Hello mages!
We have another round of Arcane Mage changes hitting the Alpha today, and we want to do a check-in on the state of Arcane Mage and how it relates to our stated goals.
As mentioned in our initial post, our goals for our Alpha Mage changes were:
- Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
- Simplify rotational complexity.
- Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
- Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.
We feel that as of right now, we’re approaching these goals with Arcane, but there have been a few outliers that we’d like to address.
ClearcastingIn this alpha build, we are officially untying Clearcasting’s proc chance from mana spent. While this did add interesting texture to the landscape of Arcane’s rotation, it created some discrepancies we weren’t comfortable with-- namely how challenging generating Clearcasting could be in AOE versus single target where mana spent varies drastically.
After this change, initial tests show proc rates marginally decreased in single target but increased in multi target-- which will assuredly have some knock-on effects across Arcane’s kit. We’ll be monitoring discussion and making adjustments as necessary to Clearcasting’s proc rate and its associated talents.
Clearcasting Out of CombatIn the latest build, we’ve removed Arcane’s ability to generate Clearcasting out of combat with spells like Arcane Explosion. We do not feel that spamming Arcane Explosion outside of combat to build Clearcasting pre-pull or in-between packs in M+ was an interesting or compelling part of Arcane’s gameplay, but it felt necessary to smoothly begin damage.
To remedy the loss of this functionality, we made Evocation grant Clearcasting, so that those of you who use it can still reliably acquire Clearcasting on pull or going into your burns. In AOE scenarios, the aforementioned changes to Clearcasting should mean you are more consistently gaining Clearcasting in AOE, so the need to build Clearcasting in-between packs should be lessened.
We will be closely monitoring feedback with regards to this change, so please share your thoughts!
Arcane BatteryBoth Arcane and Fire are seeing some Dragonflight tier bonuses baked into their talent tree in the War Within Alpha. While there was initial excitement around the return of the 4-set effects, we’ve seen a lot of discussion around the gameplay and tracking inherent to the 2-set effects Arcane Battery and Charring Embers.
After some consideration, we’ve decided to remove the 2-set effects to help reach our stated goals of reducing rotational complexity and to mitigate buff tracking. Arcane will see Arcane Battery removed in today’s Alpha build, with Charring Ember’s removal coming in a future update.
Wizened WitAs with many of our active-to-passive talent choice nodes, our goal is to make sure that the more complex option is usually the strongest, but we are making a concerted effort to ensure that the distance between the two talents is not very large. With regards to Wizened Wit, our initial tuning made it substantially better than Presence of Mind-- its more complex counterpart.
This has sparked some interesting discussion, with some parties happy to lose Presence of Mind, while others are sad to see it not be optimal anymore. We’ll be continuing to monitor the discussion, and in the meantime, we are going to be adjusting Wizened Wit to close the gap on the choice node.
Buff TrackingTalents like Arcane Battery, Aether Attunement, and Leydrinker incentivized a lot of buff tracking, something that Arcane Mage didn’t have a lot of before. While we are comfortable moving Arcane’s complexity into the more traditional buff-tracking-space, it is very clear that we overshot the mark, and we’ve taken steps to rein in amount of effects that need to be tracked.
We really appreciate all the feedback we’ve been receiving with regards to the Mage changes, and we hope you keep it coming!