I do agree with everything you have said, ive never been so frustrated playing mage for the past 20 years. My friends already quit the game completly and im about to do the same. the class rotation is completly messed up and feels so bad that everyone has to track the buff with weakauras and litarelly stare at the buffs instead of actually playing the game and enjoying content, all the guides keeps changing completly making it very less interesting to anyone tryting to learn, its pretty clear the devs are not players that actively participate in dungeons and raids and dont understand the mage community. iâm so done with this game, worst expansion ever for real. and i have been playing for 20 yearsâŚ
Exactly, could not agree more.
These are both great commonsense solutions, however, I think the reason they didnât do it that way is not because they couldnât come up with it but rather because they very intentionally wanted the buff to ABarr provided by AV to be 20%, the same as what NP provided before. But now people are just getting greedy and wanting to stack both the AV and NP buffs when the intent from the devs was clearly for AV to be a substitute for NP, not a compliment. Which is why itâs so difficult and convoluted to do both, itâs because they donât want you to be able to do it in the first place. As I already said, the only reason itâs possible at all is because the devs chose to leave ABarr on the NP buff list so that NP is still a useful talent in AoE scenarios.
The devs donât have some kind of hidden agenda here. Their intention with these changes is very clear, although frankly, they should just come out and say it in blue post to put an end to the speculation once and for all. Far be it for me to come to the devsâ âdefenseâ but I am starting to get annoyed with players throwing hissy fits and pretending that the devs are out to get them with these changes when itâs literally the other way around and itâs the players who are going out of their way to try and find loopholes to get at something the devs have made abundantly clear they donât want them doing. Itâs almost bordering on exploit territory at this point and I donât see this whole thing ending wellâŚ
If this is the proverbial hill players want to die on, then so be it, but overdramatizing and bullying the devs over this is not going to yield the kinds of results you guys want. The feedback on this topic was not ignored, itâs the entire reason AV exists at all. What is being dismissed, though, is the desire for ABarr to benefit from separate damage multiplier procs and personally I think thatâs the right call. We already have way too much to track in the way of procs as it is. I think thatâs the bottom line here and there is nothing sinister about it.
Blizzard makes the rules and the rotation. If they donât want something to work well, then they have full control to nerf it or make it no longer work.
This is not an exploit, this is simply optimizing oneâs rotation.
I donât see communication from Blizzard saying that, and it seems to me like they DO want players to find this optimization because it is in the game.
Consider that Blizzard has been balancing Arcane around double-dipping Nether Precision for about 3 years, up until last week.
Before the current patch, if you werenât double-dipping then your damage would be below average most likely.
Now, I do believe that the devs sincerely want to make a good game, and I donât agree that they should be bullied or anything like that. They are also human and can make mistakes.
But some prospective here. Double-dipping has been the standard since before I started playing Arcane.
Blizzard leadership was not truthful when they said they would respect the meta. I donât like that we have a meta to begin with, fishing around for a viable class that will get invited to pugs is not fun. That being said, there is a meta, and being knocked from the meta down to the bottom quarter does NOT feel good.
What you guys arenât picking up on is that we kinda have to do the convoluted rotation now to even be middle of the pack because of the massive nerfs they gave us to our baseline. So now we get to feel bad and do bad damage.
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Sorry I canât grow my neck beard out like you. Maybe one day youâll realize the game wasnât made for the sweatiest of folk. Itâs made for us plebs.
Then why are you trying to talk like one Mr. GiT gUd
Iâm gonna be that guy for a second:
Double-dipping has been the standard since at least Shadowlands for arcane (I donât remember the nuances of specs prior to that too well anymore). Nether Precision, on the other hand, only affected Arcane Blast until this expansion. Expanding NP to include barrage which is what allowed the new double dip that they deemed problematic.
But to reinforce your point: Thereâs no way that Blizzard hasnât been aware of spells that can double-dip for years. If they want to start phasing it out to make it a bit easier to understand at a glance, theyâre allowed to do that. But preferably without breaking everything elseâŚ
Just wanted to put that clarification in there before someone tries to use it as ammunition to derail the point - not trying to call you out or anything. Just being specific.
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You give them too much credit, lol. The only reason they spotted it with ABarr is because when you line it up with several damage multipliers in execute range (with Bombardment talented) it hits for really high numbers and that stands out when looking at logs. Probably the only reason they ever caught on and have been hyperfocusing on ABarr and nerfing it into the ground as a result ever since. And of course it doesnât help that all the theorycrafters have been going out of their way to design entire builds around that interaction.
But they absolutely should phase out these obscure mechanics. Itâs already nearly impossible to keep track of all the visible and well known procs, even with third party software (and completely impossible with the gameâs native UI), so the average player canât possibly be expected to look out for ones you canât even see and that arenât even mentioned in the gameâs tooltips. A game is only a game because it has a clear set of rules that everyone can understand and adhere to. If that stops being the case we have a major problem.
This isnât a âknowledge is powerâ type situation, this is people who have played the game longer and understand it better than the devs themselves running circles around them and trying to circumvent every attempt the devs make to reign this thing in. That sort of battle of wills can only end one way and itâs going to be disastrous for the players. More so than it has already become this week.
Which is exactly what they did but folks went out of their way to find convoluted workaround to still do it, and are upset at how convoluted they areâŚ
They have communicated it multiples times going as far back as the PTR forums before TWW even launched. They made it abundantly clear they didnât consider the double dipping a proper interaction and even called it a âbug.â They also very clearly stated that they intended to remove it and replace it with something else that preserved the same playstyle. Their answer to that was Aethervision. For once communication was not the issue. Expectations were.
ABarr wasnât even able to benefit from NP at all until TWW. This is completely inaccurate. As I said above they straight up told you they are only temporarily leaving it in place (because of the massive outcry on the PTR forums) only until they replace it, which they did.
Oh so now you choose to take them at their word? Lol! Theyâve never respected the so called meta and have always been quick to smack overperforming specs with the nerf bat unless itâs the final season of an expansion and theyâve checked out completely. Furthermore, the meta is not something Blizzard intentionally create but is rather a construct of the players and their perception more than anything else. If youâre a FOTM player that chooses to chain themselves to the meta you have always ran the risk of this happening to you and typically sooner rather than later. Thatâs why you should play the spec you want and not whatever happens to be the best for an inevitably fleeting moment. And more importantly, play with people who respect your choices and understand when something like this happens thatâs outside of your control.
youâre obviously a clown, you prefer to do easy content I prefer to do hard content. That makes wow my only source of validation? I pay money and I deserve to get content that I enjoy clown. Not because iâm not like you and want to settle for a suboptimal rotation doesnt mean that wow is my life. Get off the internet and go talk to some real people.
I find it really hard to believe that the people who run this game never look at a guide video. I learned about it basically on day 1 of learning the arcane rotation back at the beginning of dragonflight because it was talked about in all of the online guides like wowhead, icy-veins, toegrinderâs site, etc. It was also talked about in all of the youtube videos I watched, and I watched many â probably 10.
I donât think youâre giving the devs enough credit here. I think they are experimenting with new ideas, but the problem is that we are not beta testers. They need a real QA team, and not to throw random builds at the live servers and see what sticks.
I canât imagine a world where they were not aware of the double-dipping buff for so long if I, a random person watching youtube videos while learning a new spec, immediately learn about it.
They talked about the bug, finally, but Iâm not talking about that. Iâm talking about this:
How is me calling out blizzard for not being truthful taking them at their word? It is the exact opposite.
No, Iâm not. Iâve been playing arcane for almost 2 years now.
No fix to mages in hotfix todayâŚsigh
I know. Isnât that crazy?
So what youâre saying is that youâre fake? Good to know! 
You didnât âlearn about itâ you were told about it by whichever YouTuberâs videos you watched. This may come as a surprise to you but most people donât watch YouTube videos on how to play video game, especially the people who make them. You shouldnât have to go outside the game to learn how to play it. If you feel the need to do that then the developers have failed and they know it. Which is why theyâre now fixing things so that there are no obscure interactions like that which arenât clearly explained in the gameâs tooltips. Imagine buying a board game with an incomplete rulebook, you would return it and get your money back, not take to the internet to figure out how to play it. This is the same thing.
Because half of your post was all about how they never do what they say yet you also went on to state âbut they told us they wouldnât mess with the meta and I believed them.â Which is why I questioned why you decided to suddenly take them at their word on that one particular thing when according to your own experience they havenât been âtruthful.â Make it make sense, please.
Anyway, this whole discussion is completely besides the point because they did in fact say multiple times that they would be changing how things worked with the double dipping even though people are now acting like it come out of the blue. Itâs one thing to be unhappy with the changes but to feint surprise now means that you either didnât pay attention or chose to ignore them at your own peril. And I want to emphasize that I am using âperilâ very loosely because this whole thing has been overblown. The reason why our DPS cratered is because of the heavy handed and completely unwarranted nerfs, not because they took away the stupid double dipping. Once they see that they overdid it they will reverse the nerfs.
Uhhhhhh, what? lol. It doesnât matter how someone obtains a particular piece of information. Once this information is acquired, that is called learning.
Unless you work for blizzard you have no idea what they do or donât do.
Iâve been reading/watching guides about games since I was a kid. It is a huge industry. While I agree that the mechanics should be visible in the game, and you should be able to figure it out by seeing it in-game, it would be quite bland if the level of strategy and optimization were so shallow that no guides were needed. That would be a very simple game of tic tack toe basically.
This is misattribution at its finest.
Iâm not even going to dignify this part of your message with a response other than do NOT put words into my mouth, that is not a fair debate and you should delete this.
You fill in the blanks a lot with your assumptions. Instead of thinking you have everyone figured out I suggest you learn how to actually listen to other people. You might learn something!