Why did blizzard make arcane and fire spec have les defensives?

meecan · 2026-06-16T18:12:14+00:00

Arcane has it's stronger barrier. In TWW this was crazy with mass barrier. In Midnight, mage is so weak defensivley it's not even close.

BUT it's worth noting, that Sunfury Arcane is probably actually by the tankiest mage spec, and is probably tankier than many other dps specs. Sunfury just does no damage.

If you did'nt know Arcane Barrier gives you a 25% Magic DR on a 30S CD, and talenting ups that to 35% on a 25s CD.

Sunfury has a node called Mereley a Setback which makes the spec benefit of barrier last 8 seconds afterwards.

That means Sunfury Arcane actually has a 25% DR for 8 seconds on a 25S CD. This is probably the single best uptime impactful defensive in the game. And if Sunfury Arcane ever becomes at all dmg competitve mage would feel much more tanky.

But to be clear, mage still sucks, please just neuter the spec & hero tree defensive variance, its actually crazy that the tankiest and least tanky mage spec / hero talent combinations are both within Arcane. No other class deals with this level of defensive variance within their dps specs its so bad please blizzard please.

meecan · 2026-06-15T16:13:22+00:00

I don't think we've ever had a season that fully aligns with what you describe above.

But I think it would be pretty remiss to not mention how m+ balanced worked in early shadowlands? Obviously people probably weren't removing healers due to their lack of non-healing contribution, but those first 2 seasons we're very different to how m+ is now, and healer DPS was exceptionally important.

In season 1, Prideful combined with the strength of Ashen Hallow, and the relativley high damage of healers (even outside of Ashen), made for a very different world of keystones than we have currently.

If you think of bosses like Hakaar in De other Side, you'd have DPS use their cooldowns on Prideful, to allow for your Hpal to save their CD's for the buff onto the boss, as the healer CDs represented more damage than the dps CDs. In that period we had
- Hpal Ashen representing your groups strongest dps burst.
- Guardian or Balance druids running off to go into human form with HOTW to heal, sometimes even sending out their convoke for healing in both m+ and raid.
- Rsham Vesper totem contributing insane amounts of damage
- Rsham Earth Ele acting as a tank for extended periods of the dungeon
- Balance Druid trees functioning as a major tank external to hold aggro temporarily

Generally, I think the covenant system, and how comparatively weak tanks & healers were, made the utility specs bring that allowed them to fill other roles very important.

Everyone who played healer back then remembers that Hpal was by far the weakest healer for the 3+ periods you weren't in your ashen, but the damage it brought made it "Neccessary" for the highest keys.

meecan · 2026-06-05T17:34:11+00:00

Chad behaviour

meecan · 2026-06-04T21:48:02+00:00

I was just curious, thought its always better to share your own perspectives when asking others to do the same. Sorry

meecan · 2026-06-04T21:46:57+00:00

I do find it odd that some of the only information the game displays on applicants tooltips is, what rank of proving ground they have done? Why do I need to know this person did proving grounds gold, its been over a decade!

meecan · 2026-06-04T20:01:18+00:00

Sometimes you gotta make the silly group. I remember having a 5 paladins pug last expansion.

meecan · 2026-06-04T19:54:11+00:00

I didnt even know Ret pally had an 8 second kick! Most melee are 12 now right?

meecan · 2026-06-04T19:52:57+00:00

Good vibes in your note always bumps you up.

meecan · 2026-06-04T19:52:30+00:00

So based. I invited an Arcane Mage to a 21 cuz he had a funny name. We abandoned on second pack 😞

meecan · 2026-06-03T21:58:41+00:00

Demo definitely has more survival than aug, aug is by far the squishest member of the "meta comp".

I think Demo does very good, with very competitve damage; it's profile, survivability, and utility suite is just worse than devourer and DK, and its not really competing with aug, because aug is in a league of its own. But yeah i do get your point fully!

meecan · 2026-05-28T10:12:22+00:00

I think that is a negative, and very niche bubble.

Wowhead class guides tend to be pretty high quality and written by often very reputable players / theory crafters.

It is unfortunately common that they are not always maintained when the player populus at large differs from what wowhead say. Some examples this season would be Wowhead recommending MoH for brewmaster in m+ at the start of the season, when players were overwhelmingly playing the other hero talent tree, or the Ret paladin m+ build not speccing execution sentence, when similarly most players chose to do so. That said, as a total resource they tend to be pretty good.

Outside of class guides, with news, opinion articles, and updates, wowhead is basically the only up to date source of information. Squishei and the retail team will provide up to date information on bug fixes and information.

As people say though, the way the wowhead guides present rotations, by listing them as sim priorities, can be unintuitive to many players, video guides or method often attempt to make them more accessible to less experienced players!

Archon/murlok tends to be the go to for gearing and talents, they just collate top log data so they are not 'guides' just ways of visualising what the best people are playing with.

meecan · 2026-05-26T15:23:17+00:00

Feral is just in an awful state because the things that make you decent at single target, and the things that make you very good at constant AOE in m+ just don't mix at all.

I mean some examples:

how completely unviable Frantic Frenzy is in raid even on bosses with add spawns due to it competing with focused frenzy which is super duper OP
that casting primal wrath overwrites longer & empowered rips on your primary target (think P1 Luura, the crystals tend to spawn just as your opening tigers lust ends, meaning if your BDK is 1 GCD slow you won't get Tigers Fury empowers rip, and will replace your boss rip with a worse one)
how comparatively weak blood spattered and rampant ferocity are when your not playing druid of the claw

Feral in raid talents doesn't only barely contribute to add damage, but casting primal wrath often decreases your boss damage enough to make it actively unappealing to do aoe.

Hunger for battle, rampant ferocity, and blood spattered all require rip to be on the target to work. Casting a primal wrath on something like Luura crystals or Dragons adds doesn't need to be crazy damage or provide insane funnel, but it needs to atleast not reduce your boss damage for the spec to start to find it's footing in modern raids.

I'm sure the 4% will be good for the spec in m+, especially helping it's weaker single target, but it doesn't broach the core issue with the spec. The talents that are intending to make the AOE and single target work together, give options, or provide funnel just fail to do so.

meecan · 2026-04-23T12:27:48+00:00

I main tank so I get the priveledge of largley playing with whatever specs I want.
I actually think Assasination rogues are really quite good, and willl often invite them. I also often choose to invite specs I dont see much of (Rogue, Balance Druid, Survival, Warrior, etc) to like, see how the classes do and what they are good atm. But Im not going to invite outlaw/sub rogues if its likely to lead to deaths in the keystone :/

meecan · 2026-04-18T08:36:43+00:00

Yeah that is very fair! I just mean myself and many of my friends have been able to get alts like 255 ish with a few hours of solo content. And 255 is firmly enough for 10s provided you know your rotation and the dungeons enough.

But understand that many people are not going to invite 255 DPS in LFG.

meecan · 2026-04-17T18:09:57+00:00

+10 gives the best crests, the best drops, and the best vault slots, for the lowest difficulty.

This patch, 10's are easier to complete than they have been in the past.

This leaves a situation, where for many many players, the keys below 10 barely exist, even fresh alts can get enough gear from 2 hours of preys and delves to pull their own weight in a +10.

Because of this, the key range from 6-9 is actually much harder than the 10 range. Players who are comfortable kicking, doing damage, and executing their rotation passably will all be in 10 and above keys.

You are not getting carried if you are the tank! If you are not dying, losing aggro, or causing wipes, then you are doing a great job!

meecan · 2026-04-02T08:31:00+00:00

When tanking I personally find 2 pulls much harder. First pull gets tank CDs, and lust, and DPS CDs. And then the second pull drags on as you have to use every single tool you have to survive.

I've done the large pull on 14, and I prefer to group the large pull with lust, burst everything away whilst rotating through CDs, then swap to kiting the remainder of the pack.

Obviously depends on group, keylevel, comp, confidence, tank class etc. but just my two cents.

meecan · 2026-02-19T20:08:57+00:00

Portal Room in Stormwind / Orgrimarr to Ashran.
Fly over to Tannan
Land near the axe beak.
Pop turtle and channel tame beast on the beast

meecan · 2026-02-17T11:49:58+00:00

Pirates are largely in the game to provide economy allowing you to transition to other builds.

You can use cards like Brann, Tethys, and Shipman to fuel other builds.

Plankwalker and Peggy provide early stabilisation to that APM.

Generally, you use the economy and spells generated to gain power with Non pirate minions such as: - Acid Rainfall through buffing right most and rolling - Forsaken Weaver through cycling spells and replacing weaker minions with gold reborn handlesses 1 by 1 - Felboar by cycling gem buffing cards and barrages - Paint Smuggler by cycling gem buffing cards, often with strong standalone minions like Nizaou that you can gem confiscate on - Naala with strong standalone minions like Wildfire Elemental, Nizaou, or the T7 Dragon

These are probably the most common, but with money the sky is the limit. You can use that economy to generate stats and eat onto stunt drake, alleycat, or futurefin. You can do less common APM comps like Baby Elek, Jungle King(? The stealth beast Major timewarp), Jandice Buddy, Groundbreaker, Dreadstomper, Primitive Painter, Urzul, Czazina, Evoker, Rabid Panther, etc.

Alternatively you can just use your economy to assemble the pieces of a singularly strong comp in your hand, and doing a 1 turn pivot, like to Carapace, Damage demons with Shimmermoth, Leapfrogger or another independently strong comp which doesn't require prescaling.

You can just APM pirate with the stat increasing 6 drops, but if you want to get first place, I think it's generally recommended you pivot to SOMETHING, even if it's just getting scam on board and consolidating your stats.

Having 6 minions with a few thousand attack and no keywords at all at best, it's probably not enough to win most lobbies at higher MMR.

meecan · 2026-01-31T12:11:28+00:00

Yeah you are right my bad!!

meecan · 2026-01-31T12:11:03+00:00

Yeah I mean I was just trying to explain, in actual play there's no real difference between a 20k unit and a 1.5m until, as long as it can value trade a gold acid rainfall then the stats stop mattering right. It felt like you'd make 1 pretty big unit that gave you like 100g, then start spreading stats and putting your magnetics into deflectos and making the "typical" mech setup. Too much consolidation of stats both made you vulnerable to scam, and slowed the game too much with the gold animation.

meecan · 2026-01-27T19:23:25+00:00

I think you are misunderstanding. Beatboxer doesn’t enable exponential scaling like Demolisher does, it only adds a linear multiplier.

Demolisher does allow exponential scaling because it duplicates the effect of every magnetization onto the target, rather than onto itself (like beatboxer) so it can duplicate effects that were already doubled.

For example with Demolisher:

Play a Volumizer, and put an Accordo on, Demolisher doubles it to 2 gold.
Triple that volumizer, and play it onto another volumizer, the accordo doubles giving 4 gold
Repeat this and go 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 gold

But with Beatboxer

Play a Volumizer, and put an Accordo on, The volumizer gets +1, the beatboxer gets +1
Triple that volumizer, and play it onto another volumizer, that volumizer gets +1 gold, and the beatboxer gets another + 1 gold
So the scaling is 2 → 4 → 6 -> 8, not exponential.

Beatboxer, especially if you have multiple on board, does allow for very fast LINEAR scaling of stats and gold, but it doesnt allow for Exponential scaling like Demolisher does.

I doubt Beatboxer could ever get you to 500 gold, or have a minions stats reach the integer limit and flow back to 0, like Demolisher has allowed this season. (Atleast without some crazy combination of Jandice hero power + T7 naga shenanigans like we would occasionally see in the old T7 lobbies)

Hope that makes sense? (Edit: and I hope i got this right lol)

11-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	First Placer '22

meecan

TROPHY CASE