Arcane Mage Guide
Some of our class writers have written up their first impressions of the 12.1 class changes and tier set reviews. We've listed all of them below.
Some of these articles were released earlier than others, and may be out of date now.
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Devourer DHVengeance DH
Balance Druid
Aug EvokerDevastation EvokerPreservation Evoker
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Fire Mage
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Retribution Paladin
Shadow Priest
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Arcane MageFrost MageBrewmaster MonkHoly PaladinProtection Paladin
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Arms WarriorFury Warrior
Protection Warrior
Class Changes
Here are the Arcane Mage changes on the Patch 12.1 PTR.
Developers’ notes: We’re making some adjustments to Mage defensives with the goal of improving Mage survivability as a whole and slightly reducing the power of Glacial Bulwark.
New Talent: Improved Warding – Damage taken from area of effect attacks reduced by 4%.
Improved Prismatic Barrier has been updated – Now grants an additional charge of Prismatic Barrier, in addition to its previous bonuses.
Temporal Realignment has been updated – Now immediately heals 20% of your health and heals an additional 30% over 6 seconds.
Developers’ notes: We’re redesigning Arcane Mage’s Apex Talent to provide a more exciting visual moment and a greater impact on your talent build and rotation. Arcane Pulse has also been redesigned to focus its identity as a significant area damage event and a way to quickly regain charges in AOE.
New Apex Talent: Prismatic Bolt
Rank 1: Arcane Barrage has a 1% chance per Arcane Salvo stack consumed to trigger Prismatic Bolt. Prismatic Bolt devastates the target with overwhelming energy, dealing Arcane damage to your target and reduced Arcane damage to nearby enemies. Damage reduced beyond 5 targets. Generates 4 Arcane Charges. Not affected by Arcane Blast talents or effects and does not scale its damage or mana cost with Arcane Charges.
Rank 2: Prismatic Bolt has a 50%/100% chance to grant Clearcasting. Arcane Missiles damage increased by 15%/30%.
Rank 3: Arcane Salvo grants an additional 1% chance to trigger Prismatic Bolt. Arcane Barrage damage increased by 15%.
Arcane Pulse has been redesigned – Cast time reduced to 2 seconds (was 2.25 seconds). Radius increased to 8 yards (was 2 yards). Now has a 15-second cooldown, generates 1 Arcane Charge for each enemy struck, and costs 10% of base mana. No longer has its cast time, radius, mana cost, or cast speed affected by Arcane Charges.
Touch of the Archmage has been removed.
Developers’ notes: We are continuing to iterate on Mages’ defensive capabilities based on PTR playtesting and feedback. We are unifying the functionality of Improved Barrier to give all specs an additional charge of their Barrier spell, plus one “rider” effect that is spec-specific. Additionally, Arcane Mages have a new, unique defensive talent in their Specialization tree called Refractive Images.
Improved Prismatic Barrier has been redesigned – Prismatic Barrier gains an additional charge and further reduces magic damage taken by 5%.
Developers’ notes: We love the orb-slingin’ playstyle of Spellslinger Mage, and want to preserve the distinct difference in game feel between the two hero specializations. However, Orb Mastery overtaking Clearcasting usage and pushing Arcane Missiles out of the rotation has shown to have a negative impact on overall talent selection and excitement. These changes are aimed at keeping Arcane Orb as a powerful highlight of the Spellslinger playstyle, while allowing Arcane Missiles to remain an integral part of Arcane Mage’s identity. Additionally, the new defensive talent Refractive Images is intended to provide Arcane Mages with a unique survivability benefit to complement Frost’s Cold Snap / Glacial Bulwark, and Fire’s Cauterize.
New Talent: Refractive Images – 10% of damage you would take is instead dealt over 8 seconds. Casting Mirror Image increases this effect to 30% for 15 seconds.
Orb Mastery has been redesigned – Casting Arcane Orb fires 2 additional orbs at 50% effectiveness.
It is true. Arcane Mages have gotten a lot of attention for our biggest problems this PTR. I am overall very happy with the developers responding to feedback here and the defensive buffs are an overall net gain. The 4% avoidance isn't insane but it's something and Improved Prismatic Barrier was nerfed in strength, but the extra Prismatic Barrier charges are VERY welcome. Refraction sounds, on paper, good; however, they have stated that the next season will have a lot of rot damage which means Refraction will be significantly less effective if that's true, but these are the kind of defensive buffs that we desperately needed.
Prismatic Bolt is cool as it's a big magic ball of energy that hits enemies in a big AOE. It replaces Arcane Blast when it procs and does a ton of damage. It feels a lot like Glacial Spike for Frost Mages. That said, there is a significant hit to our burst by losing Touch of the Archmage as our Apex talent, perhaps more than intended given where other specs are at the moment. There is also a decade-long animation bug for Arcane Blast that has propagated to Prismatic Bolt, causing it to break the animation whenever you queue certain spells after it and obviously this happens all the time. Usually we don't care as Arcane Mages because most of Blast's animation happens before the cast finishes and Blast is a very lackluster animation to begin with.
Arcane Pulse's redesign positions it as a counter to Arcane Orb but it still replaces Arcane Explosion and just isn't really that impressive. Rotationally this doesn't change anything, Pulse will still be used the same most likely, just with a 15-second cooldown. Meanwhile, Orb Mastery is a great change and has Spellslinger feeling a lot less boxed in rotationally; though Arcane Barrage conditions will still be dictated by Polished Focus and Intuition unfortunately.
Tier Set
Here is the Season 2 Tier Set for Arcane Mage.
Arcane
2-Set Bonus: Arcane Missiles fires 1 additional missile and deals 20% increased damage.
4-Set Bonus: Each wave of Arcane Missiles increases the damage of your next Arcane Blast, Arcane Pulse, or Prismatic Bolt by 5%, up to 40%.
This doesn't really change much beyond wanting to make sure you use Arcane Missiles before using Prismatic Bolt to optimize its damage. For those who haven't paid attention, the 2pc here was something they removed from Amplification (used to be 3 last expansion) and the 4pc is basically just 1 stack of Nether Precision (also used to be a talent last expansion). While uninspired, I can't be mad, I have been begging for them to go back to The War Within with Arcane Mage and this is a positive step towards that.
State of Play
I want clearly reiterate here, I am happy that the development team is trying to address meaningful points of feedback. However, I am providing my reactions and feedback here and there are some concerns I have with 12.1 Arcane Mage.
First, Prismatic Bolt is tuned to be too strong on PTR and the removal of Touch of the Archmage has resulted in Arcane no longer having a reliable burst window, and our damage is fully out of our control on PTR currently. It is a welcome addition to the rotation overall, but it shouldn't be stronger than our burst windows. Yes, I understand that burst is being reigned in this patch, however, for Arcane, burst is the spec's identity and one of the last recognizable Arcane Mage things that we have left given that Shimmer has been neutered, Chrono Shift and Displacement removed, and Arcane Explosion has been a DPS loss to use in any scenario for years. Due to these changes, Arcane on PTR is very much a "hit what lights up" spec and while that's probably an improvement over Season 1, it very much still feels like a shell of what it was less than a year ago.
Refraction is a welcome attempt to address the passive effective hit points problem, but it is clearly not going to solve the problem. If the design team is successful in making rot damage the type of damage to worry about in Season 2, this could end up as a useless effect with even some possible negative drawbacks as it can offset a lot of damage outside of the window healers prepared to heal for, even when Refraction works correctly. I am very happy with the second charge of Prismatic Barrier and Refraction is certainly better than nothing, but I cannot help but wonder (along with every other Mage) why this wasn't just a Stamina or Damage Reduction talent in the class tree as that is what we obviously need to compete with other classes defensively. It is especially perplexing since they opted to go this route for Windwalker Monks who had similar defensive issues in Season 1.
I wouldn't be doing justice to the community if I didn't also point out that we have been giving this feedback since Alpha about the Mage defensive situation and it was just completely ignored for Season 1 and in Season 2 it is improving, but still not enough to truly level the playing field. We lost 3 active defensives and 4 passive defensives, Mirror Images in particular had more than 30% uptime; you can't just replace all of that with a second charge on Barrier. It defies logic that there are classes that have more damage reduction without any talent points spent, than Mages with every defensive talent point taken. Given how slow the response has been here, it very much feels like Midnight was intentionally designed for Mages to fail, especially when you compare the defensive capabilities of classes at the top end of defensive power.
