In Which Fireball Makes Me Angry

It took less than a month to get the gear together to legitimately try a FB/TtW build. (Yes, I still refuse to capitalize that middle t.)

I’ve got 4pT8 now, and am only 1% shy of the hit cap, though it doesn’t seem to matter. A thousand casts of Scorch on a test dummy and no misses. I’ll be trying the farm content this way, see what happens.

I had heard a FB spec was random in it’s DPS, but man… there is nothing that can prepare you for DPS swings that huge. I’ll be poking along at 3k DPS, when lady luck smiles on me and suddenly I’ve dealt 100k damage in ten seconds.

Lemme put it this way. Spamming scorch and using HS procs as they come can grant me DPS anywhere from 2k to 3.5k.

It’s like that one D&D game where I one shot a dragon, then killed a party member accidentally, cut off my own foot, and impaled myself all in the same round. Admittedly the dragon one shot was a coup dentist (or whatever that french word is), but still, it ain’t easy beating 65AC as a level 6 monk.

D&D nights that cause the DM to weep aside, all this respeccing has instilled in me a deep sense of anger that my beloved arcane tree is being so rigorously ignored.

The nerfs to Arcane Barrage I can understand. Weakening it in PvP successfully managed to get arcane PvP back to a non-competitive status (woops, heh, let some bitterness seep through there), but on the flip side resulted in ABarr being ostracized completely from a PvE rotation.

Which, believe it or not, us arcane mages are mostly fine with.

Fine by us to have it be our “movement only” spell; I mean, ABarr is basically Fireblast’s transvestite nephew at this point.

We don’t mind only really using ABlast and AM in a raid rotation; it’s simple, it’s elegant.

What we have a problem with is this notion among the developers thinking arcane still has that whole “mobile DPS” niche covered.

Well… it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. You know which spec can produce the best DPS on the move? Why, it’s fire, of course! ABarr cannot compete with the likes of LB/HS, and fire’s only going to get a LOT better at it when 3.2 let’s them…

Us.

Let’s us fire mages cast LB on multiple targets.

Arcane mages don’t mind ABarr hitting like a baked kitten, what gets those mage knickers in a twist is the delusion that arcane is somehow better than fire when running around.

Speaking of delusions, the best part is where a blind eye was turned to arcane’s scaling issues.

I know the whole “scaling” thing gets thrown around a lot, even GC himself had to comment on it once, called it a catch all complaint or something.

So all of you people using “we have scaling issues” as the default reason why your class is teh faile, please stop, because it makes those of us with actual scaling issues look silly.

And boy oh boy does arcane ever have scaling issues.

You know what the best part is?

We (we here used loosely to refer to theorycrafters) have known and feared that arcane would suffer from very serious scaling issues since freaking beta. Blizzard assured us that would not be a problem.

And here we are, on the cusp of 3.2, with very serious scaling issues.

/facepalm

Y’see, arcane has very few talents that scale, and those that do provide very tiny bonuses. Then, of course, those very few and weak scaling talents got the everloving crap nerfed out of them. C’mon, man, Arcane Mind and Mind Mastery were already relatively weak talents, was it really necessary to drop kick them down some stairs?

Oh hey, which reminds me, why is the mage tier gear so focused on fireball spec? The stats on T8 was already biased towards fire specs, as were the set bonuses, and T9 is even worse! (Or better, I suppose, if you happen to love fire.)

Sadly, I can understand exactly why.

Blizzard wants to homogenize gear as much as possible. They want to be in a place where every (reasonable) stat is desirable, varying little from spec to spec. Within a specific class, anyways.

For instance, DPS Paladins, Warriors, and DKs should all want basically exactly the same type of gear. Some stuff, like Strength and crit, are fairly universal stats. Stuff like Armor Penetration varies in desirability from spec to spec within a class. Unholy knights want nothing to do with it, whereas Blood knights love it.

Mages operate the same way, with critical strike rating offering very little to two entire trees, and offering a LOT to one.

Because of that, stuff like improving Molten Armor’s spirit to crit conversion ratio is pointless for arcane and hilariously useless to frost, while being immensely awesome for fire.

Then there’s the T8 bonus, which is bad for arcane, bad for frost, and pants wettingly awesome for fire… and so on it goes…

The real question is where to go from here.

One option is to simply have different gear sets to offer different stats and bonuses. The three trees already like different stats from each other, so having multiple, more optimal gear sets for each spec (and naturally, set bonuses).

Blizzard doesn’t like this option, as they want less loot, not more. Though ideally this would only be different tier pieces, so it wouldn’t cause boss loot bloat. But ehh, not likely.

The other option would be to simply adjust arcane and frost to like the same gear. Basically, crit needs to become a lot more attractive to those two trees in order to strike equality.

Or, Blizzard could simply say “yeah we know, but meh…”

It’s pretty obvious which path Blizzard is opting for, which is just kinda depressing.

Why bother going through all the effort of making arcane raid viable if you’re not going to bother maintaining it?

It’s not like arcane is bad, it’s just not improving, while fire just gets better and better from patch to patch and tier to tier.

Oh well. Dual spec for the win, I guess.