I won’t try even remotely to defend arcane mage damage. It was very clearly ahead of the pack and needed to get tuned down. With that said, the execution of it was very poor.
The arcane rotation prenerf was really fun, simple for beginners, and super engaging. This nerf changes it. Arcane Soul is a fun talent, I don’t see a reason to nerf it. Spellquing barrage and blast together exists for nether precision, but doesn’t for burden of power. This change doesn’t really make sense to me, because in my mind these talents line up together, but now don’t after the changes. This makes arcane a lot more complicated for newer players, when I thought the goal was to make it more accessible. The changes to arcane phoenix make sense, and I wish we had more of these passive damage nerfs, rather than nerfs that impact gameplay and how fun the spec is. Spellfire spheres could give 1% spell damage rather than 2, mana cascade could give 0.5% haste per stack, Lingering embers could be 1%, Burden of power could be changed from 30% to 10%. These are changes that don’t impact the rotation, but tune the specs down to the other ones. I and many other mages implore you to consider nerfing the specialization in the mentioned ways, and reverting the timer for arcane soul, and the double dip of Burden of power.
TL;DR:
Mage fun got nerf because of tuning, but we can just nerf tuning without nerfing mage fun.
I think it is strong, but so is MM, Enchance, Ret AoE, and a bunch of other specs.
I personally would love arcane surge to hit harder, it has never hit harder than a Glacial Spike, Ray of Frost or even Eternity Surge and it has a massive cool down.
Instead, it’s a weird arcane power hybrid. Arcane has always received its damage modifiers because of spells like rune of power, incanters, evocation, and Arcane power. We ever just can’t do damage, without those modifiers because then we’d just be even more stupidly strong.
I just want arcane to hit respectable numbers without the need of those gimmicky spell power damage modifiers.
They nerf arcane because of raid ST sims but watch how it will fall behind fire and frost in M+ as its aoe is pretty mediocre and it has the worst hard caps of all mage specs, making the spec worse the bigger the pulls get.
And they’re not gonna improve arcane aoe, mark my words.
They want you spamming the sluggishly slow arcane blast with the pitiful clearcast proc chance.
Arcane Blast spam makes the spec feel horrible, but they’re set on enforcing it.
I just want arcane to hit respectable numbers without the need of those gimmicky spell power damage modifiers.
I think most classes only do damage with damage modifiers. But if I give you the devil’s advocate, wouldn’t it make sense to get rid of these modifiers as a whole, rather than removing one, reverting it, and then removing another interaction?
It really wasn’t a nerf because it’s still enough to get you 3 CC procs and before it was just wasted since you overcapped. It’s fun to get all of your charges back and get CC procs on top of that but honestly I would have liked something more engaging than just spamming ABarr a few times and getting every proc imaginable for free.
It will get removed for Nether Precision as well. It already was but Preheat’s cohort and the mage discord community took up the torches and pitchforks and went to town on the Beta forums so Blizzard reverted the removal but made it clear that it was only temporary while they work on a better solution. I guarantee you they will get rid of it again down the road, likely sooner than later.
They’ve made it abundantly clear that they don’t consider abusing the spell queuing system for double dipping a legitimate use of that mechanic, and I for one completely agree with them. I know many people find it fun but it’s absolutely not as intuitive as you seem to think and very clearly not the intended use for that system. So to sum up: spell queuing is a legitimate mechanic, abusing it to double dip is not. What needs to happen is for all specs to be buffed at baseline so that they don’t need to resort to those types of tactics, gimmicks really, in order to do competitive damage.
They totally changed the rotation and these nerfs are prolly going to be at 15% reduction to single target. The new play style will be lackluster and clunky.
Overall, the changes are a total hamfisted attempt to lower damage. I have no drive to logon now, let alone play another class/spec as I was having so much fun on arcane. Bring back double dipping and just nerf burden of power buff to barrage by 15%. Keep the other nerfs to phoenix and soul.
That’s the worst thing they could possible do, as far as I am concerned. I genuinely don’t understand the fascination with this double dipping. What joy do you derive from slamming your keys hard enough to break them so that you can barely manage to get off an extra cast one millisecond before the buff expires? That’s wild to me.
Oh noes, you sure told me with that passive aggressive sarcasm when I’ve been playing the game as a mage since the early Vanilla days. Anyway, enjoy your nonexistent double dipping. Can’t wait to see what other gimmick you’ve been desperately holding on to Blizzard come for next.
Yeah the reason he said you don’t know what you are talking about is because you don’t have to slam your keys any more quickly than you would for any other part of your rotation, and you don’t need to get a barrage input off 1ms after blast. The spell queue handles this, and this isn’t even a mechanic that is specific to double-dipping, it is just what allows you to not have downtime from one spell to the next.
And double dipping won’t be gone from the rotation, we would still be queueing a barrage after blast on the last stack of nether precision. It’s just going to potentially be done differently based on the removal of BoP double dipping.
And as for the “fascination with double dipping”, speaking for myself, it’s fun to try to play your rotation in a way that makes the most of your class mechanics. It feels good to have a buff that empowers your next spell and get two spells of value out of it if you play it properly, doubly so if you get to double dip NP and BoP at the same time.
I was recounting my own experience. I am older guy, or rather have an older man’s reflexes and the receding hairline to match, but I digress. While I understand on an intellectual level that I don’t need to hammer on my keys the fact is that due to the tight nature of the burst windows and the heat of combat my brain just can’t handle it all and I end up going to town on my keyboard like I am John Williams after George Lucas tells him to write another lightsaber duel OST! So to quote Lady Olenna “as an authority on myself” I know exactly what I am talking about.
I fully understand that you all young whipper snappers have a completely different take on all of this and that’s fine but I don’t play this, or any other game, to be sweaty. All I am doing is voicing my support of Blizzard (for once) because what they’re doing will spare my aging fingers. There is no need to bite my head off for that. Now get off my lawn before I have my phoenix lite your sweetcheeks up!
You really don’t need insane reflexes to play into it. You just do as you would your normal rotation with Arcane Blast.
You don’t really fully wait for Arcane Blast to finish casting so you then press the button again, do you? That would leave you with entire gaps on your rotation. For the double dipping and spell queueing, you just do the same thing but press Barrage instead when Arcane Blast is nearing its end. It really isn’t difficult nor does it require insane skills to pull off.
Now, the entire game and all classes work like this. It just so happens that this is particularly powerful for Arcane since both Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage make up for a large portion of our DPS and both are buffed by Nether Precision, so cherry picking on Arcane for this kind of stuff is just stupid on Blizzard’s part and all it does is make our rotation worse.
Spell queueing isn’t the exception, its the rule. Many classes utilize spell queueing, including the other specs of mage. Changing a burden this way makes it really unfun to play around as well as learn for new players, especially since it is nearly identical to nether precision.
Blizzard Devs mentioned in the Naguura interview that they try to avoid major changes to classes leading into raid week, so why make such impactful gameplay changes right now?
I mentioned this in another thread but Nether Precision just causes too many balancing issues and the devs clearly can’t figure it out. On top of that there has always been a conflict between CC and NP which more often than not gets resolved by truncating the CC AMs and that is not only unintuitive but also feels bad. Firing off all of those missiles in rapid succession is about the most entertaining and visually pleasing part of an Arcane Mage’s ST rotation.
NP was an interesting experiment but, imo, it’s caused more problems than it’s solved and it’s just a weird and boring damage increase proc that has no visual impact. The spell queueing thing is just the latest in a long line of issues that have arisen because of NP. Along with making TotM a cooldown rather than a random proc, which lead to the unhinged cooldown stacking Arcane meta, NP has probably done the most harm to the spec.
We need to move away from the bad decisions of BfA and SL and return back to what really worked which was Legion and Aluneth’s artifact tree which truly made Arcane shine, perhaps for the first, and last, time ever.
If what people want is to work in more ABarr into the ST rotation (which I totally get) then why not replace NP with a completely different proc that makes ABarr refund the charges it spends like Glorious Incandesence, Arcane Soul, and the new 4 piece set bonus do? That will feel x10 better than the current version of NP and if it stacks it will also allow us to cast CC AMs back-to-back instead of truncating them and will even synergyze with Arcane Harmony. That’s just one example off the top of my head.
