing them.
Overall it’s Arcane, but Frost starts dominating from keys 12 and up by almost double.
Tbh, I think the changes are good but I still despise Aethervision in comparison the old double dipping. I wish I could comfortably play Sunfury again because Slinger is just too much RNG for my tastes.
At the beginning of the season Arcane S+ tier basically, but after I think 5 or 6 nerfs including two different new rotation changes it is now leading the rear in dps. Check out sites like Archon or Mythicstats or U dot GG and you’ll see it’s very under-tuned these days.
So FOTM re-rollers switched away from mage. Only us die-hards have stayed Arcane, most have switched to Frost but I think there were so many FOTM people at the start of the season that Frost will never catch up this season.
Arcane is even lagging behind the other two specs in raid right now, too. You have to look at the most recent numbers on warcraftlogs etc to see that, but it’s there for anyone to see
I’m used to arcane having low representation - the problem is that Blizzard is more likely to look at the numbers as a whole instead of “how they are today”. My guess is they’ll say “it’s fine now” and if they don’t somehow accidentally break it with the tier set bonus, we’ll need to be updated mid-season because nobody is playing it…
It was a lot cooler in DF, Arcane was a niche spec that not many people played but it was roughly middle of the pack tuning-wise.
If Blizzard doesn’t look at only the logs since their most recent balance changes then I am lost for words. But I would believe it considering how heavy-handed the nerfs were, and how long they’ve let them sit. And how they are happy with them.
I think I quit playing like a couple days after the last big changes. When I read those patch notes I was like “wow, Nevermind I’m forever out.”
I’m still enjoying Arcane when I do play my mage, but I’ve switched to druid recently so that I can heal and tank.
It’s sort of hilarious that every post on the forum and every content creator youtube video and number of logs for arcane mage have all indicated people are not happy with the state of the spec and somehow Blizzard has the audacity to say that they are happy with arcane right now.
Like dam whoever is in charge of mage is in such an insane state of denial right now that it’s a lost cause even proposing changes at this point.
I don’t even think these devs play the game to even see that Arcane is complete crap. Every instance and dungeon I’ve healed I’ve never seen Arcane near the top. I always give my power infusions to the best mage on the meters and that’s usually a frost mage.
Mana gem should’ve been made a choice node with evocation, and enlightened should have more potential in changing the flow of your mana pool.
w/o enlightened it should be more of a dump to 0 mana then evocate whereas enlightened should be about trying to manage different mana levels with different combat benefits at each. For instance if enlightened caused you to deal damage the closer your target is to your mana pool %, so if you have 50% mana and the enemy is at 50% hp enlightened works at 100% effectiveness. They could tune it to be incredibly op if you can dance within 5% the majority of a fight (mana gems) and it would also make aether incredibly strong on add spawns if you surge to a full pool beforehand. Right now it just feels like there’s no variation in what you’re doing, you basically go through the same monotonous mana flow, shifting power offers the capability to cater your windows here and there, but generally the up down nature of mana doesn’t rally influence your output its just something there requiring minimal thought so long as you are using cooldowns appropriately.
All the tier sets next tier just feel like they want players to avoid being forward thinking with their damage and rely on procs. One pull you’ll get a chain of aether but maybe the other dps gets a chain proc so you both compete to pad, then the next pack you get 1 proc between the 3 of you. I think removing controlled agency from output is terrible design philosophy and the only people enjoying it are zug zugs.
I love the idea, but that sounds more like a mastery / spec defining trait as opposed to a single talent.
As it stands, even if we had every talent / spell arcane has ever had available to the spec, I don’t think it’d be terribly easy to stay within those boundaries regularly enough for it to be satisfying. Clearcasting droughts and random surge procs would feel bad, and the 1-button AoE rotation (with luck) would be awful to try to fit into that concept.
Again, it’s a pretty intriguing idea, but we’ve been moving away from “mana matters” over the past few expansions. We’ve been ever so slowly been moving away from mana as a resource, but they’re certainly taking their time changing those old talents and abilities.
If I were to make a more in depth creation/modification I’d probably expand enlightened into a choice node, something like Enlightened:Order, Enlightened:Chaos. Really though I think arcane deserves a rework from the ground up at this point and the spec needs a base to build around, in this case having two forms of enlightenment and a non enlightenment playstyle.
Potential modifications in the tree being:
Random Clearcasting procs
Clearcasting on 4 arcane charges spent/build
Presence of Mind removing mana cost vs. removing cast time
Movement/blink reducing cooldowns based on distance traveled instead of shifting power
Touch of Magi vs. necrolord covenant arcane blast cleave/damage cd
Arcane Surge is wonky to me but it could be a choice node with arcane power/rune of power.
Evocation or Mana gem choice node
I like aether attunement, one of the better things to press across a lot of classes, I think leaving that as a deep left vs. something just as impactful on deep right, and then with enlightened on mid would keep builds variable.
I don’t mind if arcane is confined to like 2-4 target cleave and is left behind for more targets, trying to balance the kit around explosion or aether being competitively consistent aoe is just too much but thats more my impression of class balance in general as I think deviation in target count performance keeps group dynamics healthier. Like if a fury warrior/monk is very balanced aoe output and arcane is great priority/mild cleave. Trying to replicate the meta (like every pvp comp trying to emulate rmp cc) does nothing but destroy the ability for specs to feel unique.
When it comes to enlightened order vs. chaos vs. non enlightened I think it would feel better picking them on a fight to fight / group comp basis, maybe chaos revolves around even more rng to keep things fresh, but playing orderly should be a choice when the stars align and it fits a fight / you see certain windows that really fits your group comp. Unenlightened could be a more neutral mid, sort of playing like current arcane but with the potential to focus on a mix of strong end talents. I don’t think arcane should be #1 single target all the time, but when the perfect fight for arcane comes along with 100% performance across the board, arcane should be #1… if not then whats the point in having a spec designed around orderly resource management.
I’m with you kinda sad the way devs are taking arcane ./