Sounds crazy, right? Maybe it is. It’s the core of the class afterall right? and it does SO MUCH DAMAGE.
Here’s the thing. I leveled my mage the whole way in Arcane, against the advice of others. It wasn’t as easy as safe as frost, but I enjoyed it. Then I unlocked Arcane Barrage, and everything became amazing.
I eventually intuited my own Arcane missiles proc fishing rotation, and all the instant cast was so satisfying. It looked something like this. Fireball>Arcane Barrage> Fire blast >Arcane barrage> Presence of mind > fireball> Arcane Barrage > CoC > Arcane barrage. If you got lucky on procs you’d have enough Arcane missiles thrown in to repeat this combo, but if you were unlucky you may need to weave in arcane explosion a few times.
The point is the combo was fast, varied, and interesting. Often adapting based on how many procs you got and gambling on arcane power timing for huge damage. Then I unlocked Arcane Blast. My rotation is now…slap that 4 times then use missiles. Repeat.
If spells with a cast time didnt do more damage there would be no point for any to exist. If anything, plant-your-feet-and-cast spells dont do enough damage IMO.
Ive been rocking arcane for well over 10 years of my wow career. Good times and bad. Wrath-shadowlands and Second patch of tbc-now; and here’s my “hot take”: you didn’t say what made arcane blast bad, you basically just claimed you like arc-fire weaving, apparently because of the instant casts mixing up your rotation or something? Honestly arcane has always been the meme 2-4 button rotation spec. Easy rotation for pumper damage (save for a few xpacs where maintaining mana actually took a decent amount of skill). And anything outside that 2-4 buttons was really you being clutch to save yourself & occasionally a raid; you being a glass cannon and all. Ultimately the real reason i have been in love with this spec is that it lets me focus on the raid as a whole and not just myself… and that is pretty great for people who aspire to lead. Which ive done for the vast majority of my career. Ive taken a step back from being a consistent leader in classic, but i still enjoy focusing on things other than my rotation. If you want more instants and proc watching you should honestly just fully roll fire and cut out this nonsense spec weaving ive never heard of in my career…
The only times you should be solely casting instants to fish for missiles are when youre geared and soloing open world content that you aren’t AoEing… where things die before you even cap your blasts.
But at the end of the day play the game how you want, just please dont go asking to blow up a spec when the rest of us are mostly fine with it. <3
Lol !!! imagine using fireball with Arcane barage…
And why you would cast a Fire Blast in the middle of the rotation ? That make no sens lol. You use Fire Blast only if you have to move or just before the boss/mobs die…
The Arcane rotation is 4-5/4-6, that being you cast Arcane Blast 4-5/6 times depending on mana, fishing for the Missile Barrage proc. If you don’t get a proc within those 5/6 casts then you cast Arcane Barrage or you risk casting Arcane Missiles to reset Arcane Blast stacks.
What you’ve described doesn’t say anything about why Arcane Blast is ruins the fun of the spec, you just decribed that you like doing a really unorthodox rotation.
People tend to think that Arcane is just cast Arcane Blast 4 times for the 60% damage increase then use Arcane Missiles but it’s a lot more nuanced than that. You need to retroactivly change your rotation based off of how much mana you currently have in relation to the bosses hp otherwise you’re more than likely to run out of mana mid fight. Now I understand that this is in the context of open world content but even then it’s applicable.
Every boss have a different pattern about the mana utilisation and CD utilisation. And it’s change on time as technically the fight length decrease with time.
I always found the Arcane Blast animation to be annoying, where it seemingly blows up both the target & yourself at the same time. Remove the exploding animation on caster please.