Rerolled to arcane this patch and noticed arcane barrages are criting for 70-80k per cast when cds are popped. Just to be clear, I enjoy the current playstyle, but it seems like there is too much rng involved with an ability like this. Right now, on five targets, if both of the arcane barrages crit during a 45-second-cd rune of power burst, the total damage feels close to a 2-min-cd arcane power burst in which both barrages don’t crit. To put it further into perspective, in a five target fight lasting 30ish seconds, most specs at 230ish ilvl do 700k to 900k dmg, ranging from lowest to highest. Basically, depending on rng barrages, arcane can be the one of the best 5 target aoe specs, or a below average one.
The closest situation I can think of is the full moon situation. However, the rng machine deciding whether full moon procs do not run twice every 45 seconds, and its proc chance is much lower as well. For arcane mages having soulletting ruby and picking double champion’s brand, the crit chance when they fire those big barrages is more than 50%, which means taking a coin toss to go from pepehappy to pepehands. The point here is full moons play a much less significant role in total damage comparing to crit arcane barrages.
A potential fix is to add a crit modifier to arcane barrage, making the spell unable to crit, but does bonus dmg depending on current crit chance. So for example, if we have 50% crit chance(everytime cds are popped), our arcane barrage guarantees 50% extra damage, the averaged out dmg we are getting in the long run anyways. The devs can also highlight the dmg text if the crit modifier exceeds a certain percentage for the visual appeal as well.
Interested to see how many people enjoy the coin toss. For me personally, whenever I get to 60% crit during the burst and those barrages fail to crit, I become rather disappointed. I imagine in the future, if we get to 80% to 90% crit chance, those barrages not criting will become far more tilting. When we become more and more entitled to crit the barrage, we will forget about the joy of critting it at 30% chance. And lets not talk about critting those normal barrages for 7k dmg lmao.
Its definitely too rng, everything depends on your arcane barrage crit, thats why i’m rolling kleia as Arcane to increase the amount of crits I do in a M+, it reduces the potency of the crit, but made me crit around 32% of my barrages, against 18% running pelagos mastery buffs. My damage in the end of the run got bigger this way.
The problem is crit does not give you a flat damage increase and gets worse after you reach the soft cap.
This week i’m playing fire and even with the damage being a lil lower on single target, on aoe it feels way more consistent overall.
The other problem is: the most part of our damage depends on one skill, I feel arcane damage drops hard if you need to stop your rotation in the middle of it, which happens a lot in M+.
There was some dungeons last week (with quaking affix) that I didn’t do a single perfect touch rotation without being interrupted by quaking, or mechanics, or having to move, and etc, while fire is more adaptable.
I would normally run kleia because arcane prodigy even combined with combat meditation has less value in m+ than pointed courage. But since it is a tyrannical week I decide to put more resource on boss dmg. Arcane prodigy being situational is another issue for the spec. So far despite these issues the spec delivers very solid dmg.
Picking kleia for crit chance only alleviate the issue a bit. In dungeons like DoS we cast 100+ barrage so the rng is less, but in dungeons like Mist we only cast barrages 60-70 times and that can be problematic. If we only uses barrage 60 times, that means only 25 of them are casted into Touch of Magi, and 12 of them are casted during Arcane power. The issue is all about the 12 barrages here(arguably 6 since only half of those have harmony stacks). Even with the kleia build providing 60%+ crit chance during bursts getting unlucky over 6-12 of these barrages is not exactly rare. And arcane is one of the most rng-heavy specs as is displayed in sims.
I am not sure if crit in the long run is flat a dmg buff, but giving barrage a chaos bolt treatment basically what I am suggesting.
I absolutely agree. Any time you front-load such a huge chunk of your overall damage in just one spell the variance between a crit and a non-crit is always unacceptably high.
What’s worse is that there is just no escaping this as Arcane regardless of what you do because both of the viable legendaries, Bombardment and Harmony, buff your ABarr to the point of turning it into a tactical nuke. This further encourages a cooldown stacking play style which in turn means that even a bigger percentage of your overall DPS will come from those supercharged ABarrs.
For me, the amount of RNG involved with the crit, which you only have so much control over as more than 35% isn’t really feasible and that’s assuming perfect stat optimization, combined with everything that can go wrong with all the cooldown stacking (especially in a heavy movement fight which is like all of them now) just does not make for a fun play style.
It’s just way too gimmicky. The whole build is basically a giant Jenga game and if they nerf one piece, removing it from the equation, the whole thing comes crushing down. On top of everything else, Radiant Spark, which is key to the whole thing just does not function the way the tooltip says it does and if Blizzard finally notice that and wack it with the nerf bat it’s all over.
Given all of that and how needlessly onerous covenant swapping is I am just not prepared to take that risk. That and I just don’t enjoy the AM spamming and cooldown stacking but that’s more of a personal preference.
That’s why I am calling it quits for now. I always only main Arcane and they’ve tied my hands with their poor design decisions with both the Covenants and the Legendaries.
That’s super true, the moment blizzard discover the fun, they will nerf the “queue arcane barrage” rotation. And when this happens arcane will go down hard, did you see how lower the damage is without the “queued AB”?
If you guys still had 1 more arcane blast to get off before barrage but were forced to move would you just barrage into 3 stack radiant instead of possibly missing the barrage altogether? I know you should be setting your positioning and timings so you reduce the chance of messing up a totm window but we know how easy it is to get crossed up.
I did, it’s laughably low especially when taking into account all the hoops you still have to jump through to pull it off.
Yeah, getting that supercharged Barrage in is by far the most important part. Squeezing the extra AB in there will give you a decent damage increase but it’s by no means as crucial and missing it won’t tank your damage like it would if you missed the Barrage.
It’s incredibly easy when all the fights have you prancing around the entirety of encounter area like a god damn ballerina whether it’s because you’re dodging attacks or chasing down mobs even as a ranged.
They hit you with poorly designed legendaries which in turn force you to use gimmicky builds on the one side and then on the other you get hit with badly designed fights with ridiculous movement requirements. On top of that Barrage has a tiny conal cleave which causes all sorts of additional headaches with positioning. To say nothing of the fact that every time you use it it resets all your Arcane Charges and you then have the ramp up from hell to contend with. And I can go on and on… it’s like you have to be a straight up masochist to want to play Arcane.
You just have to plan your cds properly during encounters. It will only feel bad if you’re just using them all willy nilly by disregarding raid timers. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to 100% avoid everything, because sometimes someone else will mess it up for you, or somethings else goes horribly wrong.
Arcane just isn’t as flexible with movement as fire where you can just hop around like a rabbit spamming all of your damage in your cd window. Just watch the timers and you be fine.
It’s not bad, I love the playstyle, the problem is my focus is M+ and in that enviroment the overall damage is too RNG to the point you have to stack huge amounts of crit to surpass this problem, which is bad since crit is not a flat damage increase and you could be stacking mastery.
In low keys it doesn’t matter, but now i’m entering the 19-20 universe, where the damage needs to be consistent to time the key. That 2k difference between a “lucky and an unlucky” run can break the key
It definitely is a lot more work than what most other specs have to put in but the payoff isn’t always that great because while it looks fine on paper in reality things rarely work out under the near perfect conditions assumed by simulations.
Pulling off this particular build also requires a level of concentration, planning, foreknowledge of how the encounters will proceed, and micromanagement of all your cooldownds and resources that frankly not many people are capable of, at least not to the extend necessary for the spec to truly live up to its full potential. But that isn’t a reflection of player skill as much as it is a function of the build just being gimmicky and Arcane in general being quite a bit clunky because of the ramp up and movement issues that have been plaguing it forever.
I am not saying this to discourage you from trying it; I am just emphasizing the myriad of potential pitfalls if you decide to go down that path because unlike previous expansions, in SL, once you commit to a spec or build it’s pretty damn hard to switch if you find that you don’t like it or can’t pull it off to your satisfaction.
It really isnt. It plays similar to fire as you have your burst windows and then your downtime. You have a major burst window and a smaller one every 45ish seconds.
Ignore Kerathas, he complains about anything arcane and mage in general.
Okay, just out of curiosity which spec would you say has to put in more effort to execute a build than Kyrian Arcane? Certainly not either of the other two mage specs.
Fire only has to manage Combustion which is a single cooldown and since RP now casts automatically there is virtually no cooldown stacking involved.
Frost doesn’t even have any cooldowns to manage because Icy Veins doesn’t require any micromanaging. It just has to react to procs as they come which is arguably the simplest form of a rotation.
I can’t really think of any other caster spec either. Definitely not the top performing ones like Balance. Even if you find the Kyrian Harmony build easy to play I don’t think you can objectively say it doesn’t require an amount of effort substantially greater than just about any other spec out there atm. Again, I am genuinely curious to see which one(s) you think is more involved.
As for the results, even with near perfect execution, they are quite lackluster too when compared to other specs that require much less effort to pull off effectively. These are just the facts when you look at logs; Arcane simply isn’t a top performer even in Heroic and actually does rather poorly in Mythic (although the sample size there is still admittedly quite small).
You can enjoy playing it, and I am sure many people do (I just don’t happen to be one of them) but it doesn’t change the facts that it simply isn’t great, it relies on what is essentially a gimmick (abusing the mechanics of RS) and is rather clunky. The other two Mage specs aren’t in a great spot rn either although there, especially in the case of Fire, it’s more a question of bad numbers tuning rather than fundamental design flaws.
The variance between a crit barrage and a non crit barrage is wayy too high. If there was some way to guarantee this (how about have arcane power actually up crit rating in addition to the flat buff it is?). Since our mastery is still fairly bad in terms of scaling with stacking…you stack crit and pray that you get crits at the right moments.
All of the spells in the ToTM window are hardcasts. You can pom 3 of them maybe but that requires actually queueing up PoM. This is actually easily fixable. A lot of people have said to just make ToTM be an instant cast spell ala Charged up. I’d extend this to say why not just have ToTM make your next 3 arcane blasts be instant cast and remove PoM from the game. This would remove a lot of the clunkiness during burst windows for all of the Arcane covenants where the burst would feel fluid for at least a portion of it.
