On the plus side, despite all the problems arcane explosion is brokenly strong. I was beating all our fire mages on mythic mannoroth just saving rune of power for imps and spamming 4 stack explosion.
arcane mage pvp is so fun.
double blink + reverse blink
The spec is nice and its mechanics are rather interesting imho, in both PvE and PvP environements.
At the moment it just needs a signicative boost in its performance, that's all. I leveled to 110 both an Arcane mage and a Fire one, and the difference is disarming: Fire can pull multiple mobs and destroy them before they even reach you, and when they do reach you you have so much instant casts that can you nuke them on the move pretty much all life long, you have Dragon's Breath that does insane amounts of damage and control every few seconds... It really is SO much better that it got me worried at this point. Release is very close and if things go live the way they are now we will see the whole Mage community play a single spec, which is really detrimental because it will force Blizzard to take drastic actions, either by crazy buffing the other 2 so that Fire ends up behind or by nerfing it to the ground.
Either way, it's not a positive ending.
I think the current values are balanced for the prepatch. I would say it's successful given that the damage is pretty similar across the three specs.
I assume they'll tune the values when Legion releases to make it appropriate for the expansion. Depending on their goals across classes, I expect Fire to be nerfed or Arcane to be buffed. Mastery scaling into Legion is horrible and that's clearly going to be unacceptable.
It's real hard to try and play arcane with a net negative conserve rotation. I suppose it's just something to unlearn, given how long it's been ingrained to stay above 90% while conserving, but seeing it drop 5-10% with each rotation just doesn't feel good. With the mastery change, I figured we wouldn't be constrained to high mana, but I didn't think it'd go the other direction and force us to low mana. There isn't even a good set of talents to bring back a more stable conserve phase, though Words of Power does something, I suppose. Hell, Presence of Mind, Charged Up, Quickening, and Arcane Orb all cause us to burn mana faster, and it doesn't seem like we need the help at the moment.
I thought they made the mastery change so Arcane could burn outside of cooldowns, but if you're always leaking mana, it doesn't seem like any micro-burns are possible.
At the moment, Mastery scaling is completely broken. To a certain extent, i feel like is the most difficult thing to tune about the spec, since how much mana you get and how fast you regen it massively impact your damage capabilities.
Too few (like it is now) and it's horrible, too much and you become a living god able to burst on demand and actively outdamage anyone when dps is most needed.
Also, we need to consider that they have to balance the scaling with improving gear. It's REALLY messy.
That said, i fully expect a couple of massive tweaks to Arcane before Legion goes live.
Do you have anything to back that claim? I run 3 simulation comparisons, one on 750, the other on 850, and the other on 900 ilevel of the same gear set and the 3 specs came nearly identical in relative difference between them.
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The Arcane APL is pretty broken at the moment though that doesn't prove anything.
It doesn't really prove that it's harder to sim though. Just that nobody took the time to create a working profile, yet.
Could very well be. Still, the facts remain valid. At the moment:
1 - it's one of the few specs out there without a reliable sim tool;
2 - its effectiveness is barely comparable to Fire.
After playing around with it on live I really do like the playstyle of the spec. It just feels real undertuned. They could change nothing about mana and just bring the damage up and it'd be fine.
Fire is just so broken right now, I do 30k more as fire enchanted mastery.
Fire is just crap and bugged for Gorefiend since Ignite will break all the things. I went Arcane for the Slow and the control. It was better than I thought.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...-done&fight=31
Also the whole thing "your mana means damage unspend" is a nice thing to keep in mind.
Last edited by mmocdc260e8e2a; 2016-07-25 at 04:52 AM.
Also does arcane familiar randomly despawn constantly for everyone else after boss fights or randomly when out of combat?
Ye it did in beta a while ago.
Yep, that little thing disappears at his leisure it seems. SO annoying.