Arcane Mage in Midnight, What Went Wrong?
Arcane is a specialization that has failed to find solid footing over the years, receiving significant reworks in every expansion. Midnight was no different, however, many of the changes have not been well received by the community from a gameplay design perspective and the defensive changes and post-launch tuning has left the spec in a mostly non-viable state for competitive gameplay. The shift to Midnight was particularly jarring coming from The War Within which is widely heralded as one of the best versions of Arcane ever.
From Overpowered to Outclassed in Every Way
Arcane's defensive profile collapsed going into Midnight and players felt it immediately. It is evident in death stats throughout Midnight's lifespan thus far that Mages are a liability. Historically, Mages have been a defensive powerhouse since Shadowlands, and even before then Mages were one of the few classes with access to a cheat death. These facts garnered a reputation for being overpowered over the years and I do not dispute the defensive pruning Mages got and I even discussed it on Liquid Maximum's stream prior to Manaforge Omega's launch in The War Within (TWW). I want everyone reading this to understand that I agree, Mage was too strong defensively and needed to be reigned in.
The issue is that they went too far. From the class tree, they removed the damage reduction effects from Mirror Images and Greater Invisibility, removed Shifting Power and Mass Barrier for actives, and Diverted Energy and Tempest Barrier for passives. Not to mention the litany of talents built around Mirror Images that no longer work correctly in the Spellslinger hero tree, and nerfs to our defensive spells' effectiveness directly. To compound these issues further, Shimmer was also nerfed heavily and Ice Floes was removed. Those who play competitively know that high mobility specs generally take less avoidable damage than low mobility specs. We were given a very small compensation buff with an increase of 4% passive magic damage reduction. Very simply, this is just laughably not enough. Mages have no increases in Stamina available and are the lowest health class in the game, even with defensives active we end up with lower effective HP than many other classes' passive state.
As a result of these compounding issues, Mages die or have to consider damage patterns in a way that no other classes in the game have to think about. When we had Mirror Images passively reducing all damage taken by 15% for 40 seconds every 2 minutes, this was not an issue. However, we don't anymore. A stamina increase in our class tree would go a long way towards helping to resolve our issues and bring us more in-line with other classes. However as this problem is multi-faceted, the solution should be too. Shimmer nerfs were completely unnecessary and our utility around it that was given to Devourer Demon Hunters should be restored, there's no reason we both can't get barriers from blinking. Lastly, on this specific issue, it is important to note that this has been an obvious issue that the community has given loud and consistent feedback on since the start of Midnight Alpha. The community has felt completely ignored and this kind of mishandling of community goodwill and of product deliverables seems to be the norm for Midnight.
The Vibes are Rancid
The class tree was in a great state prior to Midnight, and there was little to no changes really needed to keep players happy. However, now the tree is filled with talents that don’t provide any meaningful value (or instead reduce the value), forcing players to spend points simply to unlock the real throughput and utility deeper in the tree and then giving them nothing interesting to do with the remaining points. To illustrate these points: Frost Conditioning is a talent that Fire and Arcane can not benefit from at all, and likewise Mana Confluence is completely useless for Fire and Frost, while being mandatory for Arcane. We have to spend 4 points to get a 1-minute cooldown, 6-second long, 40% movespeed increase. Most of our array of "Improved" talents are all seeing zero-percent pickrates because they actively make baseline functionality worse instead of improving on it. At the end of the day, the sheer volume of throughput related nodes and lack of inspired/useful nodes essentially makes it impossible to make any noteworthy choices, much less ones that feel good.
Hero talents exacerbate this structural problem. While Spellslinger and Sunfury were pitched as parallel fantasies, the interactions with the Arcane core tree are outright contradictory. Spellslinger’s orb‑centric kit struggles with proc frequency and Arcane Orb reliability; Orb cooldown reduction via Spellfrost Teachings, which was hilariously nerfed last week in a bugfix, is simply not strong enough for Orbs to be available in pace with Clearcasting. This is also contrasted in the spec tree by spending a bunch of required gating points on Arcane Missiles only to not use it due to Orb's strength as Spellslinger. I love the Orb Mastery talent, but it NEEDS support to not feel awful in execution. Mana tuning is another recurring complaint within the community. Arcane Salvo, particularly with Polished Focus and Intuition, is so prescriptive and so expensive that using it correctly can run you out of mana quickly and halt your rotation entirely. This is especially painful because Blizzard explicitly removed Aethervision last expansion - the mechanic they said players disliked for being too prescriptive - only to replace it with something vastly more rigid. Arcane Mages are not stupid, they correctly view this as a baffling design regression.
On the opposite end of this, Sunfury isn't as dependent on Intuition for damage and can ad hoc the rotation a bit more, resulting in a much better gameplay loop. However, due to tuning, Sunfury is just completely non-viable in content. While it is only about 5% behind in single target (keep in mind that Arcane is currently one of the worst single target specs), it is more than 20% behind in most cleave/AOE situations. Arcane Missiles, which Sunfury uses over Orb due to lack of talent synergies, just does not keep pace with Arcane Orb in AOE, resulting in Sunfury builds just not keeping up. This problem is further compounded on by needing to spec into Aether Attunement in cleave/AOE, which means you simply do not have the points remaining to justify picking up Arcane Pulse. Comically, Sunfury was very strong on tuning close to the release of Midnight, it only needed a slight nerf to bring it in-line with other specs more, however Blizzard nerfed it like they didn't want anyone playing it (which, if that was their intent, excellent job).
This is also all a stark contrast to TWW, which saw one of the most popular and beloved versions of Arcane with a heavy emphasis on planned rotational high points that paid off. It is also irony that the justification for these changes was to make specs more new player friendly, but Arcane is a harder spec to play now than it was in TWW at its most baseline level. Another point for TWW was that we actually had spec-hero combinations for Mage that felt like a real choice and option available, Spellslinger very often saw gameplay in keys and Sunfury in raid, but this wasn't limited and players found success with both hero trees in various content. By comparison, in Midnight, you have one singular build for Arcane that is even remotely viable and, realistically, Mages as a whole only have one hero-spec combination that is viewed as competitive with Spellslinger Frost. The fall from grace between TWW and Midnight was substantial, I don't think Arcane Mages have had a backslide in design this bad since Legion changed over to Battle for Azeroth.
The only saving grace for Arcane from a vibes perspective now is that it is tuned so poorly that people can avoid having to play it if they choose.
Where do we go from here?
Hopefully backwards; I don't think anyone would complain if Blizzard just reverted all the Midnight changes for Arcane Mages. That said, Blizzard won't do this, but what they need to do is nothing short of a rework. First, we need defensive parity with other classes and specs. This is a core viability issue and anything else that comes after this will be useless without this. I should not be sitting at 75% the effective health of another player when we both have done nothing to prepare for damage simply because of class selection, while simultaneously not having enough actives to cover damage intake and neutralize that difference.
Secondly, for Spellslinger, Polished Focus and Intuition should simply not be designed the way they are, Intuition should just be reverted to the TWW version which was completely beloved across the entire community, and Arcane Orb needs to be available whenever Clearcasting is for this build around Orb Mastery to work and be enjoyable to play. For Sunfury, whoever did the tuning for this needs training on statistics and data interpretation; there is absolutely no reason this should be in the state it is in currently. All in all, we just need our spec options to actually be viable and fun options.
Lastly, Blizzard needs to reassess its approach to how it enacts its' philosophy in class design. TWW Arcane was already a very easy to play spec despite people obsessing over my "Barrage Helper" weakaura. Many Arcanes played just fine with nothing but the cd manager after it was added, and 1-2 weakauras for functionality that the old UI did not support. A reduction of one or even two of the four active defensives they pruned would have removed us from being overpowered without making us feel like a liability. Midnight is a perfect example of throwing the baby out without the bath water when it comes to the Arcane Mage redesign. Combined with the other issues in the game related to bugs, system rollouts, and tuning, this should act as a giant red flag to anyone considering picking up World of Warcraft. Players do not have crystal balls, we cannot see into the future, yet every bit of Midnight feedback given from Mages was a cry for help to not be left behind on design, especially where defensives are considered. The response from Blizzard has been silence and neglect in tuning, and we're past the point of asking for help and are just at the point where most people are quitting or have already rerolled mains for the expansion. If I were asked to give a new player a recommendation on whether or not to pickup Arcane Mage in WoW currently, I would tell them to go play Final Fantasy 14.
Update: Tuning was announced on May 22nd to improve the damage output of Missiles and Arcane as a whole. These were woefully inadequate and completely missing the point of the grievances the community has currently. This is salt when you're thirsty, especially when I already gave Blizzard an accurate playbook for how to fix the hero talent discrepancies in a way that would flaten the field entirely between the two hero trees.
