Burden of Power Bug
There has been a lot of buzz in the community regarding some bugfixes Blizzard has been doing for
力量的重担 and
白炽耀焰, how they are generated and consumed to be specific. Burden should be generated after you generate your 6th
法术火焰宝珠 stack, buffing your next ability (
奥术冲击 or
奥术弹幕), when this is consumed, you should get the Incandescence buff which makes your next Arcane Barrage generate 4
奥术充能s and spawn 4
陨星 which do a bit of damage at the target's location.
What has been happening?Historically,
力量的重担 could be double dipped by queueing an
奥术弹幕 after
奥术冲击 when you have the buff, to "fix" this, Blizzard changed it so that Burden can no longer be double dipped, but still allows you to queue the spells and generate and consume
白炽耀焰, such that Blast into Barrage with Burden would buff your Blast, then Barrage would trigger
白炽耀焰, refunding your
奥术充能s and generating the
陨星s in one smooth motion.
Why are things screwed up now?There was a very low-impact bug which allowed players to stack
法术火焰宝珠 quicker by queueing
奥术冲击 after
奥术弹幕 on
法术火焰宝珠 stack 5. Yes, there are two separate buffs with almost the exact same name, the differentiator is the 's' at the end. This bug was a rather large dps loss to actually exploit and really did not need any immediate fix and only really served to make testing easier on Target Dummies. Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom, decided to push a fix for this negligible bug on live servers and have completely messed up how
力量的重担 works.
What is the bug they created by trying to fix the above?奥术弹幕 could no longer proc
力量的重担 at all. If you got to
法术火焰宝珠 stack 5, then Barrage, you'd go to stack 6, then refresh stack 6 endlessly if you never casted Arcane Blast. Burden could only be activated with Blast and you could not Blast into Barrage at any stack count or you would end up with 0
奥术充能s. In a general sense, players could psuedo avoid the issue by never using Barrage to generate Burden, however even then there are other issues. If you left combat, then re-entered combat, Burden would not proc at all if you were at 5 Spheres when you left combat. You can see why this would be extremely jarring to players.
Why Were People Upset?
This marked yet another change to how fundamental spells work for Arcane which has been a weekly issue since the start of beta. It's clear Blizzard has had ideas here they are still trying to execute on, however, it's disheartening when they captured lightning in a bottle 2 months ago and kept developing.
Despite having an extremely satisfying gameplay loop for both Spellslinger and Sunfury, Blizzard found a way to change everything for the worse, removing
节能施法 from
裂片风暴 for example, knee-capped Spellslinger's ability to compete with Sunfury AND the fun of playing it. At this point in time, Blizzard could revert the changes from the last 2 months and aura nerf Arcane to be in-line with below-average specs currently and players would probably be happier.
As of writing this, it appears they have fixed the bug above, however, the functionality currently still does not enable someone to Blast into Barrage on Spheres 5 without losing your
奥术充能s and not spending
力量的重担 on the Barrage. Overall, it is far more unintuitive how these spells work now than the Nether Precision double dipping ever was and they're dead-set on removing that next patch despite the entire community begging them not to.
Arcane is fun right now, but it feels like we are fighting tooth and nail with Blizzard to retain that fun because it doesn't match their vision of frustrating, unintuitive, and friction-based gameplay that they seemingly want us to be stuck with.
