Doubling down on Arcane Salvo is a bad idea

Classes Mage
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For those who haven’t been keeping up with the Midnight Alpha, the latest gimmick that Arcane will now revolve around is something called Arcane Salvo, very basically a new version of Arcane Harmony but expanded to generate stacks with all spells instead of just with Arcane Missiles when selecting the appropriate talents.

With the latest changes to the talent trees they’ve made it so that generating Arcane Salvo stacks is even more important and directly tied in with procs from hero talent trees, like meteorites for Sunfury. This means that we will have yet another annoying thing to track, this time without a WeakAura, and yet another unwieldy Arcane Barrage condition which will lead to confusion on when to cast it or when to hold it in addition to significantly reducing the cadence with which it is cast. It also has very obvious counter synergies with things like Arcane Soul which emphasize Arcane Barrage spamming.

In my view this is a terrible direction to take the spec in and indeed Arcane Harmony, aka Arcane Salvo, is a completely unnecessary mechanic that should have been left to rot in the Shadowlands as a mediocre legendary item and never been imported as a talent, let alone doubled down on as a cornerstone of the spec.

2 Likes
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It went back to stacking with Arcane Missiles instead of all spells.

Arcane Salvo and Resonance are the only things that specifically alter the damage of Arcane Barrage if we exclude Arcane Charges, so the conditionals have been severely simplified compared to live where there’s just a bazillion of them.

It’s true they got rid of all charge refunds through Barrage, but iirc their stated goal was that they want us to spend the charges and then build them back up and at least new Impetus helps solve that problem as well as buffed High Voltage. I don’t know if High Voltage will work with the new Aether Attunement as far as charge generation goes since it states “each wave of missiles” instead of damage, and the same goes for Arcane Salvo.

New Arcane Soul doesn’t consume Arcane Salvo stacks for its duration and each Arcane Barrage cast during it also grants 5 stacks.

Tbh, I think Arcane Salvo is alright. It’s sad that the stuff involving Arcane Missiles has changed its wording to “each wave” instead of “each time it does damage” so stacks slower even in AoE and I don’t know how it interacts with their own Cooldown Manager yet so idk how bad it is when it comes to the UI.

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From what we’ve seen so far I can confidently predict that it will literally be exactly the way it’s always been, a tiny square icon with an even tinier stack counter, only now it will appear in the middle of your screen instead of the top right. That’s the extend of their UI upgrades, lol.

I don’t hate it, I just think it’s a pointless mechanic. We already have Arcane Charges and we don’t need another thing to keep track of, especially one that doesn’t have a more predictable means of generating procs. It also goes counter to their whole pitch of simplification in Midnight.

Which is a horrific change in my view. ABarr refunding its Charges under certain conditions was the best thing to happen to Arcane since the invention of sliced mana buns.

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Do we ignore Arcane Salvo and Arcane Barrage if using Charged Missiles? Charged Missiles sounds very interesting to me because it greatly reduces the amount of things needed to track and just need to press Arcane Missiles lol.

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God forbid we have any kind of mechanics in our kit…

Currently, on live, the following talents create circumstances or procs that buff Arcane Barrage:

  1. Nether Precision
  2. Arcing Cleave
  3. Intuition
  4. Resonance
  5. Arcane Rebound
  6. Arcane Debilitation
  7. Arcane Bombardment
  8. Arcane Harmony
  9. Magi’s Spark
  10. Arcane Tempo
  11. (Sunfury) Burden of Power
  12. (Sunfury) Glorious Incandescence
  13. (Sunfury) Arcane Soul

Moving into the Beta, the following talents create circumstances or procs that buff Arcane Barrage:

  1. Arcane Salvo
  2. Arcing Cleave
  3. Resonance
  4. Mana Adept (not a damage buff, but a “resource” buff)
  5. (Spellslinger) Force of Will (it’s a small stretch, but still affects circumstances)
  6. (Sunfury) Sunfury Execution
  7. (Sunfury) Arcane Soul

I don’t usually spend a lot of time tracking Arcing Cleave or Resonance. Mana Adept is likely going to just be a passive thing (and technically we already have it, it’s just baseline right now). Sunfury Execution only matters during Touch windows and Arcane Soul is just a modified rotation.

The rest of the new changes are becoming “hey, if you have X number of stacks or more when you consume Salvo, you do more things.” Which means I’m only going to need to track Arcane Salvo. Even Arcane Soul is simplified. Without Nether Precision and given that Barrage during soul doesn’t consume Salvo or charges it should become a “spam barrage” moment.

If you remove Resonance, Arcing Cleave, and Arcane Rebound from the equation (because they’re mostly AoE things that I don’t really think about a lot) and ignore Mana Adept (because it’s not a direct damage increase) we’re going from 7-10 buffs to track to at most 3.

Yes, this is “Arcane Harmony 2.0” but instead of having “another annoying thing to track” we instead have “one annoying thing to track” which, in my opinion, will make things easier.

Is it gonna suck if Blizzard doesn’t give us an easy way to visually see how many stacks we’re at? Absolutely. But I think this is a step in the right direction. Maybe it’s not perfect yet, but this change eliminates a lot of the stress we were having with proc tracking this expansion.

2 Likes
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Arcane harmony is tracked with the current in game cooldown settings why would salvo not be shown? So you don’t even need a weak aura for it.

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So what’s your argument in favor of it, we should have it just to have it? In my view, nothing that stacks higher than what you can easily keep track of in your head while also playing effectively should be a core spec mechanic. 4 Arcane Charges with a dedicated class resource bar is fine, 20 stacks of Arcane Salvo that aren’t tracked as easily by the UI or generated in an equally predictable way, are not. I suppose you could simply ignore it, not playing around it at all, and you likely won’t even lose too much DPS as a result, but that only begs the question what’s the point of having it in the first place? Midnight has been repeatedly pitched as “simplification” not “complexity for complexity’s sake.”

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Simplification should have room for mastery. Current state of arcane in midnight can be mastered on a target dummy in 3 minutes…

When I am stuck progging a boss for 100+ pulls I want to be able to feel a level of mastery in my class improving as I keep playing the fight. There genuinely is a limit to how much mastery you can have over macro fight mechanics most of mid tier mythic raiding is just waiting around till 19 other people figure out macro removing skill expression in a class makes this process beyond miserable to play.

1 Like
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I want a spec that is accessible to all players, but mastered by a few. My favorite iteration of Arcane looked simple on paper but was complex under the hood, and it was not forgiving to casual players. I don’t want that back, but I also don’t want a “push glowing button” or “follow this script and never deviate” rotation.

Adding complexity to a spec is what allows exactly that. You could totally ignore the Salvo mechanic and it’d be likely that you can do casual content just fine. That’s honestly what I’d hope for. But for those of us who want to do more than casual play, there needs to be something interesting. Right now we have almost a dozen “interesting” ideas all competing for attention. As far as I can tell, Blizzard’s design seems to be reducing the number of competing “ideas” while making the remaining ones more impactful.

I’ve often said that almost every expansion it feels like Blizzard gives Arcane 3 or 4 totally new ideas but never iterates on or removes the ideas from the previous expansions. We get half a new spec every other year, but nobody comes around to clean up after the party’s over. This time the clean up is happening at the same time (or at least some clean up).

20 is really not that high a number. There have been buffs in the past that could stack to 99 or higher. Besides, have you looked at the talents that interact with Salvo? There are effectively 3 kinds:

  1. Buffs the damage increase value or the rate at which you acquire stacks
  2. Does something extra based on multiples of 5 stacks
  3. Does something extra for 20 or more stacks

My guess based on the current design is that we’re not going to be too worried about how many multiples of 5 we’re going to have, but that we will care about whether or not we have 20 or more. If the playstyle ends up casting a lot of barrages, I expect we might care about “do I have at least 5 stacks?” but it looks like Blizzard wants us to cast fewer barrages, so my guess is the main goal will be “do I have at least 20 stacks?” which should be pretty easy to figure out.

I don’t see a world in which casual play requires a “cast barrage at exactly 17 stacks of Salvo with 2 charges of Clearcasting ready” rotation. Maybe some hyper-optimized version that most players will ignore, but if Blizzard can’t manage to balance one buff anymore, there’s no way they could keep going with the dozen or so we currently have.

The second part of your statement, that you can’t track them easily in the UI, is also a complete falsehood.

I have never used the Cooldown Manager (I have a bunch of Weakauras that I made myself and I use ElvUI to manage my action bars, so I haven’t had a need for it). Just to attempt to validate your claim I logged in, turned on the cooldown manager, went to the buffs tab, and added Arcane Harmony. Sure enough there it is: An easy way to track my Arcane Harmony buff that didn’t require a computer science degree to figure out. I would expect that even if it isn’t present in the Beta, Arcane Salvo will be just as easy to track. It’s not as nice as the Weakauras that I’ve grown accustomed to, but it definitely proves that Blizzard is trying to allow us to track buffs in the base UI.

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That’s exactly right. That’s why the spec feels like a hodgepodge of half baked and often competing ideas, 20 years worth. All the original classes struggle with this to an extend but Mage, and Arcane in particular, are far more impacted. The Midnight overhaul was a great opportunity to address these issues but so far it looks like they will squander it.

Well it may be for you but it isn’t for me. This sort of thing is a matter of perspective. I personally use custom made WeakAuras that pop up with a nice Arcane VFX at certain stack thresholds and that’s what I am used to and have been for years. That’s going away with Midnight thanks to their idiotic decision to completely nuke whatever the WeakAura folks used on the backend, even though they specifically said they wouldn’t mess with that.

Frankly, I don’t understand enough about how that works to make up my mind whether Blizzard lied or the WeakAura team just doesn’t want to bother doing everything from scratch (wouldn’t blame them if that was the case) but the end result is the same. Bottom line is that Blizzard’s new UI will not be nearly as good at tracking things as what we had before with addons.

I fully support their desire to remove addons that gave players a clear edge but these little visual cues hardly constitute that and should not have been affected and, again, from what I understand it was never their intent to remove them but the way they implemented their changes made it all but impossible to keep things as they were.