So I was taking a look at some of the other classes and one thing I noticed was that for the new mage healing it looks like it’s better to take only the one healing abilitiy and mix it with the arcane ones. For reference mage has regeneration,rewind time, and mass regeneration as abilities. But with the effect on regeneration being 40% of all arcane damage done is converted to healing, than I would think that arcane surge and arcane blast would be better runes to take with regeneration. And the other two healing runes being niche or for a full raid possibly, which we know we’re not getting at level 25.
Arcane blast also increases healing done, so I think it’s just overall better than rewind time. Overall, the spec seems to play like a retail disc priest. Which means the more damage you do the more healing you do.
Does anyone know if I’m missing something or is this the most likely play style of the healing mage?
I can see not taking Rewind Time in favor of Arcane Blast in many situations, but I think I would take Mass Regeneration in most situations, being able to apply apply Temporal Beacon to multiple targets at once would be extremely useful in most group situations.
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for the most part you can put temporal beacon on more than one with regeneration. I could see you taking mass regeneration in say a 40 man raid, but usually in dungeons the tank is the main one taking the most damage with sometimes a second member getting in trouble. Regeneration could easily be the only thing you need in those situations.
Though it probably wouldn’t hurt to take mass regeneration I think I would prefer the mana regeneration of arcane surge.
In low level dungeons you’re probably right that only the tank will be taking much damage assuming the party isn’t standing in bad. But in general it’s still a 3 second cast to apply the buff to a single target so without mass regen applying Temporal Beacon to more than a couple people will take a lot of time away from actually doing damage to heal. Also regeneration is 32% base mana for a single target where mass regen is 21% for 5 targets with the downside that the temporal beacon only lasts half as long.
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Interesting points, mass regen may well be the better rune in mob situations. Do you foresee mages changing runes when they get to the boss?
When I was watching BlizzCon footage, as soon as you started channeling the skill, temporal beacon was applied to the target. You don’t have to channel the full duration to applied the buff.
Does that mean applying the buff wasn’t costing mana?
I imagine they will be a better raid healer than Paladin and priests so in raids it may just come down to the group makeup, in 5 mans I can see using Mass Regen instead of regen just because of the mana cost and it would be better to have the buff rolling on everyone if there is group wide damage instead of having to react to it. Both healing abilities are HOTs, so if temporal beacon isn’t already on the target I think the mage may struggle to handle unexpected damage. It’s not like disc priest in retail that can fall back on casting void mend when they need direct healing.
No, the full mana cost hit as soon as you started channeling.
I see, that would make it easier to get Temporal Beacon on more people in a pinch, but it would be extremely mana intensive to do it with regeneration.
Ah that makes sense. The applied buff at the beginning does make it more likely to run arcane surge in dungeons again though.
Note that they’re not hots. They’re channeled.
This is the spec that I’m planning to main, assuming it doesn’t feel like garbage in practice. I’m currently planning to run arcane blast instead of rewind, and will slot in Arcane surge if I’m setup as a tank healer in raids. An additional nuance I don’t see mentioned much is that arcane wand damage may trigger beacon too. One of the first things I’m going to test.
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Will mage be good for raid healing? It seems like the more people you have temporal beacon on the less healing it does. I could see mage being a very good tank healer but leaving the raid healing to say a druid.
The wand thing is an interesting idea.
Mage won’t be my main(unless I love it) but I’m looking at possible alts with these changes.
As it stands, it probably wont be the best raid healer. I suspect they’ll make it more like atonement and remove the splitting, add something that makes it do less healing on say more than 5 targets, or further runes in later phases that modify how beacon behaves. They may also have to give us a button we can press to remove the buff from a target. I’m thinking like a complimentary buff to make beacon fall off if the target hits full health.
I assume this will work as well, along with the wand specialization talent in the arcane tree, I expect wands to be fairly powerful for at least the first 2 phases of SoD, after that I’m not sure wand damage will be able to keep up.
Probably not, unless they add a rune that lets us lean into this.
If I looked it up correctly base mage mana (non-gnome) is 1,026 at level 25. That would make arcane blast mana cost 72, 198, 324 and 450 at the different charge levels I think. I think it’s way too expensive to use to full stacks, but maybe people will 1-2 charge and cast something else? Arcane missiles is 235 at that level.
Mana seems tight at 25 so if arcane wands feed into beacon there might be a lot of wanding to save mana. The nerf from 100% damage in the first build to 40% seems kind of extreme for the beacon transfer also.
Regeneration at 43% base is crazy expensive at 410 mana at 25 and mass regen at 69% is… why??? 708 mana. This is also a massive nerf from the original 1.15 datamine where regen was 32% base and mass regen was 21% base. Runes also don’t have ranks I don’t think so you can’t downrank like other healers to save resources. (current values coming from wowhead talent calc)
Arcane Surge would probably be a no-brainer if mass regen actually went live at 69% base mana. The number makes me think it’s just devs messing with people via datamining the builds though. Maybe blizzard is just putting random crap into the PTR builds now to prove datamining is useless?