Nether Precision & Double Dipping (Arcane Mage Feedback)

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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Please readd the logic that allowed Nether Precision to be double dipped by an Arcane Barrage queued after Arcane Blast.

You told us that you would find a comparable replacement when you removed it, you tried with Aethervision, and it didn’t work out. I am sorry that Aethervision did not recapture the magic. Please reassess your stance on Nether Precision being double dipped and simply codify it as a spec interaction.

There are a litany of reasons why Arcane functionally needs this and why players have been so passionate about this feedback, especially:

  • High Voltage and other charge generators have little to no place in the spec, double dipping enabling these abilities was a critical part of the fun people had during beta that made Arcane the talk of the town.
  • Spellslinger’s Arcane Splinters have once again been cut back on a ton and double dipping allows for us to resolve this long-standing issue.
  • We have too many variables that impact Arcane Barrage, double dipping Nether Precision created a specific focus point for when to “cash-in” on the numerous reasons we want to cast Arcane Barrage. Without double dipping or another similar effect, there are no rails for the train to be on. Without this, we will be prone to having to use a weakaura to tell us when we have saturated enough buffs to drive Arcane Barrage behavior. I cannot stress enough that your changes, Aethervision specifically, aren’t effective because they aren’t addressing this point.
  • Double dipping felt masterful of the spec’s interactions, it was above all else a fun interaction that served to close the loop in our proc cycle.

There were issues, but these were solvable issues. Making the buff last 750ms after consumption solves for latency issues, adding to the Nether Precision tooltip solves for it being obvious to players. Intuition added as a talent is great, but it does not solve all these issues. The fact is, Arcane was built around this interaction in beta and you guys have acted like we’re the wrong ones for playing with it, enjoying it, and wanting to retain that gameplay.

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I fully agree. Something does need to be replaced. Aethervision had several problems, but it did get (at least spellslinger) to actually barrage.

TWW Arcane’s talents and hero trees really want us to use charges as a resource and press barrage, but without a barrage buff or a compelling reason, like the spell queued barrage provided, each cast will always be a balance between “pressing blast again” or “Barrage and rebuild charges”. Currently, at least for spellslinger, it looks like blasting is always going to be better. As a side effect from this, Spellslinger loses significant amounts of splinter generation. As we are not barraging as much, we will get less orb procs and less overall splinter generation. We already lost splinter generation when the double dip was removed, this further removes it.

It was a very fun playstyle to actually leverage arcane charges for a resource. Typically they’ve been ignored in every previous expansion, but it was fun to play around them.

Aethervision was an attempt to recreate this, and I do appreciate it, but it backfired for a few reasons

  1. The buff lasting for 12 seconds made it so it was always correct to try and sync it up for another CC and get NP with it. The reason the “double dip” worked is because there was one focal point where it was great to barrage. Each hero spec had optimal points in different scenarios too, which is what led to the interesting and varied gameplay.
  2. Having it be a 1-2 stacking buff made situations where you could have 1 stack, and have odd outcomes with barrage. Again, tracking this with nether precision on top of other multipliers led to over tracking. The double dip was a potent enough interaction that we had one thing to track, and one impetus to barrage. It was not a complicated mechanic, but could be mastered.
  3. Refunding charges nullified any gameplay around using or managing/leveraging charges, and any talents that gained/refunded charged, including High Voltage, and a lot of Sunfury’s entire kit (Arcane soul’s barrage spam, Glorious Incandescence).
  4. Although it seems like refunding charges would be a good thing, I don’t think resource flooding is healthy for any spec, and leveraging charges should be part of what makes Arcane. High Voltage is an exciting talent, and if we never drop charges, many of our talents are dead and that would be a shame.

As a solution, just make the Double Dip interaction official. You’ve codified things for specs in the past when the gameplay makes sense. All feral bleeds snapshot with buffs, where as not all bleeds for other specs don’t. Frost’s damage is calculated on hit, where all other damage is calculated on cast. And again, Arcane had been spell-queueing and “double dipping” spells for expansions.

Realistically, all of TWW Arcane is built around us wanting to cast blast and barrage, both hero talents rely on it. A lot of our talents want us to cast barrage even in single target. Without a replacement, we will likely only do it with intuition procs, ToTM, or GI.

The best option would be to restore, or codify the Double Dip. I understand you didn’t want to leave it as is. I disagree that it was a bug, but like other “unintended behavior” making it official is always an option.

You could codify it in Nether Precisions’ Tool Tip. You can even add a talent or make a choice node with Intuition and call it “Dip into the Nether” or something and make it read something as “Casting Arcane Barrage within 0.75 seconds after using your last stack of Nether Precision with Arcane Blast causes Arcane Barrage to also benefit as if it had Nether Precision.”

If you are dead set against it, then I implore you to take another look at it. If you do try to make a new talent/Aethervision 2.0, consider making it short, easy to manage, and not refund charges (we already had that version in the past i.e. Double Dipping).

Aethervision was not healthy for the spec overall, but removing without any replacement isn’t either. It was one step forward, 3/4 step back. I know a lot of this may seem critical, I’m just passionate about the purple mage spec. I do want to thank you overall for listening to the feedback about Aethervision, and hopefully there’s more in the works,

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Just revert the 11.0.5 changes and everything is fixed. It’s literally as simple as that

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We respect the Devs so much more when they’re smart enough to accept what the players want instead of making changes with the “you think you do, but you don’t” philosophy.

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While I can sympathize with the stance that it wouldn’t be good to balance a class around a bug (subtlety rogues famously had this happen to them back during WotLK’s launch), I believe Porom’s suggestion of allowing Nether Precision a grace period and putting it into the talent’s tooltip would also be in line with similar changes that allow both the current Heating Up generation and classic Shatter combos to remain functional. In case some “historical” context may help, I can offer a couple of old blue posts that should show why mages have been comparing this to them.

(Prior to this, when (then) Inferno Blast was made a guaranteed crit back in late Cataclysm, fire mages had an exceptionally difficult time actually using it at long range and some haste)

(Filter comments for patch 7.0.3)

It sounds like what happened with Aethervision is a repeat of what occurred when fire’s Heating Up first received a grace period. Fire mages promptly adjusted their rotation to bank the first Hot Streak they receive until they regained Heating Up (as the two buffs were not yet exclusive) so that they had a chance to recycle the Hot Streak.

Which sounds fine in theory until fire moved into WoD where not only did their crit ratings tank in value from leveling, but they also lost access to Shatter (which functioned as a bad luck buffer against applicable mobs). This left players with the very common situation where you could go so long without critting that you risked your Hot Streak expiring before you got another Heating Up. For sanity’s sake, the buffs became exclusive, and nobody really liked gaining a proc where using it quickly was the wrong play.

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Bringing back double-dipping for Nether Precision would revive a fun and skillful part of Arcane gameplay that a lot of us really enjoyed going back as far as Shadowlands (much longer if you count other specs with a similar gimmick). It gave us a clear tempo and without it Arcane feels off and relies too much on addons to track everything.

I mean it’s literally part of the meme gif: i.imgur(.)com/WjC9QaG.gif

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I suppose it is even not that hard to make double dipping official mechanic and avoid issues that happened with Aethervision. Something like:

  • Consuming Nether Precision with Arcane Blast grants you a stack of Nether Attunement → no weird interactions like with 1 stack of Aethervision since 1 stack does not provide any offensive benefits
  • Reaching 2 stacks of Nether Attunement causes next Arcane Barrage cast within X seconds (where X is short enough to prevent abusing like Aethervision’s buff stacking but long enough to avoid latency issues and be compatible with Presence of Mind GCD to enable their synergies too) to cast as if affected by Nether Precision.

As a result:

  • Mechanic is clear and intuitive
  • Cannot be abused with neither 1 stack nor delaying for buff stacking
  • Reenables double dipping as official mechanic and keeps all synergies with Nether Precision nodes (like Leysight) and hero tree mechanics (like Splinters generation).

However, I also think that Charge refunds have place in the spec (not everyone plays Sunfury) and they should not be only RNG based (like Intuition is RNG based proc and High Voltage is RNG based number of charges refunded). Maybe some people like them so they can stay, but it would be better if one or both would become choice nodes with reliable Charge refund effects, so that people who like RNG effects can play them and people who don’t want to rely on RNG so much can pick a more reliable option for Charge refund, even if that would require additional management.

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Holy dude what a great transmog

And yeah I agree with everything said in this thread, Blizzard should def revert the Strategist nerfs and increase the damage of Revenge.

Oh, and also bring back double dipping for Nether Precision, idk if anyone mentioned this

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Making it something like that though still invites problems.

This still doesn’t work very well however, especially in AOE. For instance, lets say you have 2 charges of NP. You barrage on the first, and then refill charges with Arcane Orb. With old double dipping, you could then AB+ABarr to double dip. This was great for Spellslinger as you’d get an extra splinter out as well! Sunfury also used this to maximize the amount of barraages and damage each NP got.

In your scenario, similar to Aethervision, you’re locking the rotation to Blast-blast-barrage. It’s Aethervision just minus the charge regen and duration. It does not make the same gameplay in any scenaio other than strictly single target.

Even in single target, what happens if you Barrage on your first NP, and just Blast on your last stack of Nether precision? Do you have 1 stack of the “double dip buff” left over? If you do a full combo again, you’ll much a charge of it. Does using barrage consume it in between if you have to barrage for mana or movement?

Any stacking buff solely based off consuming NP with blast is going to create problems, conditionals, or work well in ST or in AOE, but not vice versa. I’m all for making “double dip talent” a thing, but just make it so the talent enables the original double dip logic. Anything else I think is less intuitive. Adding another buff to track, even if it’s consumed in the rotation feels worse than just queueing a spell in a combo.

I do also disagree with this. Charge refunding if potent enough would likely drive all of Arcane’s gameplay, similar to how it drives some of Sunfury’s gameplay. Sunfury generally plays around the somewhat frequent refund of Glorious Incandescence. Aethervision gave plenty of refunds and made Spellsingers rotation incredibly sunfury-esque, to the point where doing a “sunfury funnel” rotation was only a minor DPS decrease, but a large priority gain for spellslinger. Baking in the charge refund would make Slinger just play like birdless sunfury.

Any talent added for deterministic refunds/charges to not be spec warping would likely be too weak to take, or an RNG talent like intuition.

Baking in the double dip logic though would give Spellslinger more splinters. More splinters means more SFT orb procs, and more frequent charge regeneration as well.

Restoring the base Double Dip logic, either through a talent, or just codifying it into the tooltip really is the best and least convoluted way.

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Maybe double dipping is the most reliable way, but it does not seem that they intend to restore it for Arcane and try everything else (they even implemented Intuition in the tree - a change that I did not see anyone providing feedback about double dipping / fixes for Aethervision even suggest). If that is as I suspect my variant is something that can emulate this effect as a separate mechanic and preserve most effects and synergies. But we can see, maybe they will eventually decide to just restore double dipping.

As for your second part - they already intend to provide means to restore / refund Arcane Charges (High Voltage and Intuition are already implemented), so that it is already among their goals and asking for reliable alternative to these RNG based ones is reasonable. And relying on RNG of Spellslinger’s Arcane Orbs proccing from Splinters / Arcane Barrage just adds even more RNG to all other RNG based charge refunds and does not really solve the reliability issue. Moreover, alternatives would provide a choice - if people don’t want to play “Sunfury like rotation” they can simply pick the RNG refund options instead and if they want reliable refunds they can pick fitting options too.

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I’m fine with charge generation, but not from barrage itself (other than orb procs, which mainly has AOE relevance, or just 1 charge in single target). I think things like reverberate, or high voltage are great talents that provide on average pretty reliable amounts of charges. Sometimes small amounts of RNG can be fine to vary gameplay.

Consistent generation on the scale that Aethevision provided I think would be very unhealthy and spec-warping. Tuning wise as well, if we had a talent that had consistent generation they would make talents like reverb and high voltage way less likely to be taken unless tuned way weaker.

I think both hero talents have provided options for charge generation. Provided double dipping returns, or they codify it in a way that does perfectly recreate the interactions, Sunfury has a more consistent generation, and Spellslinger has more RNG in it’s generation. Pending both are tuned the same both are fun and play differently.

I think we can both agree though that spending/gaining charges has been a pretty important part of Arcane’s gameplay in this expansion, and is an important part of it’s overall design. Leveraging charges feels good and should be kept as a focus going forward. Right now with no Aethervision replacement in place, there isn’t as much of an incentive to spend (or gain) them, which is a shame and needs to be addressed hopefully before this patch launches. The double dip mechanic was the best mechanism so far to really capture this

Hopefully Blizzard has more in the works or enables the double dip logic in the form of a talent, tool-tip, clarification, or makes it work in game logic like they have for many other spec-quirks in the past.

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Honestly, at this point they should just do it, the new replacement talent doesn’t solve this problem either.

It’s a nice proc I guess, but it doesn’t replace double dipping at all.

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I agree that Charge regeneration should be limited, but there should be ways to do it consistently for any hero spec. As for question about viability of Reverberate and High Voltage if there would be reliable Charge refund option - that is why I suggested to add reliable option as a choice node with them, not separately. That allows people who like for example High Voltage to still take it and gamble with Charge generation and people who don’t like it or cannot use it effectively can pick the more reliable option in the same choice node. As for Reverberate - it definitely already would not be picked in current choice node and even if it were moved out of it is still not likely to be picked, since it is attached to Arcane Explosion that is not used much currently. To make Reverberate viable / competitive it both should be not in a choice node and provide something in addition to Charge generation, like also making Arcane Explosion ranged.

I agree with that - there definitely should be enough incentive to spend Arcane Charges both in single-target in AoE and frequently enough, otherwise this build-spend part of Arcane’s design would simply not have any sense. It should be achieved with both mechanics like double-dipping and charge regeneration / refunding (because rebuilding Charges as Arcane is very slow and clunky unlike other specs that lose only resource that was spent on the finisher), so hopefully they have more in store that just random proc of Intuition that is both unreliable and does not even address buff stacking issue like Porom mentioned above.

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Options are great when they’re tuned well - if history shows anything, Blizzard can’t or won’t tune talents well. Look at our talent choices since Legion, there has been 1 correct build for every bit of content with DF/TWW only having 1-2 extremely minor changes for cleave (which most of this was hinged on getting the ability to cleave, not actual relevant options).

There is also a far simpler option here Vlsal, they could make charge deficiencies less bad instead, like bake in the Arcane Blast cast time reduction of charges into Blast itself so that dumping charges feels less bad or reduce the charge benefit to blast so that its a more obvious “right” thing to do at low charges to build them back up. Though it is worth noting that this approach would further disadvantage Arcane Explosion, to avoid that they could have Explosion have an increased chance to proc clearcasting like Blast as well as have it increment Spellfire Spheres and either have Reverberate baked in or give Explosion some method for proccing Arcane Splinters. In other words, I think the issue you’re identifying about people enjoying charge refunders is more a condemnation of how garbage Arcane feels at low charges than it is an endorsement of having resource overflow.

They definitely need to do more to get us back to feeling good and removing Aethervision on its own is a net loss in fun and function without something to replace it.

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One thing I also want to bring up is that asking for Double Dipping to be brought back isn’t being asked for as a buff or a DPS increase. We just want the spec to feel fun.

I think a lot of people mistake asking for Double Dipping coming back as asking for the spec to become top of the meta again. Arcane was extremely popular in early progression because yes, it was strong (but not due to double dipping), but also as it was the only viable and fun mage spec (and it’s execute + spymaster profile was very good in prog). Fire was doing awful damage, and frost was strong (I think even simming higher than Arcane) but was pretty awful to play with how Spellslingers’ initial iteration went live. People were already leaving to go play Frost/Fire towards the double dip removal as the other specs were buffed. Aethervision’s addition in 11.0.5 just pushed people away further to the point where Arcane is now very underrepresented. It’s not doing damage, and not fun to play. We’re asking for the mechanic to be restored, or officially codified in a tool tip or talent for the health and enjoyment of the spec. I’d rather have Arcane be a mid tier spec and feel good to play than have it be doing the most damage but feel bad. I am perfectly happy if this isn’t Arcane’s tier in raid from a pure numbers perspective and to let Fire/Frost have the spotlight as a progression spec, as long as Arcane feels fun to play and can do okay damage.

Aethevision actually was a substantial DPS increase, to the point where sunfury had to have compensatory nerfs added hours before the patch went live. Even though it was a DPS gain overall (especially for spellslinger) I feel less people play it now just as it isn’t as enjoyable to play.

Removing Aethervision and having Intuition in it’s place is also certainly a DPS loss. It’s essentially removing a barrage impetus and leaving only our S1 tier in place. Restoring the Double Dip would likely even still be a DPS loss compared to just taking the live talent tree forward as again, Aethervision overall was a pretty substantial DPS gain.

Again, adding in the Double Dip is going to make gameplay feel better, even if it’s a DPS loss compared to the live trees. If it ends up being a gain, aura nerfing the spec to reign it in is fine. We’re not asking to buff the spec up and make it meta, just asking to make it playable like it was.

Solutions again: Reverting the logic, adding it into the tool tip, or making a talent that states “Casting Arcane Barrage within 0.75 seconds after consuming your last stack of Nether Precision with Arcane Blast causes Arcane Barrage to also benefit as if it had Nether Precision.” All of the above work, and all of the above would make it fun to play, and can be tuned up/down accordingly.

With removing Aethervision as well with no replacement (intuition doesn’t really count), I fear we’ll be back to tracking more conditionals again such as Harmony stacks, Enlightened %, Arcane Debilitation Debuff Stacks. That’s a Sim angle for now though.

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I liked the latest changes and I prefer that we cast Arcane Blast as little as possible.

May Blizzard continue to strengthen Arcane Barrage, Arcane Missiles, and Arcane Orb. Keep thinking about giving us gameplay in which we don’t need to root ourselves in place to cast Arcane Blast.

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Just to limit the amount of Arcane threads one bug that I’ve encountered so far in regards to Burden of Power.

Since barrage again now works with Burden of Power, as of this current PTR it no longer instantly triggers Glorious Incandescence when consumed by Barrage. This means you can get 2 potent barrages out if you can refill charges inbetween, but also means that you drop to 0 charges when consuming Burden of Power with barrage.

I assume this is a bug, as the previous PTR where barrage interacted with Burden of Power had it consume Glorious Incandescence as well. If not, this is yet another barrage conditional we’ll have to track to play around, as I’m not sure if it’s potent enough on its own (without harmony stacks, execute etc) to play around.

That being said, double dipping Nether Precision would likely be enough to constrain this if it Burden of Power’s intended logic, and is another reason to reimplement the NP double dip as an official mechanical quirk of arcane.

Tl;dr Burden of Powet may be bugged, but if it isn’t, then it’s yet another barrage condition that Double Dipping would constrain and make more consistent.

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As a new Arcane mage I’m generally liking these changes so far, but I feel like Intuition doesn’t proc enough. I really want to have a reason to press Barrage more often.

I also think Energy Reconstitution needs to move away from a PPM model to a flat % chance to proc one. When testing on 5 dummies, a full 6 second Demilitarize dot on all 5 dummies on average yields about a single Energy Reconstitution proc (sometimes it’s 2, sometimes it’s 0) - this is in line with it’s listed 10 PPM. If I have Demilitarize rolling on multiple mobs, I should see explosions going off left and right, but the PPM model prevents this.

High Voltage is still awkward because Nether Precision necessitates us to have full AC after Missiles end to get maximum benefit from it.

Here is my suggestion:
Intuition is changed to become a stacking effect that grants Barrage more damage and generates an Arcane Charge per stack, stacking up to 4 times. High Voltage is changed to instead have a chance of granting a stack of Intuition.

(As a side note, I’m not a fan of where Prodigious Savant and Leysight/Aether Fragment is on the tree. The bottom left 4 nodes synergize being all Arcane Missile talents. I feel like the 4 bottom right talents should all be synergizing AoE talents, with Leysight/Aether Fragment moving up the tree and Prodigious Savant either being moved up or replaced entirely.)

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Love that they heard our feedback.

10% Arcane Barrage buff does not fix anything at all. Right now we have a complicated math problem for figuring out when to cast Barrage. We need an anchor to pivot other behaviors around. This spec is feeling worse and worse every single patch and 11.2 is shaping up to be the worst yet.

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They seem to think that just buffing arcane barrage is enough to bring back the gameplay of double dip.

If that’s the case, they truly don’t know wtf they are doing.

At this point im gonna guess that the reason why they get things right at times on most classes is simply luck of the draw. Sometimes someone comes up with a good idea that works, but it’s not because they know what they are doing, purely luck.

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