Dragonflight - Arcane Talent Tree

Classes Mage
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(Edit: I feel like they have fixed the tree and addressed more or less all of the issues mentioned here with their blue post on 24th August, very happy, looks better)

While I completely understand that this is an initial iteration of the Arcane Mage talent trees, I feel like there are a lot of red flags that indicate that Arcane may not getting the attention from someone that has played arcane either in raids or M+ for an extended period of time by someone that plays somewhat proficiently (Not that I do that particularly well)

I have compiled a few hopefully constructive criticisms with examples here that may help to improve the talent tree in various ways.

1. It is possible to spend points in talents far down the tree that rely on other talents or provide little or no value to the player due to them not having selected a talent further up the tree.

  • Resonance without Improved Arcane Barrage does nothing.

  • Reverberate without Improved Arcane Barrage is a DPS loss when you cast Arcane Barrage with 4 Arcane Charges instead of another Arcane Explosion on more than 3 mobs. Also note that you wouldn’t cast Arcane Explosion on 3 mobs.

2. Way too many of what I will loosely refer to as ‘Choices’ are components of baseline spells. Without these components Arcane an incredibly tedious to play without. Arcane has always felt like the spec is handicapped with inconvenient design that feels annoying to play. Then, the talents are used to buy back solutions to these problems. It would be nice if the design could be adjusted so that this is less of the case as this is why we’ve ended up with a singular builds for the last 3 expansions with little to no deviation between different players.

  • Amplification: Hard casting Arcane missiles is not fun without this

  • Improved Clearcasting: I need to be able to save and choose when and where to spend these either for movement with Slipstream or Arcane Harmony capping at a bad time to spend.

  • Presence of Mind: Unless you don’t want every burn interrupted with movement

  • Evocation: Unless you enjoy being repeatedly punished from accidental overspend and not having to eat after every 2nd pack, I can’t replicate the Kyrian Build and have this.

3. There are many of the dead talents no one ever takes because either they are not fun, fiddly to play or have no particular synergy with other spells/abilities so the question is, why are the still here after 3 expansions?

  • Enlightened: Dull Passive

  • Nether Tempest: At least make it an AoE DoT with no Arcane Charge interaction at the very least, its to hard to weave in.

  • Rule of Threes: Clearcasting without the benefit of Amplification, this is not great.

  • Impetus: Dull Passive I assume being used to replace the super fun Arcane Orb Arcane Charge generation that was such a joy to cast within the scope of the Kyrian Build.

  • Foresight (Stand still for 10 seconds? Now? In M+ with the mildest of affixes? In PVP? In any raid? in 2022 right, not classic? World of Warcraft, right?)

  • Reverberate (Unless I am using Arcane Explosion as a movement filler to get Arcane Charges, I would not be trying to get them expressly for AoE, I would be trying to get them for my next Touch of the Magi burn since Arcane Explosion / Arcane Barrage is an off-burn rotation button I rarely use since it forces the loss of my Arcane Harmony stacks which take too long to get for me to waste them on off burn.)

  • Mana Gem: Inconvenient, 3 charges, ALL activities are more than 6 minutes and burning 18% of my mana with a three second cast is not fun between pulls or during a boss, if I get a break I can’t just recast to get top-up the charges, I need to find it in my bag, drag it out, confirm delete then recast, there used to be a macro to destroy the mana gem but it was broken a few patches ago.

  • Cascading Power: Bad Synergy, can’t currently use a mana gem at 100% mana and I am likely going to be at 100% mana before a burn, Is this from TBC? If I need mana, it’s because I overspent on a burn, not because I’m about to open up a burn again

1.Removing spell / components that are currently baseline and calling them a talent. I understand this is par for the course, but these abilities are baked in for a reason. They aren’t niche benefits for Arcane they are integral to fun play.

  • Improved Arcane Barrage: Spell component from baseline Arcane Barrage as we have it in Shadowlands which completely breaks or reduces DPS of 2 later talents.

  • Conjure Mana Gem: It was nice to have but no one asked for it in Shadowlands, as aforementioned its fiddly to keep up.

  • Mana Adept: Spell component from baseline Arcane Barrage as we have it in Shadowlands, gives us a passive way to continue playing without literally having to stop everything we are doing and wait for mana ticks. We should always have a fallback recovery method when everything else is on cooldown.

  • Arcane Orb: The best baseline spell we were gifted, which increased tempo and alleviated having to constantly hard cast Arcane Blast for Arcane Charges is now being treated as a DPS increase in of itself rather than a utility to get Arcane Charges and can’t be taken if you want to recreate the Kyrian mage build. I guess this utility has been replace with Impetus, which is not fun or satisfying. Considering the power of this spell, it doesn’t make sense that it’s so far down. Maybe just give it baseline and have a talent to boost the damage for people that want to use it as such.

Current Issues: We just want to have fun, I like the new spell replacing Arcane Power, but that isn’t going to fix struggling with the same quality of life issues we have done for what seems forever.

  • Interrupted burns due to very tight windows in conjunction with affixes and normal mechanics.

  • Effectively having the same combo points on target issue that Rogues used to have with Radiant Spark. (The target dies and you are dead in the water in terms of damage for the next 45 seconds having already having wasted a 2 min Arcane Power cooldown.

  • Having the damage of Arcane Barrage not added to the Touch of the Magi when the target dies from the self same Barrage.

  • Having mobs in M+ like the Nathrezim mini boss remove the Touch of the Magi when they die because they don’t die, they get whisked off by a Cartel member for the sake of theatrics. Same with Attumen the Huntsman in Lower Kharazhan when he mounts and dismounts (You can only get a successful burn off on pull following the first dismount, Arcanes setup is way to long for the currently pace of play)

Long Live the Arcane Dream

2 Likes
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Several notes / additions:

  • Arcane Orb and Evocation should be moved to 2nd (8+ points) part of the tree. They are neither worth to be capstone talents nor need to limit our end tree talents. They are currently even not accessible (both at the same time) for Kyrian builds.
  • Orb Barrage could also be replaced by Mantle of Kirin Tor effect that many people liked.
  • Talents that relate to specific abilities should be close to each other and in corresponding side of tree. Left side is AoE (looking at Nether Tempest and Arcane Orb placement), so it should contain most talents for Arcane Explosion and Arcane Barrage. Right side is ST, so should contain most talents for Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast.
  • Arcane Explosion could receive a way to make it ranged, so that Arcane Mages would not be forced to AoE in melee range. This could be an optional talent and if needed have some cons attached to keep it competitive with melee playstyle and not a total upgrade.
  • PoM should receive 3 charges back, it is much worse with 2. Also, I would suggest to reduce its CD to 45 seconds, duration to 30 seconds (to prevent exploits) and put it on CD on usage to make it more synchronized with other CDs.
  • Arcane could use a talent that would make Arcane Barrage a guaranteed critical strike to help Kyrian builds not be so reliant on RNG, as Arcane Barrage crit vs no crit is a massive difference in output. That dps increase is already compensated by weaker Radiant Spark (10% per stack vs 21% currently), weaker Arcane Harmony (100% bonus vs 144% currently) etc. Arcane Mages have access to Shatter, but it is not reliable enough, as Ice Nova lasts only 2 seconds, is breakable by damage and bosses are immune to it.
  • ToTM could receive a possibility to get detonated early in a Cloudburst Totem way (by using the ability again while it is active) to both address mentioned in post above issues and make it more controllable for different PVE / PVP situations.
  • Arcane Surge is controversial - it can break breakable CC, it can leave you OOM if dispelled and its cast time is irritating. I would suggest to make it a choice node with old Arcane Power and make the upgrade talent increase duration and spell damage bonus of both, so that people can pick the variant they would like more.
  • Supernova needs a damage buff and to deal full damage to all targets. Even though its main usage is AoE interrupt, its should at least deal more damage than Arcane Explosion.
  • Arcane is long overdue for some unique utility that is not available to other Mage specs and Supernova is not enough. Giving it a black hole type ability that pulls enemies together could be the solution - Arcane Mage would be the first dps spec to posess such an ability, as its counterparts like Sigil of Chains and GG are posessed by tanks.
  • Even with recent buffs, Arcane would still struggle in PVP. Arcane Surge is dispellable, so any dispel / purge class / comp can just wait till you use it (with defensive), then remove it and lol at Arcane Mage being OOM and trying to do something while preparing kick to interrupt his Evocation (if he has it). They can also just kick its 2.5s cast itself if needed. As a result, some kind of dispel protection (like Triune Ward) and interrupt management (like ability to remove applied interrupts, so that enemies can still kick your casts like Arcanosphere, but you can quickly recover from that with decent CD attached) is needed.
  • Arcane could also use a separate unbreakable CC that could be used to secure Arcane casts for short period of time from being kicked, especially Clearcast Arcane Missiles. A time stop stun could be such an ability.
  • Arcane could also use either a separate uncapped AoE Arcane Charge spender ability or a talent that would increase Arcane Barrage to 8+ targets hit and greatly increase its cleave radius (with Resonance bonus capped at current 75%). Its current 5 target cap and small cleave radius are quite outdated.
  • A way to reliably receive Clearcasting stacks (like a talent that would make Touch of the Magi generate them over duration) would be useful to make Arcane Missiles playstyle more competitive with Kyrian.
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Arcane needs something cool heavy hitter spell like this:

With a proper Arcane colours and effects ofc.

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Wish they would add mark of aluneth back and maybe Prismatic Crystal , so many spells that were interesting to play and rewarding .
Why they want to us to play the same brain dead build for 2 more years?

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Why they want to us to play the same brain dead build for 2 more years?

A few years ago Blizzard said something along the lines of the damage profile being to volatile for them to make any significant changes without sacrificing spec identity , I think they referred to the spec as a ‘Problem Child’

While that’s all well and good and I would be inclined to agree, I could happily bare playing the current spec in (9.2.5) in Dragonflight but they have gutted two abilities that I find myself using on CD, abilities that stop the spec feeling tediously repetitious, inflexible and punishing. Namely Evocation (Iconic to Arcane) & Arcane Orb (Fun) in conjunction with the Kyrian Spec.

Sure I could spec Siphon Storm and play like that, but having played that spec, I know it doesn’t feel as fun, satisfying or as effective as the full Kyrian Build which maintains good single target and acceptable initial AOE burst.

Few of the talents deal with any of the current quality of life issues, instead they appear to make more, it feels like whoever is designing the tree did the minimum they could to disrupt the status quo while at the same time lacks the experience of playing the class to imagine solutions to issues that Arcane faces while actually playing, (One of the worst offending talent being Foresight which is incredibly naive in its conception)

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I was quite surprised to find that this wasn’t how Arcane Surge worked, I thought it would be a beam attack that lasted a few seconds a drained your mana over that time.

Instead it’s a cast time spell that instantly drains your mana and causes an explosion, which is kinda boring.

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