Arcane Mage Development Notes for War Within Alpha
Blizzard has posted a large breakdown of the Arcane Mage changes in today's War Within Alpha build going over Complexity, Radiant Spark and more!
- Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
- Simplify rotational complexity.
- Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
- Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.
Arcane Mage has long had the reputation of being one of the most complicated and skill expressive specializations in World of Warcraft.
A large contributing factor to this is the way in which Radiant Spark asks you to optimize your rotation. Radiant Spark’s damage bonus was so substantial and so dramatically punished you for using Arcane Missiles, that you had to go about your big burn in a very scripted fashion.
With the introduction of Shifting Power, Arcane Mage gained access to mini-burns that can also utilize Radiant Spark, but to facilitate optimal usage of the spell those also had to be very scripted-- and worse yet-- your mini burn script was different than your big burn script.All of that to say, we don’t think that the exciting and challenging part of Arcane should be the memorization of a large script. Arcane’s burn gameplay should support and be enhanced by the mechanics and talents you have, not circumvent them.
We feel confident that the removal of Radiant Spark in its current fashion is the right path forward to achieve that goal.The soul of Radiant Spark will live on, however, through a new talent: Magi’s Spark. Magi’s Spark accomplishes a similar goal to Radiant Spark by making Touch of the Magi more of an exciting.
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