I haven’t experienced it this time around because I haven’t touched M+ in TWW but I’ve experienced it plenty of other times including at the end of BfA when Fire was beyond busted. So I can confidently say that even if the difference in output seems astronomical on paper, a huge chunk of that is Ignite padding on trash mobs and other overkill damage. The actual difference in clear speed between Fire and Arcane will probably be 1 to 2 minutes (depending on how lucky you get on procs) at most and if you’re cutting it that close bringing an Arcane instead of a Fire Mage was probably the least of your problems.
At any rate, the M+ giga chad mad lads should be jumping at the opportunity to bring along an underperforming spec to show they can “carry” them and prove how much bigger their epeens are compared to everyone else’s.
There are logs with Ret paladins doing 4 million overall DPS in keys, then you look at Arcane for the same dungeon and the rank 1 parse is like 2.3 million lol
It’s obvious that this is an intentional decision by blizzard at this point. I don’t think it will change until it does randomly one day far in the future when the spec changes hands
If I had to guess, they don’t have anyone who knows the spec well enough to fix it without making it OP. It is very easy for arcane to become OP if properly tuned, so they’re being cautious … which means it will suck for a while.
Remember, they already said they were happy with arcane at this level
I don’t think this is intentional. I think this is just a poorly tuned season because the WoW team is being squeezed to produce more content faster with less employees. Tuning is always a thing that is done last in development, so as they get time crunched the result is sloppier and sloppier tuning.
at this point we have thread after thread on the forums, I see threads on reddit too, the arcane mage discord is posting memes of Ion, and the regular discord has gone full doom on arcane.
the signals are clear, this is by design. they have overwhelming feedback at this point.
but arcane is small potatoes. it is clear they view it as a novelty spec and nothing more
Arcane had its “fun” for like the first month of S1 and S1 lasted half a year.
Fire gets to shine every expansion because they inevitably end up doing some type of shenanigans with Combustion’s uptime via a tier set bonus or some other borrowed power gimmick. This has been a recurring cycle for longer than I can remember, basically since they made all Mage specs 100% reliant on their major cooldowns to do any real DPS. There is a reason why Fire always benefits from this and it’s because the entire spec is designed around it and it’s the easiest and laziest thing to just pull a lever and increase its uptime.
Meanwhile they never gave Frost or Arcane any real identity to build around. Frost is the proc muncher and keeps alternating between spam Ice Lance till your fingers bleed or only do damage with Glacial Spike. Meanwhile Arcane is an antiquated mess of outdated mechanics like mana management and plagued by massive counter synergies with half of its talents. And yet both Frost and Arcane also massively rely on their cooldowns but they have no means of extending their uptime in a reliable way. They tried to do it with Frost but then Icy Veins ended up being a maintenance buff which was a disaster. And they’ve never once tried to do anything about it with Arcane, forcing it instead to be all about cooldown stacking and the awkward ramp up and setup that comes with that.
The bottom line is that they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing anymore and it’s purely a matter of sheer dumb luck as to which class/spec combo is playable and which is a dumpster fire every season.
The only problem I have is they tune the wrong thing and no improvements are done and we wait till 11.1.5 or 11.2 even just for more changes. Why does fire always have to be the top spec in M+ and raids.
For M+ it’s because they essentially have uncapped aoe via spreading their fire dots. That has always made them strong in M+.
Raid-wise it’s been a mixed bag. Fire was actually very low during almost the entirety of Dragonflight’s raids, often times being the bottom performing spec out of all classes.
I hope you are right. But I am sure they just think that arcane would do more damage if people didn’t play fire or frost, and simply aren’t equipped to do a full balance pass on all of the specs.
Arcane isn’t the only spec that is suffering right now, though it is the worst aside from aug (and I’m not complaining aug is in a time out right now)
I think we will get something, but there’s no guarantee it will be enough to put us in a more competitive position. It could literally just be a 5% buff to all damage and that’s it.
Problem is it’s sucked for most of the last decade. You can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times it’s been the go to for mage in any content.
^ This, dear God this. I’m still trying to comprehend why harmony remains a thing when the new “rotation” is hit barrage procs immediately and barrage spam at the end of the major cd phase. Drastically limits the number of 20 stack shots we get.
I have literally never known arcane to be a top spec. But I don’t need that to enjoy it. I could enjoy the game with arcane being below-average.
Arcane was pretty mid for all of DF M+, but still good for raiding. The problem that intersects with all of the problems on this forum is that the spec was gutted to make room for hero talents in a way that didn’t happen to other specs (that I know of)
I posted about it at the time and was laughed out of the room.
But it’s true. core rotation abilities were removed that I think seemed minor to the people making these changes, but they were not minor. fixing the spec is going to be really hard for anyone that doesn’t have a really deep understanding of the spec, and they clearly do not have that person on staff
You can’t be serious. Arcane was “good” for about two weeks before most major end-game content dropped, then nerfed to s*** because “zomg it’s OP on 15 second heroic dungeon bosses.” It’s had no less than 4 reworks already and has gone from “finally we’re good” to “if you play arcane you should uninstall” in < 6 months.
You must be pretty new to WOW-mage given fire has been the top spec for roughly 85-90% of WOWs existence.
