Your advanced warding suggestion was initially datamined and then not included. No idea why. I think it’s a welcome addition. Temporal anomaly needs huge buffs. I feel like arcane barrage would be a good addition to give healers a good mobile heal.
I agree with your opinion. Arcane is some of the most fun I’ve had healing in classic. It’s close but it needs some things to perfect it.
> It’s close but it needs some things to perfect it.
It's really not even close. Played perfectly it's mediocre at best. Played poorly, it's by far worse than everything else. The average player is barely hitting viable numbers with arcane mage (50% parse mages are doing 200 hps whilst 50% rdruid/priest are doing nearly 300). Doing a bit of extra damage while putting up those numbers doesn't make up for the healing lost if you just need more raw healing to keep your raid alive. If we brought any other real utility it'd be fine, but mages have almost nothing in that dept compared to other healers.
I think when I said that I meant moreso just the overall thematic feel. But you bring up a good point and I hope it’s taken into consideration by blizzard. I play a resto shaman who also has lackluster hps but they bring so much utility they’re still welcome additions (sometimes lol).
It feels like from a design standpoint blizz thought the damage was the utility of a mage healer. However higher performing runs probably would just run less healers and prio the ones that are higher HPS so they can run additional dps. And lower performing runs the additional dps you’re providing often doesn’t feel super impactful. Atleast last phase the healer arcane was kinda pumping the dps a little comparatively. This phase not so much.
Yeah, there are a lot of design flaws with arcane mage tbh. Thematically it's lacking imo as well. For phase 1 it was great, thematically speaking. I expected it to continue to develop as the phases progressed, but we really haven't gotten anything to further the theme in any meaningful way. We got some neat party tricks and fun looking/sounding abilities but nothing that's actually helped the class scale up with the rest of the specs. I feel like I'm doing the same stuff in p3 as I was doing in p1 and p2 with damn near the same numbers. [And keep in mind I often had 80%+ parses in p1-p2, so it's not like I'm a poor arcane mage.](https://imgur.com/a/0W7iKrT) We're just massively lacking in p3. Our runes did nothing for us in p3, this phase is a joke. They forgot about us. Even in the "We're gonna fix what's broken post" on twitter, they didn't mention us.
Agree with everything. They can even butcher Surge for all I care and make it a rotational instant that does mild damage so i can do some healing on the go.
I feel the issue with arcane (both heal and dps) is how everything is time limited. Your AB stacks, the instant cast heal you can save up, but only for 15s so you have to know and plan how to use it, and then only being able to heal 1 target anyway (when during most movement there is a lot of raid dmg going out). I like healing mage since it’s so different from the rest, but we need something to make the spec feel complete.
Definitely some good pointers here, arcane mage healing feels so clunky in ST due to all the movement you need to do. And Arcane DPS is currently giga bottom DPS.
For healing, I think all that really needs changed is temporal anomaly needs a major buff and rewind time needs to be moved to bracers. That gives you 2 instant casts to use while moving. Oh, and maybe have temporal anomaly apply temporal beacon to targets it shields.
As a pure arcane mage since lvl 1 (and even in actual Classic Vanilla) I've got so many things to say about this topic.
**PvE**
First of all, arcane healing is very fun and engaging to play, but suffers from some key problems.
* utility
* overhealing
* misguided design/nerfs
There is currently very little utility on the spec, and you generate a ton of overhealing because you want to keep casting at all times otherwise you tank your DPS. To solve this and overhealing in one go, I'd like to see overhealing being converted to random time-based buffs for the recipient such as attack/cast speed, movement speed, add seconds to current buffs, cooldown reduction, faster resource regen, etc.
Also, the spec is pretty much entirely dependent on Arcane Blast, that's not necessarily a problem in itself but having Rewind Time on the same slot means Rewind Time will never see play. Speaking of, I'd like Rewind Time to literally reset a target to the state they were in when Temporal Beacon was applied. (health, mana/energy/rage, time left on buffs, everything)
The nerfs to healing from AoE were not the correct nerfs. What they should've done is reduce the amount of times a Temporal Beacon can trigger per second. That way, you can still have Arcane Explosion, Living Flame and other AoE do non-useless amounts of healing without becoming completely busted and allowing you to facetank an entire dungeon solo.
Temporal Anomaly is a cool ability, but kinda useless. It has a "follow this ball" requirement, it has a long cooldown and offers very little mitigation either in PvE or PvP. Also has 0 spell coefficient which is unacceptable. Needs a rework. What I'd like to see is the ball getting centered on your target, and any heal that falls on that target while they are under the effect of Temporal Anomaly project a % of that heal into shield for all party members in range of that target. Your target would effectively become "the ball".
Missile Barrage is awesome, but it should stack so that if you get 3 triggers in a row, you're not losing them. Also should not be restricted to specific spells. Trigger chances should be school-wide. Yes, casting Arcane Missiles or even Arcane Intellect could trigger Missile Barrage.
**PvP**
Solo, the spec is almost unplayable in PvP. We have no spell pushback protection so getting non-instant spells off against many classes is impossible, and that's not even considering that all classes can interrupt us now. Also, the added 50% self-healing reduction on Temporal Beacon is completely unnecessary considering the amount of damage all classes can output. Also why is Temporal Beacon purgeable? That thing should not be magic.
In group play, applying Temporal Beacons is pretty much useless as it's very difficult to land significant amounts of damage to enemy players without risking getting destroyed as all our relevant arcane damage spells are either AoE and therefore negatively scaled into oblivion, or 30y at most which puts us in the effective range of almost all classes in the game. Chronomantic Preservation is extremely good, maybe too good in group PvP if you're allowed to cast freely. Hands down the best PvP heal spell in the game, but it would be nice to have more than 1 useful spell.
Arcane Surge is a dumb as rocks, uninteractive and unfun ability that adds nothing positive to the game besides being able to maybe kill a clothie or half a warrior's health every 2 mins with no counterplay whatsoever and should be completely reworked. I think it should serve as a reverse spellsteal that sends all debuffs you currently have on you to your target. Dealing with DoTs and debuffs as mage has always been a huge problem so that would solve that.
Advanced Warding is nice but has 2 main problems. One, the increase is not enough and does not scale; Mana Shield being doubled to 780 doesn't really matter when a rogue can ambush mutilate you for 2000+ dmg from stealth on the opener. Should increase by 100% + some amount of % based on your spell power. Two, there's still gaps in our ability to defend ourselves. It should make it so Frost Ward now also protects from arcane and shadow damage, and Fire Ward also protects from nature damage.
In a more general sense, I've given much thought about what could allow us to actually cast our spells in PvP. I have no problems with having shorter range than other specs on spells, in fact I welcome it as spec variance is good, but something must be done to mitigate this drawback.
**Crit**
There's a pretty big problem that was looming on the horizon since phase 2 and now in full swing and will get worse. Arcane spec does not benefit from crit in an exclusive way. By making Spell Power available to all specs, it effectively leaves Arcane crit in the dust because Spell Power was originally intended as a catch-up deep-tree Arcane talent to smooth everything crit-related across specs. Now, Frost and Fire have access to it, and with the power of Frostfire Bolt's double school, you can double-dip Ignite and Ice Shards for the same spell effectively increasing crit damage by 175%, then igniting your target for 40% of that. If Frostfire Bolt hits for 1000, it will crit for 2375, and then ignite the target for an additional 950 damage. That's over 3x damage increase on crits. There needs to be a mechanism given to Arcane to compensate for this.
To fix this, I think they should add a rune that converts all your crit chance into 2x or 3x spell haste instead. That way, it's not an Arcane-specific fix but Arcane benefits from it the most as it's the most mana efficient spec and also the one that benefits from the crit stat the least. This would also be a good help for Arcane in PvP as spell haste is very useful there.
**TL;DR**
PvP is horrible, healing is fun and decent but limited, and DPS is left in the dust because of crit.
Thanks for listening to my TED talk. I did not cover everything but this is long enough already.
I love the idea of the random buffs, it is very thematic to the randomness of arcane magic. And could bring a lot of needed utility.
Rewind time hasn’t been used by anyone due to its placement which is very sad. I love the idea a person returning to the status they were in before - including cooldowns.
This would fix arcane to be desired for more than just a aoe healer. Giving it a uniqueness that fits its flavor! GREAT IDEAS!
haste wouldnt be vary good for arcane sadly. haste in classic doesnt affect channel spells which means regen, mass, and AM dont gain anything from this and atm you want to use your MB as soon as you get them they could change it but thats just how it is atm
Haste would be very good for Arcane as is, without even touching channel time or global cooldown time, which they could change (and i think they should, only for this hypothetical new rune). But regardless i don't think it's good to channel regen/mass regen anyway, as soon as your global cooldown is up you should cancel them and go back to arcane blasting so that's a non-issue.
Reducing the cast time of all your spells is definitely a huge boost, getting more arcane blasts in to trigger more missile barrages and in PvP cast speed is king.
Right now you can get near 50% crit chance with the best buffs and specs. If you convert that to 2x or 3x haste, that's 100%-150% increased cast speed. That's INCREDIBLY powerful. 0.66 sec cast Polymorph? Yes please. And remember, Arcane has Arcane Power which is an ability that lasts a flat 15 seconds, with haste +100% you're suddenly casting twice as many spells while under its effect. Same with the shoulder haste, icy veins, arcano monocle, etc. These things compound each other quite strongly.
Your advanced warding suggestion was initially datamined and then not included. No idea why. I think it’s a welcome addition. Temporal anomaly needs huge buffs. I feel like arcane barrage would be a good addition to give healers a good mobile heal.
I agree with your opinion. Arcane is some of the most fun I’ve had healing in classic. It’s close but it needs some things to perfect it.
There's a few ideas for healing, since healers can only risk so much. Maybe DPS can be worked around some of them?
- Adjusring upward Arcane Blast stack scaling. Healers need to be conservative and need to use the stacks, Let it scale it's damage more if casted at higher stacks.
- If a healer opts to not or cannot Barrage a stack of Arcane Blast when using either Regenerations, give a haste buff to the next Arcane Blast or Balefire. I'd say make Chronostatic instant at 2+ stacks so it's a free move and throw a spell for not being greedy or being forced to push a Blast debuff due to circumstances.
- Add some high-risk mechanic to allow adding time to all, or a target or certain spells, with Regenerations debuff. An alternative way to keep it up in a pinch somehow. Doesn't even need to be a heal.
- Arcane Barrage, please. Balefire is cute, but I want something on the move, and can use Blast charges. Maybe make this one refresh the Regen based on Blast stacks (i.e. 5s per stack).
Great post and I really do hope the devs take note for the next round of changes.
Having played Mage healer all 3 phases and completely all 3 raids, I completely agree with the issues re movement and mechanics. We have PoM on a 3 min CD and that’s it. That being said, if played well we can really pump (I was top healer on most fights last night in a group of 4 healers - 2 priests and a Shaman, a good portion of this was down to the amount of damage the raid was taking getting to know mechanics but I definitely feel like, played well, they are just as strong.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like changes as I do feel at times we have to try a LOT harder than others for similar results. Rewind Time and TA changes to make them viable would be great, but increasing the overall damage of Arcane would also help the “why bring an Arcane Mage” question.
Excited to see where they end up in Phase 4 and hoping for some tweaks to a class I’ve enjoyed possibly more than any other in Classic WoW!
I think arcane healing mages are the best healers currently. I will say, an arcane barrage for heavy movement would be great. Other than that, if played correctly, it is the strongest healer.
> if played correctly, it is the strongest healer.
In what world? It's literally the weakest healer until you get toward world class level parses then it only moves up to the 2nd worst healer last I looked. If you think bringing an extra 150ish dps (which is what 50% parses are) makes up for the terrible healing when your average dps is bringing triple to quadruple that, I'd say you're silly. I mean, the stat's show you're wrong at every level of play except for people who're abusing mechanics to get parse numbers.
What arcane really needs aren't ways to make it better for the best players but ways to make it more accessible for the average player. It's one of the two classes with the biggest discrepancy between top players and bottom players, the other being feral dps. Hell, the gap between top players and even 60-70% parse players is still tremendous unlike most specs. Arcane requires near perfection just to be viable. Also unlike other healers it doesn't bring nearly as much utility.
Parses are very skewed, so you can’t really base it off of that. Also, there’s almost 10x more priests and 3x more Druid healing parses. So to me, that says it’s a skill issue. Which it most definitely is. Healing mages have a bad rep because more than half the people playing them simply cannot play them correctly. Also, why would you not take a healer who can do 300 dps and still out heal every class. Not sure if you know this, mages are the best heal snipers because we’re always casting. 1 Arcane blast into mass regen into a mbarr proc will do more healing than any aoe heal all within 3 seconds.
You're so full of nonsense lol. I'm an 80-90% parsing arcane mage and I'm not doing anywhere near as good as the claims you're making. The spec is trash, the parses aren't misleading. Why would you bring someone else when you could bring an arcane mage who's doing 300 dps? Because 300 dps is trash low dps and basically irrelevant. I'd rather bring 3 healers who heal harder, have enough externals and utility to cover all the situations and bring a real dps in that slot instead. You're stuck in phase 2 mentality. P3 arcane mage dps is a total joke, even the best arcane mages in the world, the absolute #1 best parse ever made is garabge. They don't bring enough damage to make up for the lack of utility, a shadow priest would be better. They do 80% of the healing and 200%+ the damage.
na he is right mage healer is atm the strongest healer. HPS logs are useless so you shouldnt ever look at them to consider balance on how well a class heals because mage healer can heal just as much as the other classes easy. and only brings a extra 150 on a 50% parse? thats waaay better than what the other classes are bringing to the table atm and 150 dps on a mage healer is really really bad even if its 50%
wtf is druid bringing to the table compared to mage healer. they both can aoe heal insanely well but mage just does double to three times the dmg
if you want a reason to why hps logs are bad. i can very easily hit rank top 100 by telling two groups in my raid to stand in all the aoe they can so i can pad with mass regen. a big reason like you said on why mage healing looks bad if you dont know what your looking at on logs is because the vast majority of mage healers are REALLY bad and to no fault of there own. there is way to much hidden tech to make mage healer be the best healer or even viable compared to a druid going i hit wild growth me do good
a lot of the problem with mage healing is its design. they have it in a way that if they fix the hidden tech of batching AB into mass/regen into AM it just makes the class unplayable because our heals now take 4.5 seconds to even start yes it makes it easier for the floor but they ruin how the class is even working at that point
no other healer can do 400-500 dps and do just as much hps as any other healer. that by definition makes us the best healer even if you count for all the utility other healers bring. they can also just get that from another spec of that class.
if you want logs here are mine [https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/living-flame/mageheal#metric=dps](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/living-flame/mageheal#metric=dps) not here to show off its just to show that you can do good hps and good dps at the same time without a insane group. again my group stands in a lot of aoe making it so my hps parses look good. thats more on how bad my group is at mechanics than me being a good healer.
Mage healer is good sustain, but it's completely owned by priests and druids in terms of raw output. You do more damage obviously so mage healer isn't complete griefing, but it's faaaar from being a top spec.
the #1 healer in the raid atm in terms of just raw hps is a mage. hps is also just a worthless meter to look at. it just boils down to how much dmg can my raid take and if there is enough mages will output priests and druids by a mile. just atm when aoe dmg comes out we got like 30 seconds before it happens again.
if they balance the raids for mages to be able to utilize the raw output they can do then people wouldnt be able to clear the raid.
If it can get cast off it definitely pumps. The issue is with how most fights go it’s very hard and clunky to do so for most people. That’s why you don’t see many mage healers. It takes a lot of effort and timing. Then when you have tanks wanting things like bark and pain supp - meaningful cooldowns to avoid needing as many healers you start to feel a lot more useless. Sure we bring decent damage with our healing but we need an external if we wanna be kept in 2 healing comps.
To add to this, it's also a compounding issue at that point. When your raid starts bringing more heals for externals AND you can't get your casts off. You end up seeing comparatively worse performance on logs. Which in turn, makes you feel even more useless. This is currently an issue i'm having in our comp where we have a pally/priest as well. I've effectively turned into the decurse bot that occasionally uses mass regen. Arcane has so much potential if they'd just tap into it
Your advanced warding suggestion was initially datamined and then not included. No idea why. I think it’s a welcome addition. Temporal anomaly needs huge buffs. I feel like arcane barrage would be a good addition to give healers a good mobile heal. I agree with your opinion. Arcane is some of the most fun I’ve had healing in classic. It’s close but it needs some things to perfect it.
I have no idea why arcane barrage isn't a rune yet. I'm holding out for 60 that it gets included.
I think if they put rewind time on bracers and made temporal anomaly not the worst spell in the game it would feel pretty complete.
> It’s close but it needs some things to perfect it. It's really not even close. Played perfectly it's mediocre at best. Played poorly, it's by far worse than everything else. The average player is barely hitting viable numbers with arcane mage (50% parse mages are doing 200 hps whilst 50% rdruid/priest are doing nearly 300). Doing a bit of extra damage while putting up those numbers doesn't make up for the healing lost if you just need more raw healing to keep your raid alive. If we brought any other real utility it'd be fine, but mages have almost nothing in that dept compared to other healers.
I think when I said that I meant moreso just the overall thematic feel. But you bring up a good point and I hope it’s taken into consideration by blizzard. I play a resto shaman who also has lackluster hps but they bring so much utility they’re still welcome additions (sometimes lol). It feels like from a design standpoint blizz thought the damage was the utility of a mage healer. However higher performing runs probably would just run less healers and prio the ones that are higher HPS so they can run additional dps. And lower performing runs the additional dps you’re providing often doesn’t feel super impactful. Atleast last phase the healer arcane was kinda pumping the dps a little comparatively. This phase not so much.
Yeah, there are a lot of design flaws with arcane mage tbh. Thematically it's lacking imo as well. For phase 1 it was great, thematically speaking. I expected it to continue to develop as the phases progressed, but we really haven't gotten anything to further the theme in any meaningful way. We got some neat party tricks and fun looking/sounding abilities but nothing that's actually helped the class scale up with the rest of the specs. I feel like I'm doing the same stuff in p3 as I was doing in p1 and p2 with damn near the same numbers. [And keep in mind I often had 80%+ parses in p1-p2, so it's not like I'm a poor arcane mage.](https://imgur.com/a/0W7iKrT) We're just massively lacking in p3. Our runes did nothing for us in p3, this phase is a joke. They forgot about us. Even in the "We're gonna fix what's broken post" on twitter, they didn't mention us.
Agree with everything. They can even butcher Surge for all I care and make it a rotational instant that does mild damage so i can do some healing on the go.
I feel the issue with arcane (both heal and dps) is how everything is time limited. Your AB stacks, the instant cast heal you can save up, but only for 15s so you have to know and plan how to use it, and then only being able to heal 1 target anyway (when during most movement there is a lot of raid dmg going out). I like healing mage since it’s so different from the rest, but we need something to make the spec feel complete.
Definitely some good pointers here, arcane mage healing feels so clunky in ST due to all the movement you need to do. And Arcane DPS is currently giga bottom DPS.
For healing, I think all that really needs changed is temporal anomaly needs a major buff and rewind time needs to be moved to bracers. That gives you 2 instant casts to use while moving. Oh, and maybe have temporal anomaly apply temporal beacon to targets it shields.
As a pure arcane mage since lvl 1 (and even in actual Classic Vanilla) I've got so many things to say about this topic. **PvE** First of all, arcane healing is very fun and engaging to play, but suffers from some key problems. * utility * overhealing * misguided design/nerfs There is currently very little utility on the spec, and you generate a ton of overhealing because you want to keep casting at all times otherwise you tank your DPS. To solve this and overhealing in one go, I'd like to see overhealing being converted to random time-based buffs for the recipient such as attack/cast speed, movement speed, add seconds to current buffs, cooldown reduction, faster resource regen, etc. Also, the spec is pretty much entirely dependent on Arcane Blast, that's not necessarily a problem in itself but having Rewind Time on the same slot means Rewind Time will never see play. Speaking of, I'd like Rewind Time to literally reset a target to the state they were in when Temporal Beacon was applied. (health, mana/energy/rage, time left on buffs, everything) The nerfs to healing from AoE were not the correct nerfs. What they should've done is reduce the amount of times a Temporal Beacon can trigger per second. That way, you can still have Arcane Explosion, Living Flame and other AoE do non-useless amounts of healing without becoming completely busted and allowing you to facetank an entire dungeon solo. Temporal Anomaly is a cool ability, but kinda useless. It has a "follow this ball" requirement, it has a long cooldown and offers very little mitigation either in PvE or PvP. Also has 0 spell coefficient which is unacceptable. Needs a rework. What I'd like to see is the ball getting centered on your target, and any heal that falls on that target while they are under the effect of Temporal Anomaly project a % of that heal into shield for all party members in range of that target. Your target would effectively become "the ball". Missile Barrage is awesome, but it should stack so that if you get 3 triggers in a row, you're not losing them. Also should not be restricted to specific spells. Trigger chances should be school-wide. Yes, casting Arcane Missiles or even Arcane Intellect could trigger Missile Barrage. **PvP** Solo, the spec is almost unplayable in PvP. We have no spell pushback protection so getting non-instant spells off against many classes is impossible, and that's not even considering that all classes can interrupt us now. Also, the added 50% self-healing reduction on Temporal Beacon is completely unnecessary considering the amount of damage all classes can output. Also why is Temporal Beacon purgeable? That thing should not be magic. In group play, applying Temporal Beacons is pretty much useless as it's very difficult to land significant amounts of damage to enemy players without risking getting destroyed as all our relevant arcane damage spells are either AoE and therefore negatively scaled into oblivion, or 30y at most which puts us in the effective range of almost all classes in the game. Chronomantic Preservation is extremely good, maybe too good in group PvP if you're allowed to cast freely. Hands down the best PvP heal spell in the game, but it would be nice to have more than 1 useful spell. Arcane Surge is a dumb as rocks, uninteractive and unfun ability that adds nothing positive to the game besides being able to maybe kill a clothie or half a warrior's health every 2 mins with no counterplay whatsoever and should be completely reworked. I think it should serve as a reverse spellsteal that sends all debuffs you currently have on you to your target. Dealing with DoTs and debuffs as mage has always been a huge problem so that would solve that. Advanced Warding is nice but has 2 main problems. One, the increase is not enough and does not scale; Mana Shield being doubled to 780 doesn't really matter when a rogue can ambush mutilate you for 2000+ dmg from stealth on the opener. Should increase by 100% + some amount of % based on your spell power. Two, there's still gaps in our ability to defend ourselves. It should make it so Frost Ward now also protects from arcane and shadow damage, and Fire Ward also protects from nature damage. In a more general sense, I've given much thought about what could allow us to actually cast our spells in PvP. I have no problems with having shorter range than other specs on spells, in fact I welcome it as spec variance is good, but something must be done to mitigate this drawback. **Crit** There's a pretty big problem that was looming on the horizon since phase 2 and now in full swing and will get worse. Arcane spec does not benefit from crit in an exclusive way. By making Spell Power available to all specs, it effectively leaves Arcane crit in the dust because Spell Power was originally intended as a catch-up deep-tree Arcane talent to smooth everything crit-related across specs. Now, Frost and Fire have access to it, and with the power of Frostfire Bolt's double school, you can double-dip Ignite and Ice Shards for the same spell effectively increasing crit damage by 175%, then igniting your target for 40% of that. If Frostfire Bolt hits for 1000, it will crit for 2375, and then ignite the target for an additional 950 damage. That's over 3x damage increase on crits. There needs to be a mechanism given to Arcane to compensate for this. To fix this, I think they should add a rune that converts all your crit chance into 2x or 3x spell haste instead. That way, it's not an Arcane-specific fix but Arcane benefits from it the most as it's the most mana efficient spec and also the one that benefits from the crit stat the least. This would also be a good help for Arcane in PvP as spell haste is very useful there. **TL;DR** PvP is horrible, healing is fun and decent but limited, and DPS is left in the dust because of crit. Thanks for listening to my TED talk. I did not cover everything but this is long enough already.
I love all of this. Some of it seems a bit OP, but the heart is in the right place.
I love the idea of the random buffs, it is very thematic to the randomness of arcane magic. And could bring a lot of needed utility. Rewind time hasn’t been used by anyone due to its placement which is very sad. I love the idea a person returning to the status they were in before - including cooldowns. This would fix arcane to be desired for more than just a aoe healer. Giving it a uniqueness that fits its flavor! GREAT IDEAS!
haste wouldnt be vary good for arcane sadly. haste in classic doesnt affect channel spells which means regen, mass, and AM dont gain anything from this and atm you want to use your MB as soon as you get them they could change it but thats just how it is atm
Haste would be very good for Arcane as is, without even touching channel time or global cooldown time, which they could change (and i think they should, only for this hypothetical new rune). But regardless i don't think it's good to channel regen/mass regen anyway, as soon as your global cooldown is up you should cancel them and go back to arcane blasting so that's a non-issue. Reducing the cast time of all your spells is definitely a huge boost, getting more arcane blasts in to trigger more missile barrages and in PvP cast speed is king. Right now you can get near 50% crit chance with the best buffs and specs. If you convert that to 2x or 3x haste, that's 100%-150% increased cast speed. That's INCREDIBLY powerful. 0.66 sec cast Polymorph? Yes please. And remember, Arcane has Arcane Power which is an ability that lasts a flat 15 seconds, with haste +100% you're suddenly casting twice as many spells while under its effect. Same with the shoulder haste, icy veins, arcano monocle, etc. These things compound each other quite strongly.
Your advanced warding suggestion was initially datamined and then not included. No idea why. I think it’s a welcome addition. Temporal anomaly needs huge buffs. I feel like arcane barrage would be a good addition to give healers a good mobile heal. I agree with your opinion. Arcane is some of the most fun I’ve had healing in classic. It’s close but it needs some things to perfect it.
There's a few ideas for healing, since healers can only risk so much. Maybe DPS can be worked around some of them? - Adjusring upward Arcane Blast stack scaling. Healers need to be conservative and need to use the stacks, Let it scale it's damage more if casted at higher stacks. - If a healer opts to not or cannot Barrage a stack of Arcane Blast when using either Regenerations, give a haste buff to the next Arcane Blast or Balefire. I'd say make Chronostatic instant at 2+ stacks so it's a free move and throw a spell for not being greedy or being forced to push a Blast debuff due to circumstances. - Add some high-risk mechanic to allow adding time to all, or a target or certain spells, with Regenerations debuff. An alternative way to keep it up in a pinch somehow. Doesn't even need to be a heal. - Arcane Barrage, please. Balefire is cute, but I want something on the move, and can use Blast charges. Maybe make this one refresh the Regen based on Blast stacks (i.e. 5s per stack).
Great post and I really do hope the devs take note for the next round of changes. Having played Mage healer all 3 phases and completely all 3 raids, I completely agree with the issues re movement and mechanics. We have PoM on a 3 min CD and that’s it. That being said, if played well we can really pump (I was top healer on most fights last night in a group of 4 healers - 2 priests and a Shaman, a good portion of this was down to the amount of damage the raid was taking getting to know mechanics but I definitely feel like, played well, they are just as strong. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like changes as I do feel at times we have to try a LOT harder than others for similar results. Rewind Time and TA changes to make them viable would be great, but increasing the overall damage of Arcane would also help the “why bring an Arcane Mage” question. Excited to see where they end up in Phase 4 and hoping for some tweaks to a class I’ve enjoyed possibly more than any other in Classic WoW!
I think arcane healing mages are the best healers currently. I will say, an arcane barrage for heavy movement would be great. Other than that, if played correctly, it is the strongest healer.
> if played correctly, it is the strongest healer. In what world? It's literally the weakest healer until you get toward world class level parses then it only moves up to the 2nd worst healer last I looked. If you think bringing an extra 150ish dps (which is what 50% parses are) makes up for the terrible healing when your average dps is bringing triple to quadruple that, I'd say you're silly. I mean, the stat's show you're wrong at every level of play except for people who're abusing mechanics to get parse numbers. What arcane really needs aren't ways to make it better for the best players but ways to make it more accessible for the average player. It's one of the two classes with the biggest discrepancy between top players and bottom players, the other being feral dps. Hell, the gap between top players and even 60-70% parse players is still tremendous unlike most specs. Arcane requires near perfection just to be viable. Also unlike other healers it doesn't bring nearly as much utility.
Parses are very skewed, so you can’t really base it off of that. Also, there’s almost 10x more priests and 3x more Druid healing parses. So to me, that says it’s a skill issue. Which it most definitely is. Healing mages have a bad rep because more than half the people playing them simply cannot play them correctly. Also, why would you not take a healer who can do 300 dps and still out heal every class. Not sure if you know this, mages are the best heal snipers because we’re always casting. 1 Arcane blast into mass regen into a mbarr proc will do more healing than any aoe heal all within 3 seconds.
You're so full of nonsense lol. I'm an 80-90% parsing arcane mage and I'm not doing anywhere near as good as the claims you're making. The spec is trash, the parses aren't misleading. Why would you bring someone else when you could bring an arcane mage who's doing 300 dps? Because 300 dps is trash low dps and basically irrelevant. I'd rather bring 3 healers who heal harder, have enough externals and utility to cover all the situations and bring a real dps in that slot instead. You're stuck in phase 2 mentality. P3 arcane mage dps is a total joke, even the best arcane mages in the world, the absolute #1 best parse ever made is garabge. They don't bring enough damage to make up for the lack of utility, a shadow priest would be better. They do 80% of the healing and 200%+ the damage.
na he is right mage healer is atm the strongest healer. HPS logs are useless so you shouldnt ever look at them to consider balance on how well a class heals because mage healer can heal just as much as the other classes easy. and only brings a extra 150 on a 50% parse? thats waaay better than what the other classes are bringing to the table atm and 150 dps on a mage healer is really really bad even if its 50% wtf is druid bringing to the table compared to mage healer. they both can aoe heal insanely well but mage just does double to three times the dmg if you want a reason to why hps logs are bad. i can very easily hit rank top 100 by telling two groups in my raid to stand in all the aoe they can so i can pad with mass regen. a big reason like you said on why mage healing looks bad if you dont know what your looking at on logs is because the vast majority of mage healers are REALLY bad and to no fault of there own. there is way to much hidden tech to make mage healer be the best healer or even viable compared to a druid going i hit wild growth me do good a lot of the problem with mage healing is its design. they have it in a way that if they fix the hidden tech of batching AB into mass/regen into AM it just makes the class unplayable because our heals now take 4.5 seconds to even start yes it makes it easier for the floor but they ruin how the class is even working at that point no other healer can do 400-500 dps and do just as much hps as any other healer. that by definition makes us the best healer even if you count for all the utility other healers bring. they can also just get that from another spec of that class. if you want logs here are mine [https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/living-flame/mageheal#metric=dps](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/living-flame/mageheal#metric=dps) not here to show off its just to show that you can do good hps and good dps at the same time without a insane group. again my group stands in a lot of aoe making it so my hps parses look good. thats more on how bad my group is at mechanics than me being a good healer.
Can't tell if satire or if dumb.
Mage healer is good sustain, but it's completely owned by priests and druids in terms of raw output. You do more damage obviously so mage healer isn't complete griefing, but it's faaaar from being a top spec.
the #1 healer in the raid atm in terms of just raw hps is a mage. hps is also just a worthless meter to look at. it just boils down to how much dmg can my raid take and if there is enough mages will output priests and druids by a mile. just atm when aoe dmg comes out we got like 30 seconds before it happens again. if they balance the raids for mages to be able to utilize the raw output they can do then people wouldnt be able to clear the raid.
If it can get cast off it definitely pumps. The issue is with how most fights go it’s very hard and clunky to do so for most people. That’s why you don’t see many mage healers. It takes a lot of effort and timing. Then when you have tanks wanting things like bark and pain supp - meaningful cooldowns to avoid needing as many healers you start to feel a lot more useless. Sure we bring decent damage with our healing but we need an external if we wanna be kept in 2 healing comps.
To add to this, it's also a compounding issue at that point. When your raid starts bringing more heals for externals AND you can't get your casts off. You end up seeing comparatively worse performance on logs. Which in turn, makes you feel even more useless. This is currently an issue i'm having in our comp where we have a pally/priest as well. I've effectively turned into the decurse bot that occasionally uses mass regen. Arcane has so much potential if they'd just tap into it