Same as my previous post with Sunfury; great Frostfire hero talent, inspired me to make another hero talent tree.
This time for Spellslinger, focusing on Arcane Missiles, Flurry and Ice Lance, as well as the much requested ARCANE LAAAAAAAAAAASER
Here it is: https://imgur.com/gallery/Uu37c2J
Let me know what you think
The title of the thread matching the official one is pretty freakin funny.
Give me my Arcane Laser Blizzard!!!
TL;DR that’s really cool, just too strong.
Did I read that right and if would be an 8s channel, or 12!? That would be nuts.
Since it’s just for fun, my feedback on the Arcane side would be that idk if I want a huge chunk of my damage to be tied around one 45s CD with a long channel. I know you can’t be stunned or silenced based on a passive, but that sounds too op. And I imagine you still can’t move? That’d be rough.
And the connection to CC may get frustrating. Sounds like ideally you’d want to have 5 stacks every time you use it, so you might be fearful of using any stacks (unless you had concentration).
I like the idea of the reverb tho, that seems like a unique interaction that could be more rewarding, and more flexible than RS.
I like the idea of using it during our big & mini burn, so maybe have it do that reverb thing as part of its function. And have the entire spell replace RS & ToM while providing those benefits (like gaining 4 charges, etc). AND since it’s the Spellslinger sub-spec, and the concept should be something like “chunk a whole lot of spells very quickly/all at once”, keep the animation and the un-interruptible stuff and while channeling your big ole laser (that increases your haste), you can also cast without interrupting your laser. Essentially allow you to pump a bunch of spells into/through the laser/target effected by the laser. And have it end with a nice big, shiny arcane explosion. Could even have it be the catalyst for missiles barrage, where while it’s channeled, your missiles hit nearby targets. Annnd maybe not 12s? Would increase burst, yay, but mainly might help with frustration with an add dying before the end of the 12s.
Is that animation possible? Who knows? Is that concept feasible? Also shrug.
Might be doin too much. And some of the other passives already kinda converted it to that. But that’s an idea I could get behind.
Ice floes
8 seconds at the start of the tree (jsut with the first talent, with 3 cc charges), 12 seconds with the whole tree (assuming 5 CC charges)
Absolutely agree, but keep in mind numbers are easy to tune.
You can take that laser and make it and Arcane Echo do 90% less damage and boom, it goes from OP to garbage.
Forget OP vs not OP; that’s a question of number tuning.
I just want a cool laser and an easier rotation. This could definitely do it.
For sure, I think it would literally be Ray of Frost, only purple and with the Arcane ring (the one that appears when you cast Arcane Blast) in front of your hands with the laser going through the middle of the ring as it spins.
And keep in mind it would massively help with haste stat scaling for Arcane, since the entire damage window would cost no mana with this talent, and would scale massively well with haste
All good points 
. I guess shimmer would work too.
As for the animation question. I meant more like is there an animation to sustain a channeled beam while also doing the animations for casting arcane blast and arcane missiles.
A long cast laser doesn’t sound like a “spellslinger” to me. “Spellslinger” is likely a play on “Gunslinger” and everywhere I look it references being “quick on the draw”.
Nothing about “Channel a laser beam for 12 seconds” sounds like being quick - especially if it’s unaffected by haste.
What kind of damage is “Frostwarp” damage? Spellfrost already exists (barely, to be fair) and is a combination of Frost and Arcane schools.
Here are my additional thoughts from an Arcane perspective:
Timelord: Frostwarp Laser can no longer be interrupted, and during the channel you can no longer be stunned, silenced, or be affect by any loss of control effects
12 seconds of total immunity is absurd in PvP and will never work in PvE. “To avoid being stunned, just be a mage.” If you really want your laser beam, this talent is WAY overpowered - especially given how absolutely “meh” the choice it’s fighting with is.
Junction Point: Clearcasting can now have up to 2 additional maximum stacks …
The only purpose of this talent is to make the big laser beam stronger? More maximum stacks of clearcasting really doesn’t help arcane at all right now. In fact, wanting to save your CC procs to cast the laser beam is going to be pretty detrimental to how Nether Precision currently works. Arcane’s non-burst phases are going to be even weaker somehow since we won’t be using CC procs at all - just hoarding them.
Which also means we’ll probably hit the “I’m not getting enough procs” problem we had in Shadowlands. Nether Precision alleviates that pain a lot. But if you’ve got this spell that effectively needs you to have 5 procs of CC before you can use it effectively, it’s going to hurt a LOT when you only managed to get 3 (or they timed out altogether before you were ready)
Frostwarp Battery: Every instance of damage done by Arcane Missiles or Frostwarp Laser generates a stack of Arcane Battery while Arcane Familiar is active.
At 100 stacks, your arcane familiar fires an Arcane detonation at your current target, dealing (300% Spell Power) Arcane damage to the target and all nearby enemies within 8 yards
Why tie this to Arcane Familiar? There’s no reason to force a talent selection just because of flavor. In the frostfire tree, there’s some linking talents between having meteor cast comet storm and comet storm cast meteor, but tying this ability to the familiar “because you can” will make it even harder for Blizzard to fix Rule of Threes and make it a viable talent.
This will effectively do about as much damage as the impact of Meteor (not counting any burn effects after). If you’re saving your CC procs for the 45 second laser beam and doing a full 12 second cast, Frostwarp Laser would need to deal damage 8.34 times per second to be able to cast it as frequently as a meteor (which has a 45 second cooldown). Sure, I see that the intention seems to be that it’ll do full damage to everything it hits, but not only would Blizzard never let that fly, it’d also be unhealthy for the game. M+ would be “pull the whole room and let the mage nuke it” (which, yeah, that’s sorta how it already is, but they usually try to prevent that, not encourage it).
Additionally, the fact that it isn’t controlled by us (procs as soon as it hits 100) means that you could nuke an add that has 1 hp left and lose an absolute ton of damage.
Frostwarp Weaving: Cascading Power now also grants you 1 Clearcasting stack every 4 seconds for 12 seconds when used
Again, why are we tying this to an optional talent? It’s either going to be underutilized because nobody takes the talent or make the talent required in all circumstances. For a talent that’s in the last section, that’s a lot of power to force someone to give up just to make a hero talent work.
Nether Hurricane: Nether Tempest is now permanent and applied to your target whenever your channel your Frostwarp Laser
Why? There’s not really anything exciting about keeping NT around. It’s a pretty weak spell that has incredibly minimal interactions with our kit.
Lifeline: When taking lethal damage, you instead apply a Prismatic Barrier at 200% effectiveness on yourself. If the damage exceeds the combination of your current health and your barrier, you die. 10 minute cooldown
Just put Cauterize in the general tree. Most mages have been asking for Cauterize to be available to all specs anyway, so why give the other two an option for a significantly weaker version of it when we can just have the real thing?
Frostwarp Reverberation
(I’m too lazy to quote the whole thing here)
If we go back to the math I did earlier to see that the laser could deal damage 8.34 times a second, that means this spell will end with a 100% damage increase on it. Which is a lot. If the laser does damage at a more balanced rate (say twice a second), it’ll end at a 24% damage increase - which is half of what Radiant Spark currently does.
Additionally, this is set to replace 2 talents in our tree. Do we need to have those two talents picked for this to work? Or could I avoid the center of the tree and put my points elsewhere to get even more bang for my buck? What about Harmonic Echo? Will that talent affect this new one to effectively let my laser double cleave (since you’ve added another talent for laser cleaving)?
Conclusion
This really doesn’t feel like it’s been thought out for Arcane. It looks like you wanted to add a laser beam and said “let’s put it here!” I’m not confident that any of your suggestions here even mention Arcane Blast, Surge, Barrage, or Explosion - yet somehow Nether Tempest made the cut? That’s not even including things like Presence of Mind, Evocation or Arcane Orb. I feel like these suggestions are trying to reduce arcane to a “spam missiles” build and I’m not for it.
If you really insist on putting a big ol’ laser beam into the mage kit, I honestly think Sunfury would fit the theme better. The Sunfury were Kael’thas’ army in Outland - and he’s known for his desire for power. The Sunfury raided and took Tempest Keep and were responsible for the Manaforges in Netherstorm - so I think they know a thing or two about “power” and “energy” that we could work with. Plus, I think a big firey-arcaney disintegration beam would look cooler than “Ray of Frost but purple”. I don’t know much about how fire plays these days, but a talent that allows Pyroblast to be cast while channeling the laser beam could be interesting (and probably stupidly overpowered - but that’s the direction)
You said it yourself: it’s meant to act as a gunslinger.
Arcane Familiar casts spells while you cast spells (Arcane Assault).
This talent capitalizes on that.
In fact, if anything this talent should proc more often and do less damage (i.e. proc once per 30 ticks for 60% SP)
Frostwarp laser starts with a base tick proc of 10 per second, increased by haste.
Because you need CC procs to make Frostwarp laser last the whole 12 seconds.
No
I’m gonna keep saying this over and over until it sticks.
I don’t want to hear anything about OP or not OP.
You can nerf this to give 0.1% damage per instance of damage, and suddenly the talent does no damage. Forget numbers for now, this is about the idea
Why do you think Blizzard hasn’t put a hard numbers on many of their talent trees yet? Because of arguments like this.
Because Ray of Frost belongs to Frost and Arcane fits great with Arcane Laser. Fire does not have a laser spell., which is why your next paragraph is incorrect, as shown below
I get the feeling you haven’t pushed high keys.
The talent it’s competing with is mandatory buff for VDH, bears outside incarn, monk, etc.
It is, in fact, stronger than the Aug evoker Blistering scales talent by a good 50+% margin on Plate tanks
Nothing in this kit sounds like a gunslinger. Adding a talent that drops a bomb every 45 seconds is an artillery, not a gunslinger. But that’s semantics.
That’s absurd. I’m not very knowledgeable on dot classes, but 10 times a second baseline is ridiculous.
I like your reasoning here. Very sound, and the type of response I like to see from someone asking for feedback on the forums.
All you need to do is manage the tick rate of the laser beam. 10 ticks per second before you account for haste is bonkers and makes this 120% when it’s done. The implication was to put the tick rate at something reasonably between the two extremes I listed to get it to balance out.
There’s no reason for most people to push a key beyond ~20 unless you’re going for a seasonal reward or like seeing your name on a chart. Balance for keys beyond where rewards stop should not be Blizzard’s focus unless a given class / spec is making it too easy.
If your logic is “This talent is useful when you run 25s and higher” then I really don’t care. It’s going to affect what, 20,000 players? Compared to the 100s of thousands that play at levels less than that? You want to push them? Fine, go for it. Do what makes you happy. But don’t balance the game for everyone else around you wanting to push keys.
Listen, I get it. I know you want a laser beam. You’ve wanted one for a while. And I don’t disagree that it could work, but this doesn’t sound enjoyable at all. I know my comments have been very critical, but I did try to offer what I felt was an alternative.
If it incorporated the rest of the kit a bit better, I’d be down to try it, but this design feels like it’s too focused around the laser and arcane missiles and blatantly ignores the rest of our kit and fails to acknowledge some of the existing problems.
Clearcasting has been a point of weakness in Arcane since BfA. The more stuff we tie to it, the more the cracks appear. Nether Precision (probably by accident) patches some of those cracks a little bit. Blatantly, I don’t think creating a laser beam for Arcane that’s tied to clearcasting procs is going to make anything better.
Tying it to arcane charges might work. Replacing Blast or Missiles might work. But making it stronger based on the number of CC procs is going to land us back in Shadowlands where arcane was constantly complaining that we didn’t have enough procs to do a full burst - putting big disparities between a lucky burst and an unlucky one. The easy fix is “just give us a way to force the procs to happen” but then we wind up with the comically scripted rotations that steer people away from arcane like we have now (I’m considering Nether Precision to effectively triple the effectiveness of Arcane Missiles because of how long it lasts, which isn’t really forcing the proc, but you are guaranteed one with Surge, and that’s usually enough).
So no, I don’t push high keys. But I still play the game. I’ve played the game for a long time. I’ve seen things that work. I’ve seen things that don’t work. And although I no longer attempt to play at the highest levels, I can confidently say that to me, this doesn’t feel like it would work or be fun to play if it did. But I would love it if you could find a way to design something that will inevitably make me sad when Blizzard does something else.