What are your thoughts on the most recent announcement in terms of the changes to the class?
My thoughts are:
- Still not enough choices in build if you donāt want to significantly gimp your damage
- Still dead talents that will be dead regardless of tuning because they donāt interact with other talents
- Still reliant on RoP for normalised damaged
- Still too many PvP-focused talents that will see zero use in PvE and will only be taken because we want the talent below them
- Still no love for talents that have sucked for years (but they also didnāt remove themā¦)
- Seems like weāre still losing damage if we take utility, which then makes it feel like a loss rather than a gain
- Still just taking abilities/buffs that currently or previously existed and slapping them in
- Still taking existing abilities and splitting them into multiple talents when a lot should be baseline
- Still need to take RoP regardless of spec
Iāll admit theyāre better than they were, but they are still bad. Theyāve looked at some very select feedback (either from a high-profile streamer or things that are easy to fix) rather than addressing the underlying issues with the 3 specs and their gameplay.
What we needed was complete re-design of both Frost and Arcane to try and fix what has been stale gameplay for close to a decade, but instead we got a re-hash of the current gameplay. Sadly weāre now only 3 months out, which means we arenāt getting any major changes in DF. Best we can hope for is that they see what garbage it is to play in 10.x and actually look at fixing things in 11.0.
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The updated talent trees havenāt even been made public yet so I donāt know how you are coming to all those conclusions based on a couple of sentence descriptions of their intentions. There could possibly be large scale changes that address those areas in the trees that we havenāt seen yet. Weāll know more within the next day once they are up.
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Gotta disagree with that statement on the grounds that Legion Arcane was insanely fun to play in both raids and keys AND could hold itās own with most other dps specs.
Saving up 3 procs of missiles to unload in a big burst of damage, slipstream was baseline and PoM was for movement (not part of some required dps rotation for the Kyrian build), displacement, Legendary shoulders giving chance at an orb proc in keys, explosion had a larger aoe (and an artifact ability that sometimes made it proc twice) ā¦ the ONLY thing Arcane had wrong with it in Legion was abysmal-to-no cleave ability and terrible scaling between mastery and haste.
Then BFA ruined the spec entirely and Shadowlands said āhold my beerā and brought us the Kyrian Build.
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Donāt forget that we also had Sloooow Down. I have my fingers crossed that makes a return in the updated talent trees.
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I can honestly agree with this.
I will say that despite it being fun that I donāt think radiant spark should stay for arcane moving forward. Much like Sinful brand for demon hunters it isnāt really something that I think is very healthy for the spec overall. Itās nice now with all kf the soulbinds and conduits, but even then I think outside of the shadowlands it should not stay.
But, weāre stuck with it now. I just hope they make room for builds that do not lock you to radiant spark.
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Itās honestly why I stopped playing my mage. Instead of fixing the issues with the standard builds for frost and arcane they focused on these niche gamestyles: kyrian for arcane (which is even MORE subject to disaster if mismanaged than the standard build and performance based on RNG ācrit or cryā) and Necrolord for frost (the one button spam is so mind numbingly boring it feels like arcane did in Legion).
I tried going back to fire before giving up and switching mains entirely but Sun Kings Blessing putting that terrible hard cast in the middle of combustion felt beyond awkward and clunky and ruined what little bit I did enjoy about fire (the excitement of rapid casting during combustion).
If Glacial Spike is a relevant build in DF i might consider playing my mage as an alt again maybe but so many talents buffing ice lance doesnāt fill me with hope.
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This is very true. I actually thought Legion gameplay was pretty good across all specs. Arcane as you mentioned had some great stuff, Fire had extended DB and Cinderstorm, and Frost felt like it hit hard while also not relying on BF procs for GS. Even better was that RoP was not mandatory.
I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that the legendaries we used (mostly) did some fun stuff, and that all specs had a lot in their base kit. In fact, across MoP and WoD as well the Mages had access to a solid base kit and the focus seemed to be more aimed at having fun than balancing 15 different abilities that tie into each other.
That said, none of the specs have had anything major done to them (except to make gameplay worse with things like SP and Kyrian builds). Arcane still relies on that build/spend/mana and has a fairly limited base of spells, Fire is all about that combustion window, and Frost is all about procs (which now feel worse than they did). I guess I am just salty, because DF was a great opportunity to make some big changes but weāre not seeing any of that and itās just reinforcing current gameplay.
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I hate it when people want them to change the norm and I hope they donāt change the norm.
Maybe Iām the only one, but thatās my favorite part of Arcane, and I hope we can go back to that and double down on it instead of steer away from it.
To me that concept feels incredibly different from the other two mage specs (and most other specs in general) and makes me feel unique. The new Radiant Spark - Arcane Harmony build, however, feels pretty similar to builds like Frostās BfA Glacial Spike. Itās interesting. Itās fun. But itās not Arcane, itās Purple Frost.
I agree with just about everything - that Legion was a really good feel (at least for Arcane). However, I donāt think slipstream was ever baseline. I think that was something Arcane has been asking for for a long time (and I think these new talent trees are probably āclose enoughā for it).
Also, obligatory comment about how we should remove RoP.
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As long as they go the direction where spending that mana does more than just proc something that would nearly deplete you mana bar (like now) then itās fine.
However, as it is now, it is not fine or fun.
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They just posted a new lists of changes for mages on the blizzard tracker few moments ago.
The fire changes seem pretty solid. The talent points at the bottom of the tree are really good. Temporal warp is really exciting to get. For fire Iām really happy with this change overall. This to me is now an exciting tree.
To provide some criticism, the only weird parts of fire tree to me are:
- potentially needing to take 2 flamestrike talents when you might not cast it at all
- conflagration needs to be desirable. It seems omega dead
- the choice node with pyromanic is just going to be ignored.
- blastermaster needs to be 5 seconds. You cant pf in combust at 3 second blastermaster, and spending skb mid combust forces you to waste a fireblast.
I agree with you on that. I think moving Arcane away from mana might hurt it in the long run, but at the same time the current mix of mana and other resources isnāt working and the mana side of things tends to fall off a bit. Iād almost want them to remove the AC resource, flatten out the damage and mana cost of ABar/AB to compensate, and focus more on mana as the only resource. This in itself might allow for adding more spells to the rotation outside of just AB/ABar/AM spam.
Honestly at this stage, Iād even be happy if the devs/designers let us in on the loop without all the corporate/lawyer talk. Just outright say to us āthis is our plan moving forwardā. At the moment no one is sure what their spec will feel like in 6-18 months time and itās not filling people with joy.
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Fire changes are fine so far, but I think one of the biggest things that would really make the fire tree sing is to add Conflagration to the second row of the fire tree.
It feels silly to be forced to take a talent that improves hardcasting Flamestrikes for builds focusing on single target or cleave who will likely not want to be hardcasting them in the first place. Conflagration is also traditionally seen as a single target/cleave ignite trait because 1.) itās been the defacto ST pick for mages in its row for a long time, and 2.) it also has a component that directly buffs Fireballās passive damage.
Having the traditionally ST talent be buried so deep into the AOE tree to be unreachable by single-target builds feels counter-intuitive. Iād argue it warrants either redesigning the talent to replace the Fireball component with something more grandiose for AOE damage, or moving it to a position that has it straddling between the single target instant-cast button and the AOE hardcast button as the ignite passive which improves both.
They could also flip Fervent Flickering with Improved Flamestrike in general, as thatās another talent that will improve single target damage marginally with Fire Blast CDR that scales up with more targets, but Iād prefer to move Conflagration up instead, and replace it with a more bombastic AOE option we havenāt seen for a long time in its place: Flame Orb/Kilājadenās Burning Wish.
Or anything, really. But itād be neat to see that come back.
I think the position of Conflagrate is āfineā but I donāt like that the fire tree is so mid heavy. We basically have to take EVERYTHING in the first section because thereās only 9 options and we must pick at least 8. On the entire first section, we are essentially choosing between shorter CD on Fireblast or Execute Scorch (or both), all other 7 talents are mandatory due to the way itās constructed; and no one is going to ever pick Firestarter (itās tuned bad).
It needs 10 nodes in the first section like the other trees. Maybe separate Firestarter from the Scorch dependency and it might make it a little better if we donāt want to pick Scorch at all.
I think the problem is that they keep trying to tack on āinteresting borrowed powersā without fully fleshing out the āMana as a Resourceā concept. Mana and Arcane Charges are tightly coupled. If you lose one, it defeats the purpose of the other.
Iād like to see them stop trying to play around with things like Radiant Spark and Orb Barrage and give us things like āwhile Arcane Surge is active, you can stack up to 6 arcane chargesā or āExpend one Arcane Charge to do Xā. Thereās so much potential for using our mana and our charges, but everything is bound so hard to Arcane Barrage. Itās become really powerful, but you can never use it for anything that isnāt going to fully clear your charges and harmony stacks.
Imagine, instead of Foresight, a spell that consumed one arcane charge to allow you to cast your next spell while moving? The conserve phase of your rotation would suddenly be highly mobile and (combined with something like Rule of Threes, which is largely disliked by the community at the moment) could allow you to spend 0 mana the whole time, at the cost of never getting Clearcasting procs. Thatās a choice Iād genuinely have a hard time making (in a non-spark build). I think we need more difficult decisions in our tree.
The concept of the old burn / conserve rotation was that you took the risk of running completely out of mana or having to conserve longer with the reward of having some pretty high sustained damage. The current playstyle is ārisk standing still for 12 seconds to hit REALLY HARD once (or twice) so that you can average out to bottom-5 DPSā.
Theyāre only just now realizing āOh hey, we can give them a spell that spends all their mana and does more damage the more they haveā and I think that might open up some gates of ideas moving forward. Maybe not for Dragonflight, but the potential is there.