Hey,
Pretty good thoughts overall. Glad to see more people are concerned about Arcane.
Very important, it’s stupid it’s not this way already.
Would prefer Displacement back.
Also a good thought, the way it works currently is just to fill the Spellbook and to use it when you are interrupted which makes no dmg because it doesn’t crit. This way you can get nice instant cast that should hit like max charges Arcane Blast which also saves you mana and mobility.
Doesn’t fit the specialization.
Should be the same as WoD one.
Not really needed imo.
Sounds perfect. Another arcane charge consuming spell which could give nice bonus AoE or cleave.
Permit me to add something to help with our non-existent cleave:
Change Presence of Mind to also make the next Arcane Blasts cost 20% more mana but strike an additional nearby target.
And make the old Unstable Magic baseline.
Hope we aren’t left as we are currently and get some much needed improvements.
Me too, but if we want viable talents other than Shimmer, normal Blink HAS to be off GCD. The game is too fast and everyone is too mobile for old Blink, it’s a bad spell nowadays.
Used to be a class ability in MoP and accessible quite early in the old talent trees. Most old school mages love it, I don’t get why we can’t get it back …
It would also incentivize Ice Ward and Ring of Frost as viable talents.
It is needed, because in later patches with secondary stats going up, our Arcane spells will greatly outscale Fireblast, Cone of Cold, Frostbolt or whatever non-arcane spells we end up having. ESPECIALLY if Mastery turns out to be a good stat.
I can see the appeal for these in PvE, but those changes baseline would destroy Arcane in PvP. You get a Poly on the healer, enemy DPS stacks on top of him = you cant use PoM or Arcane Blast, otherwise it just breaks Poly instantly.
Also I personally never liked Unstable Magic, it’s dumb.
Fire blast and frost bolt aren’t supposed to be part of a dps rotation, they are more rp flavour. If mastery just increase dmg of all spells it would be the worst mastery design going.
I feel you have pvp in mind though? Blink off gcd would make a good pvp talent. As would making mastery apply to fire and frost spells.
Also nether tempest already does more dmg with charges doesn’t it? It’ll be completely dead anyway after the nerf.
Supernova seems to be designed as an aoe kick but it’s place in the talent tree makes it a non option for dungeons where it would be most useful.
The thing I really want to see is a talent that makes clearcast missles hit nearby targets to your target, cleaving missles, it would be so coooool. Once they fix clearcasting procs of course.
I’m pretty sure it’s too late for big class changes (except for shadow priest cuz they said they will try to fix spec). All they will do at this point is just tuning. That being said…
I agree with some changes you mentioned but others are just dumb to me… like for example why would arcane mastery increase frost dmg or fire?? And it would be problematic to balance with trinkets that does fire dmg on use for example.
I have no idea why this is not a thing yet. This spec dosen’t work without Charged up being baseline and Arcane Power on gcd feels awfull.
Instead of buffing Nether Tempest and making Cone of Cold broken i would just suggest Arcane Orb baseline. Arcane Orb not only let you have small aoe burst but also helps manage your mana and arcane charges.
Last thing… Some high rated mages (streamers) suggested to make Arcane Power off gcd and make it drop Rune of Power under you to avoid spending 5-6 globals before you can dps.
Frostbolt certainly not, although it could be cool if we had Shatter and Frostbolt did bonus dmg to frozen targets.
As for Fireblast, in a scripted PvE rotation, maybe it should be only used to stutter step out of mechanics, but in PvP it should be worthwhile using regularly for damage.
That could work too if we get freed up from some of the mandatory PvP talents, but I feel like it should be just baseline. Blink is simply bad right now as a mobility spell and it’s more of a stun trinket.
Yea, I mean it as a Arcane Charges spender. I’d rather have MoP Living Bomb, but I tried not going too far with some unneeded suggestions.
Yea, doesn’t really fit in this row, could be on RoF row perhaps.
Our mastery only works with our spells, trinkets and item effects don’t get affected by it anymore(unlike MoP).
As for why, it’s because I don’t want our frost and fire spells to become useless later into the expansion in terms of damage.
Why not both though? I’d much rather have Arcane Orb baseline over Charged Up. And as for Cone of Cold, it would have some use unlike Frostbolt and it would be really exciting for old school mage players, like myself, to see it do damage again.
It’s my 2nd all-time favorite mage ability, after Blink ofc and I personally miss it more than anything.
That’d be nice, but you do realize that’s a 100% damage increase off GCD?
I’d rather lose some of these pointless flat percentage damage cooldowns and get Arcane’s damage designed more around mana management and not damage multiplier stacking.
Yea, except that was the worst way of doing it … they should’ve just removed/reworked Overpowered or/and lvl 30 row and just make AP off gcd.
But instead blizz disincentivizes us to stack our cds by making them clunky and putting them on long cds…
Bfa arcane already feels unplayable in PvP without 50-60% haste at least or 9 gushing wounds and just afk kite with random proc damage, due to how many gcds we need just to setup a burst. And in Shadowlands it’s gonna be way worse.
Yeah, i guess that would be too strong for pvp. How about if Arcane Power gives you 4 Arcane Charges so you can start dps after 2-3 globals (assuming they would change Arcane Power to be off gcd) instead of 4-5.
I would also add - from the pvp point of view - (although we’re getting frostbolt and fire blast I dont think it solves the problem) Arcane is too fragile about being locked… you spent several casts on ramping up and then - you’re mostly forced to do hard casts that can easily make you to have arcane locked.
Also with the defensive/cc spells (like Blink, counterspell, polymorph, temporal shield, (…)) being in the same school, its like being punished for playing arcane spec.
If fire mage gets his school locked, he still can cc with polymorph, counterspell, frost nova, etc. and miss nothing. If frost mage gets his school locked - again he can use all the spells except frost nova and ice block. But when arcane mage gets locked, he can only ice block.
So my thought was
to remove polymorph, counterspell and blink from the arcane school in the term of school lock.
or
protect arcane - atleast partially - against interrupts for example while clearcasting cant be interrupted ?
That’d be ok, but why not just Charged Up off gcd? it’s essentially the same but more flexible and on shorter cd.
I personally dont mind that too much even as an arcane main that play pvp every day. Interrupt should be a mage weakness, but I do agree that fire probably doesn’t get nearly as punished as arcane or frost.
I’d much rather see classes like DH, DK lose their range on kicks and shamans Wind Shear go back to short range.
If I cast frostbolt on a target, my arcane blasts make slow effect more impactful, slowing even more. (you can get rid of slow spell which i think never being used)
If I cast fireball on a target, my arcane blasts crit chance is increased.
That’d be cool, except I don’t want Slow removed, it has its uses in PvP, leveling and dungeons.
I just want SOMETHING to change in a positive way.
Really wished more mage players voiced their concerns, similar to shadow priests, otherwise probably nothing is gonna change yet again.
Or just revert it to Clearcasting Missiles granting an Arcane Charge. Good arcane design was already in the game, they just need to revert things without the need to re-invent the wheel.
It is public, its almost a meme at this point. They have to come back to mage as fire has a talent missing and I think combustion is still broken. Frost’s shatter is still busted and is being eaten by orb and blizzard dmg. Arcane is the ‘is that mage afk’ spec.
They changed rogue’s blade flurry from a gcd to set up aoe that felt empty to doing damage as well as setting up aoe so the gcd didn’t seem so empty. Expect some of that and maybe some spells to get merged, like arcane power to charge up when the talent is selected stuff like that I imagine… but that’s just my guess.
And we actually got changes tbf I didn’t expect anything serious to happen.
MI is now a utility spell.
RoP is a passive that auto casts on AP, Combustion, IV cast.
AP is down to 2min cd.
TotM now gives 4 arcane charges.
Master of Time - new talent in place of Mana Shield, that makes Alter Time 30sec cd and refreshes Blink cd when you come back.
Resonance buffed to 15%.
Arcane Echo - adds a crazy aoe whenever you deal damage to your TotM target.
Time Anomaly can now give 6sec of Time Warp instead of 4 charges.
Overall, really positive changes. There are still a lot of minor issues, but I think these are the most important ones to consider:
Blink being on the GCD.
Damage scaling of Fireblast and Frostbolt and how they are no affected by mastery, making them worse and worse over the expansion.
Swap Frostbolt with Cone of cold, since Frostbolt is basically useless 99% of the time.
…
… they should’ve just removed/reworked Overpowered or/and lvl 30 row and just make AP off gcd.
tbf I didn’t expect anything serious to happen.