Nether tempest is a forced talent and is on the GCD with our regular rotation. Take if off (or delete the ability completely) the GCD like you did with ToM.
You’re welcome.
5 Likes
I concur. Nether Tempest feels weird to press and it does its job but I don’t think it really adds anything to the gameplay. Arcane is not a DoT class and never should be.
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That’s just one of many problems, sadly. And this one isn’t even that hard to work around. Just macro it to TotM and never think of it again.
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Bad to play…? Cause arcane is a very good spec atm. Personally I like nether tempest since you upkeep as your first step of mana management and that means you dont need to barrage and 
have less than 4 arcane charges
This is one of the biggest blunders of the spec in my view. It’s completely unintuitive that you wouldn’t want to spend combo points on a combo skill which is empowered by them. We’re just used to it because it’s always been like that but I imagine that a new player would be completely confused by that entire dynamic.
The underlying problem is that both AB and ABarr try to do too many things at once. AB is both a builder and a spender, both a spammable/filler and a nuke. And ABarr was always intended as a simple cleave/AoE spell but because it’s the ONLY spender Arcane has it feels so awkward not to use it in ST and any attempt to make it viable in ST has historically failed.
To me the obvious solution has always been to add a new ST Arcane Charge spender and to transfer all the power of 4 charge AB spamming over to it instead. That way the new ST default would be AB to 4 charges into the new ST spender. This would also give it parity with the basic AoE rotation which is AE to 4 charges into ABarr.
Alternatively, a lazy way to do it is to add a talent that greatly increases ABarr’s damage per Arcane Charge if it only hits one target. But either way AB would have to be fundamentally redesigned with a much lower cast time and damage to accommodate this new builder/spender playstyle.
That’s my vision of what the spec should be anyway.
Arcane is absolutely 100% a good spec right now in terms of performance. It’s among the top specs in raid and, as far as I can tell, is fully capable of high level keys (at least up to and a bit beyond 20 since that’s where rewards basically stop). Personally, I feel that arcane is currently performing at one of the highest levels it’s performed at for a long time.
But if the spec is so good, why is it so underrepresented?
In mythic raid, Arcane is listed as the 4th highest damage dealer but is almost exactly middle of the pack in terms of representation.
Drop the difficulty to Heroic and Arcane, despite being the second highest spec listed for damage, becomes the 4th least represented spec for damage dealers.
In M+, in the 20+ bracket, arcane has ~1/10th the representation of the other 2 mage specs.
I can’t speak for PvP because I care so little about it to even know where to find those statistics.
So at least in PvE, despite being a good spec for damage, the fact that people aren’t playing it should be an indication that something is wrong. Either the aggregate data for how well it performs is wrong (which is VERY possible, don’t get me wrong), or people just don’t want to play arcane.
Looking at the data from a strictly “What are people playing?” perspective and disregarding the level of content / competitive aspects, it’s clear that Arcane isn’t popular despite being strong. So it’s probably safe to say that players don’t enjoy playing it and likely consider it “Bad to play”.
Arcane has been unique in how it’s “builder/spender/filler” design worked. Namely that it’s backwards. We still want to build, but it’s our filler that deals the damage, not the spender. I don’t know what new players think, but I can’t imagine it would take too many leaps to figure out “more charges = more damage, so why would I get rid of them?”
I wouldn’t want Arcane to become a generic builder-spender. I want to say “maybe that’s the only way to get more people to play it” but I suspect that it has more to do with the fact that our rotation is a 30-step process (about twice as many steps as the other two mage specs).
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Yea, a spec can perform “well” and still be absolutely garbage to play at the same time. These two things are not mutually exclusive.
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I can respect that and ideally it wouldn’t be either or. I am thinking along the lines of Frost for example, it’s not a builder/spender unless you take GS. This would be the same thing with the new ST Arcane Charge spender I am proposing. Both playstyles could be accommodated if the talent tree provided any actual choice and wasn’t chock-full of generic passive damage increases and previously baseline spell functionality that used to be baked into spells before the revamp from tiers to trees (which was basically an illusion of choice to being with).
And you’re right, another major factor aside from the unintuitive nature of the spec is the overbearing rotation. That also definitely needs to go.
I did a 21 tott the other day as a 2.9k io arcane mage.
There was a 3k io fire mage in the group.
I ended up beating him in dps by a small amount.
Id say arcane is pretty equally to fire sub 23s and i have never seen a frost mage out dps me.
Arcane is not in a bad place. Arcane takes a little bit of skill to be an average arcane mage. The difference between average and good requires a lot of practice.
1 Like
If that data is accurate (and I am not contesting it) I think players don’t like Arcane as a spec because it is literally arcane.
I swapped to Frost last night because I thought I might change my main spec going into the next expansion and I was kind of shocked at how empty my bars were. So, out of the gate, Arcane just has more to it. When I was raiding SoD in SL, I had to read the ideal rotation for Arcane (as Kyrian with AH legendary) multiple times in between trying to make it work across several raid weeks… and I still wasn’t sure I was doing it right. Once everything clicked it was amazing and I will honestly never go back, but man were little hiccups unforgiving to my dps.
I like that Arcane takes some investment to master and I agree with you that I like how the spec defies typical build/spend rotations. That said, if anything could be done to improve it, perhaps the one thing I would suggest would be to attempt to make the delta between knowledgeable/informed average performance and master class performance not huge.
I have not been playing since I dropped Sylvanas in SoD with my guild, so maybe it already is, but I referenced Wowhead to check the rotation and it seems even more involved than before. Which is fine, so long as that is for “ideal” performance, and not functional performance, and so long as that, underneath the minutiae, there is a framework that you can build upon. If the spec starts to become chaos, such that you do not build upon your performance knowledge but have to leap from one radically different mindset to the next, then I will agree that it is bad to play.
I don’t think that’s true though, but again, I am a little rusty.
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Honestly when I saw NT was a forced node on ST I died a little inside.
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Don’t worry, it’s comin
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Its always been the least played mage spec, mana is something that has phased out of most players enjoyment of the game and it has an unearned reputation of being ridiculously hard to play.
I disagree
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I just want to manage my mana and not a whole bunch of cooldowns.
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Throw in Arcane Missiles actually hitting hard (like Rapid Fire), and Arcane Blast applying a slow per charge (15, 30, 45, 60%) but always be at 1.5 seconds cast. Sounds weird, but I miss the slow glyph from Mop.
The current tier set is HORRENDOUS. Having timers on the buffs is actual insanity. We’re lucky to get 2-3 actual good uses of the buff thanks to it just dropping off from rng.
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I agree with Nether Tempest being a generally awful feeling button to press, but I also personally dislike using Radiant Spark, another forced button. It muddies the entire rotation, and has hijacked the spec as a whole.
Arcane has become Cooldown Vomit, instead of mana manager. If I wanted Cooldown Vomit I’d just play Unholy instead.
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This and 1000x this. I’ve noticed a trend on the forums in the past 8 or so years, and that is that more players seem to consider a spec “bad” due to its gameplay and not necessarily the output. There will always be those posters who chime in with “but X spec is top caster dps”, which isn’t untrue, but I suspect it’s also not what the majority of players are considering when talking about whether a spec is good or not.
The people willing to forgive or ignore problems with gameplay in specs that perform well are typically those doing Mythic raid progression, and/or very high keys. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I suspect they make up a very small percentage of players doing that type of content. Those in Normal or Heroic, or doing sub 20 keys (and likely it gets worse in the 10-15 bracket) are less concerned with pure output and more concerned with how a spec feels to play, and sadly Arcane has missed that mark for a very long time. I fall into that type of player, and since WoD every time I pick up Arcane I generally try a few bosses/dungeons, realise it still sucks to play, and go back to Frost.
1 Like
Arcane is very strong right now.
Nether tempest interacts with arcane echo