State of Arcane Mage

How about making it so we can decide when TotM explodes in case we want to explode it earlier?

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Arcane is unplayable. It has a terrible, clunky play style with legendaries and covenant abilities making it very rough and difficult to play without any significant strength. It’s extremely unfortunate because I’d like to be able to play arcane and have it be enjoyable. However, fire and frost are much more versatile and have a fun play style. It’s poor that arcane does not even pull off enough single-target damage to support the weak AOE presence .

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Arcane can pull off good single target damage. However, as you’ve said, atm there’s really no point in using arcane when frost and fire covers everything between consistent and or burst st or mt better and more reliably than arcane. It’s not bad (except in pvp), but there’s just more fun and valuable options in fire and frost. Especially with frost at this point where the options available just makes it so much more fun to play around with. Although, I’m still not 100% used to cf, it’s still there as a wip… for next week. I’m not touching explosive dungeons.

Back to arcane. It is powerful in its own right it’s single target is still powerful and its mt as well, but many things could interupt that attempt to pull it off in both raid and dungeons that will make it almost impossible to recover from that. Just having arcane power and rune of power active won’t even make a difference since you might as well just use a cancel aura macro for them since you’re really not doing anything there.

Note, for those bothering to read this, I’m not advocating to use cancelaura macros and to do that, but just saying that one hiccup with touch and that’s all of your burst right there and all of your single target and multitarget damage that matters comes from that one spell.

Every time I come across these threads, it reminds me how data illiterate we are as a species.

Mind clarifying for the class?

Nobody knows how to read WarcraftLogs. It unfortunately happens everywhere, and I’m guilty of falling for traps without researching. The patronization is unwarranted though.

Some food for thought…

Well, the way things look Arcanr mage isn’t loosing it crappy mana system in 10.0. I was really hoping they were going to rework classes, but instead they are doing trees. Don’t get me wrong, I’m super happy for it, but I would have liked to see reworked classes as well.

I’m right there with you guys. I was a Venthyr Arcane mage and was doing resonable damage but felt I could do better so I replaced my legendary and covenant to Kyrian. Between renonwing up to 80, spending about 50K on my legendary, and completely relearning my rotation I put a ton of time and money in. Then I get into a raid and I find out that being able to stand for roughly six seconds in order to cast the requisite spells needed to buff Arcane Barrage to make those juicy 300K crits was almost never viable. It seemed like every single dang time I would start the rotation I would cast about half of it and then something would go under my feet, or I had to switch targets, both nullifying the rotation. It was so demoralizing that I have largely quit the game, but haven’t quit completely because I don’t want my guild to feel like I’m abandoning them. On paper Kyrian Arcane Mage is incredible, Crits so high you can pull the boss, but the ability to reliably complete the entire cast every time requires expert level planning.

Funny, I was so bummed about this whole thing that I googled to see if others are having similar problems, feels a little better I’m not the only one.

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Can’t speak for PvP, but for PvE, Kyrian Arcane has been great for me. It’s a high risk high reward spec that has strong ST burst and nearly unmatched 3-5 target burst. It’s damage profile is extremely versatile for priority damage, cleave, or big AoE. Yeah it sucks when your ramp gets interrupted, but there are ways to avoid losing out completely and once you learn fight timers, this is pretty rare anyway.

Because of our damage profile, I would argue that Arcane is in the best position to bring higher overall damage to higher PUG keys than the other mage specs…frost needs big pulls that don’t get moved, and fire needs pulls to be coordinated around combustion to excel. Arcane can keep pumping no matter how hectic the pulls get if you know what you are doing. That said, in a highly coordinated group a frost mage will definitely be higher damage, but let’s be honest, how often do you get that in PUGs? Almost never.

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I love arcane mage - but that doesn’t mean it’s in a good place. A few things that would help it immediately:

-Make it so you can press totm a second time to explode whenever you want (instant cast OFF the GCD). Too many times totm doesn’t work because a mob dies before it goes off and we invest too much time casting it for it to do nothing.

  • baseline arcane missiles being castable while moving with clear casting

  • New ability Wall of Arcane Power - allows mage to put up a wall of arcane power that either reduces damage of any projectiles / frontals that go through it OR slows the speed of enemy missile type attacks by 75% so you could place it and it allowed raid members to dodge slowed down projectiles that travel through it

  • Arcane orb baseline

Those changes would make a huge difference in the right direction for arcane.

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Bring back Legion arcane.

Sure our cleave was terrible but out ST and AoE were amazing.

Missiles felt GOOD … build up the three charges, drop a RoP, dump missles and feel good.

The change to missiles is what ruined Arcane for me. I tried the Kyrian build last tier … not a fan.

Hey, nobody said they won’t rework specs just because they’re already revamping the trees. If anything, the revamped trees is a good reason for some specs to get a nice rework, even if not a complete one, like Frost Mage 100% deserves an [Icy Veins] rework, but not necessarily the entire spec.

One of the leaks that hinted at Evoker even mentioned that the spec it was taking its name from ([Evocation] from Arcane) might receive a complete rework due to the way the new class would work. I just hope they’re not entirely taking the time magic fantasy away from us, but I do hope they do away with mana completely.

I want to think that’s possible, but blizz’s track record completely tells me different. They limit the time and money they spend on the classes, and with the talent trees coming in along with a new class, albeit a 2/3rds full class, I doubt they rework things. I think the most they do is work on the spells that are on the talent trees, but they will most likely be modified to fit the cds and class systems already in place.

At the end of the day, do you even trust them to do a full mage revamp?

They revamped Arcane for BfA without any explanation and look what we got.

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No, I do not trust them.

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I think you get after the heart of the issue when you say:
“Arcane has suffered from a major problem for a very long time. It’s a high risk playstyle that doesn’t often retain the high reward expected from from taking risks.”

I don’t mind being at risk of being 1-shot by lots of things, if that means I’ve got crazy output or utility to offer the team.

But if I can be 1-shot and bring only mediocre results to the party, what was the point?

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Tbh I wish there was just a more user friendly spec for m+ outside of high key fortified the dmg profile doesn’t line up very well…. There has to be a better way

…. Well without gimping my boss dps

They have no time to design classes and specs properly because all their budgeted design team hours goes to borrowed power systems.
Can’t be distracted with designing the classes properly when you have people who used to design slot machines and casino games making systems to boost “engagement metrics” and “borrowed power.”

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This has been a longstanding (and IMO valid) criticism right up until the expansion announcement.

Thankfully as of the beginning of the development of Dragonflight, this appears to no longer be the case.

Unfortunately, it does leave us with the remaining time in Shadowlands with what we hope are the last of the borrowed power systems.

To be fair to Blizzard, this little buff that Arcane received is at least an attempt to tweak the numbers and is better than nothing.

That’s not to say I don’t have my criticisms of how Arcane plays (particularly with the Kyrian Harmony build). It’s a rigid, fragile, glass cannon spec that unless perfectly executed over the course of combat (regardless of mechanics), your numbers will greatly suffer to the point of folks asking if you even know what you’re doing. (“Why are you just spamming Arcane Missiles?” You know what I’m talking about, fellow Harmony mages. :wink: )

If you’re lucky, your raidmates will eventually come to understand that if you can just stand still for a few seconds on every cooldown, yeah, big numbers. Otherwise, nope, dumpster numbers.

Personally, my feelings are mixed about the Harmony effect and whether or not I want to see it continued past Shadowlands. On one hand, it’s really cool pulling off an absolutely massive ABarr crit, followed by an equally impressive Touch of the Magi hit. So far as I know, we have one if the the highest single shot potential damage bursts in the game right now with this build. So that’s pretty cool if you can set it up and execute it consistently.

On the other hand, as mentioned, it’s incredibly inflexible to the point of being impractical in most combat situations most of the time. We’ve all been there. The start of combat is great, and you’re rocking the meters. Then as combat continues and things get hectic, it all falls apart over time as we contend with mechanics and cooldowns not quite lining-up.

With this in mind, I do kind of pine for “traditional” Arcane and burn/conserve phases again (AB spam on burn, followed by AB, ABarr, and AM on proc). It wasn’t quite as exciting as building-up a mega-crit ABarr, but it was a bit more stable and reliable. The problem is that recently traditional Arcane has simply become non-competitive in numbers. An Arcane mage spamming AB simply doesn’t have the output compared to other specs, which is contrary to the original design of the burn/conserve cycle. This is going to need fixed going forward unless they intend to lean-in to a permanent Harmony-style rotation for Arcane.

So, in short, I don’t have the answer for how to best fix Arcane. There are a couple of different paths they could take. A complete redesign might be interesting, but perhaps a bit too aggressive considering all the work involved with converting every spec in the game to the new talent systems. Keeping traditional burn/conserve Arcane can work, but they’d need to substantially tweak the burn numbers to compete. Finally, doing a Harmony-style might also work, but I’d like to see some tweaks given to improve mobility/flexibility if that’s the case. Being a mega-nuke cannon must come at a cost, but I could stand for it being a little less punishing, personally. I think buffing our filler damage (AB and AM) is as step in this direction.

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They design mechanics totally independent and without thought to classes, specs, or class balance. This is why we can never have a 100% class balanced game. Some mechanics just break some classes while other classes flourish… My 2 copper.