Arcane buffs are much appreciated! Worth taking a look at the target cap on Barrage/damage breakdown of Blast, Explosion, and Orb separately for sure, but an 8% overall buff is awesome and definitely needed. You rock!
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Unfortunately, the small improvement in PvE came with major reductions in PvP.
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I could easily see a new talent:
Arcing Cleave+: Arcing Cleave can hit twice as many targets
And they could put it anywhere on the tree because it’s impossible to pass gate 1 without taking Arcing Cleave…
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Glad to see we are getting something but a blanket 8% buff is going to be enough of a fix.
This is exactly what I was predicting though. Maybe next patch we will see something more substantial to address our issues.
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I’m glad to be wrong that arcane wouldn’t get tuning, but yeah still feels like this is just a band-aid. I think frost may pass fire now though
Mobility nerfs hit hard. Makes me sad.
They shouldn’t be removing movement effects. The real culprit is shimmer and alter time giving back a charge.
Like, what is the point of chrono shift now? 10% movement buff? Lol. Terrible.
4% to frost is nothing, it will not pass fire. Even with the 3% nerf.
Frost has been doing about 96% of the damage of fire. Now frost was buffed 4%, and fire nerfed 4%. Frost has basically the same kit and excellent prio. you do the math
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3% is nothing. And 4% is nothing. These minuscule numbers will not make frost superior to fire. I wish it was because I think fire feels like the spec is on crack. But it is what it is.
Put it where High Voltage is.
Chrono Shift needs to be back in the Arcane tree, but, alas, I guess it’s too OP or something. It felt amazing in Legion. I miss it dearly.
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I see frost right up there with fire on the leaderboards though, some frost mages have timed 17’s pre-buff (and pre fire nerf)
sometimes a tank wants a frost mage because frost can help stack the mobs really tight (when done right this means really good blizzard uptime too)
no doubt fire will still remain a good spec though
Eh, not to be a downer but 8% is a drop in the bucket considering that Arcane would need a 20%+ buff just to break into the middle of the pack. The very least they could have done since these are purely arbitrary numbers that don’t reflect the raw data is to have rounded it up to 10%.
And at any rate, the damage isn’t even the biggest problem. The spec plays like trash mechanically and has some of the most outdated visuals of any spec in the game with key spells like Arcane Orb literally never having had their VFX updated (even though it exists in the game’s files and is used by NPCs).
My subscription expires the second week of March and this measly buff won’t make me change my mind. I guess I am going on another hiatus that will probably last until Midnight unless they pull a Hail Mary with TWW’s final patch.
Although I could see a talent like this being a capstone, I definitely like High Voltage - at least in concept. I wouldn’t want to see it replaced.
I miss it a lot too, but the fact of the matter is that we cast it too frequently now. Back in Legion we’d barrage a handful of times in a fight. Now we’re practically spamming it. Ignoring any PvP problems, we’d have the buff up for entire fights - which is a bit too strong.
Eh I think arcane could be taken out of the woods as the bottom outlier with a 10% buff to arcane blast. This would give arcane a bit of its identity back (since single target will still be low) without taking the spec out of the below average crew
A 10% buff to Arcane Blast would net us about 3% more DPS.
I am going to keep pounding the drum that we need SIGNIFICANT increases to Arcane Blast and baseline Arcane Barrage, and a slight reduction to Barrage multipliers - most notably Resonance, which is killing us when we can’t cleave.
I also think we need some more control over our procs during our burst window. Having raided a few times as Arcane now, I can definitely tell that a good parse or a bad parse for me largely depends on whether or not I’m getting procs during my Magi and Surge windows. If I can get Intuition to proc right off the bat into a Magi’s Spark, and then one or two Intuitions during my Arcane Soul window I am off to the races. I had one burst phase peak at over 4.5M DPS. But if I don’t get procs? My DPS crashes real hard. Like down to 2.5M hard. The variance is insane.
This is one of the reasons why I advocated for Presence of Mind being changed to be a bankable instant Intuition + Clearcasting in my large Arcane change post. Heck, even just upping Intuition’s proc rate during Touch of the Magi would be a huge help.
We are simply too cleave dependent and too RNG swingy.
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I’m not saying you’re wrong, but a 10% arcane blast buff would shift the damage profile in a good way towards single target, making the target cap a bit more meaningful. It is an elegant temporary solution to a complicated issue
Oh I agree Arcane Blast should be buffed. I just think it needs to be more than 10% - more like 20%. They could also MASSIVELY buff it’s damage and have it cost more mana, giving us more impetus to cast Barrage, but that would be bordering on a rotation rework which I am not in favor of until next expansion.
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Worst of all, most arcane abilities are from a single school of magic, and most of the damage needs to be cast.
Arcane is known for its mobility, unlike frost and fire, which have better defensive abilities.
It is preferable to reduce its damage, rather than making the arcane, which already suffers at the hands of other spellcasters, also suffer at the hands of melee fighters.
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Agreed on both but the real issue here is our last two “buffs,” the 10% to ABar and now 8% overall, are effectively just reversing two of our four nerfs. While I agree that 10% more might take us out of the s*** tier, just being barely playable isn’t really all that fun. Not asking to be top 5, but more than just “out of s*** tier.”
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