I got bored and this really intrigued me. I have a lot of opinions (and not necessarily good ones). You’ve put a lot of effort into this, so bravo to you! I’m assuming you posting this means you’ll revel in any form of feedback. Regardless, don’t take anything here personally. I’m a grumpy mage with more thoughts than I have spells.
Considering how long it took them to fix our UI to make 4 charges work, I don’t see this being a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of being able to have an extra arcane charge, however, I think something like that should be dedicated to a cooldown instead of a full passive effect. Having a choice node on Touch of the Magi that granted an extra max charge (or two) for its duration instead of copying damage could be interesting.
The extra increase to Blast and Barrage damage could be detrimental to missiles as a whole. In my opinion, there’s a very fine balance between how powerful our blasts should be compared to our missiles. I, personally, think it should be:
Arcane Missiles (no CC) < Arcane Blast (4 charges) < Arcane Missiles (with CC) < Nether Precision Arcane Blast (4 Charges)
For at least part of BfA, CC missiles did less dps than a fully charged blast, making it rather irrelevant to cast unless you wanted to conserve mana. I don’t want to go back to that.
…Why? To attempt to get two full barrages out of a single arcane orb (once after cast, once after they hit the targets and grant you charges)? This would cause some very degenerate “I need to be at least X yards away from the mobs so I can hit them with Arcane Orb and get off 2 barrage casts, but I need to be WITHIN X yards to cast explosion”. Honestly I like the concept of foresight as it is, there are just too many existing throughput talents that compete with this decidedly not throughput related space. We just need to consolidate our throughput better.
In a perfect world, I’d like to see us have more choice in the utility that we have. That’s something we, as mages, are lacking overall. I’d rather keep foresight and find a way to make it a better choice.
Again, why? In all honesty we don’t need so many stacking buffs (heck, these are stacking debuffs at that, which are objectively worse). If we’re going to suggest anything, I’d rather it be that either one of these is completely removed OR we’re given a choice for which to take (and their damage numbers are adjusted to make them both competitive choices, just perhaps for different scenarios)
If Mana Adept is going to change, it should be to combine it with another talent (or make it baseline), not to add more throughput to it. We already have too many throughput talents. Adding yet another is just going to hurt, especially when you add another throughput talent just to nerf an existing one. Mana Adept, as it is right now, is something that you could potentially play without if you’re careful enough with your mana. In the next patch, with a set bonus that grants more mana, we may be able to give this talent up in favor of other things because we won’t need it anymore. Add throughput to it and suddenly there’s no option anymore.
I do agree that Resonance and Arcing Cleave should be combined. It just doesn’t make sense that they’re separate AND that Resonance comes first in the tree. If we get any changes here (besides combining them), I’d like to see a talent that more evenly distributes the damage across all the targets hit. Something like For each Arcane Charge, Barrage hits 1 additional target (for full damage) but deals 5% less total damage.
If I wanted to stop caring about crits, I’d play fire. Or Frost (at that Shatter crit breakpoint, if that’s still a thing). Arcane is already more complex than it needs to be. Trying to time out which of my spells is going to crit to ensure that my barrage or my surge crits is going to steer people away. Being able to guarantee them is great, just not like this.
I like the idea of keeping a talent called “Rule of Threes” that does something fun with the number three, I just don’t like this one. Something interesting, though, would be to make “every third consecutive Arcane Blast” do something (like increased damage or castable while moving or regen mana, etc.). It would be something fun to put directly under Nether Precision. It could give an incentive to cast a third blast as part of the rotation, but it would need to be well balanced so it doesn’t make us not want to cast arcane missiles
This is Impetus, but worse?
So it’s a repeat of Arcane Echo, but less controllable? Honestly, I like the idea of the haste and blink reduction a bit more. A 10% proc chance on missiles is pretty low, especially considering it’s only 8.25% damage. Something named “Unstable missiles” should be more along the lines of Clearcast Arcane Missiles have an X% chance to duplicate to another target.