Hi friends,
In all my 20 years of playing WoW, I am looking to play and main mage for the first time ever to help ensure my raid group has Arcane Intellect and I rather like how arcane plays. Arcane is a spec that has always interested me from a distance, but I just never really got around to playing.
I wanted to provide my thoughts as somebody who has never played mage before.
- Arcane Explosion Feels Disconnected
Sooo… this is probably the one that has me scratching my head the most. I just can’t quite figure out what Arcane Explosion is intended for. I always got the impression that Arcane Explosion is supposed to be Arcane’s aoe tool, but it’s just… so bad at this. It costs a lot of mana and just hits for negligible damage. I’ve tried playing around with Arcane Explosion talents such as Static Cloud and Energy Reconstitution, but they have virtually no impact on my aoe performance. The best way I’ve achieved AoE DPS is to just spam 4 AC Arcane Barrages with cleave and pray that I repeatedly proc Orb Barrage to refill my AC. I have had some success with Reverberate using Arcane Explosion to refill my AC when Barrage fails to launch an orb, but that is all Arcane Explosion seems good for: refilling AC.
I think what astonishes me most is that Arcane Explosion does not interact with Arcane Charges. It seems like it should be the aoe rotation filler replacement for Arcane Blast, meaning Arcane Explosion should deal more damage and cost more mana per Arcane Charge you have.
Arcane Explosion should also be able to consume Nether Precision - especially since arcane mages will no longer have a way to cleave Dematerialize next patch as Arcane Barrage will no longer consume Nether Precision (if I’m understanding next patch changes right). This means the already undertuned Energy Reconstitution talent is about to become even more useless without a way to cleave Dematerialize. Energy Reconstitution could be a really cool talent if we can spread Dematerialize via Arcane Explosion and if it also procced more often.
- Evocation’s Current Design Renders it Redundant
So when I went into Arcane, my understanding was that Evocation is what I press after a burn phase when I’m out of mana to refill my mana. Imagine my surprise to learn that - nope! - Evocation is what you press before you enter your burn phase. Why? Because Evocation currently also gives you an Intellect buff, which you want to stack with Arcane Surge and Touch of the Magi to maximize your burn phase DPS. Okay, makes sense… except, this renders the mana regeneration of Evocation completely and utterly useless. This is because you hit Arcane Surge after Evocation, which consumes your entire mana pool and gives you a huge mana regen buff during its duration.
“But wait,” I hear you say. “Doesn’t Arcane Surge deal damage based on your mana? Doesn’t Evocation ensure you deal maximum damage with Arcane Surge?”
Well. Yes. Except the problem is that the direct damage Arcane Surge deals is small and entirely inconsequential. In other words, I really don’t care if I have 4 million mana or 1 mana when I cast Arcane Surge. This means all the mana I gain via Evocation is basically pointless. So right now Evocation is basically nothing more than a buff CD I have to channel before every Arcane Surge, rendering it kind of redundant since it has the same CD as Arcane Surge. There just isn’t a good reason for me to ever want to separate these two.
In summary, giving Evocation a buffing component has destroyed its seeming intended purpose as a mana refiller. I think it would make more sense for Evocation to instead refill Arcane Charges over its duration so it would instead be used as a mini burst prepper. That way I won’t be required to use it in conjunction with Arcane Surge.
- High Voltage is Functionally Useless due to Nether Precision’s Design
Having a capstone talent be functionally useless feels pretty weird. At first glance it seems like a decent talent - free AC’s from missiles so I can conserve mana! - but when you examine it under the scope of Nether Precision’s importance in our toolkit, it just completely falls apart. The long and short of it is that casting Arcane Missiles when you are at 0 AC is just a huge mistake. This is because if you don’t get at LEAST 3 AC’s when you do your followup Arcane Blast, then you are basically just wasting the damage boost from your Nether Precision charge.
At least right now you could maybe make a case for using High Voltage to lead into an Arcane Barrage, but the problem is that next patch Nether Precision will only be consumed by Arcane Blast.
I don’t really have a good suggestion for a simple easy tweak to High Voltage - I feel like this talent has to be fundamentally redesigned. Maybe change it so it gives a stacking buff that is consumed on the next cast to treat that cast as if you have X more Arcane Charges?
- Aether Attunement, Arcane Harmony, and Arcane Bombardment are SO Good They Warp Talent Choices in Row 3
This is probably my feedback of least concern since most classes have some black-hole talents that warp talent builds around them, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. These three talents are good. VERY good. Like absurdly good compared to everything around them. The simple fact is Arcane Missiles and Arcane Barrage are bread and butter abilities for arcane mages and deal a lion’s share of our DPS. And these three talents are MASSIVE gains for them - on paper, Aether Attunement is a ~33% boost to Arcane Missiles (even more if you benefit from the cleave), Arcane Bombardment is a ~30% increase to Arcane Barrage (in most situations), and Arcane Harmony is a 25% boost to Arcane Barrage in the typical situation where you only Barrage while you have Aethervision.
One could make the arguement that Aether Attunement and Arcane Harmony don’t matter much in a strictly AoE scenario (spamming 4 AC barrage to fish for Orb Barrage procs) - the problem is that the alternative talents on the other side of the tree (Prodigious Savant, Leysight, Concentration, and Leydrinker) just aren’t competitive enough to warrant taking over Aether Attunement and Arcane Harmony.
Basically, I guess what I’m saying is that Arcane Mages have some pretty lopsided talents in the bottom row that is restricting build diversity.
There are a few ways this could be addressed. These three talents could be pushed further up the tree, or maybe the bottom-right talents could be made more appealing.
It’s a not huge deal to me personally because, again, this is not a problem unique to Arcane Mages, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.