[ARCANE] Legion Beta Megathread

[Obelisk Kai]

I kinda feel the same way. Wasn't sure if it was talents or just me not being used to playing Arcane.

Surprisingly though, Frost seems pretty decent for me game play wise with Glacial Spike. And i assume will only feel better once that new Brain Freeze proc spell comes around and once we get hold of the artifact.

Frost is a ton of fun...it doesn't have the issues Fire has and doesn't seem broken like Arcane. After a few hours on the PTR I am leaning back towards Frost. Not to mention ebonchill is my favorite artifact look anyway. Sure i'll lose Greater Invisibilty, and that sucks, but it's a small price to pay for a spec that is fun to play.

Arcane seems to be falling down because it's talents are uninspiring and the conserve phase isn't working.

I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe tuning will fix the spec but right now, I am sorry to say...more sorry than I knew, but Arcane STILL isn't fun.

[stevenho]

New arcane doesn't work without the MUCH larger mana pool provided by artifact and lvl 110. I don't think it matters for 30 days of prepatch though.
Also all classes DPS was gutted, I wonder what will they do to HFC to offset this.

[Obelisk Kai]

New arcane doesn't work without the MUCH larger mana pool provided by artifact and lvl 110. I don't think it matters for 30 days of prepatch though.
Also all classes DPS was gutted, I wonder what will they do to HFC to offset this.

Hmm that's an interesting point. Yet playtesting Arcane also revealed a large reliance on talents such as erosion and quickening.

I was optimistic about the spec, now I am substantially less so. I will probably be picking Frost at launch. I'll pick up Aluneth second though and then test both to see which is my preferred choice. But I find Frost a lot more attractive.

P.S. How does the artifact provide a larger mana pool? I am not seeing a trait that provides that.

[Deleted]

Might just be me but for raiding to stick to higher conserve phases it might be alot wiser to go with overpower instead of quickening, the higher the gear level becomes and thus mana pool through mastery stacking, it might become viable to swap Overpower for quickening but as it stands now Arcane power is one of your best conserve tools on 4x arcane charge AB spam. only casting the occasional AM to keep AP up as much as possible.

Also the artifact has Mastery and Haste on it the higher your slotted relics become and thus Ilvl of your arti the higher those secondary stats will scale.

What I'm noticing on beta atm though that it is much more about knowing when to dump a 4 stack of charge through barrage on long fights and especially not to only use Evocate on 0% mana with the shorter cooldown it has I tend to use evocate at around 20-30% of mana rather then fully emptying my mana pool. If you're lucky enough to obtain Kilt of the Runemaster legendary it is going to be a huge boon in mana conserving with the 20% mana pool return on Arcane barrage dump.

[stevenho]

P.S. How does the artifact provide a larger mana pool? I am not seeing a trait that provides that.

I am not keeping tabs on all build changes, seems like sadly it was removed. It was this talent: http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=1872...hyst-awakening
With 3 ranks ending up at 400% mana pool increase.

[Obelisk Kai]

I am not keeping tabs on all build changes, seems like sadly it was removed. It was this talent: http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=1872...hyst-awakening
With 3 ranks ending up at 400% mana pool increase.

Then as it stands it looks like I am going Frost. Which, as I have said, saddens me a little bit as I truly wanted to Arcane work. It just isn't there yet.

[whisperingsage]

I suppose mastery levels might be higher in Legion, but stats usually drop while leveling. It seems strange that we'd be having so much trouble when the new mastery adds regen on top of making it less punishing to be at low mana.

Maybe mastery trinkets are going to be more necessary to make the spec work?

[Deleted]

The spec appears to be doing extremely low DPS during conservation phases, unlike anything we've seen before, due to mana dropping too fast if one tries to conserve it.

[Kainslife]

How is Arcane looking for Mythic+ dungeons?

[RWJ]

Just not sure what Blizz is intending... It seems like they don't want us to change spec for each encounter (ie artifact weapon), yet then they give multi-dot to Fire but cap NT. So for council fights, we are forced to play fire with a (best case scenario) 20% nerf to our artifact weapon. And that's if we are crazy determinants that level two artifacts.

Wish Nether Tempest was not capped! Not sure about the community, but I liked multi-dotting in Mop on council fights. It was a welcome change to tunnel targeting. NT largely went away in WoD and instead, we switched specs during raid. NT looks to be the same uneventful throw away talent that it was in WoD. The difference now is that changing specs during raid is going to be less appealing with artifact weapon... would love to just play one spec the whole raid. I think uncapping NT would solve that problem.

Blizzard, have you thought about it this or is this: "working as intended" ?

[whisperingsage]

The problem is we have our aoe spender as our single target reset/conserve. If we're too low for aoe they can only buff barrage so much before it affects the single target rotation. Then they can only buff AE so much before it messes with the aoe rotation.

I wish they just gave the mage bombs to each spec, and turned that spot in the talent tree with either altered the respective bomb or was something new entirely. Then barrage could work as the reset/conserve for both aoe or single target, and NT would be the "spender". Or I guess they could make NT cost charges.

[Deleted]

Aluneth is an annoying prat. I don't know if we can stand listening to his pretentious muttering all the expansion. He should probably become progressively more humble after each wipe.

Just not sure what Blizz is intending... It seems like they don't want us to change spec for each encounter (ie artifact weapon), yet then they give multi-dot to Fire but cap NT. So for council fights, we are forced to play fire with a (best case scenario) 20% nerf to our artifact weapon. And that's if we are crazy determinants that level two artifacts.

Wish Nether Tempest was not capped! Not sure about the community, but I liked multi-dotting in Mop on council fights. It was a welcome change to tunnel targeting. NT largely went away in WoD and instead, we switched specs during raid. NT looks to be the same uneventful throw away talent that it was in WoD. The difference now is that changing specs during raid is going to be less appealing with artifact weapon... would love to just play one spec the whole raid. I think uncapping NT would solve that problem.

Blizzard, have you thought about it this or is this: "working as intended" ?

The problem is we have our aoe spender as our single target reset/conserve. If we're too low for aoe they can only buff barrage so much before it affects the single target rotation. Then they can only buff AE so much before it messes with the aoe rotation.

I wish they just gave the mage bombs to each spec, and turned that spot in the talent tree with either altered the respective bomb or was something new entirely. Then barrage could work as the reset/conserve for both aoe or single target, and NT would be the "spender". Or I guess they could make NT cost charges.

I tend to think for the past couple of days that Arcane returns to what it already was before the end times of HFC anyway, a spec that works well on specific cases that burst is needed, but, it's kinda not a very general-purpose spec. Legion would want to avoid that and I see steps towards that direction but I think the effort fails so far.

I think the whole spec-progression thing is a failure and I don't see it going forward after Legion. We never needed spec-progression, it's an overdoze of personal progression since the game is already heavy enough on character progression with gear and achievements. People should be able to respec flawlessly, but, hopefully the catch-ups might be potent enough to prevent a problem (not very likely though).

A problem at the moment is that Fire is so easy to play and it's so well equipped with utilities that it makes it unfair. Even frost now becomes a more complex spec most likely. I tend to conclude day by day that spec-progression Lore is great, keep it, but give players all 3 specs simultaneously with the same progression, it's really not going to hurt the game much.

[Vlper]

With todays changes I'm not really sure what they want Rune of Power to be on arcane.

It only lasts 10 seconds so it seems like nothing you'd use as a CD you use when in burn phase, but doesn't have any kind of cooldown (10 seconds) and has 2 charges so...do you just always have it available and use it during each burn rotation? Seems like a waste if so.

Anyone know if you can Presence of Mind it? Maybe you can just pop that at the start of your burn and work in an extra Arcane Blast?

[Imnick]

It still has a 45 second recharge alongside its 10 second cooldown. This change may merely have been to prevent you from accidentally placing two at once.
In fact given that WoWhead didn't report it at all, it may simply be a datamining error. I usually treat anything that looks that silly as such.


I don't think the spell actually experienced any change this build, except the addition of "Max 2 charges" to the tooltip (which isn't a change, just a clarification of how it already worked).

[Deleted]

I see no change. It can not be casted with Presence of Mind. I think the 10sec cooldown was already there.

- - - Updated - - -

Presence of Mind specifically gives only two instant Arcane Blasts, not all spells.

[trm90]

I thought I was going crazy playing Arcane on the PTR proving grounds, but I'm also having issues conserving mana. Does this get easier with higher ilvls and/or the artifact? I can barely make it past wave 5 of endless PGs. Even with Words of Power I still don't feel like I'm getting enough AM procs to keep up. It's quite frustrating.

That said, I disagree that it feels flat - the spec stills packs a punch, and there's obviously a higher skill cap than Frost, which is fun. AE is doing surprisingly high damage for me. Quickening has the potential to be immensely fun if mana becomes less of an issue and we don't have to constantly dump ABs (I don't see anyone ever managing a max Quickening stack though :P)

[Deleted]

I thought I was going crazy playing Arcane on the PTR proving grounds, but I'm also having issues conserving mana. Does this get easier with higher ilvls and/or the artifact? I can barely make it past wave 5 of endless PGs. Even with Words of Power I still don't feel like I'm getting enough AM procs to keep up. It's quite frustrating.

It's pretty crappy during conservation phases. I had to have up to 1 or 2 arcane changes to not drop low on mana giving an extremely low DPS at those points and that's pretty bad on regular fights that last longer than a few seconds. It's an extremely good spec for levelling with single target burst though because now the Rune of Power change gives a very potent cooldown on top of Presence of Mind burst on top of Charged Up (but levelling does have a lot of downtimes and the conservation phase isn't felt much).

I'll test now how it is on my slightly better gear of 836.

Nope I still have to go around 2 charges max.

[whisperingsage]

I don't understand how arcane is going to work as a spec if so. Especially when the prepatch hits, since we won't have our artifact, though I suppose it doesn't really have anything that particularly helps mana gain. Given that, I don't understand how arcane will do any better at max in legion, unless we're able to get a ridiculous amount of mastery, but there's nothing preventing that on the PTR...

I really think they should lower the mana cost of blast and the mana restore from mastery, so at least a conservation phase can happen. Though I suppose they could balance it so a three stack conservation is fine, but that could have long-reaching effects.

[The Archmage]

I don't understand how arcane is going to work as a spec if so. Especially when the prepatch hits, since we won't have our artifact, though I suppose it doesn't really have anything that particularly helps mana gain. Given that, I don't understand how arcane will do any better at max in legion, unless we're able to get a ridiculous amount of mastery, but there's nothing preventing that on the PTR...

I really think they should lower the mana cost of blast and the mana restore from mastery, so at least a conservation phase can happen. Though I suppose they could balance it so a three stack conservation is fine, but that could have long-reaching effects.

I think tuning is still under heavy progress for Arcane.

It's harder then other specs because it was designed to be the "the facto" spec on pure ST, pulling ahead on every other dps in the game with proper usage, at the expense of everything else (AoE, movement, etc...).
Now with Legion they are trying to make it so that every spec can get an average performance on every aspect of the game, which requires big changes for Arcane...
I expect heavy mana costs changes in the upcoming builds

[Deleted]

with Legion they are trying to make it so that every spec can get an average performance on every aspect of the game, which requires big changes for Arcane...

That's not what they do exactly. If they did that it would kill Arcane because the whole point of its existence as a design is to not be average on single target. Listening to Hazzikostas and thinking about it, what they want to do is to bring the specs closer but still keep certain differences, e.g. Arcane being better at single target than other specs.

At the moment, and I'm not certain because we may be missing something on how to play that spec, that goal doesn't seem to have been reached because only on very short bursts that last for a few seconds Arcane seems viable, mainly for levelling.

They overdesigned it I believe. There would be little drawbacks in giving the progress of artifact power and relics to all specs simultaneously. The spec lore progression would still remain and the balance of utilities wouldn't have to be extreme.