PTR Build 22864 - Arcane adjustments

[gurudox]

here's few logs.

So, at best, it's a sidestep in playstyle with the possibility of really great or really poor DPS, depending on RNG. At worst, it's a downgrade in DPS and more headaches for mana management and cooldowns. Live gives us more consistency if we know how to manage our Quickening stacks.

Seems to me if these changes are implemented as-is, it's a confirmation that they're being made with Nighthold tier and spec legendaries in mind specifically. But if that's the case, it's unlikely to feel like a significant buff to most players.

[Unreal]

From my own experience, burning down all your mana at pull takes quite some time, putting your ap and evocation pretty far off sync. Having higher bursts and your cds closer aligned to each other are probably the only benefits of the current changes.

I'm really curious to see how these changes would perform with the nighthold tier sets. With a shorter cd on evocation, we can burst more often. Basically, this is probably a pretty decent buff once you have the nighthold sets. Though as for right now, the spec becomes less enjoyable to play.

[Komma]

Seems like there's a whole lot of confusion behind why they're making this mana cost change, so I'm cross posting this from a reply I made on the the MMO-C Arcane thread.

With the latest Savant hotfix and current Mastery stacking, it is possible to reach the 65-70% levels of Mastery. This converts to a damage bonus of 90-95% per Arcane Charge. This is dangerously close to the 100% mana increase per stack. In other words, Arcane Charges is starting to fail at making spells more expensive per damage dealt. This will get worse as we enter Nighthold with higher itemlevel and slight increase in secondaries.

If we continued on this path, any Mastery buff effect or trinket would make it so that higher Arcane Charge spells are more mana efficient than 0 Arcane Charges. Once that happens, the ideal DPS rotation will involve standing around and waiting to cast AB4/AE4 instead of resetting stacks with ABar. That's a disaster.

To create some room for rotational design, they increased the mana cost. Going from 100% to 125% mana increase per Arcane Charge easily adds room for another 50% worth of further Mastery gains. The issue of "it's a nerf" is pretty easy to fix - just change the base coefficient so that Arcane Blast overall does more damage at every level.

What we should do now is obvious: test things, do some math, fix some spreadsheets and sims so we can confirm how much of a nerf or a buff this change is. Then, tweet these numbers to devs, so that they can use it to adjust the base coefficients, such that it ends up being what Celestalon said it should be in the first place: a significant buff.

[Komma]

Oh, and some napkin math. I'm quite sure they messed up the coefficients here and ended with a net nerf for us.

AB/AM contribute to ~60% of overall single target damage, which means the buff is a maximum ~6% gain before considering any mana cost hikes.

With the mana cost hike, the mana cost of Arcane Blast at 4 Arcane Charges (Abbrev. as AB4) has increased by 20%, implying a Damage-Per-Mana decrease of 20%. Currently, we see ~60% of ABs being casted as AB4s. Doing some napkin math where we assume roughly the same amount of mana consumed by AB before and after the change:

Code: Select all

Let P be the percentage of ABs casted as AB4 after the mana cost change. old_mana_consumed == new_mana_consumed (40% [old frequency of AB0-AB3] * 7.5% [Average base mana cost of AB0-AB3]) + (60% [old frequency of AB4] * 15% [Base mana cost of AB4] == ( (1-P) [new frequency of AB0-AB3] * 9% [New base mana cost of AB0-AB3]) + ( P [new frequency of AB4] * 18% [New base mana cost of AB4] ) P ~= 33.33%

So the estimate is that only a third of ABs will be casted with 4 stacks, down from ~60%. Assuming 40% mastery:

Code: Select all

new_damage / old_damage = ((66.67% [AB0-AB3 frequency] * (1 + 1.5 * 80%) [Averaged '1.5 Arcane Charge' multipler]) + (33.33% * (1 + 4 * 80%))) / ((40% * (1 + 1.5 * 80%) + (60% * (1 + 4 * 80%))) ~= 83.47%

Roughly a 12% loss of Arcane Blast damage. At 30% overall single target contribution right now, that means the overall damage loss from Arcane Blast is ~5.0%. So most of the buff is already gone just from lost Arcane Blast damage.

[gurudox]

Thanks Komma, for pointing out some things we hadn't really talked about yet in this thread. Considering your point about mana cost vs. damage on 4-stack AB and mastery scaling, I almost feel like Blizzard ought to just reduce everything across the board - base damage, base mana cost, multipliers AND cast time (just keep them all in-line with each other). Then, we can stay active for the entire encounter while still putting up equivalent numbers, and the spec doesn't feel as broken while we work our way around the clunky mana management. ABC, always be casting!

[Melondwarf]

Can we just all chip in with some money and put Komma in a parcel and send him off to Blizzard HQ to sort all this out?

[gerbodis]

https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/status ... 1022031872" target="_blank

Seems like they may up the damage increase before tuesday

[Zyjax]

Komma has indeed pointed out some things I hadn't seen before. The buff to single target damage is nice but they made the buff useless when they increased the mana cost. I don't think the mana cost would be a problem if we got a better damage buff though. I'd really hate to play a permanent burn phase, so I understand why the mana cost addition was needed, however we still lack damage to compensate for it.

On Twitter they said they'll push it further. I am eagerly waiting for satisfying results.

Let's put it this way: Fire Mages are doing very good. Arcane Mages are doing less than average and are struggling to reach satisfying results. Frost Mages are underperforming greatly and I'm not sure the buffs are going to be enough but I'll wait to try it out.

[Ilm]

My hope: +15-20% more damage for AM and AB and at least 10% more damage for AE, and a 5% scaling back on Mana costs.

My realistic expectation: another +10% for AM and AB and nothing for Barrage or AE or mana costs.

We'll see what the devs cook up for us by Tuesday!

[Milou]

Highly doubt they'll lower mana cost based on their statement, so expect just an increase from the 10% AM/AB (maybe ABarr? it's already pretty strong though). The concern would be they don't go far enough, they were so far off on their first pass from their stated goal of "significant" buffs to arcane.

[Jhazz]

For me the biggest issue with these changes is that they completely negate the limited viability that we had in Mythic+.

Straight nerf to Arcane Explosion hits us hard. But more than that is the even higher likelihood that we'll be out of mana between packs. An idea for this that a few of my guild mates and I had would be the introduction of conjured food, specific to mythic+ mode, that allows far more rapid regeneration of mana while out of combat. Thoughts?

[gurudox]

I could only see m+ viability being an issue until we are able to get our Nighthold tier. Increasing AM proc chance by 5% and reducing CD on evo will likely help us keep our mana topped off better in a quick moving environment like higher level m+. I suppose it could be an issue for players who aren't interested in raiding, but this time around you can get set bonuses from Raid Finder.

[Skrewpa]

Before they clarified that this was supposed to be a buff, I thought it was just a preemptive change to prepare for increasing obtainable mastery levels. Good to know they actually intend it as a buff.

[Orcanum]

Looks like they settled on just a flat 17% damage buff to AB, AM, and AO.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/20335228" target="_blank

Edit: Nevermind, they snuck the Arcane Charge cost increase into the notes after I posted this.

[Mythlos]

Arcane Blast now costs 600% base mana up from 500% base mana.

So you can cast 5 Arcane Blasts for the same mana as you could cast 6 before.

So you are dealing 5/6 of the damage you did before for the same mana at 1.2x the time.

So they buffed our damage by 17% (~1/6) to compensate.

So we now deal 97.5% of the damage we did in 80% of the time. So far it looks like a straight buff.

If we consider AM proc potential as well as Quickening stacks, I'm not sure how much of a buff it is, if that.

[Ilm]

Arcane Blast now costs 600% base mana up from 500% base mana.

So you can cast 5 Arcane Blasts for the same mana as you could cast 6 before.

So you are dealing 5/6 of the damage you did before for the same mana at 1.2x the time.

So they buffed our damage by 17% (~1/6) to compensate.

So we now deal 97.5% of the damage we did in 80% of the time. So far it looks like a straight buff.

If we consider AM proc potential as well as Quickening stacks, I'm not sure how much of a buff it is, if that.

A buff, barely, I think. I mean, how would this shake out for fights longer than, say, two to three minutes? Wouldn't this just be better burst / sustain until OOM, and OOM happening sooner? Seems to still screw over anyone without legendary bracers and/or kilt, and more highly valuing those items over other legendaries even more so than before. So anyone with no legendaries or ones other than one or both of those two seem to be in a somewhat worse spot in 7.1 than before, while those with such legendaries are better off given the relative power increase of these two legendaries, considering our mana problems actually are getting worse in 7.1 tomorrow.

Haste also still sucks for us, and things like Shard of Exodar still aren't great, although maybe better a bit if paired (as it should be) with Arcane Power and an evocation.

I am also really concerned.about Mythic +. Arcane Explosion is where it was at before. Now, that's far less sustainable with no buff to Barrage, Resonance, or Rebound.

I'm pretty unhappy with the changes. Getting the wrong attention is arguably.worse than getting none.

[Ponkster]

I'm absolutely blown away with the arcane orb damage increase by 17%

Do they think this somehow makes it worth taking over quickening?

I can understand overpowered, it has a niche that might put it into our builds later on or with synergies.

Orb just doesn't compete; why did they even bother buffing it. It would need to give us 20% haste for 10 seconds after use to make it remotely competitive.

[Blownt]

Anyone run any numbers on unstable magic > NT or erosion since inherently those talents will see an increase in value with the changes?

[gurudox]

I'm absolutely blown away with the arcane orb damage increase by 17%

Do they think this somehow makes it worth taking over quickening?

I can understand overpowered, it has a niche that might put it into our builds later on or with synergies.

Orb just doesn't compete; why did they even bother buffing it. It would need to give us 20% haste for 10 seconds after use to make it remotely competitive.

I think Orb, like Overpowered, fills a niche for certain players, but probably isn't the go-to in a cookie cutter spec. Trolls, Orcs, or players with the Exodar legendary ring, can use Orb as a substitute for getting their stacks up to align with burn phases on their racial/ring buffs. I don't know really how it compares DPS-wise, but I do know lots of arcane mages that aren't worried about min-maxing really don't enjoy the way that quickening works - and I don't blame them. It's a pretty boring talent overall, that requires a lot of attention to handle correctly. Orb is visually the most interesting, for sure.

[Komma]

Orb has never been competitive for single target, but was a very strong option for AOE fights. It was used on progression on several bosses (Imperator, and even world first Archimonde), before Nithramus' synergy with Prismatic Crystal muscled it out. The biggest nerf it received was when all AM proc rates were reduced by half (except for Arcane Blast). I don't see an issue with buffing it. That said, buffing the damage doesn't do much because damage dealt was never its strength. Maybe they should restore the AM proc rate it provided.