The gcd issue with arcane is a big problem, so big I am going on the assumption that it won’t go live like that.
K, so we jumped back to bfa. Most specs did ye cos the traits were op. Bad design. If this was reference to me saying things got better in 8.1, I was saying things got better for mages relative to other specs in 8.1 due to changes to our traits that made our dps better. Think you missed half the convo.
The changes to arcane power will be balanced out in tuning. Focus power was put in because mirrors went baseline, how is that bad?
Sorry but that’s bs.
As for cleave the skeleton mage covinent ability is a great cleave for arcane, amazingly strong.
Shimmer has had 5secs added to its cd but they reverted the other change. Also missles wont be a dps loss without azerite traits enpowering arcane blast so much.
Everyone is losing there borrowed power but the mage leggos look strong. Fire’s actually getting a buff to the max level talents too.
Thats partly about how you build your toon. There 3 different builds for frost and fire right now all with different dmg patterns but that’s kinda the mage thing. Burst dps is really important in progress which is why mages are often wanted. Ask a shadow priest or an ench shammy if they prefer some burst over flat dmg.
All the gearing systems in shadowlands are coming with launch, we are unlikely to get anymore afterwards. Tier sets or something similar are likely to be the tier to tier changes.
No way combustion will be bigger than it is now, most people enjoy the lucid build and thats about 60% dmg in combustion i think.
Everyone will be farming leggos but theres a weekly cap to stop an endless grind and we should have our first one before the season starts. Also grinding towards that op trinket or weapon in raid is fun.
I mean if you don’t like it build your toon the way you want or play a spec you like more. There’s always going to be talents that fit in better with builds. Meteor was the standard for a lot of bfa for example and its looking dead in the water against a buffed kindling and pyroclasm with leggos to compliment them.
I feel like I missed something about losing our only heals from azerite but soulbinds will likely have some small heals like azerite. Haven’t checked them yet.
Edit: forgot about the ignite issue but thats still a work in progess.
Every time something like this is written I’m tempted to flag it for trolling. Either you nitpick things like slight numerical exaggeration that serves to show what exactly is the problem to people who likely are new to Mage, or you completely overlook BIG problems because you play Fire so you don’t have those problems & everyone else has to git gud. I’m showing you how things work, why they work that way, why it’s problematic. And you keep arguing while your arguments are being busted. Not sure if trolling or, what’s the English diplomatic term, special needs in the mind department person.
Let’s dissect some world class trollcrap.
Holy Jove, Minnji has acknowledged existence of a problem with Arcane spec! The end of days is coming, prepare for the rain of fire, put your affairs on order! …Wait, it’s just trolling as usual. Making big assumption makes big something of you. 3 first letters in assumption. And it’s not about the animal either. You think Blizz cared when they completely brokeworking Legion Arcane spec? Did they care it was most fun that spec had since the Lich King? Nah, Blizz just destroyed it, and left the husk. There were people in BFA pre-patch who believed Arcane won’t go live in that state. There were people who believed in “8.1 will fix it”, then 8.2, then 8.3, then Shadowlands, and now we already hear about “no big changes in beta”, i.e. “forget about your spec being fixed in Shadowlands, wait for 10.0”. And the fools were proven wrong - ALL OF THEM. So, want to bet something on this outcome? Better be something you can afford to lose…
Nice try, Ion, but we’re not buying it! Blizz had like 4 months to do so and didn’t. And Arcane Power was already nerfed HARD from Legion because 14-17s/90s was cut to 10s/90s. Should be 15s/90s. And should be off GCD in the first place because otherwise it’s about 1,5s shorter effectively - you cannot use it for that time, but you CAN lose it, say by dispelling… AND they were saying those things about Azerite, Essences, Corruptions, and everything else. I do not believe them anymore. If you do, then (insert Illidan gif) your faith has blinded you. Sheepies that go SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT! while the lady laughs? Rings any bells? Or are you unread as well as not knowledgeable about your own class?
Because Mirrors aren’t of any real rotational use, like say powerful targeted AoE, or cleave, or ST. It’s just 1 more button that serves only to increase damage done, or dump threat, or confuse opponents for about 0,1s. 1 GCD more before Arcane can start doing damage. 1 MANDATORY GCD more before you open up because it is likely too strong to ignore, so you have to use it on CD. Do you begin to see why this is a problem?
And it is in Rune of No Choice If You Want To DPS row. Thought it’s crystal clear, but apparently for SOME REASON it is not, so I will try to clarify: You either take Rune or your DPS is not optimal. It might be average if otherwise you work your fingers off. But it will NEVER be top, good, or even decent. Because Incanter is DPS loss already. Focus Magic is gonna be DPS loss simply because Rune is better.
And this is stupid, because 1) SOMEONE worked on it, why? and 2) SOMEONE wasted working hours to put in game something that will NEVER be used while there are OTHER problems they COULD work on, and 3) SOMEONE OK’ed the whole thing. All those guys should check whether they have anything between their ears. GET IT?
Oh wait. You are one of those optimal Rune of Power Fire mages, stuffed to the gills with Masterful corruptions, who live or die by their Combustion window which curiously enough contains about 3/4 of their output, 40% of which is granted by Rune of Power. And you have the gall to pretend like it is of no consequence. Thou art not fit for any forum section but GD! Get thee hence!
Shimmer only had 2nd charge left alone & Displacement was left as it was only because it was uniformly bad for ALL mages. And Arcane gets short end of the stick anyway. You play Fire, the spec that has inbuilt okay-ish mobility, you don’t know &@#^ about Arcane turret problems, they’re not your problem, it’s those other guys who have problem, they have to git gud. And you say “This is fine”. Well, for YOU this is fine, YOU don’t need more mobility, YOU have it inbuilt into spec. People like you are part of the problem.
Well news flash for you: Arcane NEEDS BOTH SHIMMER & SLIPSTREAM. BADLY. Shimmer isn’t enough and Slipstream SUCKS because not enough procs & DPS loss. Arcane DPS at any given moment either 1) is casting Arcane Blast or 2) isn’t doing real damage. This is how it works. We do not have real instants. 2 charges of Presence of Mind are used to squeeze more Blasts into last seconds of AP or Rune. Missiles can’t kill a thing, Mastery alone won’t help them if Blast gets its stacking damage buff AND mastery from gear. And about the proc…
Be enlightened, child: https://www.wowhead.com/spell=276743/clearcasting. 1% proc chance per 500 mana spent. Wanna know how does it work in practice? Went to dummies, wasted entire mana bar 10 times, got 24 procs. Around 5 procs per 1 mana bar, 100-0. This means, IF you take Slipstream, roughly one 2 seconds movement window per 20% mana spent. So I was off the point by 30% to showcase how f&%^#@ up this “proc” is. In time terms: there is 20s burst of NO MOVEMENT CUZ BLASTING, then you can start moving around. When you get the proc, that is. Which takes about 15 seconds on average if starting from 0 charges, because it doesn’t work on spells being cast, only how much mana you burned. And then you cannot reposition when you’re casting. DPS loss. And as long as 4-stacked Blast does more damage than Missiles, Missiles WILL be dps loss, so you will be effectively trading DPS for movement. While Fire doesn’t need to. Oh wait, YOU play Fire, so it’s 100% OK! Just for the love of Titans, shut your trap & kindly look how something works BEFORE you say/write BS about it.
It’s another Blast buffing ability, short-sighted one. We don’t need MORE buffs for Blast. We need Missiles & Barrage buffs so that single ability - Arcane Blast - does not deal 80% of our damage. Any buffs to Blast point exactly to that. All numerics like Equipoise/Enlightened. All stackable cooldowns like Touch of the Magi, Rune of Turret, “X on use” trinkets. Because Blast stacks damage increase gets more mileage the more % buffs you can stack with it. And if you do not understand why it is so, then I recommend getting a crash course in basic math, chapter “Multiplying”. And this ability is YET ANOTHER GCD that does NOTHING while we power up. AND it is 20s/2m while we can cleave. Then it’s back to 1 target turret issue. Translation to English: NOT VIABLE if more than 20s once per 2m burst of cleave is required. And guess which spell will NEVER be cast while Deathborne is active? Hint: It will not be Blast, because it benefits too much from it.
Yes, but some specs are more affected by it or less affected, depending on how badly they DID need Azerite/Essences/Corruptions etc. BFA version of Fire is only well-performing for the moment, because Mechagon bracers/lots of damage increases/Mastery corruptions/very specific CDs interact with themselves in a unique way. When this is taken away, well, your filler is a wet noodle, your proc is kinda OK but you have to get that proc first, and those big Combustion windows seem like a thing of the past because you will not be able to cram as much damage into it as you could.
Wrong. That is Frost thing. Fire has only One True Way now. Unless you prefer your damage to suck, which you seem to do. Arcane too has only 1 mechanically (sort of) viable build. All others fall short by not dealing enough damage or in not mobile/cleavelike/bursty enough way.
Burst Cleave dps. As in: you hit the main target AND everything else around gets hit too, because switching to adds when you can kill them WHILE you dps the boss is DPS loss. Fire does it by design, through Ignite. Frost can to some degree, through Splitting Ice. And this is the reason why you don’t see Arcane mages in Mythic Nya’lotha, where 10 of 12 encounters are cleave friendly and Arcane is ST turret. Btw, you are playing Fire Mage whose filler (Fireball) is a weak, long cast spell that does nothing except killing time when waiting for procs. You play PvP Greater Pyroblast talent which is “35% of total target’s HP” because you know how much your fillers suck and you wanted to use broken as hell OP spell instead. Get thee to a dummery!
Again, wanna bet on it? Perhaps a brutosaur, or 5m gold? Azerite was said to be set system for the whole expansion, too! And Essences! And Echoes, and many other things… Thing with Blizzard right now is, when they put in game something that doesn’t work, they 1) won’t admit it doesn’t work, 2) they will try to put something ELSE on top of it to “fix” the original problem which won’t help in the least, while 3) adding a NEW problem and 4) having TWO problems instead of one. Observing this pattern through the whole BFA, I can say with high degree of certainty: that is how it’s gonna be in Shadowlands. When something turns out - what a surprise - to be unbalanced crap, they will try to “fix” it by adding MORE of something new on it. The idea that THEIR original system is broken in the first place is alien to corporate mindset.
As for the “Be prepared” lines… If you would take 5 seconds to copy & paste the link, you’d find that it was a US forum user’s comment, meant as a set of tips for someone who asked about maining Mage in Shadowlands. I.e. getting a 120 lvl Mage first, and then bringing it to a state of being somewhat playable. IF. And, of course, the nitpicking lawyer GF “forgot” the fun parts.
Be prepared to put in twice the effort for half the damage as other classes.
Wanna compare a Fire Mage to, say, BM? Or Havoc? Go ahead, make our day.
Be prepared to have 1-2 specs ignored entirely by Blizzard for at least 2 expansions.
Arcane got the silent treatment for the whole BFA & doesn’t look good in Shadowlands. Guess this didn’t got your attention, as you only play flavor of the month, and at the moment this means Fire. I’m going to laugh my backside off if Fire is completely broken in 9.0 and then promptly ignored for the rest of expansion except for say 8% dmg buff on Fireball. “This is fine”, I don’t see any problem with it. Do you feel lucky in another expansion? Well, do you, punk?
Be prepared to play the 1 spec that is actually good. No guarantee’s it’s fun though.
The issue called Rune of Not Fun, or how to force casters into staying in 16y wide circle, while pretending they can move around. It’s not fun when all your real damage spells are hard casts. It’s not fun that you have to execute 20s long burn phases perfectly, no mistakes, and maybe then you will be equal to facerolling Havocs. It’s not fun that you HAVE to take the Rune or suck because it is DESIGNED to stack with other buffs. And it doesn’t matter what Blizzard says about “not wanting players to stack buffs” - you can lie to your employees, you can lie to your clients, you can lie to yourself, but you cannot lie to math - stacking buffs always beat scattered buffs. And let’s face it, right now Fire is the only viable spec in endgame PVE. Kinda brokenly good in PvP too. But then our resident expert doesn’t see any problem in THAT, because https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/character/eu/eonar/minnji plays Fire with Greater Pyro.
Having one viable, one kinda viable, and one not viable spec means 1/3 of Mage players can have fun, 1/3 only kinda fun, and 1/3 doesn’t have fun. And that’s not counting people who dislike majority of their damage output crammed inside Combustion & Rune & on use trinkets & whatever else you can get, because stacking % damage modifiers beat scattering cds & wet noodle Fireball filler spam.
Has chest equipped with Impassive Visage
Likely has some parts in bags with Cauterizing Blink or Quick Thinking
Doesn’t know about them
…or rather pretends not to know. There are words I’d use for this kind of behavior and most of them is considered no-no on this forum.
I would kindly ask you to cease & desist this troll-like behavior of yours, consisting of talking about stuff you clearly have no idea about, or you DO have the general idea, but not details (when it is convenient), or seem to forget certain things (while you have it equipped on your character according to armory, so you KNOW what it does and it can be checked, not mentioning Google…). You play Fire flavor of the month, optimal, kinda broken spec, fine, just don’t talk crap about Arcane. It has enough of its own problems. Doesn’t need people saying it’s OK when it CLEARLY is not. And the very last thing WoW needs is trolls baiting people into believing that Mage is all fine and dandy & will continue being so in Shadowlands when all the signs point to NOT being fine. And I’m not even talking about Venthyr/Maldraxxus Covenant “meaningful choice” here. Let’s just say there is a good reason why the wise prepare 4 characters of each class to have ready in Shadowlands.
Dude I was more than half way through a point by point reply and accidently deleted. It’s a loooong post to cover so I’m not starting again!
Let me start by saying I didn’t say Arcane looked great for Raid, I didn’t say it looked as good as it was in Legion. All I said was I thought it looked good for raid and you went off.
To sum it up I agree Arcane suffered badly from losing artifact traits, it’s azerite traits amplified the problems in it’s talent tree and forced you to put all your power into one ST or AoE.
I had thought Arcane was looking a lot better for shadowland, no azerite to funnel your power, skeleton mage and a leggo to improve barrage for better cleave and stacking missles.
Something about your rant about missles procs didn’t make sense and I realised I can’t remember playing arcane without the arcane pummeling az trait which increases proc chance by 10%. This seems to have been completely overlooked in the shadowland changes so far which is indeed worrying. What also makes this worse is the leggo that stacks barrage dmg is linked to missle procs. Hopefully this gets picked up in beta.
As for movement, all casters lose dps when they have to move unless they are lucky with instant timings, except mages in bigger areas as we can shimmer . You can even barrage during conserve phases only losing minor dps from rule of three.
The problem is gcd moving, repositioning during a fight. You can shimmer in some situations but, I agree, baseline slipstream with decent procs would be the best way to solve this problem. Worth noting NoIL frost has had the same problem this expac.
The burst cleave thing, nya’lotha is kinda a one off, as is fire’s insane burst cleave. Most tiers it’s ST like Jaina’s wall or Za’qul’s shield.
Fire’s current builds are lucid build, minute mage and golden crit. All very viable and all can out preform the other in different situations.
GPyro isn’t op, top players don’t play it. The 4 sec cast is too easily stopped or los’d. I use it in bgs to kill off healers and tanks.
I don’t understand why you play Arcane if you have such a problem with RoP and burst phases? I didn’t play Arcane before BFA in any end game but hasn’t RoP been meta for ages?
Tier sets/Gear systems, you could be right but thats not the plan. Imo essences were always coming and corruption was an experiment to decide what they wanted to do with gear in shadowlands.
Ah man, im going point for point again…
Twice the dmg for the same dmg as a dh or bm, I’d rather play an something more engaging. Ever tried raiding on those specs? It’s so dull.
Arcane did get buffs a few times during bfa but, ye they were band aids. Don’t think many specs get anything other than buffs though, spriests did, maybe ench shammies? But they do seem to be trying harder to get things right.
Pointing out I’m wearing azerite healing traits because I said we’d likely be getting replacements from soulbinds?? Did you actually read what I wrote??
Also your bitterness with me for being a fire mage is weird. I play mage, I’ve played all 3 specs through the expac when gears allowed me too. I played quite of bit of arcane in 8.0, I loved it in dungeons, full mobility on packs and tons of dmg! I played it a bit in uldir on fights with no cleave. I played it on Maut in 8.3. I liked playing frost in dungeons too for more consistant dmg and less reliant on tank pulls, but in 8.3 I got kicked from groups for not being fire one too many times. I assume you know how that feels too?
Again I’m not saying Arcane is good right now but (before I realised the missle proc issue) I still thought it would be good in raid in 9.0. Strong ST dmg is likely and skeleton mage will give on demand massive cleave for single add spawns. I do think Fire leggos look better fun though.
I was quite bored tonight this gave me something to do lol
Shadow Priest is suffering from a complete identity crisis. I wouldn’t recommend going near them unless you really can’t get over the theme in some form of roleplaying sense.
Mage on the other hand is 3 damage specs. There’ll always be something that works for them and in PvP they’re basically always strong one way or another.
Currently, Shadow Priest sucks and all you need to do to get an idea of how much they’ll continue to suck is to review Devouring Plague’s return. Absolute disaster of a spec since Legion pretty much.
. You can even barrage during conserve phases only losing minor dps from rule of three.