Worst Experience Playing WoW to Date (Rotation changes mid season)

Classes Mage
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TLDR; Aethervision sucks, please bring back my class to what it was.

I am going to try and not make this post from an emotional stance but be as productive with my feedback as possible.

I am just super confused, how can whoever made this choice not only change our classes rotation mid season but remove a playstyle that was extremely smooth and fun? Nobody asked for Aethervision, you claim Barrage queuing was unintuitive how on earth do you create something worse? Also why is Barrage queuing unintuitive? Because people will have to go to class discord to learn about it? Blizzard regardless people will always have to go to guides to play their class optimally that’s how you have designed your game for many years.

You Single handed turned mage from the most fun playstyle its had (especially Arcane) and most intuitive also to the worst iteration of the class ever! I am actually fuming over a video game as a grown man this is embarrassing.

Aethervision is Janky Clunky Unfun and no one likes it. If you are going to nerf mage and toss us in the gutters be my guess but at least leave the playstyle alone my god, I legit had to stop playing my mage mid prog because of your changes after spending so much time on my Character.

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Shatter combos are not intuitive either.

And to me, it is one of the most satisfying mechanics I’ve experienced in this game.

It was probably a good year playing a mage before I learned it. Just gave my favourite class more depth knowing there were more cool new ways of doing damage.

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Blizz slapped the face of every person playing Mage midseason. No way around it. Now, if Blizz wants to take responsibility, they need to revert the changes back to spell queuing immediately.

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I am genuinely curious why people are piling on the hate train for Aethervision and calling it “clunky and unintuitive” when it’s anything but. What is so complicated and unintuitive about always doing the same three spell combo of AM > AB x2 > ABarr?

While the rotation, specifically for Sunfury, did get a lot more convoluted it isn’t because of AV but rather because there are now multiple sources, including from the current tier set, of virtually the same proc that conflict with each other. Playing with AV on Spellslinger is as smooth as butter.

I fully expect them to revert at least some of the last minute heavy handed damage nerfs that went way too far and were completely unwarranted once they see the data from this week. That’s all likely coming in a hotfix down the road. As for smoothing out the Sunfury rotation, that may take longer but I rather they get it right than have them rush again and make an even bigger mess. They may have messed up now but doing away with the double dipping was definitely the right call and will bear out in the long run. I think folks are just blinded by their frustration right and I get it, I am annoyed too, but I can also see the bigger picture.

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Probably because the rotation you’re listing isn’t the “optimized” way to play? The fact that you list AM > AB x2 > ABarr when the optimized style is actually AM > AB x2 > AM > ABarr to get that extra Nether Precision proc for your barrage goes to show that it’s not as intuitive as you’d have us believe. (And I’m sure there’s more that I’m missing out on rotationally there)

Yeah, sure, I’ll give you that it’s a bit nitpicky and is going towards a level of play that’s beyond what is necessary for most players, but it still creates an unintuitive way to play the spec. Just like Spellqueueing. Neither are difficult concepts but neither are explicitly explained by simply reading the spells.

Is it better to use NP on Arcane Blast only? Is it better to use NP on Arcane Barrage when I have 2 stacks of Aethervision? What about Glorious Incandescence and Intuition? Am I supposed to use those right away or should I wait until I have NP for those? Am I supposed to wait until I have one of those two AND Aethervision AND NP to barrage? None of these are questions that can be answered by simply reading the text on the abilities. They can be answered through guides, sims, logs, and perhaps some trial and error. Which means Aethervision’s impact on arcane, specifically the Sunfury rotation, is no less “unintuitive” than spellqueueing.

This right here is your best point: The concept of Aethervision isn’t bad, but the implementation is awful given Sunfury as a hero tree and Intuition as our 4 set. Without a rework to Sunfury or our set bonuses, this gums up the works a lot.

You’re right that Spellslinger is smooth as butter by comparision, but spellslinger is also, unfortunately, really boring to most players (I find it dull and I’ve seen quite a few others agree). I’m not confident there are any rotational differences for a spellslinger arcane mage compared to an arcane mage who somehow has no hero tree at all… I see are Spellfrost teachings (which is RNG and only impacts AoE), Unerring Prophecy (which I think is undertuned and takes away some of our utility to produce damage), and Shifting Shards (which I don’t think is as good as Signature Spell in just about any case). And since two of them are a choice node it means at most there are two talents that can impact your rotation, and neither of them are significant.

The long and short of it is that Aethervision should not have happened mid-season - at least not with its current design. Balancing should be weekly but major rotational changes to classes and specs should be happening between seasons. Aethervision should have just been a stacking damage increase to compensate for the removal of spellqueueing. Things like this should have spent more time in the PTR so that players could adequately test and provide feedback. To me it looks like there was some discussion in the PTR about how Aethervision was going to impact the rotation and it looks like those predictions came true.

One of the main points there is that we have too many things that buff barrage. If Aethervision either only buffed barrage or only provided a charge refund, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.

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I was just about to reply and tell him thats not the optimal rotation but you did it for me.
He is probably playing at a +3 key level and doing world content so he doesnt need an optimal rotation.

Also I dont feel like its nitpicky it legit is a very annoying unintuitive rotation.

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They don’t do keys (I don’t believe) but have some heroic progression. Content where knowing most of your rotation is important but where optimizing isn’t necessary for the whole group yet.

I only say it’s nitpicky because I don’t actually know what difference it makes in terms of overall DPS. Waiting for that extra NP proc or not could be a 1% difference for all I know. And let’s be honest, a 1% difference is not very substantial. Every little bit helps when you’re pushing your limits, but not if you’re being casual.

And I need to make this point as strongly as a I can: There is nothing wrong with being casual.

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Yeah the issue is it creates a very annoying rotation that involves 3 different versions. Specifically; AM > AB > AB > AM > Abarr > AB > AM > AB > Abarr > reset. And this only works with full CC stacks. This disrupts the flow of the spec greatly and feels very off-putting because if you only have 1 CC or 2 CC it also changes how you react to the desired rotation.

This isn’t gamebreaking at all, but it essentially took a rotation that felt fluid and smooth from beginning to end which gives most people a chance to react to procs to something that is going to take considerable amount of time to get used to. This feels bad, but most of us will soldier on.

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I 100% agree and I don’t even play arcane that much anymore. The Frost side is just as bad. It went from following the flavor of being an ACTUAL spellslinger to glacial spike spam again. i’m tired of glacial spike and ray of frost. i’m tired of frostbolt. i’m tired of these 3 abilities having 0 synergy with anything else in the talent trees. frost prior to tuesday was FINE and it wasn’t even OP in single target or aoe situations. I am coping and hoping for a revert of some kind soon, but I know it’s wishful thinking. Between this and the horrendous anniversary event, I think I’m ready to take an extended break or quit. I’m now bottom of the barrel in my raid while we’re already struggling on Queen progress. I’m doing ~30% less damage than I was doing last week despite no gear changes.

I’m tired of being a beta tester.

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Is that what the streamers are telling everyone to do? Well no wonder everyone is up in arms. I don’t care if it gave me 100k more DPS there is no way I would sit on the AV proc to get another NP proc first, that’s ridiculous and over complicates things to an epic extend. It’s also very clearly not the intended way to play given how the talent was designed.

This is exactly the same thing as the double dipping. Blizzard make a simple and straightforward way to play the spec but then someone comes out of the woodwork with an “optimal” rotation that is super convoluted and only squeezes out a bit more DPS. Then people go out of their way to learn it and when the Blizzard devs inevitably crack down on it because they have a god complex and only want you to play the game the way they want, the players get tilted because all of that extra work they put in is now meaningless. And on and on it goes in a vicious cycle that never ends. I am so glad I no longer take part in that travesty.

I completely agree and that’s exactly how I feel about it too but I had my fun with Sunfury until this week and I am already pretty much done with this season so I don’t mind settling for Spellslinger atm until they get their act together with Sunfury.

Again, I completely agree but the reason it works the way it does is because the devs tried to go out of their way to accommodate the folks who wanted to preserve the double dipping playstyle. And so of course now nobody is happy, typical of this game, lol.

This is exactly what I mean about the vicious cycle… tell me WoW is your only source of validation in life without telling me it is. Honestly, these types of try-hard players and the devs who constantly try to stifle and stymie them at every turn kinda deserve each other.

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I am still in shock and trying to process that this is the consensus that the theorycrafters arrived at as the so called optimal rotation. The devs lost their marbles trying to figure out how to prevent ABarr from benefiting from that second NP proc and made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want us to do that and yet that’s exactly what people are still trying to do and then complain that it’s now even harder to do than before. And all of that because the devs wanted to provide a minor QoL change in allowing ABarr to benefit from NP so that NP wasn’t a dead talent in AoE situations. The whole thing is just crazy to me…

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This is exactly why people aren’t happy. It’s incredibly convoluted.
Personally, I don’t care what the streamers have to say. But it is what our guides say now, which are often developed by people who put a lot of time into running some incredibly optimized sims. Sims that Blizzard could easily do themselves.

It wouldn’t be quite as bad if our damage output wasn’t absolutely gutted as well. A top 3 performer in raid was shot down by about a dozen ranks according to the logs so far. So anyone who had been playing Sunfury Arcane before now feels obligated to try to optimize themselves just to be a fraction of what they were last week. Had the rotational change come without nerfs, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of mages would ignore the complicated way to do it and just keep doing what we were doing before. But I tried doing the same rotation I was doing before and lost about 15% of my damage compared to the previous week.

I’m not confident Blizzard spent a lot of time designing our rotation. If they did, they could’ve easily seen the potential for this to happen. When you go into a change to fix “unintended gameplay” you should be absolutely 100% positive that your new fixes didn’t create a new set of unintended gameplay. Besides, they had a warning in the PTR feedback. To quote Lucidness on September 6:

The community knew immediately. If Blizzard “didn’t design it that way” then we gave them ample opportunity to come up with a better solution. They chose not to.

If they didn’t want Arcane Barrage to benefit from Nether Precision, they wouldn’t have made it so that Nether Precision buffs Arcane Barrage. It’s that simple. They could just as easily give us a different talent, with a different buff, to compensate us in other forms of play.

To blame the playerbase for playing the game is a wild take that I have no intention of entertaining. This problem was created, broken, unbroken, then made significantly worse by the team that almost refuses to acknowledge feedback. I say almost because they did undo the original removal of spellqueueing when their PTR thread for mages literally doubled the number of posts on it within 48 hours of their announcement. If they would actually spend some time listening to feedback we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Besides, I’ll take a page out of your book: I’m going to play the game the way I want to play it, regardless of what you tell me I should be doing.
And the way I want to play it is be an arcane mage that does as much damage as possible. Which means if someone comes up with a super complex rotation, I’m going to spend the time to try to learn it.

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I like the new rotation…it’s absolutely punishing if you mess it up, but super rewarding if you nail it.

Worst experience to date? This feels like an instance of “git gud or reroll”

Evoker rotation is easy if you can’t handle arcane.

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What am I missing here on my frost mage? Or is it just arcane and fire that are changed now?

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When he said “literally no one asked for this” I knew the type of thread we were in.

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I love when people like you post flippant responses like this. 9 times out of 10 their stats are an absolute joke. You did not dissapoint in that regard

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Do you even do difficult content to be commenting like this lol

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He does not. No raid progress whatsoever and is struggling to time 7s. I cant believe he typed git gud to someone.

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Like I said, they only did that to make NP useful in AoE situations, not so that people can “abuse” it in ST. The underlying problem here is that ABarr just tries to do too many things and for as long as it is the only spender in both ST and AoE it will be a nightmare to balance. I know you know this because we’ve talked about it before and anyone who has spent any real time playing Arcane knows it as well.

I don’t disagree with this and I am not passing blame on anyone. Everyone is free to do whatever they want. I am just left scratching my head as to why people are upset by this development when they’re actively trying to do something the devs have made abundantly clear they don’t want us doing and have subsequently made very difficult to do. You can’t be upset when you’re pushing boundaries on purpose and trying to get around safeguards put in place to prevent you from doing it in the first place. It’s like getting upset at your parents for grounding you because you kept trying to come up with creative ways to get around your curfew.

I get the frustration but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the devs are actively trying to make the rotation worse just to annoy players. If there is anything untoward at play here it’s their inability to shut down this unintended interaction completely due to a lack of understanding how to do it properly. And by leaving the door slightly ajar they’re unintentionally allowing people to make things worse for themselves because theorycrafters figure out these wild ways of doing it anyway and then folks get upset (at themselves really) for choosing to go down that path for that little bit of extra damage. At the end of the day, as things stand right now with Sunfury Arcane, if your priority is getting around Blizz’s embargo on the juiced up ABarr benefiting from that extra NP proc then giving up enjoyable gameplay is apparently the price to pay for it. :man_shrugging:t2:

If this keeps up I won’t be surprised if the devs pull the plug on ABarr benefitting from NP completely and then NP will go back to being a dead talent in AoE. This is why we can’t have nice things, lol.

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Double dipping is not coming back, for good reasons, while the gameplay resulting was good, it was also a hidden mechanic that was objectively hard to find for the vast majority of players and it’s reliant on low lag and perfect play to pull off consistently.

Aether does everything double dip did, and more, they just need to fix a few things. And then arcane will get back the same rotation as before, just without hidden mechanics

One idea is to make precision stack up to 3 so you would blast twice, get aether and do a 40% buffed barrage that also fills your charges, they just need to make it so the nether precision consumed with aethervision does not generate a stack of aether, so there are no weird interactions, basically consume both and reset counter.

Then you just go back to cc 2 blasts 1 nether aether empowered barrage.

The second is to increase aether buff to 40% and put some kind of exclusion list, so when you have aether up, your nether precision will not be consumed, basically barrage will still consume nether stacks, but only if you don’t have aethervision up. This makes it impossible to do a aethervision and nether buffed barrage, removing the issue completely.

The idea is not the problem, how it’s implemented is.

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