Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists
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Affliction Warlock
Dragonflight Arcane Mage in Review
The Dragonflight talent system was a huge success for Arcane, not only did we carry in some stronger points for Arcane in the prior talent system, but also some Covenant abilities and Legendary effects from previous expansions that were successful like Radiant Spark and Siphon Storm. The Dragonflight talent system also opened Arcane up to share utility with Frost and Fire who each brought things to the table that Arcane sorely needed in previous iterations of the spec. The rework in 10.1.5 was an additional godsend as it brought probably one of the best two feeling buttons defensively, Mass Barrier and Ice Cold. Hopefully this trend goes forward into The War Within as there is plenty of room for improvement of the spec, from bug fixes to talents that need attention. This article will focus on exploring the areas for opportunity and break down some of the problems the community has had within what currently adds up to Arcane.
The Talent System
Arcane’s AOE was overhauled completely with one single change, by reworking the failed experiment that was Orb Barrage. The way Orb Barrage worked was that consuming Clearcasting reduced the cooldown of Arcane Orb by 2 sec. Additionally, casting Arcane Missiles 15 times fired an Arcane Orb toward your target. Clearcasting buffed Arcane Missiles count as 2. The new paradigm switched it to work like the Legion Legendary Mantle of the First Kirin Tor. This brought a ton of fun to the spec’s AOE kit – however it is almost as random as something can possibly be, which presents problems of variance that can be a bit sink or swim on enjoyment. I can’t articulate just how much an improvement this ability is on AOE gameplay, but something more deterministic might help the damage pattern feel a little less like gambling.
Despite some successes early on in patch cycles, driven by initial patch tuning, Arcane has not had much success in finding any permanent footing in dungeon groups. Even when Arcane is on par damage-wise in dungeons, as is the case at the time of writing this, it just does not have Cauterize. Having only 1 specialization get a Cheat Death mechanic does terrible things for Mage spec balance; in a very real way the worse a player plays defensively the better automatic defensives like cheat deaths become, and there are situations, most commonly in M+, where unpredictable one-shots can happen often. Having a way to obtain this powerful defensive would be good, preferably an Arcane version – Frost deserves to get in on this as well.
Arcane has a capstone talent problem; some talents completely eclipse others. Apart from Cascading Power, the bottom of each branch of talents is exceptionally strong, especially Siphon Storm and Radiant Spark. However, the talents above these vary in strength, the weakest being Illuminated Thoughts. This talent is 2 points and changes the 1% proc chance for Clearcasting to 1.1%, it is not even noticeable. Concentration also suffers from the fact that it acts as a shield for Clearcasting instead of a Clearcasting proc itself – you need both it and a Clearcasting proc for it to work correctly. Arcane Harmony is strong, but because of these talents that lead to it, it gets left behind by stronger passives like Enlightened and Prodigious Savant as usually these are what compete with Arcane Harmony and Cascading Power. Siphon Storm being extremely powerful also has a knock-on effect that makes the Arcane Opener a full 30 second window, which no one has found enjoyable all expansion long. Radiant Spark is also still a problem when trying to teach new players how spell-queueing works and having to prescribe macros or Weakauras solutions to the unique problems it presents to the rotation.
Along with capstones, some mid-tier talents are not working out to do anything, with near 0% pick rates. Then there are talents that are 100% pick rate which the community almost universally agrees there is need for change on. Among the talents not being picked at all we have Rule of Threes which is just not good in the current design of Arcane and may never really offer anything in any version of the spec that is fun. On the other end of the spectrum, Nether Tempest is more of a chore in its current iteration, and lacks depth as a spell in the toolkit. The effect of it could be baked into Touch of the Magi and no one would really notice much of a difference. It would help fill an important niche if Nether Tempest became a multi-target DOT spell that could give Mages an option on spread-cleave fights. Making it an anchor for Arcane Missiles to cleave would be especially cool. Touch of the Magi also has an issue of precision and timing that often proves to be a difficult thing to use efficiently. The 12 second duration is probably too long, or the spell should just do the increased damage immediately. Shadowlands had a much better feeling balance, making the explosion happen after 8 seconds.
Another issue within the spec talent tree is that we have multiple utility spells that are essentially impossible to use or justify taking in PvE content and some that are just not justifiable in any content. Presence of Mind is a given since it is the only gate to the very powerful Siphon Storm capstone, and Slipstream is a gate to Impetus which is also a very good single target/cleave talent. Foresight serves no purpose as a talent; standing still for 10 seconds happens frequently enough, but needing to move for 4 seconds straight is relatively rare. We have other options that fill this role already: Slipstream and Ice Floes. To top that off, Presence of Mind already gives us an option with which to access the capstone tier Enlightened/ Prodigious Savant talents. Improved Prismatic Barrier makes an already good defensive better, and Supernova provides a knock-up that does a very minor amount of damage. Both are just redundant within the overall kit; we have enough defensive power with our default Prismatic Barrier, and we have Dragon’s Breath and Blast Wave, but more than that, we simply do not have enough talent points to justify taking these talents in PvE. Blizzard stated during the 10.1.5 PTR that they would free up points in the spec tree to make utility easier to get, but it did not really play out. The ideal solution would be no throughput in the class tree and no utility in the spec tree. The underlying issue is that when there is throughput there are seldom any options, everything ends up just depending on tuning of talents and damage profiles.
Temporal Warp and Time Anomaly
This is the part of Dragonflight, Shadowlands, and Legion that I enjoyed least as Arcane and as a Mage; therefore, it deserves its own section here. Temporal Warp causes a lot of problems for Arcane: gearing issues around the limited value of Haste due to running over the GCD cap during Bloodlust, making the specialization more of a 5-minute spec than a 1:20 spec, and, most importantly, Temporal Warp causes social friction for all Mages, but especially Arcane, when navigating Time Warp usage in dungeons. The alternative, Time Anomaly, is random and at times downright frustrating. I believe both options in this node need to be fully removed for Arcane Mages to not be hamstrung by the question of when Bloodlust is going to happen in the future.
Arcane Blast reaches 750ms cast time, the minimum GCD, at 104% haste with 4 Arcane Charges. After this, the value of haste begins to drop off for Arcane within a specific burst window. Below you can see the effect of stacking Temporal Warp or not, the highest peak is with Bloodlust and Temporal Warp, and the 4th peak is with just Temporal Warp. As a result of this stacking, we end up multiplying the value of our potions, trinkets, and cooldowns by a large amount, and burst windows where you have Bloodlust and Temporal Warp up are much higher value than those without. Thus haste becomes the least valuable stat after you hit 104% during this time. The unfortunate side effect of this powerhouse window of burst is that our non-Temporal Warp buffed burst windows feel slow and relatively weak, it also subjectively feels bad to gear away from haste as expansions march on; haste is, after all, the only stat you really feel in gameplay – but that is a problem for a different article. This has no real solution so long as Temporal Warp stacks with Bloodlust and the haste cap on Arcane Blast is so easily achieved.
The extreme above is basically double damage, and the disparity is compounded further by the fact that dungeons are usually more than two Bloodlust usages. For Arcane that can also mean using Temporal Warp somewhat inefficiently between Time Warp usages, simply because you need to use it so you have the cooldown back up for the group’s preferred Bloodlust timing. This pushes us into what is essentially a 4:30-5:30 cooldown cycle for very large damage output. In this case the widely suggested community solution of making Temporal Warp its own button would help to alleviate the pressure, however that would be a very boring button to have, and would likely just be put into a macro with Arcane Surge, Combustion, and Icy Veins. Being a 5-minute cooldown spec has a lot of downsides in dungeons where you usually need damage more often than that. Where the most important metric is saving time, having to pull around an Arcane Mage’s cooldowns when they are only huge every 5 minutes is unappealing for groups in many dungeons.
Lastly, regarding Temporal Warp, there is an unhealthy social friction that exists between Mages and group leaders; Temporal Warp makes me deal double damage, it is my cooldown, I need it to be a competitive damage dealer, however I am held back by my group leader who wants the group’s strategy to include Bloodlust at a specific point in the fight or pack/boss in a dungeon. This has never been fun gameplay – I occasionally have to lament a fight because I know the group leader’s perspective is reasonable and I understand the reasons why they want to hold Bloodlust, however I know it will also make me feel bad, harming my damage and ultimately my fun. I want to use Bloodlust on pull for every boss and use Bloodlust on cooldown (without regard for my groups cooldowns) all the time, it is a night and day difference in my enjoyment whether that happens and I cannot really overstate enough how bad the feeling is when my gameplay and effectiveness is at odds so frequently with the group’s strategic use of a group cooldown.
Enter Time Anomaly, which should be a savior from the problems above. Time Anomaly has a consistency to it despite appearing fully random, it operates on the deck of cards logic to draw from a 16-card deck once every 2 seconds, 1 of the 16 cards in the deck contains a Time Anomaly proc. The proc selected has a few rules preventing overlaps of some effects so that you cannot get an Arcane Surge proc during your normal Arcane Surge cast (though you can unfortunately get it in the moment just before casting Arcane Surge, losing the TA proc essentially). The big issue for this is that while it works decently well in constant combat situations, it falters heavily when periodic downtimes occur in fights as Time Anomaly has no brakes; it draws cards and procs once every 32-seconds regardless of whether the boss is available to hit or not. Because of the randomness in proc timing, the talent is largely considered high risk, and I have had dungeon runs with it where the proc was extremely mediocre and not giving me what I wanted or needed. Because of the rules of Time Anomaly procs, during Bloodlust you can also encounter the earlier issue discussed about 104% haste. Another widespread pattern in encounters is also that if you want to save Bloodlust, you want to do it for a reason, and Temporal Warp tends to win even when Time Anomaly should, because that reason requires maximized damage during Bloodlust.
So, the problem in this talent node is 2-fold, one causes social friction, complicates and injures haste scaling, and leads to long gaps between power spikes which can be undesirable in certain types of content, and the other which is feast or famine, and does not escape all the problems that make Temporal Warp frustrating to use. My dream world would simply be these getting removed, Mages getting an overall buff to compensate, and Arcane in specific getting some of that power infused into all cooldown windows evenly. The talent spot on the tree could instead be used for Cauterize access which would also do a lot towards freeing up choice in the Class tree.
Bugs and Quality of Life
There are some places that I would really like Blizzard to focus first on fixing some key bugs that cause major quality of life issues for Arcane. The first of these is that if you have multiple stacks of Clearcasting, your primary proc, and use Arcane Explosion, the remaining stacks stop benefiting from many of the Clearcasting benefits when used on Arcane Missiles. This functionality has been broken since Shadowlands started, along with the default spell alert not working with multiple stacks of Clearcasting like it used to in Legion, prompting people to make Weak Auras to mimic what Blizzard once had as a baseline. This is also seen in Conjure Mana Gem, which requires an add-on and macro to create when you have a Mana Gem already in your inventory, functionality that was fixed in Wrath of the Lich King and works better currently in Classic Wrath. It is very strange for players to rely on add-ons for quality of life that an older client used to provide.
This is not to say we are not grateful for the bug fixes Arcane received over the course of Dragonflight. Concentration providing Nether Precision now, Cascading Power no longer causing Clearcasting to bug (in the same way as described in the above paragraph), Arcane Echo being fixed to spawn on the enemy debuffed by Touch of the Magi instead of the Mage’s target, Arcane Surge being fixed to correctly deal reduced damage to targets beyond 5, and more as well, all supported Arcane becoming a better spec with better quality of life. These felt very good for the community and continuing this trend of bug fixing several times throughout the expansion boosts morale and lets us know that feedback and bug reports payoff.I am hoping this continues in the future and includes the above two bugs as those are very hard to not encounter for new and old players alike, and are very disruptive to gameplay.
Arcane’s Mastery: Savant has many effects, one increases the damage of your Arcane spells that aren’t Arcane Blast or Arcane Barrage. Unfortunately, however, it operates off an inclusive list of spells that may or may not get updated when new implementations happen. An example of this is that Arcane Surge and Shifting Power do not currently benefit from the mastery stat as a result of not being on the list. It would be nice to have this list expanded to reference all Mage spells as well, as it causes a devaluation of many of our utility spells like Dragon’s Breath, which for Fire, is frequently a part of its rotation due to the damage benefiting from much of Fire’s kit.
Hero Talent Wishlist
Arcane is getting access to the Hero specializations Sunfury, shared with Fire, and Spellslinger, shared with Frost. The third Mage Hero spec is Frostfire which is shared by Frost and Fire. Sunfury is the name of the Blood Elves who served under Kael’thas – kind of a strange name for the player character who fought Kael’thas and his Sunfuries – it is at least tied to Warcraft lore properly. My hope with Sunfury is that it emphasizes burst in the spirit of Kael’thas by enhancing spells like Arcane Surge for Arcane and Combustion for Fire. Another idea for Sunfury would be to focus on procs as well, giving added power to Sun King’s Blessing for Fire and giving Arcane the Mage Arcane 10.2 Class Set 4pc as a parallel spec mechanic to buff. This could also apply to Spellslinger, with Frost getting cleaving Brain Freeze. Spellslinger is a somewhat uninspired name. It exists in many RPGs as a base class of the wizard archetype; Spellslingers in other RPGs tend to wield wands and pistols aggressively rather than focusing on spell casting. However, given how comically left behind wands have been for casters in WoW, I don’t expect that to be a focal point for the sub-spec. My hope here is that Spellslingers will focus on cooldown resetting and funnel, as both Arcane and Frost have been known for that over the years.
My wish list would have these themes changed and the Hero spec names renamed. Spellslinger is dissatisfying – there are many examples of Spellslingers in WoW that are weak nothing mobs. Spellslinger could be Lich and give the theme of Kel’Thuzad, or an ArchMage like Jaina and Antonidas bringing in storm-based spells or some of those arcane cannons we got to see Jaina use in the Battle for Lordaeron cinematic. There are many titles and names in WoW that better fit the fantasy for a hero Mage sub-specialization that would get me more excited than Spellslinger. Sunfury works a bit better within lore, though it is tied to a faction and Blood Mage would have been a bit cooler. it is unfortunate that Death Knights got San’layn, given the Mage theme there as well. I think Frostfire is also about as uninspired as can be, and although I am the Arcane writer, I cannot help but hope they change that to be more lore inspired like Elementalist. “Frostfire Fire” or “Frostfire Frost” Mage sounds terrible. The theme for bringing back Frostfire Bolt is fine, but the name could be better. When the system was originally announced I had high hopes that it would be something like Master of Space between Fire and Arcane, Master of Time between Frost and Arcane and Master of Elements between Fire and Frost.
Without seeing more trees and understanding the design intent behind the trees Mages get, it’s hard to provide more feedback, but I cannot help but look over and wonder if they ran out of names with cool factor like “Rider of the Apocalypse” or deep lore ties like “Keeper of the Grove.” It really feels like Blizzard missed the mark here for Mages, and hopefully, when the actual tree is presented, they can turn it around to support the naming convention, or they work on making it something more exciting. I could think of several notably neutral Mage titles with WoW ties: Archmagi, Netherwind Wizard, Runemaster; Blizzard could have even got funky with it with things like Necromancer, Stormcaller, or Blood Mage; there is support for all of these in lore.
About the Author
Hello, I’m Porom a Mage player in <Divergence>. I have been playing WoW on and off since release and am an active staff member in the Altered-Time discord. I have played at the top end in the earlier expansions of WoW but now I prefer to keep my raiding time short and efficient. I stream my guild’s raids and some dungeons every now and again over at twitch. You can also find me in the Arcane Dream discord.
