[ARCANE] Legion Beta Megathread

[The Archmage]

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.

Yeah, i miswrote. By "average" i meant that they are trying to allow all specs to perform "decently, even good" on all aspects, instead of being completely locked out of something (like AoE has always been for Arcane).
This also means that the gap will be reduced: it will always be the best single target spec, but most likely it won't be so with the huge margin that there is now.

[Deleted]

hello !! any1 has tested the arcane rebound? i hit 4 targets and he did 0 damage, is bug ??

[The Archmage]

Still no changes to Arcane stuff it would seem... Man, it's gotta be harder than it seems to properly tune it. Which does not surprise me to be honest, between the 3 mages' specs it's the one that got the most changes, but still i was hoping to see something.

[tgrape]

Still no changes to Arcane stuff it would seem... Man, it's gotta be harder than it seems to properly tune it. Which does not surprise me to be honest, between the 3 mages' specs it's the one that got the most changes, but still i was hoping to see something.

The only time Arcane gets changes is when Blizzard wants to nerf something. Spec still has major issues and bugs that have been around since the start of alpha. The spec has pretty much been abandoned by the blizzard devs.

[Deleted]

Still no changes to Arcane stuff it would seem... Man, it's gotta be harder than it seems to properly tune it. Which does not surprise me to be honest, between the 3 mages' specs it's the one that got the most changes, but still i was hoping to see something.

The only time Arcane gets changes is when Blizzard wants to nerf something. Spec still has major issues and bugs that have been around since the start of alpha. The spec has pretty much been abandoned by the blizzard devs.

I haven't written off any spec yet. Fire does not look as god-like as people might want you to believe in the early content I've seen, unless I don't play it optimally which is true, but I haven't seen a mage dominating all other classes yet. Frost also has chances.

This is still Legion and the design goal is to not screw over any player that picks any spec.

Arcane has a chance still.

[The Archmage]

I haven't written off any spec yet. Fire does not look as god-like as people might want you to believe in the early content I've seen, unless I don't play it optimally which is true, but I haven't seen a mage dominating all other classes yet. Frost also has chances.

This is still Legion and the design goal is to not screw over any player that picks any spec.

Arcane has a chance still.

I totally agree. It's too early to call off a spec entirely. With all the changes that are still coming there is a good chance that we will see some fixes to the problems the spec currently has, aswell as some nice tuning going around.

We shall see

[Deleted]

Honestly I wish they'd either up our in combat mana regen through our mastery or baseline. that or reimplement the artifact trait that increases our mana pool by 100/200/300%, I think that would be a good fix for the current mana sustainability problem.

[Deleted]

Honestly I wish they'd either up our in combat mana regen through our mastery or baseline. that or reimplement the artifact trait that increases our mana pool by 100/200/300%, I think that would be a good fix for the current mana sustainability problem.

It's likely they want to destroy arcane for a while. I was getting signals that they were trying to do that in the past when a spec was played a lot because it would be rare to be a coincidence. This time around though they can't overplay that because of the spec gating.

[The Archmage]

It's likely they want to destroy arcane for a while. I was getting signals that they were trying to do that in the past when a spec was played a lot because it would be rare to be a coincidence. This time around though they can't overplay that because of the spec gating.

I don't think they intend to do that, even if Arcane turns out to be less polished than Fire or Frost. WoD king is still Fire after all, since at Mythic gear level it's only slightly less on pure ST and immensely more powerful when AoE is involved.

The problem with tuning Arcane is that it has always been a niche spec: monstrous on static pure ST, weak in all other situations. Legion tries to change this niche themes, so that all specs can, in addition to their core functionalities, perform at least decently in all aspects of their role... which is probably harder to pull out for Arcane, which has always been the nichest between all specs of the game.

[Deleted]

WoD king is still Fire after all, since at Mythic gear level it's only slightly less on pure ST and immensely more powerful when AoE is involved.

That's not really true. Fire's potency was clearly an accident Blizzard did not anticipate since it is based on capping the crit chance against the prismatic crystal. It is also lower DPS on shorter fights, on longer/progression fights it is clearly unreliable because of utility and ring syncing issues and arcane can be high AOE on very short fights.

- - - Updated - - -

It is also an irrelevant factor since because it was mainly useful on very short fights with crit capping against the prismatic crystal, it wasn't used as much as you might think. It was mainly a trend of the top guilds for a few weeks and when fights became even shorter they went arcane most of them (frost->arcane->fire->arcane).

[stevenho]

Fire is currently topping logs on 4 bosses with 5th being a tossup.
So yeah, quite a strong spec.

[Deleted]

Fire is currently topping logs on 4 bosses with 5th being a tossup.
So yeah, quite a strong spec.

Top logs are irrelevant if one doesn't do the bosses in those durations.

[stevenho]

It was mainly a trend of the top guilds for a few weeks and when fights became even shorter they went arcane most of them (frost->arcane->fire->arcane).

Here is where you are wrong.

[Deleted]

Here is where you are wrong.

That was a very rough approximation. It was not done like that by an individual player or your guild. But it is clear almost nobody played fire for a while, then we had a trend of fire mages on the most progressed guilds when someone figured out he can crit cap against the prismatic crystal and then we had another clear trend of returning to arcane mages when someone killed a Zakuun in a few seconds with mage stacking.

[stevenho]

Critcap against crystal was attainable with proper gemming even before november valor, after that it was a non issue. And fire mages are dominating those 4 bosses for the last 8 months.

[Deleted]

Critcap against crystal was attainable with proper gemming even before november valor, after that it was a non issue. And fire mages are dominating those 4 bosses for the last 8 months.

We were talking about trends and dominating specs, not niche players. Besides, 4 bosses out of 13 are not a majority. The hardest boss in the instance is consistently done better with Arcane, and the weirdest thing is, they perform well even on very long durations (unlike in other fights, though I guess the explanation there is that on the last phase most others need sustained damage while there is movement while Arcane do most of their damage on the short windows nobody moves much).

[trm90]

What kind of 5-man template are you guys thinking? AO + Resonance to quickly dump a huge barrage on trash packs, with Erosion to cover the ST damage (seeing how it's pretty easy to stack to 8 if you get lucky with AM procs)?

For raids I'm thinking WoP, IF/RoP depending, Charged Up, Erosion, and Overpowered. Swap out WoP for familiar/PoM and Overpowered for Quickness once we get a much larger mana pool.

I'm just basing this off PTR and "feel"crafting though :P I have no idea what M+ or mythic raid arcane mages have been running.

[stevenho]

We were talking about trends and dominating specs, not niche players. Besides, 4 bosses out of 13 are not a majority. The hardest boss in the instance is consistently done better with Arcane, and the weirdest thing is, they perform well even on very long durations (unlike in other fights, though I guess the explanation there is that on the last phase most others need sustained damage while there is movement while Arcane do most of their damage on the short windows nobody moves much).

I'm not saying it is best for everything, what I'm saying is that there is no such thing as "returning to arcane" because the bosses fire excelled on 8 months ago it still excells on.

[Deleted]

What kind of 5-man template are you guys thinking? AO + Resonance to quickly dump a huge barrage on trash packs, with Erosion to cover the ST damage (seeing how it's pretty easy to stack to 8 if you get lucky with AM procs)?

For raids I'm thinking WoP, IF/RoP depending, Charged Up, Erosion, and Overpowered. Swap out WoP for familiar/PoM and Overpowered for Quickness once we get a much larger mana pool.

I'm just basing this off PTR and "feel"crafting though :P I have no idea what M+ or mythic raid arcane mages have been running.

Did you get good numbers with those setups or is it theory? I get a sense that most players have abandoned thinking about Arcane at the moment and mainly head to fire or rarely frost. But, I'd expect tuning more than not getting tuning.

[The Archmage]

Did you get good numbers with those setups or is it theory? I get a sense that most players have abandoned thinking about Arcane at the moment and mainly head to fire or rarely frost. But, I'd expect tuning more than not getting tuning.

I still think the way they reworked the spec is pretty cool. For it to be played as much as the other 2, imho, will heavily depend upon how well the spec can perform in its critical lackings.

If they manage to make Arcane the ST beast it always has been (even with a lesser margin this time) and to give it also some decent mobility, AoE (both burst and sustained), i think the spec will be represented