Idk man my post wasn’t a “knee reaction”. I was hitting target dummies until I got to 75% - 80% of my sim damage and did several +10 to +12 keys before making my post. I know how to play this new style, and I just prefer the old one. There’s a handful of legitimate problems with the changes they’ve made.
Say as much, it helps keep arrogant sons like me away. But some of these others float those buzzwords that just scream waaah.
DK trolling mage forum? Go away. You have no perspective that has any useful information to relate. Everything you say is “FOTM” . You have zero ability to understand issues other than your own knee jerk reaction categorize everything as FOTM.
Complaints about arcane nerf are based on more than just DPS numbers, such as rotation smoothness and engagement, heroic talent choices, zero testing on impact of changes, and time investment of player base.
There’s a lot to get upset about with the Mage changes, and it’s not just numbers.
Fire changed the least rotationally, but somehow caught a nerf. Nobody really knows why this was done, since it’s been pretty meh from 11.0 on. Still okay in a dungeon setting, I guess.
Arcane got a playstyle adjustment that pushes it into an uneven cadence and makes both ST and AoE rotations a mess.
Frost caught stray nerfs due to Arcane getting nerfed, and on top of that its ST setups now involve spamming Frostbolt far more than Frost as a spec should. In ST it’s literally ignoring procs of a core ability almost entirely.
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I am beginning to get used to it - i don’t want to switch mains, i’m trying to like it. I’ve edited my post as well for transparency. The majority of folks speaking out are very much NOT getting used to it. It is still a downgrade in playstyle.
Also, i tried it quite a bit before making my initial post. We’ve traded a steady, smooth rotation for one that’s tremendously rng dependent. We’ve lost agency in our own playstyle. That’s something to be upset about mid-season. And i said in the initial post, the ROTATION is the gripe. You immediately spouting that we’re crying about nerfs just speaks to you not reading the post you’re responding to.
This is, by far, the main problem. Most of us long-term arcane mages have dealt with being slightly under par (or even majorly) for a long time. We play the spec continuously because we enjoy the basic themes. We just want to have fun playing it.
The players who swapped to arcane because it’s doing well are the ones who only care about the numbers. You won’t make those players happy unless Sunfury Arcane mage becomes the top of the chart. But most of us here don’t want to cater to that subset.
In terms of playstyle, I tried to make a weakaura to tell me when to cast arcane barrage. I’m now at a point where it has at least 12 separate triggers to track (mind you, a couple of them are for the same buff, just different stack counts) and I still don’t think I’ve properly tracked it all. The amount and depth of If-Then statements I’ve tried to make goes deeper than weakauras even allows me to go. It feels like Sunfury Arcane has stepped back into the “complexity for the sake of complexity” problem.
THIS is what a good majority of the players seem to want fixed. Most of us are perfectly fine being a little worse than our counterparts, but we’re A LOT worse if we’re struggling to even understand the rotation that was, by most standards, perfectly fine until Blizzard tried to fix the double-dip issue by adding in completely new mechanics. In my opinion, had Aethervision not refunded charges, we wouldn’t be having most of these conversations.
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Mages aren’t really great about useful group utility in keys. Our role leans more towards being a fairly independent damage cranker. Personal defensives can take some amount of pressure off the healer, but because of how healing and damage events actually work this is not really as useful as a group defensive. It seems like mass barrier is on the weaker end for helping survive damage events but this is more vibes based. Something like Zephyr is harder to notice but actually very strong.
But anyway the first and most important question is how does a class contribute to the group’s overall success. Mage’s answer is basically threaten deletion; clearing an enemy off the board with high burst damage. This is a very valuable role and personal defensives synergize with that. But because that is our role, we are generally outclassed in areas of useful mob control and group defensives. We don’t have a good aoe stun, or good damage mitigation or point buffs for the group, the thing we do and are good at is kill targets. In some odd metas, our litany of kiting tools can be useful in a kite meta, but this is more niche than just a big stun move or something like Oppressing Roar which is insanely good. The damage profile is what we’re actually bringing to the table. The personal defensives are strong but that’s only if we’re bringing something to help the group’s success first.
I dunno, man. We can decurse. We can aoe knock back / knock up / stun groups. We can spam sheeps. We can spam spellsteal. We have a ranged interrupt. The Mass Barrier can absolutely take off pressure. We can survive unsurvivable hits. We can severely mitigate big damage chunks on our own. We have time warp. We have roots.
And we have biscuits.
Mages have a heck of a lot of utility if you know where to look.
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The Sunfury rotation certainly became clunky because of all the conflicting procs doing the same thing but I would argue it’s the players who are overcomplicating things by obsessing over the absolute perfect time to hit ABarr. Call me a basic scrub but I am perfectly fine with just hitting a button when it lights up and not worrying about it any further. If the devs aren’t going to take it seriously and make a mess of things, then why should the players be left to clean it up with WeakAuras and addons?
You said it great here:
I’ve been working overtime for 20 years trying to make Arcane work in spite of Blizzard instead of with their help. Major kudos to those of you who still try but I am done. I am too old for this 
and only here for the pretty purple pixels from now on. 
P.S. Been messing around with Spellslinger for the first time ever since the Sunfury debacle and it’s kinda grown on me although nothing about it feels “heroic.”
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If you join the mage discord, Porom has a WA for this that many are using. I’m not personally - i just track the AV buff, but high-end players are vouching for its usefulness.
Pretty much we have devolved back to basic rooting, sheep, AI and Portals like how they treated us throughout most of TBC expansion. That’s not what fun is. No one rolls a mage to play as a support character for CC. You’re crazy for accepting this as the way for mages.
I know, and I could easily go and grab it. But I find that for me it helps a lot if I try to make one on my own. It often helps me better understand why I need to do something at a certain time.
Plus I kind of enjoy making my rudimentary weakauras. It lets me pretend that LUA is language I know how to code in (it’s not).
I wasn’t planning to at first. I was just going to keep doing basically the same thing that I was doing. But this is where the nerf part comes into play. Doing the same rotation I was doing previously had me doing a good 20-25% less damage than I was the week before. Doing my best to optimize my damage brought that closer to a 15% reduction.
It was a noticeable difference, however, both cases were still bad enough that I swapped to Spellslinger just before my raid group got our AotC kill (I think maybe 2 pulls?). It’s much easier and outperforms. I’ll miss the original Sunfury rotation, but it’s not worth the squeeze for me to try to optimize it.