TWW an Arcane Mage disaster - worse spec imaginable

Classes Mage
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I don’t roll mages much but the one spec that has interested me over the long years is Arcane Mage. Was good and fun in Dragonflight for DPS.

Roll out TWW.

Wh-what happened? Extremely low damage output after long cast times, doesn’t make casting the spells worth it. I’m down 25% health by the time I finish cast Arcane Blast a second time. Only does like 20-40K damage against foe with 2478K-ish HP. lmao

Huge mistake nerfing this spec, especially gating Arcane Missiles behind a random proc.
(why does it randomly target nearby enemies, especially ones not aggro’d? lame, broken, flawed imo).

I thought by leveling to 80 and getting better gear, it would get…better.
Nope. With around ilvl545±ish gear, I went back to the main quest for TWW on Tranquil Strand. Was getting my butt handed to me by the Nerubians. Whereas my Rogue and Hunter and CLEAN HOUSE no problem, and mow everything down. One might say, “Yeah, but that’s Rogue and Hunter who are DPS classes.”—yeah, and so is a MAGE but apparently, the team behind the changes totally were lost on what mages are supposed to be.

Anyways, took forever to complete the quests. I get to Zirix and have to keep my distance not to aggro any Nerubians. Why? Because that’s how bad things are, the fear I’ll aggro something that will nearly kill me, again, and have to chow down on mana buns for a minute or two before continuing on.

Still aggro’d one anyway. Then Arcane Missile randomly shoots another Nerubian fighting an NPC far away, and pulls it. GREAT (not). Everything happened as expected (which is bad, btw).

When I finally get to the “staged” Zirix fight, it took around 10 min. just to get his health down enuff to trigger the cinemantic that ends the fight. During the fight, Arcane Missiles randomly shoots flying-Nerubians yonder, and drags them into it. Had to constantly pop prismatic barrier, mirror image, potion, just to stay alive. Are players supposed to die in the scripted fight? lmao. Whereas all the other classes I’ve rolled through this quest line, never broke a sweat.

It wasn’t fun at all, felt like I was playing a “Souls-like” game. Was that the intention when they nerfed the spec?

Anyways, I have various stats, numbers on all this too, and so overall, it’s a crappy class spec at this point, to where they should offer (free) class-changes if they’re not going to make it better, it really feels “broken” and they should “fix it”. My guess it’s by design to corral players into playing other classes for the TWW to fit a clownish theme or some wildly delusional plan (let me guess, was it this?->“TWW is a pally/priest/warrior themed xpac. Midnight will be Mage/Warlock themed. Last Titan will be Hunter/DK themed. We’ll make Mages weakest in TWW because Dalaran gots blown’d up SEE? MAKES SENSE! FANS WILL AGREE!” :drooling_face:).

Bottom-line: NOT FUN. :-1:

As to my poor Arcane Mage, she’s lucky not to get booted from parties for too-low DPS.
My Warband pities her predicament, as does her guild, over the loss of her abilities. She is but a shadow of her former self, the poor thing, we’re doing everything we can to support her through this.

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It’s b-been just so incredibly difficult. Wh-what good am I for now except to keep portals open, be an extra in the crowd, or become a guest on Hollywood Squares? Or get a small role in low budget movies…infomercials? :face_holding_back_tears:

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It was a stupid decision to make AM proc only. Mage is a supposed to be a ranged class not a melee class. With free AM you could easily take down enemies before they reach you, but now they almost always reach you. Sure you could use blast wave but that only slows them down and then they’ll get right back into your face. I don’t really pay attention to the stats, but from my experience AM did a ton of damage when cast. Proc only AM also creates a sense of urgency to use the spell before it goes away.

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That’s the perfect reference! We would just have sit there and listen to Paul Lynde mock us endlessly!

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I honestly ain’t reading all that but all I can say is that pre-double dipping nerf, Sunfury Arcane was peak. If they just revert some of the nerfs it’ll be great again but I wish they’d figure out what the hell they want to do with Aethervision because as it is, it just ain’t it. Double dipping was perfect before; good damage, good gameplay and versatile while Aethervision just promotes more degeneracy.

Hard disagree. Making AM proc only was one of the good decisions they’ve made with the rework. It was never optimal to use it outside of Clearcasting procs and with Arcane Harmony being picked it only promoted another kind of degenerate gameplay where we’d want to spam unprocced missiles to stack up before a big barrage.

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Arcane Missiles without a proc was a wet noodle. Blizzard removed the wet noodle. The reason things reach you now isn’t because you can’t cast missiles, it’s because you don’t outgear the content yet. Last expansion by the end of it we outgeared the content by so much that the wet noodles could kill things. That’s not the case anymore.

Arcane has been historically bad at world content until it can 2-shot mobs - which usually takes a bit of gear to get to. When I was having issues with world content this expansion, I made a simple change to my rotation: Lead with frostbolt. The duration of the slow was usually enough for me to kill most mobs before it reached me.

It didn’t make me as powerful as other specs / classes, which is a fair complaint, but it allowed me to successfully complete quests without needing to switch to a different spec.

Overall, Arcane Mage really isn’t in that bad of a place. It’s somewhere around middle of the pack right now. Sure, it’s not S tier anymore, but it’s doing just fine. Unfortunately it does sound like you’re doing something wrong to be having as many struggles as you are… I don’t like to point fingers and say “get good” because it’s a not a fair assessment of anyone, but despite Blizzard constantly saying they want to make it more new-player-friendly and less punishing, arcane is still a bit nuanced and a bit unforgiving.

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I don’t pay attention to the stats. I know from experience that free AM did a ton of damage to enemies. I pay attention to the health bars of enemies. The only attacks we have now are Arcane Barrage, Supernova, Arcane Surge and Arcane Orb. So I say Free AM was entirely optimal due to the amount of damage dealt to enemies before they even reach you.

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I totally feel for you. I felt the same way when they hit Arcane with the hotfix nerfs. I was extremely pissed off, but hey I’ve been a mage for 20 years and I’ve learned to enjoy every spec. So the moment I found out Frost was doing some damage, I hopped on it right away. As long as mages aren’t completely useless in every spec, I can’t really stay mad for that long. I hope you find enjoyment in other specs, frost would’ve definitely mowed down those mobs you were struggling with.

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This right here is the reason they should not have made this change. Since it wasn’t optimal, it wasn’t something one would do in say group content. However in the open world, not having AM available is a huge nerf. It shows the lack of consideration the balance team has towards people who don’t do group content.

I have noticed a few specs having issues with spells pulling stuff that you’re not in combat which is really frustrating in world content.

Now, I don’t spend a ton of time doing world content, I am a mythic raider etc, but I do keep up with most quests in the xpac. While I don’t struggle, per-se, to do this content, I DO get annoyed. I just want to mount up and go to the next thing but one of my abilities is randomly butt-pulling mobs and I’m still stuck in combat type thing. it IS annoying and SHOULD be fixed.

I want to see the data to back this up. The data I see shows it being an F-tier spec in M+, and low-average in raid. With the fire mage buffs, it will most likely be the worst mage spec by far in raid now once this week is through

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How is free AM not optimal? With free AM you could deal a ton of damage to enemies based on how fast they lost health. It was the best spell to use in every setting.

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Are you possibly forgetting a very important spell called Arcane Blast?
I don’t think there was ever a point in the last 3 expansions where an unbuffed arcane missiles was going to do comparable damage to a fully charged arcane blast. It may have done more than an uncharged blast, but not a charged one. Which you can spam.

If you aren’t paying attention to stats but think that arcane missiles without clearcasting did “tons of damage” then perhaps you didn’t realize that a spammable, fully charged blast did 2 tons?

The argument of “it felt better” is a perfectly good argument to make, but at no point since BfA (when missiles became castable without a proc again) was it a dps increase to cast arcane missiles without a clearcasting proc unless the mob in question was going to die before you could finish an arcane blast proc. Sometimes it was a damage loss to cast missiles at all - even with clearcasting (which was a really unfortunate situation).

Warcraftlogs has Arcane currently around 14th out of 26 specs (which is just below being middle-of-the-pack) in mythic raid and 15th out of 26 specs (2 below the median this time) in M+. That placement goes up a few ranks if you switch to heroic for raid and trends around the same, if not higher, for M+.

Arcane is not S tier right now. In a lot of content, it might still be the worst of the 3 mage specs. That said, it’s not unplayable. It’s capable of completing content and is, largely, middle of the pack in PvE content.

I don’t know what data you’re looking at that puts arcane as F-tier in M+. Most places still consider Arcane to be A or B tier (just not S anymore). Arcane still has great burst and great priority damage on top of the other utilities they bring.

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I only know from the enemy health bars that Arcane Missiles did more damage than Arcane Blast. With Arcane Missiles, enemy health went down quickly. You can even tell now by looking at the health bars how fast they go down with Arcane Missiles.

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So… you’re bad at mage, is what you’re saying.

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How am I bad? Just because I play differently than you doesn’t make me bad.

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And this right here is why I play Night Elf Frost Mage and hunt Haste gear. I legitimately don’t know why Arcane Mage is just “Frost Mage but darker blue and with no payoff” but I gave up really fast.

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You don’t even understand the basics of the class lmao

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How about you stop criticizing me and let me play my way.

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Tbf, your way comes at a fundamental misunderstanding on the spec all throughout this thread.

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Arcane Missiles do not randomly trigger or target nearby enemies. You’re probably specced into Spellslinger and confusing the Splinters for Arcane Missiles. They’re also not random and trigger based on what other spells you use and from consuming Nether Precision procs. They do fire automatically and typically target the closest enemy but they will never hit a target that you weren’t already in combat with.

As for Arcane Missiles now only being usable when you get a Clearcasting proc, that is not new and only a reversion back to a time when Arcane was probably the best it’s ever been, namely in Legion. This change is not a problem at all, though the heavy handed baseline damage nerfs we got recently certain are and should be reverted.

Lastly, and I don’t mean this disparagingly, after reading through your entire post it’s clear that you don’t understand the inner workings of the spec or indeed the class and seem to play the game very casually. I want to stress that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that but it does mean you shouldn’t be overly concerned with performance or overall DPS when you’re only playing at that level. Just play the way you want to the extend that you can and don’t stress about it too much.

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What’s to not understand? I use the spells to attack enemies. It’s that simple.