First Impressions of 11.0.5 Arcane Mage
Since the release of The War Within, Arcane has seen a resurgence in popularity, largely driven by the hype during beta over it's redesign, specifically Spellslinger, and, above all else, it being tuned significantly higher than all other specs prior to the expansion's launch, specifically Sunfury Arcane. This popularity has also brought a lot more developer attention from Blizzard it seems and Arcane has been regularly evolving over the last 5 months, mostly weekly.
Early on in Beta there was a major change to how one of our core buffs work,
Nether Precision, which added
Arcane Barrage to the short list of spells that benefit from this buff. This instantly changed the rotation towards double dipping the buff, so when you get
Clearcasting, use it, you get 2 stacks of
Nether Precision, you could then spend one stack with
Arcane Blast, then cast
Arcane Blast again and immediately follow with
Arcane Barrage, because both spells were cast simultaneously, they could both benefit from the last stack of
Nether Precision. This works still as of writing this article and is extremely satisfying to perform, not just because it feels like you're exploiting the game, but because you were excercising some mastery over the spec's toolkit.
At the very end of August, 4 months after introducing the above double dipping mechanic and the community-at-large talking about it in every YouTube video involving Mages, the developers called this a bug and removed it. This immediately had consequences for the rotations that players had been praising Blizzard about for months,
Arcane Barrage was immediately off the menu for Spellslinger which, due to tuning, was already not likely to be played, and also severely cut back on the spells usability for Sunfury as well. The community erupted over this and Blizzard relented stating that they would return at a later time to remove the double dip and replace it with something that retained the playstyle players were justifiably defensive of.
In the last act of this saga,
Burden of Power, which worked identical to
Nether Precision throughout beta, also had its double dipping removed at the end of September (after launch), requiring another rotation change to adapt and adding a litany of bugs that occasionally broke how Arcane worked for multiple weeks after. Thankfully it works decently well now, though it still does not behave the way the tooltip states today.
Fast forward to 11.0.5 and, perhaps much sooner than expected for many players, Blizzard has made good on their word to remove
Nether Precision double dipping, but have they hit the tone right with it's replacement,
Aethervision? Let's discuss a bit further and understand the differences that exist between these effects and what that might mean for the rotations of both Spellslinger and Sunfury.
To start here, let's talk about baseline functionality,
Nether Precision benefits from talents like
Dematerialize,
Leysight, and
Leydrinker (though it is worth calling out here that this has been changed to not work with
Arcane Barrage), but also for Spellslinger, consuming
Nether Precision generates
Arcane Splinters. Essentially, double dipping increased all of these effects by 50% and removing it this will impact the effectiveness of all of these talents, with the exception of
Arcane Splinters, which are getting a compensatory buff in damage and associated procs in the Spellslinger tree, however this still loses some splinters visually.
Aethervision also stacks with
Nether Precision, leading to some potentially complicated conditionals for when you want to Barrage, though this is a broader problem with the spec that
Nether Precision double dipping controlled for in a way that's not obvious. Arcane has a ton of variable modifiers on
Arcane Barrage that all contribute to the math problem of when
Arcane Barrage is worth casting over other spells, particularly
Arcane Blast which hits harder without the below multiplicative modifiers:
Yes, a total of 42x modifier on
Arcane Barrage damage!
Many of these effects restore
Arcane Charges as well which changes the cost-benefit analysis of dropping
Arcane Charges to cast
Arcane Barrage at all. This is also juxtaposed against a stronger
Arcane Blast baseline, but with fewer mods and as a result this leads to a very complex problem of having to reach a saturation point of buffs where the spell is worthwhile to cast. It is an important call-out here as well that double dipping avoided this problem by having a moment-limited time window for taking advantage of the increased power to
Arcane Barrage, thus circumventing the need to compare an array of modifiers and potential saturation points.
That said, my skepticism above may be unfounded and it may come down to
Arcane Charge refunds being the primary driver of
Arcane Barrage behavior, in which case I think the fear of having an extremely complex rotation would be diminished. I think this option could also have some potential for failing in a big way though too, largely because Spellslinger could simply just divest itself of
Aethervision and focus more on
Arcane Blast/
Arcane Missiles, or end up with a rotation that seeks to stack
Aethervision and
Nether Precision in a way that would make the rotation feel clunky.
Spellslinger
Spellslinger is going to be the most impacted with the change above and will likely be in a positive way given that
Arcane Charge generation is currently a big limiter for the hero spec, as is
Clearcasting, which is also being re-added to
Splinterstorm which is a great decision and return to one of the elements of Spellslinger that properly resonated with the community! Generating less splinters due to the removal of
Nether Precision double dipping could look a little less cool in a general sense, however
Arcane Orb generating more splinters on more targets and the extra
Arcane Orb procs from
Spellfrost Teachings proc percentage being increased to 2%, as well as the addition of
Signature Spell should also increase our
Arcane Splinter generation as well, but its unclear what the over-under will be overall. Hopefully the aesthetics are at their peak!
I also hope that the damage % buffs to both
Spellfrost Teachings and
Charged Orb result in the talent being more useful as it's a lot of fun to
sling Arcane Orbs around. Though this is juxtaposed against
Aethervision being added in the first tier of talents, which is already extremely stretched thin. Not only do we
need nine points to leave the first gate properly, but in AOE with how things have been moved around, I think there's a strong chance we end up wanting to take every one of the eleven talents in our first gate which I do not think will be very popular.
Sunfury
Sunfury is going to be a lot less affected by this change, however I think this could shake up AOE talent choices a bit, especially in conjunction with the
Leydrinker changes which have the spell functioning better and in a way that is much more leverageable around cooldowns. The extension of
Arcane Soul,
Ignite the Future being buffed to allow
Mana Cascade to stack higher with the
Mana Cascade bugfix could also change some of Sunfury's stat favorabilities.
In a big way, the new
Arcane Soul spell alert overlay that Blizzard has built in is a perfect fit with the already existing
Clearcasting display, which hopefully gets an update soon as well. You can see pictured below the original purple blob they put in the most inconvenient of all places, but the new one is a familiar pink and in a much less obstructive place:
Conclusion
A lot of this is conjecture today and will come down to APL work, sims, and efforts by the community to solve the new puzzle of how to best optimize our new talent. We'll have to see but I think all of Arcane will see a shakeup from this rotationally and our priorities in stats and rotational choices could shift as a result. My hope is that at the end of the day the playstyle resembles something closer to what we had during beta where Arcane felt extremely mobile, reactive, but had a simple feedback loop that players didn't need a dozen weakauras to properly minmax the potential of the spec.
That said, even if our rotation feels worse or, really no matter what, we're still the best spec with a second-to-none aesthetic and were a Mage so life is good! Proof of this is in the new
Alter Time animation, but also in the
Spellfire Spheres animation bug as well!
