yeah! i play all three specs, but i’ve spent most of my time as arcane since launch because it’s the strongest. that includes world content, mythic dungeons and pvp.
hard to say anything about this, since a lot of my leveling was grouped and i was carried by 311 mythic raid gear from shadowlands. turning on war mode and using pvp talents like ring of fire and arcanosphere REALLY helps during questing though.
https://www.mage-hub.com/arcane
other resources like icy veins or wowhead are fine too. and join the altered time discord for help!
we need cooldowns and procs to deal damage in current builds that’s why it feels bad when you use any spell without a proc or buff. it doesn’t satisfy me either atm but try to do the rotations on the guides, they will at least give you some push
The only changes I found to arcane mages were PvP nerfs in the weekly hotfixes on 5th Dec., were there some others I may have missed? Fire mages got some class buffs though.
I have to ask the question why tinker with class specs just 1 week into a new expansion?
I think you missed the point. I was referring to devs changing class specs, i.e. nerfs/buffs, when the game is still so early and evolving in the new expansion.
You asked why I would tinker with a spec when it’s this early in the expansion, and I said it’s because I love the spec. it doesn’t matter what state it’s in, I’ll still play it and tinker with it.
I never questioned you tinkering with the spec, how could you unless you’re a game dev? If you mean changing your talents, then I do that all the time, that’s just reconfiguring your skillset.
The devs tinkered with the spec by reducing the damage of a number of arcane PvP abilities and increasing the damage on a number of fire mage abilities less than a week into the expansion.
Beta testing is a public stunt made available by Content creators and their sheeple, pre-season and season 1 is the real beta test.
There are barely any descent mages in this game, let alone the sheeple off a the 3-4 mage streamers
I don’t see any mages in the top 50 in any arena/RBG stats, you may find the odd one in the top 100 but they are truly outclassed on the rankings list.
OK it’s fine to prune a certain ability if it way too powerful, but surely they should look at the overall spec when it shows they are underperforming in general.
There are far too many kneejerk yoyo changes going on, where they buff a class one week then nerf the hell out of it a couple of weeks later.
Frost is overnerfed. It has no aoe. Blizzard and frozen orb which are aoe abilities do less damage on a pack than spamming ice lances with fof proc. This spec has no future in high keys with this aoe damage sadly.
Arcane is good but a spec which was famous of being 1 button spec and literally everyone made fun of it back in the days now every spec is 1 button spec but they decided to overbloat arcane. You need to line up 5 abilties to do good damage while bm hunter press multishot once or demo warlock press felstorm once and they pull 150k+ aoe. Weird balance I should say.
Fire has the same issue for many expansions. The spec which does not work without combustion. 95% of the damage comes from burst during combustion. They need to bring back the dot version to fix this. The spec is supposed to be a crit based spec but the 100% crit combustion makes it the worst stat so when you don’t have combustion up you should be critting naturaly but you don’t because it is your worst stat and you have no crit on your gear. Regular rotation hits like wet noodle. People don’t seem to be bothered by this but it really annoys me when I don’t have combustion up and my damage is as low as healers.
The whole talent tree is kind of meh. Every node is just damage buff to abilities. Not a single build altering notable (well I guess glacial spike is one but it is already nerfed). This is exactly what people said will happen and no one believed it. There is one build which everyone copies and that is it. There is no build diversity which is supposed to be the point of the talent TREE.
Well kind of true. In order to do ok damage you need full burst while other classes literally spam one button and pull twice your dps. I’m not fan of the whole combustion reliance. It should be a cd when you do superior damage for a short period of time and then you still do good damage after it ends but right now all of the damage comes from cd and then just wait for it to be back up again. I hope they get rid of it and just add a new CD for fire. Even the dot version of combustion is better than this despite it being way too rng based. Don’t think any major changes comes though.
Even if they buff fire’s damage I despise the playstyle. No one pointed out that hardcasting 4 seconds pyroblast no way shape or form worth it?
If blizzard decide to buff frost and fire these specs need more than 10% dmg buff. Frost need literally like 2-300% dmg buff on blizzard to do damage. It is a tool only used to reduce cooldown of frozen orb. It has never done any decent damage. I don’t know why? How else should you do damage then? Why is it ok for demo warlock Felstorm to crit like 40k while blizzard ticks for like 4000 damage?
I love how Fire plays around Combustion, but it just does no dmg right now…
Even with the recent ignite buff it’s lacking 10-15% to be competitive with frost, that isn’t even talking about Arcane.
It’s only worth it once you get a Pyroclasm stack or want to enter the SKB mini-combust.
I however don’t understand how Chaos Bolt can do 20k more dmg (compared to Pyro using Pyroclasm!!) and have half the cast time…
Fire right now is like the little brother off Destro
Yes this is the only reason to use it but not because of the benefit of pyroclasm but because you want to activate SKB. But pyroclasm procs way too frequently to justify hardcasting 4 seconds pyros. I have 2 stacks expiring becuase during combustion you won’t hardcast pyros. Wasted procs.
Fire is a mess. Only people like it who plays with high end premade groups and they pull half the dungeon in one go.
And this is not it. The list could go on and on.
Hyperthermia? I tested it. Procced once in 3 mins. It should proc once every 30 sec to make it viable.
Living bomb? In its current form not a viable talent. They need to remove the cd the 1 target limit and let us multidot with it like in wrath which is great. If they want to keep the limit and the CD this needs like a 5 times dmg buff. Not even joking.
Meteor needs to be baseline fire spell. This is badly placed talent. You need to take the shifting power and the temporal warp which makes you not able to get meteor ever. Even in other expansions this skill was barely used… why not make it good once?
With the way things are, I feel it’s going to be a little bit before they gather the data from all the mythics and such being run, before they start to buff/nerf classes.
But with the current state of the Mage, even with solo leveling, compared to a tank or another class, it’s at the bottom of the list.
You deff want to hardcast a Pyro if it ends before combustion ends, you get a garuanteed crit.
The only way you don’t use your Pyroclasm procs is when your Combust ends before Pyro finishes casting, that’s where you ignore Pyroclasm and do them after Combust.
The tier set is about 10% buff to Pyroblast aswell, so I am hoping that’ll help us…
Although they did just roll in with some new class changes. 
