#0 - Aug. 10, 2009, 5:09 p.m.
Q u o t e:
I'm not sure it's possible to get Arcane to within 5% or 1% of Fire, but if we get it close enough then players who just really love Arcane will still be able to play it without feeling they are making a bad mistake.
Did you guys completely forget about Naxxramas? I understand what you’re trying to get at here GC, but we’ve seen arcane and fire specs extremely competitive with one another once already this expansion. It wasn’t too long ago that arcane and fire were very close to one another. Don’t make this sound so difficult.
Well, at any rate let’s get to the butter of this post.
The major reason behind why arcane is falling behind is scaling. The living bomb change certainly hurts, but it is not the end-all-be-all of this situation.
Arcane scales worse than fire with pretty much every stat (other than intellect). You look at the damage modifiers and coefficients behind each spec and the winner is obvious. But the most pronounced weakness is critical strike rating. Fire mages have high critical strike damage bonuses, sitting at a 245% multiplier between just burnout and ignite. Whereas arcane sits at 175% with just spell power on normal arcane spells, and 187.5% on arcane missiles (glyphed). This is pretty low when you consider most casters can talent up to a 200% multiplier. Furthermore, the critical strike component on hot streak makes critical strikes that much more valuable for fire mages.
As you can see fire gets a lot more out of their crits than arcane does. It doesn’t help that the molten armor change made spirit scale with critical strike rating as well. I understand that just throwing some higher crit multipliers on arcane may not be the best route (pvp), but as with hot streak there are definitely ways to make crit more valuable.
Blizzard says they don’t want huge gear differences between similar specs. That makes sense, after all this expansion did homogenize a lot of gear. The problem is arcane still gears vastly different from fire. Arcane mages gear for haste because crit is such a poor stat for them. In addition, with maximum hit talents arcane only needs to gear for 7-8% hit rather than fire’s 13-14%. That is a massive difference in hit rating, and it frequently leaves the arcane mage in a tight spot for picking up gear. Frequently arcane has to give up hit talents (which also have a mana component to them) just so they aren’t overdoing the hit cap because there is just so much hit gear these days.
Arcane barrage had its coefficient nerfed by 10% because of pvp reasons. This (in conjunction with the AM glyph being introduced) ultimately dropped arcane barrage from the arcane mage’s standard rotation. But was this nerf necessary at all? Let’s consider pvp for a moment here. Arcane’s burst was already hit down significantly between the AP/PoM changes. A couple hundred extra damage on this spell wasn’t making the burst that much more powerful—and especially not now with everyone in higher stam/resil plus the damage nerf tacked onto resilience.
Take the sweet nothings from Affix out of your ear for a moment and think about it. Reversing the coefficient nerf could potentially accomplish three things. Increase our scaling, our mobility (which is now much worse than fire with its multi-cast living bombs), and get our 51 point talent back into our main rotation.
I’ve hammered on this so many times before. Arcane is the only spec in the game other than Subtlety with no real talented raid utility. This is a huge problem, especially in 10-mans. Just because raid utility has been homogenized doesn’t mean the gaping imbalance doesn’t hurt.
Ghostcrawler often talks about how people will play the spec they love regardless of a small increase in damage by taking up another spec. But this is so much harder to do when you don’t bring any raid utility. Raid utility is generally not a “small difference,” it’s something every raid considers—even the more casual ones. So when your damage is poor and you don’t bring any raid utility it becomes very difficult to justify recruiting this spec.
I really don’t like having to dual spec fire so I can bring scorch every time the other mages aren’t present. Worse yet, I’ve been in guilds where I need to be fire just so I can stack up improved scorch faster. That’s just not cool. I would like to be arcane on every fight that isn’t some sort of whacky gimmick, so please give me something to work with here. Even something that isn’t the 5% crit debuff would go a long way for arcane mages.
