I love playing the current arcane mage, but I hate having to stack crit through the roof and still see my major cooldowns end in a fizzle becuase Arcane Barrage didn’t crit. It would be amazing if there was a way to guarantee a crit at the end of a damage ramp. I don’t think it would be that hard.
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Seems really simple to build in an auto-crit mechanic into Arcane Barrage similar to how Chaos Bolt works for Destro Locks. Could even be active only during CDs or be a component of those CDs themselves but yes, hoping for that 1 ability to crit and that roll being the determining factor of your entire 45 seconds of build up is rough.
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Shatter was removed. We could of had decent crit chance for our spells like arcane barrage. Now we have to gear mage poorly to make up for shatter being removed. Thanks blizzard. Bring shatter back already. Half the fun of mage is gone.
That doesn’t solve anything in boss encounters.
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The real question is why you’re using first sigil.
This x100.
Or how about we stop doubling down on the Kyrian/Harmony cheez build and return arcane to the traditional style of game play … or, at the very least, give those of us who can’t stand the Harmony playstyle an option with the new talents to play the spec traditionally?
All three mage specs look to be maintaining their Shadowlands playstyles. Given that long time mages, like myself, walked away from the class entirely cause all three specs now have some niche (and imo very boring) playstyles, this seems like an absolutely stupid decision.
Then again, this is a Bliz devs and mages we’re talking about …
I went Warlock main ages ago. Started working on my mage again as I was hopeful the DF talent system would bring me back. Looking at the current ones and still seeing SKB for fire, IV/TV for frost, and Harmony for arcane being the likely go-to’s, I’ll probably not even play my mage as an alt and give it up entirely.
To your original point, I can’t see them adding a crit modifier to barrage. If they did, they’d just tune the other spells down to balance it out. They seem content with the RNG nature of the Harmony build (considering that the build was actually “discovered” by a Streamer and was never intended to be the meta playstyle to begin with).
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I completely agree about our struggles with forcing a crit. Frost and Fire can guarantee crits when they need to, but arcane can’t. It’s just not built into our kit. Probably because we weren’t designed to do one big hit every 30-45 seconds like we currently are… When shatter was part of the tree, the only hope we really had was if Blizzard would add some form of Flurry to the general tree as well (for the Winter’s Chill effect), but that’s taking too much from Frost to feel comfortable. But, overall, I still think I’m glad that shatter isn’t in the general tree.
There are a couple of ways that blizzard could fix this issue, but I doubt they’re going to go for them (and I’m not sure if they should).
The first would be having Arcane Harmony also increase the chance for the barrage to crit. The problem with this is I feel it makes Harmony too powerful on its own, but I don’t think it’s a strong enough concept to be its own talent (especially that far down the tree).
The second would be to increase the critical chance of spells against targets affected by Touch of the Magi. This one seems powerful enough to be its own talent (possibly fitting between TotM and RS in the tree), however, at that point we’d practically be playing fire’s rotation with guaranteed crits.
The fact of the matter is that Arcane simply wasn’t designed to force crits. It was designed around managing mana and charges - neither of which I feel like I’m doing anymore. It feels like Shadowlands gave Arcane a rework without all the benefits of getting a rework.
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I just made an Arcane Missile build in the PTR and it played really nicely and felt powerful (in duels and fighting world elites). Can’t really test endgame in PTR, but it seems solid.
Main issue for mage remains ROP and how much it skews the dmg profile.
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Missles is how the spec currently plays.
RoP isn’t an issue and based on how arcane and fire are designed rop continues to be a good thing.
This is a good thing believe it or not.
RoP is actually problematic for Arcane. It’s fine for Fire and for Frost it depends if [Icy Propulsion] is giving enough CDR so that more runes can be put down through [Icy Veins], but it has an anti-synergistic relationship with Arcane’s design.
In Dragonflight for example, you’d need to use it before [Arcane Surge] because it doesn’t benefit from its own rune due how damage is calculated. The other problem is that you sit on it at times due to how the cooldown and automatic rune work on live.
Funnily enough, Arcane is the one that has the most problems with [Rune of Power] instead of Frost as one would expect. Those aren’t gigantic problems, but it’s a failure of design for how it works without charges but still having the main cooldown put one down and the 45s cycle.
For a crit mechanic to [Arcane Barrage], I think it should come with [Radiant Spark]. A ramping crit chance along with the increased damage would probably be in line with how it’s designed and help lower the gigantic variance on Arcane’s DPS on its burst windows because that’s where it really matters most.
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I really don’t like how you can play the spec perfectly down to every percentage of damage and use of gcds only for the only thing to make your performance suffer as if you’re some noob that’s just trying to figure out how to play the spec… is a crit from barrage at the end of your burst rotation.
The number of raid encounters that I’ve been in where I’ve seen no crits at all during my burst rotations have been some of the most demoralizing things that I’ve ever experienced playing any class except that terrible MoP fury warrior design, but this somehow feels worse than that.
I would extremely disagree.
Having rop for every touch go > using it on CD.
I don’t know what’s there to disagree. The spell doesn’t interact well with the kit and the 45s cycle in addition to the auto RoP.
The only time RoP was problematic for Frost was in 9.1.5 when it could reset [Icy Veins] so much in dungeons that RoP uptime was through the roof.
I get it that you like the spell but its current iteration doesn’t work as it probably should or was envisioned and has another kind of problem with Dragonflight Arcane. I’m not arguing for its removal if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not a fan but I’d rather the spell get the attention it deserves to work better with all specs since it’s quite apparent it isn’t going anywhere.
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we’ve already been down this rabbit hole and no one agrees with you. Literally 300+ comments of people explaining you over and over again why ROP is bad for the health of the class. I’m not going to do it again.
It’s ok if you personally LIKE ROP, but as a talent, it is certainly very problematic.
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But it does. You use RoP on every touch go which is where Arcanes damage is.
I am not discussing frost.
I am not agasint RoP being improved. I am against people that have little to no raiding exp advocating for its removal like Wyvern.
Not sorry but again people with zero to little PVE experience dont really have a credible opinion.
LOL? Again, go be an idiot to your own little corner. No one likes you.
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I see you’re having fun with your Magical Friends here, Xino. 
I dont care if anyone likes me. I especially dont care if some LFR hero with 0 keys doen that cant even use the correct legendaries likes me.
You arent playing any content that matters so your opinion means literally zero.
Meh. If you want to call it that.