Feedback on the New Arcane Changes

Classes Mage
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A new Alpha build went out today with fairly massive changes to how Arcane will work in TWW but the feedback thread with Blizzard’s reasoning was posted only on the Alpha forums pretty much ensuring that almost no one will see it and even fewer players will be able to actually provide feedback. I firmly believe that you don’t need to have access to the Alpha forums to weigh in on these changes so I am creating this thread here on the Mage forums for greater visibility and to encourage discussion. Please refer to the two links below for the full versions of the relevant posts as I will only quote the portions I wish to provide direct feedback on.

Link to the changes:

Link to the devs’ reasoning behind the changes:

My Feedback:
First and foremost, I want to highlight this portion of the explanation which really resonated with me and made me feel heard and validated for all the years I felt like I was screaming into the void of the forums but that was apparently being registered even if it was not acknowledged in any way.

That not only speaks to me, that is me! I am the player who “engages with the spec because of its visuals and fantasy, not its inherent complexity.” The fact that they acknowledge this is monumental and represents a shift in thinking that I firmly believe was long overdue. Specifically, taking into account that the vast majority of people playing this game aren’t “sweaty” and don’t want to be but merely wish to log in every once in a while to press buttons and kill stuff, and crucially providing us with viable alternatives.

This is another huge change for the better and something that has been suggested over and over again for years now. Arcane Missiles just work better as a proc and Legion Arcane demonstrated that unequivocally. It really never should have reverted to being castable at will precisely for the very obvious reasons they outlined and it definitely shouldn’t have taken this long to go back but at least we are back on the right path again and that is a major win in my book.

Again, it is very encouraging to see that they’re actively monitoring feedback on this but from reading the reply it doesn’t seem like they’ve done enough to alleviate the concerns around Clearcasting proc rate. I am also really confused by the statement which says that Sunfury provides increased rate of Clearcasting because it does not aside from Arcane Soul which is incredibly underwhelming, especially as a capstone node and will only have an uptime of a few seconds every 2 minutes or so. This will in no way solve the abysmal Clearcasting proc rate issues we have now.

This is the one area I take issue with and which is in total disconnect with the rest of the post and their stated goal of reducing complexity. The “skill expression” of Arcane should not revolve around “lining up various buffs and effects” to use in a brief burst window. That is precisely what all but the most hardcore “sweaty” players dislike about Arcane, even long time Arcane players like myself. Cooldown stacking or what they call “lining up various buffs and effects” is not compelling gameplay, its odious and very punishing if you get it wrong. It’s also the very definition of “scripted gameplay” which is exactly what they said they are trying to move the spec away from. As I said, I see this as a massive disconnect from everything that they said up to that point and that concerns me deeply.

Lastly, I want to briefly mention some specific talent changes. The biggest thing that immediately stood out to me is that they flat out removed almost everything that was flagged as problematic, things like Mana Gem, Radiant Spark, and Nether Tempest, rather than even attempt to fix it. That’s problematic in of itself in my view at least because a lot of these things could have been salvaged, though some more easily than others. The Radiant Spark removal in particular, and its lumping in together with Touch of the Magi (which to be fair is what we always did anyway) just screams of the most low effort solution possible. Same with Nether Tempest which could have easily be reimaged as a Fury of Elune type spell but with a distinctly capital letter Arcane flair. Mana Gem’s removal I am fine with although it could have simply been turned into a cooldown that was off the GCD but apparently that’s one low hanging fruit they choose to ignore.

I am also not a fan of the doubling down on Arcane Familiar and Nether Precision.

Arcane Familiar just looks incredibly dull, it’s literally just a floating blob that occasionally shoots out these tiny, ineffectual sparks at your target. It needs an incredible amount of reworking to turn into a proper feature of the spec, not just a couple of purely passive talents. For starters, it needs to look like an arcane elemental, like the ones seen guarding the Mage class hall and used by Khadgar and Kalecgos, and also potentially be turned into a guardian type cooldown like shaman’s Fire and Earth elementals.

Nether Precision on the other hand simply needs to be rejiggered to no longer have the inherent tension between wanting to spam Arcane Missiles but needing to cast other spells to consume Nether Precision procs. Until that tension between Clearcasting and Nether Precision procs is resolved this will continue to be a problem area and so far none of the changes really tackle that in a meaningful way.

Please, please sound off below with your own thoughts and feedback! They seem to finally be listening and now is our best shot to get heard and to hopefully contribute to improving our favorite spec!

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I do line up all my cds and still have crap parses. I guess I’m just getting old.

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The main thing I take from the posts you’ve quoted here is “Arcane is a hard spec for super skilled players but most people really just play it for the visuals. We’re going to try and fix this by keeping it exactly as it is now.” - Blizz

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Mood, lol! :mage:

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They need not to make arcane familiar passive

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It is though.

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Having arcane missiles only cast on a proc feels so terrible. It will be compounded even more so during PvP. You get the proc, and you have to play even more conservatively to make sure you can fire it off.

So, if you are in the beta, please provide feedback on how terrible it feels. Personally, I already have.

And it wouldn’t hurt if Presence of Mind gave some sort of kick/interrupt protection (not silences), since we are a solo arcane school.

CHeers

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How about redesigning nether precision to increase arcane damage instead of arcane blast. weaving sucks.

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So when were you ever casting it without the CC proc as part of your regular rotation? When a target is about to die anyway and you didn’t want to bother casting another Arcane Blast? I am sorry but the extremely minor QoL of having AM be castable on demand does not warrant nerfing AM into the ground to compensate, which is exactly what Blizzard did when they made the change. Since we can’t have a world where that isn’t the case, because Blizzard are too afraid to let it happen, I would take having AMs as a proc only any day.

I think the idea behind the weaving is a sound one as it breaks up the monotony of only spamming one spell but unfortunately it doesn’t pan out in practice and worse still, creates a massive tension and counter synergy between the two procs. So yeah, I definitely think Nether Precision needs more work to alleviate that tension.

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I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with you. Blizzard nerfed the spell because they just like to take a hammer to things.

If you look at the changelog for Arcane Missiles, it has seen some wild fluctuations. If we just focus on the Legion Arcane Missiles (which many claim is when arcane felt great), The damage was increased from 50% to 60% per charge, and later dropped in BfA and onward.

But, despite that, damage was still increased by arcane charges and still castable without a proc during Warlords, MoP, and Cataclysm. I think it was the power creep that made them want to remove the arcane charges.

This being said, arcane missiles should still be able to be cast without clearcasting – and maybe as a middle ground, clearcasting can still “amp” it.

Lastly, I did use arcane missiles without a proc before, especially when my arcane artillery was about to wear off and I had no clearcasting proc in sight.

Link for arcane missile changelog:

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If I recall, going from Legion to BfA, Blizzard had an intended goal of trying to make Arcane easier to understand and less punishing for failure. Arcane’s mana-management system at the time wasn’t something that the general public seemed to understand. Whether or not any of us think they met that goal is a different conversation, but that’s what I remember the reasoning being (memory subject to age).

As a part of that change, they removed the “Missiles!” proc, added Clearcasting, made clearcasting based off of mana spent instead of a raw % per cast, and made a weaker missiles castable without the proc. As far as I understood it, the intention wasn’t to ruin missiles, but to make it easier for casual players.

Additionally, as you pointed out, that’s when missiles stopped scaling with charges. Their logic behind it was something along the lines of “you should be able to use your procs as soon as you get them - it’s not intuitive that you need to wait to have full charges before pressing the big glowing button” which is honestly a pretty good take for casual / new players. But now we spend very little time sitting at no charges (at least while in situations where casting missiles matters).

Of course, they did absolutely destroy missiles in BfA as a result - but I don’t think the intention was just to nerf it into the ground. I remember doing the math and realizing that - if you didn’t have any mana problems - it was a DPS loss to cast missiles, even if you buffed it as much as humanly possible. The only real benefit was that you’d save mana when you used Clearcasting to cast it. BfA, as a whole, felt like Blizzard got halfway through an Arcane update and decided it was good enough (even though it wasn’t). We’re still suffering from decisions made in BfA and switching back to the pre-BfA missiles (both in castability and proccing) is undoing some major issues we’ve developed.

Their argument for setting it back to the pre-Bfa style (only castable with a proc) seems to be based around difficulties keeping it balanced. If they can make missiles worth casting when you get the proc and worth casting the whole channel, I’ll welcome this change.

One of the big things I keep pointing out is that Nether Precision effectively triples the effectiveness of Clearcasting procs. I don’t find myself feeling proc-starved like I did in Shadowlands. Sure, there are some times I get low rolls and I don’t get what I need, but it’s not consistent enough for me to be concerned about it. Removing Nether Precision would require a significant buff to the amount of CC procs we get. Perhaps a middle ground for those who don’t like weaving would be a choice node on Nether Precision that doubles the rate at which CC procs.

As much as I also welcome their decision to prune some spells, I do think that Arcane lacks in the “a spell that you can just cast as a filler” department. Something equivalent to a Fire Blast for arcane would be really nice - a low or instant cast time that does a bit less damage but isn’t going to tank your mana pool and isn’t going to sacrifice your arcane charges. That said, I never felt like Arcane Missiles fit that niche. It felt weird to channel half a spell when the mob was dying, and it if I have a CC proc I really don’t want to cast missiles on a dying mob. I do sometimes use Fire Blast to fill this role, but it doesn’t scale quite well enough with arcane to make it worth thinking about most of the time.

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We all did because of the abysmal proc rates but it never felt good to do it. But that is no longer going to be a factor in TWW precisely because you can no longer cast AMs without CC.

I also completely disagree with bringing back scaling with Arcane Charges. As far as I am concerned the only spell that should scale with charges is ABarr and in an ideal world a single target alternative to ABarr. It’s impossible to have a well functioning combo point system (which is what Arcane Charges are) when the ability that generates the combo points also benefits from them. Which is why the 4 charge AB spam comes with so many problems like wanting to cast nothing else and being severely hamstrung when having to drop your charges with ABarr in a single target situation.

Doing away with that degenerate playstyle is the real solution to all of Arcane problems and it’s plain enough to see but for whatever reason Blizzard continue to refuse to implement it.

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It’s because arcane is not - and hasn’t been (at least in modern history) - a builder-spender spec. It has builders and it has spenders, but the goal isn’t and has never been to build and then spend as quickly as possible (at least in single target). Turning arcane into a typical builder-spender would effectively be a redesign of the spec.

It made a lot more sense in context when mana management was more relevant. You dealt more damage the more charges you had, but the longer you held those charges the more of your mana drained. My biggest complaint for many years was that our “spender” (arcane barrage) felt fundamentally bad to press. It signaled the end of our burn and the start of our conserve and didn’t usually hit very hard - but that’s because it wasn’t the focus of the rotation.

Arcane felt its best (to me) when we had to manage our mana and not our cooldowns. It was very controllable. I could burn when I wanted to burn and conserve when I wanted to conserve.

Arcane has been very enjoyable to play for a long time using a “combo point system where the ability that generates the combo points also benefits from them.” It had a completely different design and feel from other specs, giving it a very high degree of uniqueness. I’d vote to go back to the mana management instead of turning off the arcane charge scaling.

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They failed.

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You, me and everyone else, but it’s important to understand why it doesn’t feel good to press. It’s not because the skill itself is bad but because the ramp up that follows to re-generate the charges you spent on it feels terrible. Which is why I keep maintaining that it would be fundamentally better if Arcane Blast was relegated to a simple generator and the damage of the 4 charge AB spam transferred over to ABarr or another spender.

Of course the other main problem with ABarr is that it just tries to do too many things at once and that’s never a good place to be from a design perspective because you can balance it properly. At its core ABarr is a cleave/AoE spell so using it in ST scenarios will always feel awkward. Which is why for the longest time I’ve suggested that we need an alternative charge spender for ST. And if they don’t want to create a whole new spell then a talent that increases the damage of ABarr per charge spent if it only hits one target.

If they truly wanted to make Arcane more simple and straightforward nothing can accomplish that better than turning it into a builder/spender spec (it’s half way there already anyway).

Now I understand you and many others feel nostalgic about the mana management roots of Arcane and want to go back to those days but obviously Blizzard aren’t willing to do that and frankly I don’t blame them because the fast paced modern game just can’t accommodate a DPS class that relies on a slowly regenerating resource like mana, it barely accommodates healers using it. More than that, over the years they’ve tried almost every other iteration of Arcane imaginable but for a builder/spender. Why not give it a go for an expansion, or even just a season and see how it goes? I thought their whole design philosophy going forward was driven by the mantra “if nothing changes, nothing changes.”

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I never said they didn’t and I wholeheartedly agree that they failed - I just wanted to provide the context that I remembered.

I completely disagree with this. To be honest, the big fix to “barrage feels bad to cast” came in Shadowlands with Arcane Harmony. Harmony - like most of the talents/ spells that have been added to Arcane since BfA was not well-received by everyone. But I think that’s because there were too many things all around.

I’m nostalgic for it because that’s when it was most enjoyable to play. I’d actually argue that the damage profile was less extreme back then and that we were capable of doing more damage when we didn’t have cooldowns ready. I’d even argue that back then mana regenerated faster than our cooldowns do now. The mana management was what made me WANT to play the game. Instead of trying to make it more interesting, Blizzard has been slowly making it less impactful but refuses to outright remove it. As I’ve said for the last 2 expansions, they need to just make a decision and stick with it. Not this weird “mana only matters in single target if you have too much haste or mess up your rotation, otherwise you can ignore it” style.

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Right, which is why it’s time to pull the plug. They’re only keeping it in for flavor atm but they also keep chipping away at it slowly which just turned it into an annoyance rather than a proper mechanic. They either need to double down on it or remove it altogether. This in between thing doesn’t make anyone happy.

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Personally I think if they remove the mana management aspect of Arcane entirely then the spec loses a lot of why I enjoy playing it in the first place, which for me is a big deal because normally I hate playing casters in MMOs.

I think if they shifted Evocation to being a flat regen ability again instead of attaching DPS buffs to its usage and gave some abilities a “mana leech” effect, then made costs higher overall for Arcane Blast and the like, it could hone in more on that aspect of its design again. The trick is to avoid making it feel tedious to work with.

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I hear you but as I said before they either need to bring mana management back to what it was and double down on it or get rid of it altogether because the current version is a nuisance. They’re trying to placate both sides by minimizing the impact of mana as much as possible while still leaving some vestigial aspect of it in for flavor’s sake and it’s not making anyone happy.

Look at what happened when they brought back Mana Gem, sure the flavor and fantasy was there but everyone hated the way it worked mechanically and now they removed it.
It’s the same thing with mana management, you think you want it because you have fond memories of it but trying to shoehorn it into the modern game just does not work.

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Arcane Familiar isn’t passive at the moment. In TWW they are making it passive