Don’t worry, we’re getting something much worse with Death’s Chill.
Doubt we are. It’ll all boil back down to what it is on live atm.
I played Frost for the RNG. The excitement of a proc(when procs were a reward and not mandatory) knowing I was going to be doing big damage was exhilarating. Time Anomaly was a fun alternative to Temporal Warp mistakenly over and over again not being it’s own button(Blizzard continuing to show their Mage incompetency). I’ld probably still pick it over TW just because of the RNG.
It is funny anyone who disagrees with you is just “derailing” the conversation.
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TW is gone, you can’t pick it anymore. The new alternative talent is “Inspired Intellect” which is a baseline int increase of 3%. Before it was introduced in this latest Alpha build there was no alternative to Time Anomaly.
Same logic applies, RNG over flat damage any day.
Hopefully if more and more people keep hammering on them that “frustration” shouldn’t ever be a design goal (the devs themselves mentioned it can be frustrating), they will remove it for good.
Time Anomaly is flat damage though. Temporal Warp used to be the burst option.
A certain degree of RNG is incredibly healthy for any and all specs. Some players want more control and less RNG because your damage is more predictable - but make it too strict and it will get stale.
TW was not a mage-defining ability. It’s something that’s been around (on and off I think for 3 expansions total?), but honestly that darned water elemental is more mage-defining than our double warp.
Blizzard could have salvaged it by giving it a sperate button with a separate cooldown, but - much like Rune of Power - I think it was healthier overall for the class to prune it. As pointed out, TA was largely (but not entirely) selected only in cases where TW either can’t be used or can’t be used effectively. Now there’s a chance we’re actually going to use this talent on a regular basis.
Temporal Anomaly isn’t a bad talent in theory - my concerns are the rate at which it procs and the value those procs actually provide. I know from an arcane perspective, I’m used to a lot of my damage happening during my burst windows. Getting a 6 second buff outside of one of those windows doesn’t sound that appetizing to me, and I expect that procs that happen during my burst will have minimal impact.
However, I feel like Blizzard is attempting to move out of that direction in favor of wanting us to be more reactive to how things proc. I’d want to see it in action and get a feel for it myself with all of the other changes before I pass judgement on it. If nothing else, the conversation in this thread proves that removing TW has opened mages up to more valuable choices in the long run.
My biggest concern at this point is just how much RNG we have and how much more we’re going to get. A lot of the arcane talents - especially the newer ones - seem to favor random chances of things happening. I don’t see a lot of randomness in the Hero talent designs, but if the foundation of the spec is a chance for a chance of a chance, it’s going to turn people away when they get those low rolls.
I actually ran temporal anomaly for a while when I was learning arcane. I didnt care about most of the procs but the arcane surge one was a great way to regain 100% mana.
I especially found double time warp was hard on my mana before i knew what i was doing
I always considered temporary anomaly to be a biginner arcane mage talent designed to make mana management easier
Same, I ran it almost exclusively in fact and I had the same observation, the surge proc made mana management almost obsolete. The problem was the RNG. The other two procs are almost useless because the CC one is often wasted since it can proc when you’re capped and the TW one doesn’t last long enough to even benefit 2 spell casts.
This is a personal thing but I found that I relied on the surge proc too much which made me drop my guard and run into situations where I almost ran out of mana. It was almost like a trap.
The bottom line is that Time Anomaly’s main selling point was that it alleviated the nuisance that mana management has become. At this point the devs just need to get over themselves and do away with it all together because in its current form it’s not a meaningful mechanic like it used to be but just a minor annoyance that you have to keep track of on top of everything else.
Forcing DPS players to rely on a slowly regenerating resource like mana is an incredibly outdated concept and makes no sense in the modern fast pace iteration of the game, not to mention that it creates very real problems in how Arcane interacts with haste buffs (something no other spec in the game has to deal with). I feel like that they’re only leaving it in for nostalgia’s sake which is never a good place to be from a design perspective. If something no longer makes sense it should never be left in just because it’s been the status quo for so long.
Nothing like getting a Surge proc as you are casting Arcane Surge. Or a Combustion proc as you are hardcasting Pyroblast to activate SKB. Or a random proc as you are flying to the next platform on Tindral. Ah, Time Anomaly really is great!
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Or when you’re flying in The Nokhud Offensive. triggered
they should remove the RNG out of the spell and make it rotate every 10 seconds.
I don’t think that would really solve the problem because very few players would bother tracking it and even if you did it would be very difficult if not impossible to actively play around it.
I would much rather have it removed entirely and replaced with a more unique and interesting proc, one that we actually have control over and can choose when to consume.
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Then it’s just another Incanter’s Flow which you don’t track.
As someone who isn’t a fan of rng talents, I’m in full agreement with this.
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