With the Onyxia patch hitting either this week or next, we stand on the cusp of arcane’s third or fourth facelift. Honestly I’ve stopped counting, poor girl’s had more tweaks and fixes done than a ret paladin.
In case you missed it, the tweaks are as follows:
- Arcane Blast buff can now stack to 4, increasing mana cost by 175% per application.
- Missile Barrage now has a 40% chance to proc from Arcane Blast, and causes Arcane Missiles t0 cost no mana.
- Arcane Blast buff only lasts 6 seconds.
Alright, not that we’re all up to speed here, let’s start talking consequences.
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, these changes render arcane dead even with the standard fireball spec. On a patchwerk fight, considering perfect play and BiS gear, arcane is actually 1% ahead.
Realistically speaking, there is no appreciable difference. Fire is better at movement and AoE, arcane has way higher burst potential and can change targets far faster.
In other words, which one you choose to play is the one you want to play.
A bright, fantastic day for mages everywhere! Except frost mages.
In theory, anyway.
I’m one of those old fogeys who really liked arcane back when it didn’t really have a true rotation. I mean, it sort of did, in that you cast Arcane Blast anywhere from one to four or five times, then used a finisher, either AM or ABarr, depending on MB procs.
The arcane of today is pretty much set in stone. You stack up the ABlast buff, then hit AM, regardless of MB procs. A rotation, if you will, but an immutable one.
Alase fore thee, olde arcane, Ie hardley knewe thee.
I suppose sadness here is pointless; the arcane I mourn died before the world first kill of Yogg-Saron.
These new arcane changes buff up today’s version of arcane. The immutable ABx4AM rotation has changed not at all, it is simply more potent.
Blizzard had aimed to do several things with this arcane tweak, only one of which they’ve been successful with.
Buff arcane to fire’s levels? Check.
Create two rotations (3xAB and 4xAB) to give arcanists a burn mode and a not-so burn mode? Woops.
Make ABarr the clear choice for when arcanists have to move? Oopsie.
Right now, arcane being able to match fire is contingent on being able to use the ABx4 rotation for all of a given fight. To put it another way, ABx4 is equal to fire, ABx3 is not.
In order to remain competitive, arcane must be able to maintain a rotation of ABx4.
Currently, it can. The 175% mana is not quite high enough to prevent an arcane mage in a raid group from using the ABx4 rotation, but still high enough to require the mage to pay very close attention to their cooldowns.
It is on the very precipice of being unplayable. A mana increase of, say, 190% per stack would outright kill arcane as a viable raiding spec.
What Blizzard wants to do is create a situation where arcane mages move between the ABx4 rotation and something that consumes less mana when there’s less mana around. That way, a skill gap is created between those mages who mana dump and mana conserve at the right times.
However, to do this, arcane’s damage cannot be balanced around either extreme.
Take hunters. If hunters were balanced around always being in Aspect of the DPS, then they would be underpowered as they must spend time in Aspect of the Not DPS.
On the flipside, if they were balanced around always being in Aspect of the Not DPS, they would be horrifically overpowered.
The sweet spot, therefore, has to be somewhere in between.
This has not yet been done with arcane. Honestly I expect there’ll be more big changes in 3.3.
Moving to ABarr.
ABarr fell out of favor when it got nerfed harder than ret paladins and DKs combined. To be blunt, it sucks. It’s terrible.
And now, all of a sudden, the AB buff duration gets nerfed to make ABarr the clear choice for movement, whilst ABarr receives absolutely no buffs to make it actually worthwhile to cast.
Interestingly, it will be this change that creates the skill gap for arcane mages.
Moving is a fact of raiding life. It has to be done. Combined with the rather stringent six second AB buff, the mark of a good arcane mage will be how efficiently and correctly they can move so that an MBAM is always their finisher.
Hilariously this means that arcane is now the worst possible spec to be for heavy movement fights, when it was, by far, the best less than a year ago.
We’ve come a long way, dearest arcane.
“Aspect of the DPS” and “Aspect of the Not DPS” LOL I’ve no idea what they’re called either.
I’m a non mage but I did once recently try and figure out how Arcane is meant to cast with my brother who wanted to try it.
We kind of figured that it only works for heroics and super short fights. Not so good on long fights.
Did make me feel better when I do the daily with some mage doing insane dps though 🙂
I’ve recently changed my mage into Horde and was planning on starting to raid with him. However I wasn’t looking too much forward to “having” to specc fire to be a viable in raids. With these changes I will be able to keep to the play style I prefer.
Creds to Blizzard for managing to make two raid speccs pretty much equal!
I was so pleased at the Arcane changes, then after reading the truth, you just rained on my parade. 😦
I haven’t been in Arcane since 3.0 and level 70, but is Arcane Barrage REALLY that bad? Because that spell was all kinds of awesome then.
Now my mage is 80 and I have to decide whether I want to use Fire or Arcane for groups. If I’m solo, though, I’ll stay Frost for the awesomeness it is.
Yeah, ABarr really is that bad.
Essentially, it sports an absolutely pitiful amount of damage for a relatively high mana cost.
It’s used for movement or for when you can only cast instants. That’s it.
ABarr’s damage is not that high, but you should see it in respect to what it is: an instant cast, and for that 1.5sec global cooldown it costs it’s rather good (at least better than AM without ABarr). Its spellpower coefficient is the highest of all instant spells (71.429%, other instant spells only get 42.857% of your spellpower).
The higher MBarr proc chance of AM however renders both ABarr and AM (without MBarr proc) useless in a rotation.
As an instant cast while moving, or as finisher, it still deserves a rightful place in an arcane mages toolbox.
I don’t know what makes you think that ABx4AM is the one and only rotation. In fact there is a whole family of possible arcane rotations, with a wide choice of DPS and DPM rotations (http://www.frostnova.ch/tachyon/blogArticle.do?action=view&topic=3.2.2+Arcane+Mage+Changes) that can be tweaked with on the fly, depending on your mana pool or burst damage needs.
ABx4AM isn’t even a optimal rotation, there are other rotations that have better DPS *and* better DPM, same with ABx3AM before 3.2.2.
My point is that, in order to be competitive, arcane MUST be able to consistently make it to at least ABx4. If arcane has to use ABx3 (or even less) on a regular basis, then the spec is still inferior.
Let’s assume that the average arcane mage has 20% haste from gear and talents, then the ABx4(AM|MBarr) rotation burns 318 mana per second.
My mana regeneration in combat in a raid was slightly over 350 mana/sec last time I checked, and that was without using mana gems or evocation, so you shouldn’t run into mana problems even when using this rotation.
In my simulation (3000 spell power, hit capped, 50% crit, 20% haste) ABx4(AM|MBarr) yields 5518 DPS at 17.34 DPM, whereas the mana preserving rotation of chaincasting AB until MBarr procs, then use MBarr regardless of how many stacks you have, yields 5560 DPS at 21.9 DPM, burning 254 mana/sec, way below what I regenerate during combat.
I’d say our mana problems are gone, and arcane should be able to keep up with fire easily.
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The AB debuff definitely falls off much faster–smooth recasts are needed for sure. But, I can honestly say it was a nice buff to DPS. I used to hover around 4500 on single targets in 25 mans–I was challenging our #1 DPS in 25 Ony last nite(phase 1) with about 5700dps. Needless to say the AoE of phase 2 whelps put me over 8K for the fight.
But, I have to agree with Euri–we slammed VoA after and with the added movement, my dps was at or below the threshhold before the patch. So ABarr is definitely still viable in mobile fights, but if you can stand still–ABx4+AM= sexysauce.
I suggest that they make a minor tweak to Abarr. Perhaps if they made it so that it does the damage it used to do, if you have 1 stack of ABlast. I haven’t tested out the changes too much, except I recall only 3 seconds to cast the next ABlast.
Generally when in arena I stand still for as long as possible, using a IV/AP/Trinket macro to burn someone down fast. Thankfully I have a disc priest with me that gets their attention, otherwise standing around that long is suicidal.
In PvE, in areas where you do have to move such as out of void zones, stacking to 4 is going to be impossible. Perhaps they should buff up our haste?
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