Arcane Explosion, Spellslinger, and How Arcane Works
For Arcane Mages in Nerub'ar Palace, our tier set bonus revolves around increasing the damage of some of our core abilities and occasionally allowing
Arcane Barrage to refund the charges it spends. Overall this set is going to be somewhat cool in single target and pretty lame in AOE. The 2-set bonus here is about as uninspired as they come, but worse over it treats
Arcane Blast and
Arcane Explosion as equals rotationally and they simply aren't. We actively avoid using
Arcane Explosion in AOE meaning that this is really mostly just a single target set bonus. Historically, Arcane has had past issues with
Arcane Blast tuning relative to our other spells being too high, this contributes to that without any interesting outcome.
In a similar vein, the 4-set, due to the above, procs a lot less in AOE situations since it hinges on
Arcane Explosion usage. On top of that, the proc is another random 4-charge refund, which we already have in the
Orb Barrage talent, while its cool to have some backup for it failing, this set doesn't really accomplish that, it just gives us the opportunity to munch charges in AOE.
We do not want to use
Arcane Explosion in AOE and the tuning for it would need to be much, much higher for that to happen - it would also run heavy risk of degenerate rotations. All in all, we should just move away from trying to make
Arcane Explosion more than it is and instead focus on other parts of our toolkit.
Spellslinger has nothing interacting with
Arcane Barrage and the set could push us towards Sunfury - which due to
Burden of Power has great synergy with
Arcane Barrage in single target. My best Spellslinger builds at the moment actually ignore this proc in single target (as well as the
Arcane Orb proc from
Spellfrost Teachings) to just optimize
Arcane Blast and
Arcane Missiles. As a result, Sunfury is going to get much more from this than Spellslinger. It might be a good idea for the 4-set to also work on
Arcane Missiles for Spellslinger's sake.
Successes
In single target the set feels pretty good -
Arcane Blast is a core part of our rotation and the 4-set proc happens frequently with obvious use cases rotationally (almost exclusively for Sunfury through
Burden of Power). For Sunfury, in single target, this set is amazing feeling. Spellslinger needs some help here, but the proc is still useful as a mana conservation tool. I can't add much more positive here because the set's sweet spot is relatively narrow here.
Conclusion
The concern here is that if left unchanged, this set will disadvantage Arcane against other specs in AOE while also disadvantaging Spellslinger against Sunfury for Arcane specifically. The damage bonus needs to be higher on
Arcane Barrage to be worth using the proc as Spellslinger (as well as justifying potential talent changes) and the 2-set and 4-set should probably use
Arcane Orb for proccing in AOE, a spell we want to hit and naturally generate in AOE through
Orb Barrage. Overall, the set has a solid foundation as getting refunded charges on
Arcane Barrage is genuinely something the community has asked for and is a cool concept to explore, it just needs some reworking and tuning.
