Arcane and Fire were literally the reason for me to preorder TWW for $90. I kinda wish I didnt play Arcane on beta when it was so fun and fast. Feels bad losing it.
Scratch Arcane off of the fun list. Now they just have to make fire less mobile and all the hype is gone lol
1 Like
I agree with most other posters that Chrono Shift removal was a massive mistake and should be reverted. People asked to make it more accessible, not to remove it.
An easy fix to its accessibility / competing with throughput talents issues is:
- Make Arcing Cleave baseline (as it should be as a core component of Arcane AoE like Flamestrike and Fuel the Fire are for Fire and Blizzard is for Frost and all of these are baseline).
- Put Chrono Shift instead of Arcing Cleave in Arcane talent tree.
As a result:
- Core AoE talent for Arcane would be baseline just like Flamestrike / Fuel the Fire is for Fire and Blizzard is for Frost.
- Chrono Shift is easily accessible, but still optional for people who don’t want to take it (they can take Consortium’s Bauble instead).
- Its rate of competing with throughput talents is reduced, as you need 8 talent points to open second gate and you need to pick 1 talent in third row to progress down right part of tree. Losing 3% damage to Arcane Blast to take it would be manageable, especially for AoE situations.
10 Likes
Arcane Talent Tree Feedback pt. 5
To start with, I think there are many good changes here that I appreciate. In particular:
- Removing/baselining Crackling Energy, Improved Arcane Missiles, and Mana Adept has greatly lessened the node bloat of Gate 2.
- Baking Siphon Storm into Evocation and centralizing Evocation has freed up a Gate 3 point and made Gate 2 pathing less restrictive.
However, there are still some things that can be improved.
Chrono Shift: I am indifferent to Chrono Shift, but I know there are a fair amount of mages who like this effect in PvP, Legacy content for collectors, and just as quality of life in general. Removing it completely feels wasteful. It will never be competitive in PvE if it has to exist as a talent, but mages outside of PvE should still be able to access it somehow.
I believe there is a perfect spot for it, and it is in the current position of Presence of Mind. This would not change the fact that Slipstream will still be the preferred choice in almost all PvE scenarios, but it allows for the effect to be still accessible.
As for Presence of Mind, it should be baseline for Arcane. Period. That Presence of Mind only competes with Slipstream now is good compared to where it was in the last couple of beta builds, but I do not see a PvE scenario where Slipstream is not the heavily preferred choice. We are back to Presence of Mind being dead of arrival for The War Within. This feels bad.
Aether Attunement: This is more of a bug report. Finally, Aether Attunment is increasing the damage of Arcane Missiles. Instead, Aether Attunement now procs every 4th consumption of Clearcasting, not every 3rd Clearcasting which the tooltip suggests.
Time Loop/Concentration: For the same reasons elaborated on in previous feedback, these nodes are too weak, uninteractive, and irrelevant to be in Gate 3. Is there a realistic scenario where you drop Arcane Harmony, Magi’s Spark, Orb Barrage, or Leydrinker to pick up Time Loop or Concentration? They feel tacked on for no reason, and the alternative nodes to reach the final capstone nodes are vastly more powerful and universally useful. There has to exist something more exciting than this.
5 Likes
please return chrono shift.
5 Likes
High voltage is not returning arcane charges like it was. it barely returns any charges. Is this intended? It was infinitely better filling up my arcane charges as it was last week.
2 Likes
While I personally find a frostbolt-focused build option interesting, I do agree with some of the suggestions mentioned here. Frostbolt generates flurry charges, so letting flurry also cleave in Fractured Frost (FF) would allow some more weaving and burst potential with the Death’s Chill (DC) and FF build-style.
Additionally, letting frostbolts contribute to icy veins would remove all issues with deciding between extensions versus frostbolt cleave. Maybe 0.25 [s] per target hit?
I view the DC and FF style-build like affliction warlocks with their shadowbolt talents, modifying a filler spell to see more use. Should it completely dominate the playstyle such that you want to spam frostbolt in every situation? No. But providing a bridge between “Two target ice lance / glacial spike cleave” and “12+ target infinite frozen orbs and ice lances where you literally can’t fit anything else in” is nice build diversity to help us adjust based on the dungeon/boss.
In DF M+, whenever my tank is pulling 5-6 mobs at a time, there’s not much I can do. Either pull a massive pack and I do great damage with good frozen orb CDR, or have 2-3 targets so I can cleave well. Imo, FF and DC provides an option to minimize the weakness of frost when dealing with mid-sized packs.
Regarding Arcane, these newest changes are definitely welcome and highly appreciated: at last I no longer feel starved for points. Mana Adept being baseline instead of Arcing Cleave is a fair compromise. As several others have noted, however, the removal of Chrono Shift is a mistake. While not, strictly speaking, essential, this piece of utility is very handy and should be baseline to Arcane (it should not go in the talent tree, which is now freed up and in no need of further nodes). If not, then at least find some way to bake it into the class tree. There is no real justification for its removal from the game.
Other Thoughts and Suggestions
Capstones
While there is much incentive in going for a few of the capstones in AoE, in ST I find myself (in most builds) not picking one at all (except sometimes Magi’s Spark). This is a great shame and should not be the case. High Voltage (now a capstone) offers very little in pure ST as it stands. It has no meaningful impact on my rotation or damage output. The quick solution to this would be added functionality to the effect of, “when you generate, or overcap on, four arcane charges from Arcane Missiles, your arcane damage is increased by 10%” (analogous to Impetus with Arcane Blast).
Also, please change Nether Munitions - it is simply not competitive. The damage bonus is not high enough and, even worse, it occurs AFTER the burst window, further diminishing its value. If it remains this way, I foresee it never being picked. It is also a very boring talent - for a capstone it should be a lot more interesting.
Dead Talents
1.) Surging Urge - with current tuning and being tied to a (by default) 1 min 30sec CD, the damage bonus from this talent is negligible at best, so that it is not worth picking in any situation. I love the idea of this talent and would like for it to remain, but it has to be significantly buffed; secondary functionality of some kind should also be added to it, so that it has use outside of Arcane Surge casts (alternatively, each Clearcasting could increase the damage of the next Arcane Surge by 5%, up to 100%).
2.) Concentration - the chance for a free Arcane Blast is too low, and one free Arcane Blast every now and then is just not worth a talent point. This would be much better if it were also to increase the damage of your next Arcane Blast.
Spellslinger
1.) Please make Unerring Proficiency also reset the CD of Supernova at 30 stacks, or, less preferable, increase the stack count to 40. This is an important issue that should not go unaddressed, as its competitor may win out most of the time. I love this talent (since I have always believed Supernova should again be something like a true DPS ability, as it was in the past) and want to be able to play it without the frustrating lockout upon overcapping on stacks.
3 Likes
Arcane feedback:
The new tree is a big improvement over the previous one. However certain problems still remain:
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Arcane Harmony while easier to take now (point wise) it’s still a capstone talent, when it’s somewhat essential to Arcane’s single target rotation.
Again, please consider switching its position with Impetus. -
Magi’s Spark remains too strong to give up on, and yet it forces you into a single target rotation for the first few seconds of each ToTM, even when in AoE.
-
Nether Munitions continues to be underpowered in comparison with Magi’s Spark.
-
Evocation. Having Siphon Storm be merged into it might seem nice at first, however the emerging gameplay of channeling Evocation for 3 seconds before you even begin casting Arcane Surge isn’t fun.
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Arcane Orb should be able to consume Clearcasting to gain a buff. As it stands in AoE fights, clearcasting procs keep getting overcapped and wasted, while nether precision isn’t gained as often as it should.
-
Aether Attunement is locked behind 2 points of Arcane Debilitation, a single target focused node, therefore making it very hard to pick in Mythic+ builds.
1 Like
Changes I’d like to see:
- Chrono Shift returned and in the place where Impetus currently is
- Impetus moved to where Resonant Orbs is and Resonant Orbs removed (you got rid of the other passive dmg to one spell talents why not this one?)
- Enlightened and Eureka swap places
1 Like
Frost
Please make our current 2 set a capstone for GS, its by far the most fun I have had in AOE as frost.
If fractured frost is to stay, it would be a lot more satisfying if it was available in some limited way outside of Icy Veins. The main fun component with it on beta is cleaving your frostfire empowerment procs, but that only being available during Icy Veins severely limits its gameplay implications.
Death’s Chill would also benefit from not being locked behind Slick Ice, a talent we don’t want to take in AOE/M+ at all. If you want to keep the tree symmetrical then put it below fractured frost and split the ray choice node so you can take both them.
With the ridiculous amount of flat % buffs to spells coming out of beta our mastery will definitely need a tuning pass before launch to ensure it isnt a dead stat again. As is with so many hero talent effects not benefiting from it (ice nova, meteor, living bomb) its likely to be near avoided again for certain builds.
7 Likes
No nerfs to Magi Spark, tyvm.
It is the best visuals arcane got this xpac and if it ever gets nerfed to not be the always go to choice, my interest in playing arcane will decrease.
Making us forego class aesthetics for some bland invisible passive alternative is bad.
2 Likes
Chrono Shift is core to Arcane mage’s PvP identity, and the idea of using a PvP talent on it and losing another isn’t super appealing either. But of course, if we get anything that’s what it’ll be. Fantastic job devs.
4 Likes
Here is continuation of my Fire Mage feedback post including their hero talents with feedback brought more in line to stated questions / topics quoted below.
Fire Mage:
- Choice node between Dragon’s Breath and Supernova does not impact other specs very much, but can be harmful for Fire - it has talents that are based on both spells and cannot be played together anymore - for example if you want to play AoE focused Sunfury with Gravity Lapse and Alexstrasza’s Fury you simply cannot, as affected abilities compete with each other in a choice node. The choice node itself is controversial - Dragon’s Breath as a full CC often has much higher value and Supernova does not deserve 45 seconds base CD for its effect when similar effects of other classes (and Supernova itself when it was in Arcane tree) have 25-30 seconds CD. As such, maybe Supernova should become a choice node with other talent to address these issues.
Suggestion: Reduce its base cooldown to 25-30 seconds (to match its value) and make it instead a choice node with either Quick Witted (based on how Shadow Priests can pick between shorter cooldown for their interrupt / CC Silence and additional CC in form of Psychic Horror) or with Blast Wave (based on how other classes like Shamans and Hunters have choice nodes between knockback and knockup effects). In latter case Volatile Detonation could just affect both spells and reduce their CD by 5 seconds (so Supernova base cooldown could be put at according level) and increase their knockback or knockup value. - Both Pyromaniac and Hyperthermia are likely to be / stay not competitive in The War Within - Pyromaniac was overnerfed and Hyperthermia is badly compatible with latest Fire playstyles. Both talents need boosts and changes for competitiveness.
Suggestions:
- Buff Pyromaniac (both proc rate for reliability and echo damage for better throughput value) and make it also trigger from Hyperthermia affected spells (to improve their synergy as Pyromaniac is its required prerequisite).
- Change Hyperthermia into active off-GCD ability with X seconds cooldown. That would allow to both trigger it when needed instead of current unreliable RNG than can also proc it when not needed or harmful to the rotation and make it synergize with other capstones, as active Hyperthermia would be able to be used to hasten Combustion cooldown reduction or building of next Sun King’s Blessing and that could increase its value and make it a more competitive capstone.
- Fevered Incantation and Fire’s Ire are both overpriced for their effect (they in total provide comparable increase to Wildifre that is a 1 point investment talent) and still bugged and provide 1 point investment effect even with 2 points invested. Please just reduce them to 1 point investment with full current effect - that would both make their effect better match their cost and help with capstone build diversity, since after picking central talents and one of sides it is very unlikely that players would spend 3 talent points on mostly weak talents to take even single talent that they like at the other side leading to reduced build diversity.
- Spontaneous Combustion is an incredible QoL feature than finally allows Fire Mages to freely spend their resources outside of major cooldown. However, it directly competes with throughput in form of Improved Combustion and that is not good, since it forces Fire Mages to pick between QoL and throughput and can reduce pick rate of Spontaneous Combustion for Fire Sunfuries, who have additional synergies with Combustion duration. That could be improved.
Suggestion: Split them and turn into separate talents. - Scorch is very undertuned without its procs and upgrade talents with 300% damage increase from Scald and PVP modifier being already a large enough red flag how undertuned this ability is baseline. That should not be the case with the politics “talents should not require their upgrades to be viable” and baseline Scorch should be a viable “I don’t have instants but need to do some damage while moving” button like in earlier expansions.
Suggestion: Buff its base damage and if needed reduce modifiers from Scald and PVP modifier to compensate. End goal should be just having it deal meaningful damage without procs / execute, but still less dps than Fireball and Frostfire Bolt (so that their usage is still justified). - Additional issue is that Improved Scorch can add another maintenance buff to track / upkeep and combined with Heat Shimmer that can be needed even outside of execute phase. Since stated goal for Fire’s rework was reducing number of maintenance buffs, that could be addressed or improved.
Suggestion: Remove Improved Scorch or at least reduce it to 1 stack with no longer duration, so that bad RNG would harm you less and it will be easier to maintain. - Firefall can be decent, but its design is odd - it is located in AoE part of tree and triggers an AoE ability, but it procs and is triggered exclusively from single-target abilities. That could be improved.
Suggestion: Make it also get stacks and trigger from Flamestrike. That would make it more compatible with AoE situations too. - Some bugs / oversights were fixed in latest patch, but others remain. Aside from mentioned above these include:
- Convection does not affect Living Bomb triggered from Frostfire’s Excess Fire proc.
- Lit Fuse can apply Living Bomb to random enemy near target instead of target itself, which is confusing and should be fixed.
- Sparking Cinders does not state its chance and it should, since that will be a major part of deciding whether to take it or not.
- There are several other undertuned / underused / too niche talents in Fire tree that were mentioned in this post and might need boosts to be competitive.
- There are also several potentially no longer needed PVP modifiers in Fire tree like for Fiery Rush and issues with some of Fire’s PVP talents like Glass Cannon and Fireheart that were also mentioned in linked above post. Please take a look at them too.
Frostfire (Fire) Mage:
- Elemental Affinity reduces cooldowns of both Fire and Frost general spells.
- Flame and Frost is not competitive enough with Elemental Affinity (since it requires you to literally die or spend your insurance effect to trigger) and needs a redesign. For example it could trigger from only casted Combustion and affect only spells with CD equal to or lower than 1 minute - that would make number of additional Frost spell usages from Fire and Frost comparable to Elemental Affinity with different pros (on-demand resets) and cons (would have less usages of low CD Frost spells like Ice Floes) and turn it into a competitive alternative.
- Other general issues with Frostfire like difference in tooltips and effect for Frostfire Empowerment and bad trackability / visibility of procs were mentioned in my Frost feedback post above. They apply to Fire based Frostfire too.
Fire Sunfury:
- Spellfire Spheres generation outside of combat is still too slow - it remains every 50 seconds, heavily disaligns with base cooldowns of both Combustion and Arcane Surge and can cause issues when moving between packs or resetting after a wipe where Sunfury would have diminished power level if his party / raid would not wait for long enough. That should be addressed.
Suggestion: Reduce Spellfire Spheres out of combat generation period to around 30 seconds without Rondurmancy and 20 seconds with it. That would cause 90-100 seconds required to stack it that would both align much better with base cooldowns of Combustion and Arcane Surge and help with stacking spheres in mentioned above situations. - Mana Cascade and Burden of Power (Pyroblast part) were overnerfed and provide undertuned effect that is barely noticeable. Please buff them back a bit for Fire Sunfury and if needed compensate with tweaks to other talents.
- Burden of Power still triggers from every 6th cast instead of 7th. If that is intended, that should be indicated in the tooltip (which still states next spell after creating a Spellfire Sphere).
- Merely a Setback is still bugged (it states 5% Leech in hero tree tooltip when it is actually 3% now and Blazing Barrier still states 0% Avoidance increase with it taken instead of actual value) and is still a very niche and underwhelming defensive node, especially after nerf to its Leech value. It should be boosted and could have a choice node alternative for situations where it would provide too little value.
Suggestion: Buff its value and make it a choice node with other defensive talent (like 2 other Mage hero specs have choice nodes for their defensive talents). That could be for example Cauterizing Blink from Legion artifact traits - it is both more generally useful and fitting for an Arcane + Fire hero tree (as cauterizing is a Fire effect and Blink / Shimmer is an Arcane spell). - Both Lessons in Debilitation and Gravity Lapse are underwhelming after their nerfs. LiD provides 2 additional Spellsteals with 60-90 seconds CD that might not even be used if there is nothing to steal or effects are undispellable. Gravity Lapse after change is both another root that Mages already have plenty of and is not needed and is pretty much a fancy looking and often worse Ice Nova - it has target number cap, longer cooldown, does less damage than Ice Nova in some cases, its delayed damage can break breakable crowd control effects applied to target and on top of that you need to lose Dragon’s Breath to take it which is a better and more impactful crowd control effect. Gravity Lapse needs a boost too.
Suggestions:
- Buff Lessons in Debilitation with either more Spellsteal usages or some additional effect.
- Revert Gravity Lapse to a stun and if needed reduce its target number and / or increase its base cooldown to compensate. AoE stun is much more fitting for a “hero talent that upgrades existing CC effect” and is in line with other specs hero talents like Mountain Thane’s Storm Bolts.
- Sunfury Execution is not competitive enough with Savor the Moment (which has additional synergies with talents like Memory of Al’Ar) and could use a boost.
Suggestion: Make it also increase Scorch damage during execute phase by X%. - Ignite the Future is also not competitive enough with Rondurmancy and could use a boost.
Suggestion: Change it to make Phoenix cast 2 exceptional spells per Spellfire Sphere consumed and / or increase damage of Phoenix exceptional spells by X%. That would make it a more competitive “more / stronger exceptional spells from Phoenix” choice option compared to “more sustained personal damage and potentially longer major CD” option in Rondurmancy. - Rondurmancy can have a Fire Mage specific issue where it can be problematic to stack its 5 spheres even in combat, as Combustion can get off cooldown faster than that happens in some builds. It could use a boost for such cases.
Suggestion: Make it additionally reduce number of Hot Streaks required to generate a Spellfire Sphere in combat by 1 if taken. That should make its in-combat Sphere generation more aligned with Combustion and its cooldown reduction effects builds. - Nerf to Memory of Al’Ar did not change total throughput much (you lose 1 instant and guaranteed to crit spell every 60-120 seconds), but made it feel much worse - you can now easily lose it right before you press next Pyroblast / Flamestrike and start to hardcast it, especially in cases where you start combat with low amount of Spellfire Spheres. Please revert its duration nerf and if needed compensate with adjustments to other talents.
This is not what I’m asking for.
I’m asking to either make it more seamlessly integrated into the AoE rotation, or provide a proper alternative.
It really should be triggered off 1 hit of arcane missiles and then 2 hits of either blast or barrage instead of 1 each
1 Like
I can agree to that.
I love how arcane is feeling with the cleaving missiles and arcane orb.
They should have nerfed arcing cleave’s aoe component instead or ensure we keep arcane barrage in our ST rotation and allow orb to also be a choice in ST with supporting talents.
Anything that isn’t spamming Arcane Blast on single target is an improvement.
Question: Why are Frost’s splinters so garbage when Arcane generates 4x as many in 3 minutes? Why is Unerring Proficiency 60 stacks as Frost and 30 as Arcane? Am I missing something here? Yeah Frozen Orb is better but it’s not that better. Arcane’s also not wasting the GCD to throw Orb. And it has the better CI method/damage contrib.
???
8 Likes
chrono shift being gone feels really really bad for us pvpers. Just make arcing cleave baseline and put chronoshift there. mobility is arcanes survivability in pvp compared to frost having two iceblocks and fire cauterize
9 Likes
Echoing a lot of what has been said here, this build feels pretty good (for arcane), and if we stopped iterating on Arcane here I would be almost completely fine with it, with one exception.
Return Chrono Shift to us, please. It was awesome and I’ve been sad for years that we’ve not been able to spec it in normal dungeon builds. Please give this back. It was super helpful for arcane especially, since we’re in melee for AOE almost constantly.
Bake the Surging Urge talent into Surge baseline (or delete it), and put Chrono Shift under it instead, maybe. Keeps the tree symmetry and gives us at least an option to take it, where its not linked/required pathing for any other node.
Potentially also could combine Static Cloud and Reverberate into a single talent, as independently they are weak options, and drop Chrono Shift in one of their places. Either of those would work I think.
3 Likes
I mentioned that Frost active talents have been neglected in The War Within. I figured I could make this point clearer by actually looking at the numbers. Note that this isn’t a complete picture because Ice Lance got an additional talent (Permafrost Lances) and Frostbolt got… a lot of stuff (Fractured Frost, Frostfire Bolt, Thermal Conditioning or Severe Temperatures), but I think even then it’s fairly telling:
- Frostbolt was buffed by 20%
- Ice Lance was buffed by 23.4%
- Flurry wasn’t buffed; the buffs from the dev notes are happening to the wrong spell
- Icicles were buffed by 9%
- Frozen Orb was buffed by 7.8%
- Blizzard wasn’t buffed
- Comet Storm was buffed by 8.9%
- Glacial Spike wasn’t buffed
- Ray of Frost wasn’t buffed
Compared to the core spells, talents such as Glacial Spike are now more than 20% weaker. Glacial Spike is also losing a rather powerful set bonus. It wouldn’t surprise me if these active talents were no longer competitive.
10 Likes