Nah, Blizzard crunched the numbers and determined that because 90% of Arcane Mages use that build it must be the most fun and therefore everyone in DF will be forced to use it.
Rather than use the trees as a way to rebuild the specs and add new life into the game they’d rather just take existing abilities, slap them haphazardly into a tree and call it a day. I mean how dare players not want to play the same terrible way that they have for years. New spells? Not a chance, here’s the same crappy borrowed power talent that you had for 4 years. Yaaaaaay.
Nah, ROP has been problematic for Frost ever since it became the clear winner for damage boost. It doesn’t fit with the theme or playstyle, feels bad to use and is an awful decision by the devs to push it so hard on all 3 specs. There are enough threads about how and why ROP is possibly the worst long-term decision Blizzard has made to the game.
I feel that was an end of the expansion issue balancing numbers and has been addressed with the addition of guaranteed damage in execute. Crit being a bonus stat and not something to be balanced around much, so its fun to see them, but nothing require to play the spec.
No agreed. I explained it wrong. I mean builds that are removed from the rotations we’ve all been familiar with or change rotation drastically.
I don’t have a problem with each build having a strong suit. In Legion it was well known my damage was going to be terrible on cleave flights. I’d start going frost for those ones.
Been difficult to do that with SL cause changing spec meant keeping up with another covenant.
As much as I dislike agreeing with the class troll, I have to on this point. The cooldown and usage of Rune of Power works well with arcane. It doesn’t mean that RoP is something I like, but it’s probably LEAST problematic in Arcane, even going into DF.
As pointed out, RoP needs to be used with Touch of the Magi. Anything beyond that isn’t going to give the same benefit (there might be a case for using it with radiant spark without touch, but I’m not going to entertain that thought because if it is better, it likely isn’t by much). The fact that Arcane Surge doesn’t benefit from its own RoP is likely an oversight (bug) that will be addressed.
Even if it isn’t and that interaction goes live, you’ll just cast RoP before surge and TotM, then have surge drop an extra RoP. It does kinda defeat the purpose of having our major cooldowns drop a free rune, but the timings will still line up with TotM.
As far as I can tell, you and I have similar PvE experience (at least on your mage, if you have other characters). I’m advocating for Rune of Power’s removal. I’m no expert. I’m not a hardcore raider. I’m just someone who plays the game for fun, and Rune of Power (among other things) is currently contributing to a loss of that fun.
BUT this isn’t the thread for that conversation. The main problem here is arcane’s lack of guaranteed crit. Putting it onto Radiant Spark is also a good idea. I think maybe the best thing we could do is increase Radiant Spark’s cooldown to 45 seconds (so that it lines up with everything else), make it stack 15% damage per stack (to account for the increased cooldown) AND either stack crit alongside it OR grant an increased chance or guaranteed chance to crit on the very last hit.
When my Warlock cast Soul Rot and put down the haste field to empower her demons and when something just happens to be under its feet, she can tank it thanks to Soul Leech, Soul Link, her demons constantly generate Soul Leech, Demon Skin, Unending Resolve and pretty much everything that allows her to continuously deal damage while under fire in that field.
On my mage, I can’t do that. Whenever there is a Lower Kara boss places his fiery tornado on my RoP. I was like… “Whelp, there goes my 40% of my Spell Damage”. Because while my mage is elusive, she’s made out of ricepaper and can’t take hits as well as my warlock.
… Also I like 6 digit crits on my Arcane Barrage. Strangely, I don’t see Touch crit like ever though. I wonder if it works like that.
If I’m not mistaken, Touch of the Magi cannot crit. If it could, we’d all just be stacking crit all the time. So it’s probably a good decision to not let it crit.
… So that’s why Mastery is the most desired stat for Arcane. I’ve thought about Crits for a very long time thinking “Wouldn’t it double dip with Touch?”.
Makes sense that it doesn’t. Otherwise Crit would be very much inflated. Still good for AB though.
They also changed Touch partway through the expansion (I forget when) to not double-dip on damage modifiers that are applied to bosses. So when Sludgefist hits a pillar and takes extra damage, your spells will be increased, and touch will record the increased damage of those spells, but touch will not receive the benefit from the debuff on Sludgefist.
And crit is still highly desired, simply because we need to force that barrage to crit. Whether or not it crits can potentially be a 100+k damage difference in just one spell.
Looking at my own logs this week, my highest barrage HIT on Stavros in the Council of Blood was 134k while my highest crit was 68k. I lost 134k damage simply because barrage didn’t crit. If my math is right, that one singular hit was something like a .2% damage loss overall. Not huge overall, but still painful to watch.
I really like Mastery on arcane. Vers isn’t that bad either though unless they multiply with each other. I’m gonna feel like a bloody idiot if I find that out just now…
Well that’s lame… I thought it would be up to the player to benefit from the damage increase if he/she knows the fight and timeframe to use the cooldown.
I could be wrong, but I think it’s crit/mastery > haste/vers. I believe that the stat distribution is actually incredibly close, to the point where you basically want 3 crit and 3 mastery for every 2 haste and 2 verse.
Regardless… Those 6 digit crits are very satisfying. Hearing my raid leader say “I need everyone to switch to the … wait where’d the add go?” will never get old.
