This not about radiant spark being the forced playstyle or not, but why is arcane harmony a capstone? Is there a world where you would ever pick harmony and not radiant spark? Them synergizing is one thing but to me it seems like a huge flaw of the talent tree system if you need one capstone to justify picking another unless I am missing a playstyle where you would ever optimally pick harmony without spark.
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No, you’re not missing anything lol. I think Blizz just sort of took the elements of the current Arcane mage and spread them out to populate a tree.
It’s one of the issues with many of the trees - that they’re not really introducing much that is a brand new playstyle, just making us choose what we already have.
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I’ve toyed around with the upcoming talents a bit to see if I could make a build similar to arcane’s old burn / conserve rotation. It’s possible to make a build like that, but numbers tuning might mean it’s not a competitive build.
In that particular case, yes, I could see myself taking harmony without taking spark. Harmony at least provides a passive boost to damage in a situation like that, especially if we can make a “build and spend charges as fast as possible” rotation. It would be usable, but it probably wouldn’t be capstone-worthy (but at that point, I don’t think any of them would be. It’s pretty clear that’s not the playstyle they want us using).
It’s the other way around that I don’t see being possible: taking spark but not harmony. Maybe there’s some clever way to use Spark every 45 seconds (to line up with TotM) and use Arcane Surge for one and Meteor for the other. I don’t know if meteor is even affected by Radiant Spark or how difficult it would be to line that up correctly (and it’d be pretty lackluster if there’s even a single extra mob nearby).
So I think my answer is “Technically: yes. Realistically: no”. That was one of my first complaints about the tree. The synergy between them requires about 11 points to set up (depending on how you allocate your points, their common ancestor is Resonance, and then there’d be 10 points to go with from there).
Even if you’re going for a burn/conserve build are you sure spamming [Arcane Missiles] would be better than [Arcane Blast]?
Anyway, I believe separating those 2 capstones isn’t very good design since they’re supposed to feed off each other. And [Arcane Harmony] definitely isn’t capstone worthy just like the [Arcane Orb] talents.
I may not have been fully clear on what I was getting at. If I’m trying to make a burn / conserve build and I’m not taking Radiant Spark, the number of stacks of Harmony that I have when I cast barrage isn’t as important as long as I’m not wasting them. That means that I can return to the old concept of only casting missiles when I have a clearcasting proc to use because I’m not trying to force myself to hit the maximum number of stacks before I cast barrage.
It may not be using Arcane Harmony to its fullest potential, but it’s still absolutely usable in a build like that, and wouldn’t require me to spam missiles the whole time. Whether or not it’s the best use of that particular talent point would be up for debate though. Some of the talents like Nether Precision, Arcane Tempo, and Prodigious Savant make me think it’s possible to make some non-spark builds, I’m just not sure if they’d be strong enough to compete.
It is useable and I understand it’s not a DPS loss, but is the point investment justifiable? I don’t think it is. It certainly is not what a capstone talent is supposed to be either.
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That’s exactly where I’m stuck with trying to make that particular build. It’ll help, sure, but it’s definitely not something I’m excited to put a point into, which really defeats the purpose of these trees.
I’m hoping that, on top of a lot of other things, they either move harmony to be closer to Spark and / or add a new capstone talent that’s more favorable for a burn / conserve rotation.
Harmony is a great talent that modifies Arcane mage’s entire rotation by encouraging casting Missiles on AoE and Barrage on ST. It absolutely deserves to be a capstone.
Its power isn’t necessarily tied to Radiant Spark either. As long as there’s some damage modifier on Barrage, it’ll work in its favor. In fact during execute (35% and less HP) Bombardment + Harmony is almost tied with Radiant Spark x 4 + Harmony.
I think I am still a bit skeptical about it and don’t we already use barrage in single target? As much as it changes the rotation I don’t think it should be a capstone talent because I don’t think the power is there for it considering it is a nerfed version from shadowlands. Not picking radiant spark means you would be spamming missiles when you could invest into arcane blast instead.
I’ll be honest with you: I like the Kyrian rotation, but I don’t like casting missiles in AoE. Yes, it’s powerful, but it’s an oddity that I’m not a fan of. We’re already an oddity because we’re a melee-ranged caster during AoE, so do we need another thing to make our AoE weird? I’d rather have an actual AoE rotation that does AoE the whole time. But for right now, I’ll take it. So yes, it does buff our AoE quite abit.
Single Target is a completely different beast. My problem with casting Barrage in single target is that it’s not very strong on its own. It’s something I’ve disliked about arcane for years that the Kyrian rotation helped fix.
So the problem isn’t whether or not Arcane Harmony is a good talent, just whether or not it feels powerful enough on its own to be a capstone. Considering how much they’re nerfing it going into DF, I don’t know if it’ll be that strong on its own. It’s definitely worthy of being a tier 3 talent, just maybe not a capstone specifically.
I haven’t spent any time in Shadowlands playing with just arcane harmony and not Radiant Spark, so maybe it’s not as bad as I’m expecting it to be.
It’s not particularly weird to use single target abilities to empower AoE abilities. If anything Arcane has typically been weird in that it had not one but two spammables, one for ST and one for AoE. Most specs have just the one ST.
Because it’s a playstyle would be my guess.
I can’t be the only one that thinks that, if Blizz is continuing with the build/spend+mana thing for Arcane, that it would benefit from having ABarr split into 2 different spells. One for ST or maybe even 2-target stacked cleave that drops stacks and restores mana and one that is used only for AoE that hits multiple targets (no split or diminishing damage) that does the same. Could be an interesting way to change things up a little.