So, I have gone over the new talents and tried a few builds and I just don’t understand what Blizzard’s intent is/was for Arcane. None of the final talents in Arcane appear to help my damage in any way other than Leydrinker which still performs just under my talent build with NO final Arcane talents chosen.
It appears Blizzard wants us to dump our arcane charges with Arcane Barrage at key opportunity moments, but have not given us any way to adequately recover arcane charges without having to cast Arcane Blast sub optimally. Arcane Orb was nerfed in how many charges it generates and is now basically a DPS loss to cast. High Voltage at best generates only one or two charges per Arcane Missile cast. Magi’s Spark is gimmicky and depends upon us using Arcane Barrage, but then be nerfed in our damage output as we build back up arcane charges.
So, at the moment I don’t have ANY of the final Arcane talents chosen in my build as I don’t understand what their intent or use is and when I have attempted to incorporate them into a build I do less damage than without them.
Are we back to having to have 50 external applications to track server ticks, buffs, procs, etc. along with having to have the same amount of macros to do all the heavy lifting? Are we back to trying to “squeeze” in several spells in a nanosecond to take advantage of buffs that only last a few seconds? Is there ANY method to these talent changes or are they just a bunch of “neat ideas” that Blizzard just threw into the Arcane talent tree?
I am truly at a loss here. Does anyone know what Blizzard was trying to accomplish with Arcane? Do I just need to sit this expansion out until they fix it? How’s Frost doing?
That has been at the root of all problems facing Arcane. It’s a core flaw of the spec’s design because generating Arcane Charges in ST situations is a slog. Therefore, the incentive is to always spam AB at 4 charges and to almost never use ABarr. They tried to address that in TWW but in all the wrong ways i.e. by empowering ABarr in various ways instead of making Arcane Charge generation in ST faster.
I’ve been proposing a very obvious solution to this conundrum for years now: to turn AB into a ST generator, just like AE is in AoE scenarios, by reducing its damage and cast time and transferring the power of 4 charge AB spam to ABarr so that the default ST rotation is AB to 4 charges into ABarr, mirroring the default AoE rotation.
To me that’s the most commonsense solution but for whatever reason they don’t seem to want to do it and instead choose to blunder into these ridiculous half measures that make no one happy and leave people wondering just what is it that they’re trying to do with the spec. It just demonstrates a lack of a cohesive vision for what the spec should be. That’s been the status quo for years now and quite frankly I don’t see it changing, sadly.
So to answer your question directly: I have no clue. And I’ve been maining Arcane for almost 2 decades.
Yeah, I feel you there. I’ve been playing it since the original Burning Crusade and I don’t think Blizzard has ever really had a vision for it since they cobbled the spec together way back then.
Yup, it has always felt “cobbled together.” Aluneth in Legion gave it a bit of flair and the artifact tree provided a sense of actual spec identity. Unfortunately, it’s been downhill since then and the hero trees coming with TWW are too generic to fill that gap.
and blizz said they wanted to make Arcane more “accessible” HA
the main issue is confusion , blizz wants us to cast barrage all the time or keep ABlasting until lest say 70% mana and enter conserve phase?
or how its this supposed to be played ?
isnt like Fire where crit + crit = instant pyro is the base of the whole gameplay.
frost with IL shatter combos.
the new issue with arcane is “RNG” , ToTm combo , w/o CC procs is not fun. Or u can fish for a proc before doing …still rng.
when u toss barrage u never know what will happen , will proc orb?
will the High Voltage proc… 0 , 1 , 2 charges?
will spellfrost teachings proc? random orbs are cool dont get me wrong , but watching orbs proc at max charges will feel kinda bad
Random procs are fine (Clear cast) , gaining random resources is not and never will be.
the proc chance for CC on AB feels bad, because AB at 0-3 charges is the worst casting spell in the game , its slow and crippled in dmg because its dmg is based on number charges.
oh and of course the elephant in the room - Nether precision that is used to summon more splinters
P.d Arcane feels more “oracle” than w/e blizz intended with oracle priest tbh lol
Just as a final observation, is it even possible now to play Arcane without some mod or addon that tracks and shows your procs and cooldowns?
I know Blizzard fully embraces mods and addons and I use them myself for many quality-of-life adjustments to the game. But it occurs to me that if they are going to make us track multiple cooldowns and procs, shouldn’t those be incorporated somehow into the UI without us having to go and find an external source to display them with?
I just don’t see how I could actually play an Arcane mage now without some form of external program support (which I use) and I just think that is somehow negligent on the part of Blizzard.
That’s the case pretty much across the board for all classes and specs but Arcane is definitely one of the worst in this regard. The base game UI’s that tracks proc buffs which appear as tiny icons at the top right corner of the screen by default has always been wholly inadequate, especially considering that so much of gameplay now revolves around tracking them. But instead of fixing it Blizzard have completely ignored the issue and forced players to rely on third party software.
A disproportionate amount of the difficulty in this game comes from these sorts of inadequacies with the base game’s UI and the difference between a good player and a bad one often comes down to who has the best addons. I’ve always felt that was completely unacceptable, particularly in a competitive online game, but it has always been the case with WoW. It has just gotten more apparent in recent years as the game continues to become ever more complex and convoluted.
All I know is I went from sucking-but-ok to sucking-and-not-wanting-to-play over the course of a single patch. I’ve tried every configuration of the talent tree I can think of, and none of it is fun/good. My guess is they locked most of our power behind the hero talent builds, and what we have now (with no access to the hero talents) is just suck. But agreed, none of the capstones are exciting, and Clearcasting is such a low proc, the myriad of talents that rely on it are gimped.
this was the thought I had today. My damage in keys is…fine. Other classes still do a good bit more outside of single target and big burst. Either arcane’s damage is intended to be mediocre, or the current tuning is waiting for the splinters. Also, touch and echo still do really underwhelming damage. Casting a random blast in aoe or barrage in single target (outside of kill%) during the window is a pain.
Pretty much. I’m honestly not even sure if exploding it is worth the global. Although, the other options aren’t really much better and/or are RNG dependent. Feels bad having two major cooldowns and neither doing top 5 damage. With clearcasting being as rare as it is (with the 5% mandatory talent) I feel like missiles should be sufficient to blow it.
spellsinger gives u tons of power , in beta it was like 30%+ of the arcane dmg , and blizz refused to nerf it and instead…nerfed barrage to the ground!
still the whole arcane thing is confusing as hell
why arcane surge gives 1 CC but ToTm doesnt? lol
aether attunement every 4 missiles , it cleaves …WHY?
make it cleave as default nerf it if needed , but Missiles cleave is fun ! is not like u get tons of CC procs while aoe anyway.
clearcast? RNG > need CC for nether precision > using NP give u splinters …
high voltage? RNG
orb barrage? RNG
Spellsinger - spellfrost ? RNG
there is no gameplay loop at all
give barrage 100% CC Chance , make high voltage gave 2 charges 100% (u can use orb and be at 4 charges if orb doesnt proc)
build to 4 charges > barrage > missiles > AB x2 or Orb > barrage > missiles
CDS in the middle for moar dmg
maybe its a bit boring that way ? yep , but the foundation of arcane is done…and u use all your spells , instead of hoping for RNG in order to use other spells.
but who know what blizz is thinking , before the nerfs the amount of CC and orbs and u were at 4 charges 90% of the time it was maybe to much , but now is meh.
I did not play the Beta, but have heard that basically we are playing with an “unfinished” talent tree that is supposed to only actually work once we get the Hero Talents. Reminds me of the axiom of people telling you that a game will get really good once you get past the first 100 hours or so into it.
I find it interesting that the Arcane tree is populated with many talents that no one will be taking because of all the mandatory talents necessary just to make the spec work successfully. Oh, and Arcane Debilitation…
Really, Blizzard? A 2-point mandatory talent that gives .5 percent extra damage to a spell? I thought you got rid of this thinking for talents long ago. Could no one come up with anything better?
At least if and when they get to pruning the Arcane talent tree, there will be a LOT of talents they can just get rid of since no one will be taking them. Bright side and all…
LOL, I think from Blizz perspective, we are done with the pruning. They think they did a great job with the arcane rework. I can’t say I understand their reasoning, but they put lots of work into landing us where we are right now.
This must be some new usage of the word “winning” that I’ve not previously encountered before.
Also, has anyone else noticed that Arcane Blast went from a good spell that charged up into an OP spell that wasn’t maintainable mana-wise into a really crappy spell that is only good now once it is fully charged and no longer maintainable mana-wise? I thought that was an interesting evolution of an ability.
Arcane has always been a disjointed mess of a spec. In that regard this latest iteration is nothing new. The hero talents will do very little to address those underlying problems and instead will only muddy the water with even more procs to manage. The only thing they’ll do is to add more damage.
Arcane is still in a bad spot gameplay wise just as it has been since Legion, even if the damage is there if you’re willing to get sweaty. The haven’t gotten the spec right in 20 years so we shouldn’t really expect wonders, lol.
The issue is that arcane needs a rework like Survival, or maybe at Combat > Outlaw levels.
i still dont know how we ended using evocation as DPS CD , and why they removed chrono shift from PVE players…bah not worth to break your head against that wall
There’s quite a few things still in arcanes design that makes it a bit confusing as to what they truly want, which makes it even more apparent that it needs a complete top to bottom redesign. Like those specs you mentioned.
It stil, has leftover parts of its design from pre legion era. But, it also has parts of its design coming from Legion onwards. And for years now they’ve been juggling arcane bewteen the two and creating problems because both can’t work well together BECAUSE one doesn’t do anything and is conflicting with the other (the parts around mana) and the other is annoying and holding the spec back with too many modifiers to count on top of a useless mastery stat (arcane charges).
Arcane is so over the place and it either needs both of those things removed or for 1 to stick around and made the main gameplay priority of arcane.
, 1 
, 2 
charges?
, and why they removed chrono shift from PVE players…bah not worth to break your head against that wall