Actually it makes me think of talking rats that train talking turtles in the ways of ninjitsu.
Now, if Spellslinger hurled talking ninja rats I’d definitely switch to Frost or Arcane for that.
At the end of the day I’ll be going with whichever one doesn’t add more damned spells to my bars or require a weak aura to track a buff or something.
The amount of addons I have to use to play this game and the # of macros I have to use to have enough room for spells, trinkets, active weapons is really getting to the point of frustration.
Spellfrost teaching for frost mage is just a copy/paste of Glacial Assault talent. Please rework that to something different.
while the rework of frost mage talent tree have brought much needed burst, but frost mages lost a lot of mobility. The hero talent tree is a good opportunity to boost the game play. for instance, make glacial spike and ray of frost castable while moving when some splinter conditions are met (8 splinters are present or something similar).
Also, frost mages are also in need for some defensive retune. To be clear, I am not asking for more defensive spells. Frost mages have a lot of defensives available already. But all of them requires pro-active activation (barriers, alter time, mirror images, greater invis, ice cold/block and cold snap). Look at the superior survivability of fire mages, it is primarily coming from cauterize, a passive defensive option. So maybe make the reactive barrier in the hero talent tree auto trigger when health is below certain threshold (10% for example).
Just a penny for your thought.
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Absolutely agree, although this isn’t really something that can or should be addressed in the context of a Hero Tree. Cauterize is in an entirely different ballpark to any other defensive mages have access too, it’s in a league of its own. The fact that it wasn’t included in the class tree is quite frankly a travesty.
P.S. I would love to see a talent in the Sunfury Hero Tree that works like Sprit of Redemption but instead turns you into a phoenix that can dish out a lot of damage. It could be called “Phoenix Reborn.”
From an arcane point of view, in my opinion, Splinter should have a direct relationship with abstraction and either replace arcane missiles or be activated when we use arcane missiles.
The arcane wizard is one who uses arcane magic in its raw state, with arcane missiles consisting precisely of the wizard condensing pure arcane magic in the form of several smaller missiles.
Splinter, therefore, would be the wizard improving this technique, condensing raw arcane magic and mixing it with moisture in the air to create a new, more powerful magic, creating magical crystals that are lethal and as resistant as diamonds.
This technique, in fact, even reminds me of Guren, from the Naruto universe, as she was capable of summoning and manipulating crystals in various ways.
If you’re going to use a similar concept, I at least suggest that you be more creative and give us more interesting and fun abilities, like turning your skin into crystal or trapping your enemies in crystal prisons.
If we didn’t have nether precision right now we would only press arcane missiles for mana reasons, so it would be used even less in the rotation. The issue is how weak missiles is relative to blast.
Agreed. Miss when missiles were a big deal tbh … probably why I like this season’s tier set.
This is something that I keep seeing people repeat on the mage Discord, but I don’t think holds true anymore. AM is still weaker than AB, but the magnitude isn’t as bad as on release
According to some math and charting that I did comparing Arcane Missiles to Arcane Blast, the difference between the two is around 3%.
Here is the chart for reference: https://imgur.com/gallery/zSu17xF
This is comparing Arcane Missiles to Arcane Blast relative to Mastery only since Vers/Crit/Haste all scale the exact same for those two spells; only mastery has different scaling between the two.
To demonstrate my point, here are the DPS curves when you increase Arcane Missiles’ base damage from 47.066% to 48.5% SP per missiles (~3% buff to AM)
Here is the chart for reference: https://imgur.com/gallery/a9x6G4O
I should add to that statement that this is AFTER several buffs to Arcane in the form of ~10ish % buff to Arcane Missiles and ~4-6ish% buff to Arcane Blast, so certainly at the start of the expansion it was very true, and the difference between Arcane Blast and Arcane Missiles’ DPS might have been >15%
EDIT: Looking at the data: it looks like this is slightly overexaggerated (not >15%, but >10%)
- Arcane Blast went from 54.29% SP base damage at the start of this expansion to 72.8% SP
- A cumulative buff of 34.09% increase
- Arcane Missiles went from 32.805% SP per missile at the start of the expansion to 47.066% SP per missile
- A cumulative buff of 43.47% increase
- The difference in absolute damage buff is 9.3% in favor of Arcane Missiles. Thus, if Arcane Missiles had gotten buffed to the same amount that Arcane Blast had been throughout this expansion, (i.e. 34.09% total buff instead of 43.47%); it would be ~10.25% behind in DPS relative to Arcane Blast w/ Nether Precision; CE and PS at all available Mastery levels (9.6-100%)
Interesting. It definitely feels like AM is worse off than AB but that’s largely anecdotal and I’ve honestly never delved too deeply into the numbers before.
I think the underlying problem is that the devs never settled on what to do with AM once AB was introduced in TBC. Over the years AM has undergone so many changes it’s hard to keep track but I think by and large it worked best the way it was in Legion. However, so much has changed since then that simply going back to that version won’t really work.
Arcane in general struggles mightily with it’s identity as a spec and that identity crisis is so deeply rooted that every individual spell is also schizophrenic and doesn’t know if it wants to be a filler, a nuke, a proc, etc. That’s why I keep urging for a wholistic overhaul/rework of the spec but Blizzard just aren’t willing to do that for whatever reason.
At the end of the day though it will have to happen because all of these older specs are houses of cards that are teetering on the verge of collapse under the weight of almost two decades of stuff that was just pilled on seemingly without any consideration or outlook for the future. It really wasn’t until just a few years ago that the devs finally started even talking about making aspects of the game “evergreen” let alone actually implementing the changes needed to bring that about.
Boring/10. Just another combat modifiers, for min-maxers, been there so many times before. Can we have at least one expansion with quality over quality improvements? For example Mages has a lot of buttons to press, but only 1 GCD. So why not to have talents for Arc spec, which put all utility spells on separate GCD?
This is mostly a “lore” comment, but how is it possible that Frost+Arcane isn’t named Archmage…?
I don’t like the increased focus on Nether Precision for Arcane. I don’t particularly enjoy the lack of flexibility in the basic missiles-blast-blast rotation, but there’s no alternative because Nether Precision is too strong. This will just double down on that strict rotational gameplay.
I think the spec would be better off if banking and channeling multiple clearcasted arcane missiles in a row was optimal in at least some situations. That would offer a better “moment of glory” in the rotation compared to missiles-blast-blast.
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Unfortunately, blizzard killed that gameplay. Whether on purpose or by accident, I can’t say.
One of the biggest complaints I remember from arcane in Shadowlands was that we weren’t getting enough missile procs. Even now, I see players complaining about our current set bonuses because they don’t get procs frequently enough to keep their buffs running or don’t get to use the 4 set as often as they like.
Nether Precision - again, not sure if this was on purpose or by accident - is effectively a way to triple the value we get out of a single proc of Clearcasting. Not only do we get the benefit of stronger missiles, we also get 2 stronger blasts.
So the easy fix for that would be a choice node that either grants Nether Precision or triples the proc chance of Clearcasting - but there’s an inherent flaw in that choice: Clearcast Arcane Missiles cannot proc Clearcasting. The more missiles you cast (assuming you clearcast them), the fewer clearcasting procs you receive.
In Legion, I felt like we were insanely flexible with our design. Every expansion since then has made us less flexible either by changing the way Clearcasting procs or by tacking on another static cooldown. I would love it if we had more flexibility, but considering they opted to make “Hero Trees” instead of fixing the existing ones signals that we’re likely to continue to get more rigid in next expansion.
But I do miss the glory days of annihilating my target with a seemingly endless stream of Arcane Missiles…
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This is my biggest regret as well. And the worst part is that, once again, this was all caused by their inability to stay the course and instead to constantly tinker and change things that didn’t need to be changed.
To me, the Legion version of Arcane, and indeed most other specs across all classes, remains the golden standard and I will never understand why they decided to essentially undo all of that in the subsequent expansions. They want “evergreen?” What could have been better than to leave the artifact weapon trees in place and to expand upon them as we continued to empower the weapons?
Instead we effectively destroyed them to supposedly remove the threat of Sargeras’ sword which is still sticking out of Silithus and the only danger it presents is players accidentally running their months into it as they afk-fly to farm AQ for transmogs once a week…
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Sweet Baby Jesus … Porom advocating for Spinterstorm to be an active ability.
Where in the name of Khadgar would I put that on my bars?! I already have 4 different macros for combining spells/abilities just to make room for what I need (and I already have Nether Tempest macro’d to RS so making NT a passive doesn’t help me lol).
I miss the days when I didn’t need 4 macro’s and 3 action bars to play a spec in this game.
I haven’t enjoyed playing specs less than in Dragonflight.
“If any Arcane Mages were hoping for any major shakeups to talents or rotations from Spellslinger, they will probably have to hold out for Sunfury or potentially alpha changes to the class/spec trees.” … SO MUCH THIS.
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I get why he said that, the desire to have agency over a powerful ability like that (at least we assume it’s going to be anyway) is understandable and active abilities generally feel better than passive procs. However, and this is a major “however,” we were entirely overwhelmed and inundated with active abilities following the DF talent revamp to the point where, you like said, we have action bar space anymore.
Tbh, the passive nature of the tree never really bothered me nor does the cyclical nature of Splinterstorm because it breaks the feeling that you’re not really doing anything in between cooldowns. But I also understand why more sweaty players want to double down on the cooldown stacking. It’s just not my preferred play style.
P.S. Yeah no shakeup of any kind is coming from these Hero Trees, that’s become painful obvious already. If they don’t also massively redesign the base talent trees in conjunction with this new system it will completely fall flat.
Already feeling it. The new talent system has drastically reduced my enjoyment of playing the game. Maybe I’m getting too old for WoW but the button bloat … especially when it comes from damage modifiers or excessive rotational abilities … has left this former altoholic playing 2 toons for the most part.
If hero talents add to the complexity and business of rotations, I’m probably done with WoW.
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Porom has some recommended macros that could help with that 
I think I’m already using 3 of his lol
Please, the macro tab on my mage is easily twice the size of any of my other characters. 
The one good thing from all of this is that I changed all the ability icons to cooler looking ones with the macros. If anyone else was to log in on my mage they wouldn’t recognize half the abilities on my bars, lol!