As one of the few mages that are completely excited about spellslinger, I have to say it just needs one more thing:
Tome of Unstable Power trinket turned into a hero talent. And adjust the visual so the mirror images fire out ice shards or an ice lance from the arcane portals!!! Boom! Best hero class in the game! Mic drop.
Exactly and same here. I think this far this is also covered by spellslinger for frost and arcane. However I would like a different bird for sunfury as arcane.
I always thought you mained Frost because of your name lol
But I too am a mage that is extremely excited for spellslinger(as arcane). blizzard please donāt think everyone hates it lol.
Yeaaa this is something I was thinking too. As a spell-slinger frost mage you have a lot of stuff floating above your head and the splints are indeed already like the spikes. Idk what they can do but I would like them to address this too.
Spellslinger lacks a lot right now. aesthetically it barely registers on the screen for Frost and Arcane alike, completely overshadowed by normal rotational animations like Icicles and Arcane Missiles. This is probably the biggest problem, not only is the theme of Spellslinger kind of lackluster and has next to no meaningful gameplay interactions, but then you have the added punch of it not having impressive animations. Comparing this to Sunfury is just night and day, and while Frostfire isnāt insane, itās still got a lot more going on in terms of gameplay, theme, and visuals than Spellslinger. My hope today is that, if the visuals and gameplay doesnāt get changed from how it is now, that Spellslinger is tuned to be the worst option so no one is forced to play it over the much more impressive alternatives.
Nothing about Spellslinger currently makes me feel like I am slinging spells anymore than my counterparts.
In fact, I even like that Spellslinger has a visual effect similar to Arcane Missiles for the arcane, instead of some visual that resembles ice, something completely unrelated to the fantasy of the specialization. In the current version, the Spellslinger looks more like an arcane mage specializing in Arcane Missiles, which is appropriate for the fantasy.
That at least in terms of visuals we have some minimal choice to maintain the fantasy of specialization.
One, thanks for being the lead on arcane feedback in the Alpha forum, you have great feedback and based on what they said today, a lot of your recommendations were taken to heart by the dev team. Keep pressing on them for our sake.
As you mention here I hope spellslinger gets the visual juice it needs to be awesome in its own right. I am gonna end up there, I just know I am, so you are my champion.
I am really not a fan of ice lance style of play. Missles are cool, Blasts are cool, orbs not based on procs awesome, little Ice lance tickle spells = despare. If our spells hit like pastry, then buff our shields 10000%. I think if we had unlimited orbs that proced an aoe arcane missles, that would be epic. and for ST arcane blast procs an empowered missles as well.
My thing is orbs animation. Itās nice and pretty but when I think of magical orbs I want them to float around us then launch. The single huge orb look has never had my favor.
If anyoneās seen channel demonfire, I would love that but with an arcane aesthetic.
I feel the same. Itās usually a good thing when spells flow together seamlessly and make the rotation feel more cohesive but in this case they blend so well they practically disappear into the background and youāre left wondering if maybe you forgot to spec into a hero tree at all. This is only exacerbated by the otherwise completely passive nature of the entire tree.
Wellā¦ I guess itās official. Spellslinger isnāt going anywhere. Sad to see. It sucks.
I mean itās still early days. We have at least 4 months before a possible pre-patch so things could still change. The potential for a workable spec is there, at least mechanically, but I feel like the main problem is that it just doesnāt capture the mage fantasy in any meaningful way.
Spellslinger was supposed to be the hero tree that bridges Arcane and Frost but instead of looking to Jaina as the inspiration (like they did with Kaelāthas for Sunfury and look how wonderfully that turned out) all they could come up with was: splintersā¦
I guess at a very rudimentary level I can understand how they arrived at that, Arcane has missiles and Frost has icicles, but of all the different things they could have gone with that definitely feels like the most underwhelming one.
Itās almost like it was left for last and the creative juices just ran out by that point. Of course I have no way of knowing if thatās what really happened but it definitely feels that way, to me at least.
Iād love to have the same hope as you. Reality is 4 months isnāt early days at all. With everything they need to doā¦ 4 months just isnāt a lot of time to completely rework an entire hero class. They have a lot of other content to work on not to mention all of the other hero classesā¦ and the reworks for Arcane and Fire that still arenāt balanced.
This! Spellslinger needs more visual effects.
I love this proc as Frost, it feels strong and even is starting to feel Spellslinger-y. However, as Arcane this is just not a good feeling proc. In single target the damage is too low to be worth utilizing in any unconventional way, itāll just be an extremely minor buff on things youāre already doing. In AOE, the damage will be significant and the extra orb is nice to have, but also basically requires taking Charged Orb for functionality reasons which is currently awful to think about how that works with how few talent points we have to construct coherent builds with in our spec tree now. An additional issue with this talent as Arcane is that it is very intuitive to Arcane Barrage prior to using Arcane Orb, however in single target, Arcane Orb only recuperates half of your charges, making this proc even worse numerically than it already is.
Sadly, I really liked the Empowered Arcane Echoās from the old Spellfrost Teachings talent, they would proc on random targets and you noticed it happening, looked cool. That said, I think focusing on Orb spells is the right direction, but I really want to call out one major issue. Some bosses that exist over absent terrain (think Eye of the Jailer in Sanctum of Domination) do not get hit by Arcane Orb, it instead just falls off the platform and doesnāt connect. The design team will need to make sure that Arcane Orb connects on these encounters.
Overall, I want this proc to feel good, as Arcane, I think to do so it needs something extra, I think it needs to fire off several consecutive orbs, this would solve the issue of not getting enough charges to recuperate to full. It would also allow this proc to cover a couple of Arcane Barrages in AOE which I think would be a very comparably good feeling to the Arcane Soul provided by Sunfury.
Simply put, this talent is strong, but about as boring as you can make a talent in WoW. Why Spellfrost Teachings was changed to be the Orb proc instead of this escapes me for reasoning.
The change to this talent makes it do nothing in single target, why was this even changed? It was low enough damage that it did not present any real threat of a degenerate Blizzard spam rotation for Frost and it promoting Charged Orb for Arcane I view as a good variation on talent choices between hero trees. Reconsider this change as having a talent that does nothing in a situation just feels off.
For your continued commitment to this tree, I do feel that it is starting to come together.
Just want to echo similar sentiment about Spellfrost Teaching; while it resets Orb similarly for both specs, the value and role for Orb are not equal for Arcane vs Frost as already detailed by Porom. Both in ST and AoE, Arcane Orb serves as utility spell that recharges Arcane Charge after dumping via Barrage, thus to incentivize Orb, it really should has additional effect that enhances Barrage. Something like this already exist in Sunfury in the form of Glorious Incandescence where it allows 3 casts of fully powered Barrage per Orb.
The original form of Arcane version of Spellfrost Teaching takes the form of Glacial Assault talent from Frost as a random proc. Thematically, I liked this version as it represent Frost and Arcane teaching each other some trick from its own spec that enhances the other. Mechanically, vulnerability period plays to the Arcaneās niche of stacking damage into damage window, and even has positive interaction with Aether Attunement and Arcane Harmony in AoE rotation, where you can bank the AA charge until the vulnerability happen before you send the Cleave AM, follow by Harmony enhanced Barrage. To incentivize Orb casting like Glorious Incandescence, the vulnerability could be a proc effect that happens on the next Orb cast; should probably also reset the Orb charge in case it was already on CD as well.
The following would be my ideal version of Spellfrost Teaching:
Spellfrost Teaching
Direct damage from Arcane Splinter has a X% chance to reset the cooldown of Arcane Orb and increase the damage taken of all enemy damaged by the next Arcane Orb by Y% for Z sec.
Direct damage from Frost Splinter has X% chance to reset the cooldown of Frozen Orb and increase all damage dealt by Frozen Orb by Y% for Z sec.
I like the direction this is going nowā¦ Itās stillā¦ not as creative as I would like similar to Sunfury as an option butā¦ improvement is improvement.
Orbs and splits are great for AoEā¦ Iād like to see something a little more focused on ST.
Like perhaps an instant cast for our big spells on both Arcane and Frost? Exampleā¦ Proccing fingers of frost x amount of times grants you an x percent chance to instant cast glacial spike.
Also the visual identity isnāt quite thereā¦ people on youtube that Iāve watchedā¦ their main complaint is that they have no real visual identityā¦ they canāt tell they are playing spellslingerā¦ the visual indications just arenāt there. I canāt even really tell when splinterstorm goes offā¦ As people have mentioned many timesā¦ this hero tree will live or die by itās visualsā¦
This could be said about pretty much every single hero tree talent node. The reality is that Arcane is an incredibly messy spec and nearly impossible to balance alongside either of the other two specs. Arcane is like a house of cards being precariously held together by a hodgepodge of outdated mechanics and expansion after expansion of half measures, hotfixes and bandaids.
At this point, unless Arcane gets a complete overhaul (which is increasingly becoming less and less likely), it will simply not be possible to adjust the hero tree talents that will benefit Arcane to the same or substantially same degree as they do Frost and Fire.
I think weāre rapidly approaching a time in the development process where things have gotten as good as theyāre going to get and any further adjustments are likely to do more harm than good.
Just wait until the Beta goes live and more people get to experience the visuals firsthand. The forums are going to be inundated by complaints from all of those who couldnāt be bothered searching through countless nonsensical YouTube and Twitch videos to get to the handful that show a glimpse of them (shout out to Lanfear and Venruki for showcasing them, lol).
I really hope so. Iām getting to the point where I might have to play the class I donāt wanna playā¦ because of the lack of effort that went into Frost and Spellslingerā¦ Like zero changes. And itās kinda likeā¦ Why? Why keep giving them my money. When they are so obviously leaning into the class fantasy of other hero classes at the expense of the one I was most excited forā¦ Kinda ruined all the hype I had for TWW tbh. Although the gaming industry as a whole is just a let down. Soā¦ kinda used to it I guess.
I initially thought Spellslinger looked stupid and there was no way I was not going Sunfury as Arcane spec, but after testing it a little bit on training dummies today I was actually pleasantly surprised at how fun Spellslinger was for Arcane.
I think the primary reason for this is the semi-passive chance to reset arcane orbās cooldown. Yes a bit of it is left up to RNG but the bottom line for me is that it makes the spec exciting when you get those procs, and you do seem to get a fair amount of them.
I was surprised how nice spellslinger was as well. It has some fun feedback loops to play around with. I definitely feel like it behaves better with arcane than frost, though.
I will be an odd one out and say I donāt mind the spellslinger visuals, at least for what it is. It isnāt nearly as epic as a voidweaver or anythingā¦ but given how highly generic this hero tree is by design there are not a lot of iconic motifs to draw on to begin with.
Spellslinger is awesome to pair with season 1 tier (frost). I was skeptical and I was wrong. Nice job bilzz.