75% is really bad tho, like if you’re a bad player don’t expect great dps (you also hit the nail, you need to play better than many other specs to get good logs because you lose tons of dps if you make a mistake in your cooldown usage and that’s why 75% is bad measurement) According to full gear sims, it will be pretty good, and it’s not bad atm. Also consider there are lot less arcane players than fire for example, so there are far less logs (with worse players, because top raiders play fire)
i totally lost it , hahahahahaha so true.
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Wrong, Chrono Shift (+50% movement speed) and Ring of Frost are on the same talent row so it’s one or the other meaning less Utility.
We are the only spec in the game who’s Burst CD (Arcane Power) is reduced in PvP. All others you mentioned (abilites like Aimed Shot with Double Tap) are baseline abilities or talents or hidden modifiers which affect everyone. Avatar, Avenging Wrath, Icy Viens, Combustion, Shadow Blades, Incarnation and all the rest have the same power in PvP that they do in PvE. Arcane Power is nerfed from 30% to 20% in PvP hell even our talents Incanters Flow and RoP are nerfed in PvP.
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Does it matter? Like would it be better if blast/missiles got a pvp-only nerf instead of AP and you would do the exact same damage? (Just to be fair, AP + RoP combo with 90% bonus damage would be really hard to balance, especially since AP places rune and don’t have a gcd. In that case either they nerf blast to oblivion to prevent lucky crit 1 shots, or nerf the damage increase part which they did)
Still you can choose to adapt for different situations.
They are weak in this fast paced meta we live in. Everyone has more and better cc and utility than mages nowadays.
But not using them when available is also a dps loss.
It’s not like we get procs too frequently for that to happen.
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How so? Also desired utility changes based on the content. TW for example… needed in m+, yet only 3 classes can provide it, 1 with dps loss). Also I don’t think shadow priest/lock utiity is better than mage.
Sure, that’s the difference between a bad and a good arcane mage.
Not at all, but hardly anyone purges it either. (Also there are only a few specs with spammable purge)
I’m not saying AP with RoP wouldn’t be overkill if they weren’t both nerfed in PvP what my suggestion would be is keep AP the same in PvP as it is in PvE and keep the PvP nerf on RoP active. This way it’d be the same as it was for the MM hunter, trueshot aura (the burst CD) actually got a buff early on and Double Tap (the talent) got a nerf. I’d also keep the PvP nerf on Overpowered Talent active as well (maybe give it 10% more power instead of 20%) if baseline AP was 30% in arena.
Also you say about nerfing blast or missles to compensate but given the lack of damage we do anyway this would make Arcane worse even with AP being normal baseline power in PvP. The thing to nerf in that instance would be Barrage due to the 2 different Leggos we have that can empower it (even though we all run Triune Ward in PvP).
But as one Arcane Mage to another I’m sure we can agree on one thing, our talent tree needs a massive overhaul with soooooo many dead/beyond dead talents.
OP 10% buff would be nice, we can agree on that. However I don’t feel like we lack the damage. With proper cc chains, it’s quite nice. Obviousy there are some op specs which can kill you without any form of cc, but that’s not the standard.
I don’t feel like that way.
1st row: Amp / Familiar viable, rule of 3 bit underpowered, but it was bis whole bfa
2nd: Shimmer / Master of time both good for different situations.
3rd: RoP / Incanter great, Focus not viable
4th: All 3 viable
5th: RoF / Chrono viable
6th: Reverb / Orb viable, supernova not so much
7th: Op / enlighted viable
So we got 6 bad talents from 21, every row giving you at least 2 choices.
I have to disagree from a PvP point of view (as i don’t PvE) but Familiar is never taken over Amplification. I’d replace familiar with a talent that makes TotM grant 2 clearcasting procs.
Shimmer and MoT are both viable Slipstream should be baseline for Mage and I’d replace it with displacement as a talent.
Row 3 we agree on. Not sure what I’d replace focus with
Row 4 only Resonance is viable the other 2 break CC
Row 5 we agree on, not sure what I’d change Ice Ward with.
Row 6 I’d like a change to Reverberate so it works similar to Sub rogue shuriken storm. My change would be it has a 50% cahnce to grant one arcane charge for each enemy hit.
Row 7 we agree on.
I agree with good CC chains we can pump some good damage but it does require a lot of setup/build up. Downside is we only have one real CC where all other speccs have 2 or more. I’d like Deep Freeze back to all mage specs but make it so it only works on targets hit by frost nova in the last 5 secs or so. This would give us a good CC like most others have but we’d only be able to use it every 30 seconds without Ice Ward talent selected.
Sure, but you can use it in pve. It would be impossible to create a talent tree that provides valid options in both pve and pvp at once. Like every cc talent is useless in raids, yet it’s really good in pvp. I think we should view the tree from both perspectives.
Echo is usually best in pve, tempest can see some use against certain rog comps to prevent reset.
In pvp it would still lose against orb, in pve it would be super op.
Fire got +1 with DB, but what frost has as a real cc apart from poly? Also casting poly during mass invi is pretty good.
Was talking mostly for PvP. Over the years mage lost stuff while other classes gained.
3 Likes
Maybe before the TotM hotfix, but now it’s ~10th placing at best from bottom to top, even in single target fights, where arcane is suppose to excel at.
That’s below average and if you check the bottom ~10 specs, there’s usually a 15% to 20% damage difference between them and the top 5-6.
And keep in mind that’s mostly single target fights, where arcane is suppose to be one of the best at, cuz if we take a bad cleave fight like Huntsman, Arcane is sitting well at the bottom.
Logs, arena participation and performance, go look at them yourself.
Which streamer in particular?
Haven’t seen xaryu play arcane much lately, he mostly plays fire now.
Ven and Ziqo play it here and there, but they always end up switching to fire.
Raiku, Gelu and the other few barely touch Arcane.
Only Vultz plays Arcane religiously and I’ve talked with him about arcane and he agrees on almost everything I’ve pointed out in my threads.
Except hot streak is used instantly and can be rarely sniped with a purge, due how fast you gain the proc with Fireblast off gcd. Fingers of Frost isn’t even dispelable.
Clearcasting, similar to FoF and BF for frost mage, is ideally suppose to get stacked up and used in burst/CC windows, which you can almost never do, due to Clearcasting being dispelable and such a low proc chance rn.
Interrupt part is fine, I’m only pointing it out because we had tools to deal with it before, now we don’t. Mobility isn’t THAT HUGE of an issue in most PvE fights, but it clearly is in PvP.
First of all, no. No other class gets their damage cut in more than half from getting spam purged.
And second, Fire is already different. Majority of their burst is off GCD and can be casted while casting. By the time you snipe off combustion, usually fire gets off 80% of it’s damage.
Spellsteal spam is the major benefit of arcane in PvP, but currently that’s about it.
Remove Curse is good, but plenty of specs can do that too.
Arcane Int is like the only reason mage even existed in the world first race.
Normal Blink is sh*t, it’s our only mobility and it sucks at being a mobility spell, due to being on GCD. It’s basically a stun trinket in PvP and we’re left with only Chrono Shift for mobility.
Except keeping up Chrono Shift means that we do no damage in the meantime.
Also except Chrono Shift what do we have? Blink a stun, by the time your GCD is over, melees are already back on top or healer is behind a pillar. Or Shimmer, get focused, use both charges in the first 10sec of the arena and then you have no mobility for 25 seconds, while you can’t cast anything because 1 lockout and you’re dead in 3-4seconds.
You mean makes it competitive in PvE and actually playable in PvP? Ye, I agree.
Except those bottom 8-10 that are below average deal up to 25% less damage than the top 5 specs.
Just like everyone else.
Those “future” sims mean very little, and absolutely nothing in PvP.
There’s mythic raiders with 215+ ilvl already and arcane virtually doesn’t exist in their raids. Besides, I wanna play Arcane now and not at the end of the tier in months or whatever, when everyone has optimized BiS gear.
There’s a slight difference between “min-maxing” and playing something that’s good over something that’s trash.
Cauterize is not really an advantage over Arcane rn. If you want to survive as Arcane, you can with Master of Time. Arcane’s issue is lack of mobility and damage mostly.
No comment, worst example in existance of the universe.
Except other classes that can spam purge aka Shaman and Priest, have most of their damage coming from instants, DoTs and pets, meaning that spam purging for them is usually more beneficial than sitting and hard casting damage, because majority of their damage is already being dealt while they are purging.
RoF and Chrono Shift are on the same row.
I’m not saying that our utility is a huge issue, but we really don’t have that much.
Just go to wowhead talent calculator and make a list of utility for each class and you’ll see that some have 2-3 times of what arcane has.
Polymorph is too overrated currently and it’s not nearly as good as it used to be in older expansions, but blizzard and majority of the playerbase that plays other classes, don’t understand that. Poly is still strong, but 1 CC spell alone does not make a class.
Sorry…what?
SP - stun, silence, fear, 3x MC, spam healing, shields, fortitude, slow, purify desease, dispel magic, vamp embrace, shackle undead, mass dispel, SW:Death, leap of faith, power infusion, thoughtsteal and life swap.
Lock - 3x Fear, Coil, Shadowfury, Infernal, Slow, Nether Ward, Curses, Banish, Soulstone, Gateway, Healthstone and all different Command Demons.
Mage doesn’t even come close, especially to SP.
Yes, basically every spec in the game except Arcane and Frost, if they pop offensive cds and you don’t counter it with LoS or defensives.
Familliar and Reverb are basically dead, sims say they are okay, but in reality you’ll just lose damage gained in AOE, whenever you fight a single target boss in dungeons. Ofc they are horrible in PvP too.
Incanter is dead in raiding.
Nether Tempest is hot garbage.
OP is bad in PvP.
So yea, that’s about half our talents dead.
6 Likes
It’s not really bad, it progress kills lol not a good measure of a spec I agree 
but I just wanted to show how low it can be.
I can agree that arcane feels good in M+, at least on lower keys.
But that might just be because how simple and straight forward arcane AOE is.
There’s just close to no room for error in the rotation and it’s mostly about cooldown management between packs/bosses, so even the average arcane mage can pull out decent numbers.
Arcane is totally fine when it comes to just getting your weekly vault, but so far it seems to be falling off in higher keys according to the logs.
I’m mostly worried about the bad reputation we might get from underperforming too much. It was already a thing in BFA and it wasn’t a rarity to get kicked from a pug for not being fire.
Otherwise, I’m not gonna push high keys, so I’m generally fine with our M+ performance. Although Arcane Bombardment might be a huge factor of it, with how easy it is to pad the meters by barraging 1% hp mobs for 20k+.
1 Like
Arcane’s problem in m+ is utility. On lower keys you don’t need the stops so much, on higher keys spells like dragon’s breath are important. Frost has unlimited slows if a tank needs to kite, this was seemingly used early on in the expac to survive high keys.
If Arcane had supernova either baseline or in a viable talent position it would be viable in high keys (tuning permitting). Although the new anti melee affixes are a problem.
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I agree with you but Double Tap is nerfed by 50% in pvp and aimed shot by 5%
Also nobody says it, so I will.
Arcane ST damage is undertuned. We used to be a purely ST spec, that’s not the case anymore.
AoE is much better in Shadowlands.
The reason? Arcane Blast damage is underwhelming and Clearcasting proc chance too low.
Arcane Blast isn’t even on my top 3 total damage in m+.
Top damaging ability is Barrage, because of the leggo.
The proof: Even with all CDs ready, with hero, with Prideful, I get beaten by almost every class on ST bosses. Even if there isn’t much movement.
Prideful benefits Arcane more than any other dps spec because it grants big mana regen. Thus, you have unlimited mana to burn for some time.
Theoreticaly if we shine at ST we should be always on the top because of this.
Arcane Blast needs a damage buff or Clearcasting proc should be increased to legion levels.
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That’s kinda what this whole thread is about tbh
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Sending my feedback as high m+ player.
I read everywhere that arcane excels in ST. That’s not the case anymore.
Wanted to point it out here.
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Hunters got the unlockable option to tame undead mobs, but mages got no unlockable option to enable pollying undead. There are dungeon situations I’d love to poly in, but the mobs can’t be.
1 Like