I started leveling my mage. Well, we’ve been asking rune of power get removed since legion, and our baseline damage adjusted to compensate, but rune is still here. This is wild. I don’t get it, and I’m disappointed in this. Please just remove it.
The whole game is about moving and dodging fire, but your programming players to stay in one spot. It’s a contradiction to the fundamentals of mechanics.
I’m also trying arcane, simply to see how it is, even though I plan to go fire. And yes, I also noticed we traded arcane power for radiant spark, (in terms of damage rotation, i.e. cast this first before arcane surge). I really don’t like having two windup buttons or this ability in general. Not sure why we ended up with a borrowed power from Shadow Lands that kept me from playing my mage seriously last expansion. It’s like adding more buttons for no reason, and to simplify the game we could easily adjust output by fixing baseline damage.
Arcane power was my favorite aspect of being an arcane mage, but now we kept a covenant ability from a culture I can’t connect too, that came from some far off land, that remains in the shadows.
(added 5/2 I do like arcane surge, and in a way it’s like arcane power, but it lacks character animation and since we kept PoM I don’t get why this is on the GCD and not an instant cast. Non-gcd arcane power is what we loved in TBC. Again a lot of these abilities could just be combined. If radiant spark was gone, and we just had arcane surge that might be enough to clean this up, as long as arcane surge gave you 4 arcane charges, and applied the same buff that touch of the magi did. Right now the rotation feels clunky. So very clunky : (
Arcane orb on a button isn’t terrible but I believe 100% in having less buttons. We have too many now. I do feel like somehow combining Touch of the Magi with arcane surge is the best solution, and eliminating radiant spark.
and give fire spec and arcane spec an optional talent for each their own pet. fire pet for fire and arcane familiar pet for arcane. frost can keep their optional talent for water elemental but with this change blizzard can make the pets much more tankier with melee type abilities. like a voidwalker or hunter clefthoof.
they can almost even do the same for shadow priest with a nice talent for a tanky fiendling flesh beast. but that is another topic for the priest forums.
that would bring many players to the class and make the class in open world 1000X more fun.
I would agree with this and the game is moving in a faster direction towards this. I enjoy the fast paced gameplay. While i think casting standing still will always be an essential part of playing a caster, the game should allow for counter play, when using abilities like shimmer to maintain your buffs.
Mage is not a pet class so I actually wouldn’t want that. I’d be OK with a limited time guardian like Frost’s old water elemental if they’d be turned into a DPS cooldown, like summoning a phoenix or the elemental for ~20 seconds or something that do big damage.
For open world and other stuff, maybe we could be given some form of self-sustain considering we are the only class in the game without a form of actively restoring health in combat. And yes, that’s including [Diverted Energy] because that talent is atrociously tuned.
Because blizzard devs listen to the .000000001% of mages on discord and in limit and method instead of the other 99.9999999% of us.
We’ve been complaining about Rune of Power for over 10 years at this point. So this isn’t a new thing. They were doing the same thing ignoring most of us over a decade ago.
I hated Rune of Power as soon as it was added in Mists of Pandaria. I said it was a terrible idea at the time and refused to take it (back then it lasted for a minute). I hated the alternative options as well. I still refuse to take it and only took Incanter’s Flow because I have to take something.
I mean technically we could ignore that talent spot, but I get what you’re putting out there. Better to have essentially a boring dull 12% buff than nothing at all. The game would be so much better off for everyone if that talent spot was just deleted and alternative options built into the specs (e.g baseline buffs, buff built into other existing spells etc) to bring us back to where we are.
Incanter’s Flow is just a trash concept. In a world where it were significantly buffed on the top end I’d probably still take RoP because the idea of sitting around waiting for it to “flow” upward (and praying the encounter timings line up) would be infuriating. Anything that reasonably competes with RoP needs to be an active spell so that it coincides with our burst profile.
That said it doesn’t have to be an overly complicated option. Something like an Arcane Power at say, 36%, that drains at 3% per second, would still give a numerically-inferior but reasonable alternative. If you like RoP, keep it and do more damage; if you don’t, you can at least pick some less-challenging on-demand burst that doesn’t completely tank your damage.
I’m not sure if you were ever meant to play around Incanter’s Flow in the first place? The class largely doesn’t feel designed around you being able to do that, with its proc-in, proc-out gameplay.
I think IF was only meant to be a flowery passive. IIRC, Blizzard’s never made a single attempt to change how IF works to encourage taking advantage of its oscillation, unlike how they’ve changed RoP several times to “encourage” more people to take it. It’s always been effectively a passive damage boost, but with a twinge of pointless annoyance to it.
You don’t. Just pretend it’s not there and accept that sometimes you will do more damage and sometimes do less damage. It really is a pretty bad concept, especially when we’re always incentivized to stack cooldowns/modifiers instead of spreading them out.
I’d honestly prefer if we had something [Arcane Power]/[Incanter’s Flow] suggested but if it read something more like:
→ Arcane Power: You deal X% more damage for Y seconds after activating Arcane Surge/Combustion/Icy Veins.
→ Incanter’s Flow: Your Arcane Missiles and Arcane Explosion/Pyroblast and Flamestrike/Ice Lance, Blizzard and Frozen Orb deal X% more damage.
This would be a compromise on burst vs sustained but without the annoyances most people complain about for either talents.
I see the concept of a self-buff acting as a replacement to ROP thrown around a lot. While it does alleviate the issues that less-skilled players have with movement and timers, I don’t think that a competitive option should be designed around them. The actual issues with ROP occur because of cooldown stacking (where that 40% can become 45% or more), the fact that it is in the general tree meaning it needs to be ‘balanced’ across 3 specs, and that it has such a large portion of the power budget allocated to that single talent.
If ROP needs to remain in the game, then it needs to be moved into the spec trees. Reduce the 40% and/or bake it into existing cooldowns (doesn’t need to be IV/Combust/Surge either) or better yet, make it an Arcane capstone to compete with harmony/spark. Fire could easily have slight tuning done to combustion or the talent below it to retain its burst, and Frost could have some tuning done to burstier spells like IN, CMS and GS. Obviously its tuning will be done outside of this as well.
I’m hoping that towards the end of expansion when the devs might be willing to actually spend more than 15 minutes on the talent trees that they’ll look at it and go “Hey, you know Frost has 10 talents that are nothing more than generic ‘do X% more damage’ talents?” and look at fixing that starting with the deletion of ROP/IF.
I’m pretty sure I can identify the problem part of RoP right here:
Places a Rune of Power on the ground for 12 sec which increases your spell damage by 40% while you stand within 8 yds. Casting Arcane Power/Combustion/Icy Veins will also create a Rune of Power at your location.
They added that last part in Shadowlands and that’s where Rune of Power truly took over the class. Frost didn’t care about RoP and Fire only sometimes cared about RoP, but then Icy Propulsion and Shifting Power made it have insanely high uptime and it became omnipresent.
I’m pretty sure if you deleted that highlighted section of the spell, you would instantly free every Frost Mage from RoP’s shackles. RoP and IF would actually be comparable.
Radiant Spark - this ability should go. It’s not traditionally part of arcane’s toolkit and feels alien to the spec. It’s also not forgiving or fun.
Rune Power - this ability needs to go. Currently, it’s the most powerful mage talent for every spec. It’s basically, the class-defining ability. But it doesn’t work well in today’s movement heavy content and is not fun.
Siphon Storm - get rid of it. Traditional arcane mage behavior has always been about mana management. A big part of that was controlling mana usage and choosing when to evocate. This talent breaks all that and turns evocation into “just another dps cooldown”. It needs to go.
Arcane Surge - Unlike the previously mentioned abilities, this one isn’t horrible. But it feels foreign to the spec and isn’t very intuitive. Arcane Power, which it replaced, was more fun. Get rid of this ability and replace with Arcane Power.
This one could be good if we didn’t have everything else in the kit to manage as well. If we pruned half of the cooldowns we have and put this as a choice node with one of the few that remains, I could see it doing really with a build that focuses more on Arcane Blasts and less on Missiles. The potential is there just… not so much when we have as much as we do.
I agree that this should be removed, but I disagree slightly on why it should be removed. I don’t think the movement part is really a big deal and others will argue it’s a “skill issue.” Regardless, I don’t think a spell that provides provides a flat damage increase is all that enjoyable. Even if there was no “stand here” component, it’s pretty boring and uninspired
I was going to make a comment about how I’d like to see this stay if Arcane goes back to a mana-centric spec, however, I think with the inclusion of Arcane Surge, this won’t ever have the kiss/curse it used to (of needing to pay extra close attention to your mana). If arcane surge goes (or loses its mana regen), I think there could potentially be a place for this. But as is, I agree, it hurts more than it helps.
Arcane surge should do twice as much damage as it does. Considering the long cooldown, long cast time, and the complete drain on our mana pool, it really should hit at least the primary target harder.
On my best Mythic Eranog parse (this is gonna be a small sample size, sorry), my best surge was a 162k hit. My best arcane blast hit (you know, my filler spell) was 115k. Yes, I know that one can AoE and one can’t, and yes, I know that it could’ve just been some bad luck, but I don’t think there’s a big enough gap between those two spells to make it feel good.
My biggest complaint of arcane used to be that Arcane Barrage didn’t hit hard enough to feel satisfying. Arcane harmony was added in and I think it does an absolutely amazing job at solving that problem. However, as soon as they fixed one spell not feeling strong enough, they gave us another one.
Also, don’t forget to include Touch of the Magi or Arcane Harmony in your considerations.
If we could only get rid of one spell, I’d get rid of Touch of the Magi (and, if possible, bring back the old Charged Up). Right now, because of how it copies damage, touch is the main reason why we need to stack so many cooldowns. Out of everything, it’s the major component that’s multiplicative. I’m pretty confident all our other buffs are additive, which means we could technically spread them out to be less bursty and more consistent if we wanted. But TotM means we must hit all of our cooldowns and biggest spells within its window, otherwise we lose damage.
TotM is also part of what forced us out of the old burn / conserve phase system and into the burst / wait style. Although they have similar damage profiles, the burn / conserve gave the player a lot more agency over how to play. There was more flexibility. Nowadays, I could probably make a bot that plays arcane better than I do because of how scripted it is.
Arcane Harmony - this talent needs to go. It reinforces a playstyle from Shadowlands that is alien to how arcane traditionally plays. It’s also not fun in that it requires a ludicrous amount of ramp-up.
The sheer number of talents this applies to really boggles my mind when I stop to think about it. It’s almost as if the devs randomly generated a bunch of talents at the eleventh hour before the latest expansion launched just to fill up a tree-shaped talent interface. Oh wait…
