Arcane Mage: Midnight Expansion Preview

Welcome to our Midnight guide for Arcane Mage. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Arcane Mage spec in the forthcoming Midnight expansion, including all of the Talent and Build changes, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the Midnight Alpha & Beta. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Arcane Mage, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Alpha & Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Midnight comes with a huge rework for almost all classes and specs due to Blizzard's new approach on Addons and class design. Arcane Mage is no exception, and has received a lot of changes.

Mage is having a lot of its button bloat removed in Midnight. Especially on the defensive side of things, almost all of our defensive power will now lie entirely in Prismatic Barrier and Ice Block, with most of our other defensives being removed, or turned into pure utility spells. Additionally, the Mage tree overall is seeing a bunch of nodes removed, which makes it significantly easier to pick up all remaining strong nodes with little trade off.

The base Mage part of the talent tree has received significant changes so far in Midnight. Many talents have been combined into one, or have been fully reworked, or turned into choice nodes, etc. Reading the full changes can be quite difficult to parse how it actually impacts you, so below I provide a summary of how it actually impacts what spells you have access to and how these have changed. Afterwards I will list the full detailed changes.

• Prismatic Barrier has been buffed, providing more damage reduction and a lower global cooldown (meaning you can go back to DPSing quicker).
• Greater Invisibility and Mirror Image are now purely utility spells and no longer provide damage reduction, but their utility has been improved. (more movement speed, lower cooldowns, etc)
• Instead of being able to choose between Ice Floes + Blink vs Shimmer, you can now choose between Shimmer or an improved Blink. Shimmer is also nerfed, having only one charge and less ways to reduce its cooldown.
• You can now only have Ice Nova or Cone of Cold.
• You can now only have Mass Polymorph or Ring of Frost.
• A new talent has been added: Brainstorm — Clearcasting increases your Intellect by 1% for 8 seconds. Multiple stacks will overlap.
• Some new talents have been added to improve the crowd-control and utility of our existing spells:
  • Improved Spellsteal: Spellsteal will repeat its effect after 4 seconds, but now has a 4 second cooldown.
  • Improved Counterspell: Counterspell prevents casting for an additional second.
  • Improved Remove Curse: Casting Remove Curse on a friendly target also casts it on yourself, but its cooldown is increased by 20 seconds.
• Incanter's Flow is removed and Overflowing Energy now only provides critical strike chance to Arcane Barrage, however various new talents are added that provide similar benefits in the form of Charm of Aegwynn and Charm of Medivh.
• The following active spells are removed:
  • Blast Wave
  • Ice Floes
  • Mass Barrier
  • Shifting Power
  • Slow
  • Supernova

• Mirror Image no longer reduces damage taken, allowing you instead to use it for its threat management effect. It now lasts 15 seconds. (from 40)
• Greater Invisibility no longer reduces damage taken, allowing you instead to use it for its threat management and target avoidance effects.
• Prismatic Barrier's cooldown is increased to 30 seconds. (from 25) It now shields you for 25% of maximum health (from 20%) and has a shorter global cooldown, allowing you to more quickly go back to casting other spells.
• Mobility changes:
  • Shimmer now has a 30 seconds cooldown (from 25) and no longer has 2 charges.
  • Blink now has a 15 second baseline cooldown. (from 13)
  • New talent: Spatial Manipulation — Blink gains an additional charge. Choice node against Reflection.
  • New talent: Reflection — After casting Blink, it is replaced with Reflection, which allows you to teleport back to where you last Blinked from. Choice node against Spatial Manipulation.
  • New talent: Time Walk — Alter Time resets the cooldown of Blink / Shimmer when you return to your original location. Choice node with Temporal Realignment.
  • Master of Time no longer grants a charge of Blink/ Shimmer, but instead grants 5/10 seconds cooldown reduction on Alter Time.
• A new talent has been added: Brainstorm — Clearcasting increases your Intellect by 1% for 8 seconds. Multiple stacks will overlap.
• Some new talents have been added to improve the crowd-control and utility of our existing spells:
  • Improved Spellsteal: Spellsteal will repeat its effect after 4 seconds, but now has a 4 second cooldown.
  • Improved Counterspell: Counterspell prevents casting for an additional second.
  • Improved Remove Curse: Casting Remove Curse on a friendly target also casts it on yourself, but its cooldown is increased by 20 seconds.
• New talent: Temporal Realignment — When you drop below 25% health, you automatically retroactively cast Alter Time and get healed back up to 50% health, putting Alter Time on cooldown. Choice node with Time Walk
• New talent: Improved Conjuration — Reduces Mirror Image's cooldown by 30/60 seconds.
• New talent: Charm of Aegwynn — Increases the critical strike chance of your spells by 5%.
• New talent: Charm of Medivh — Increases your mastery by 3%.
• New talent: Permafrost Bauble — Reduces Ice Block and Ice Cold by 30 seconds.
• New talent: Master of Escape — Reduces the cooldown of Greater Invisibility by 45 seconds.
• Overflowing Energy now only increases the critical strike chance of Arcane Barrage, instead of all spells.
• Quick Witted now reduces Counterspell's cooldown by 5 seconds.
• Time Manipulation now reduces your crowd-control cooldowns by 5 seconds.
• Incantation of Swiftness now reduces your movement speed during Invisibility by 30/60% for 6 seconds.
• Ice Nova replaces Cone of Cold when talented. Ice Nova is now a choice node with Freezing Cold.
• Mass Polymorph and Ring of Frost are now choice nodes.
• Improved Frost Nova and Ice Ward are now choice nodes.
• Many talents were removed. Most of them just talents related to spells which have been reworked to include them directly in their main effect, or otherwise are no longer relevant to the changed version of spells. Below a list of the relevant deletions:
  • Blast Wave
  • Displacement
  • Ice Floes
  • Incanter's Flow
  • Mass Barrier
  • Shifting Power
  • Slow
  • Supernova
  • Reduplication

One thing that is immediately obvious when you play Arcane on the Alpha, is the huge reduction in number of buffs / debuffs you need to track. As Blizzard describes, effectively all buffs that interact with your Arcane Barrage are all combined into a single buff, Arcane Salvo. Many Talents and Hero talents interact with this new buff. Basically anything that previously interacted with Arcane Barrage, is now mostly reworked to work via Arcane Salvo. This makes it a lot easier in terms of the actual buffs you need to track and think about, however, if it will actually significantly decrease complexity of decision making is not yet known.

Arcane has received a large rework in Midnight, with a very large amount of changes across almost all spells and talents. I will first highlight the core changes made to the spec and how this impacts your available spells and how they work. Afterwards I also provide the full changes for context.

• At a very high level: All buffs either impacting or benefitting from Arcane Barrage, like Arcane Harmony, Intuition, Arcane Tempo have either been changed, or combined into Arcane Salvo. This makes it so you only really need to track this single buff, in combination with your Mana and Arcane Charges, to decide on your Arcane Barrage usage:
  • Arcane Salvo is a new talent which grants you a buff every time you cast a damaging spell, increasing your Arcane Barrage damage by 3%, stacking up to 60%. Note: Arcane Missiles gives a single stack per wave, providing many stacks per cast.
  • New talent: Focusing Crystal — Gives each wave of Arcane Missiles a 50% chance to grant an additional stacks of Arcane Salvo.
  • New talent: Arcane Singularity — Increases Arcane Salvo's damage bonus by 2%/4% per stack. (2 points)
  • New talent: Expanded Mind — Gain an additional stack of Arcane Salvo when casting a damaging spell.
  • Updated talent: Orb Barrage — Now causes Arcane Barrage to have a 3% chance per Arcane Salvo stack to launch Arcane Orb.
  • Arcane Tempo now just grants 2% Haste passively, instead of stacking Haste based on Arcane Barrage usage.
• New Apex Talents: Touch of the Archmage. This is a set of talents buffing the strength of Touch of the Magi. Most notably, it gives Touch of the Magi a second charge, which might open up interesting optimizations around its usage. It also greatly improves the strength of Touch of the Magi by increasing the damage of all your core damage abilities based on Arcane Charges, and leaves behind a pulse effect after Touch of the Magi, doing significant damage to enemies based on the damage done to Touch of the Magi.
• Arcane Pulse is a new talent, which replaces Arcane Explosion when talented. This provides a ranged AoE option, which is not only ranged, but also has a few different mechanics, like doing increased damage with Arcane Charges, but also costing more mana. This is effectively an AoE version of Arcane Blast. This makes Arcane now able to be played fully from ranged instead of needing to go into melee for AoE.
• Nether Precision has been removed. This talent was a very impactful buff which was played around a lot, like making chaining Arcane Missiles very unfavorable. With its removal, chaining Missiles might become much more common again. Which is a great quality of life buff, as channeling spells are difficult to properly queue up without losing ticks, unless you follow it by another channeling spell.
• Evocation has been changed to now only grant Mana. Previously also granted Intellect and Clearcasting.

• All buffs related to Arcane Barrage have been changed/removed:
  • Arcane Salvo is a new talent which grants you a buff every time you cast a damaging spell, increasing your Arcane Barrage damage by 3%, stacking up to 60%. Note: Arcane Missiles gives a single stack per wave, providing many stacks per cast.
  • New talent: Focusing Crystal — Gives each wave of Arcane Missiles a 50% chance to grant an additional stacks of Arcane Salvo.
  • New talent: Arcane Singularity — Increases Arcane Salvo's damage bonus by 2% per stack.
  • New talent: Expanded Mind — Gain an additional stack of Arcane Salvo when casting a damaging spell.
  • Updated talent: Orb Barrage — Now causes Arcane Barrage to have a 3% chance per Arcane Salvo stack to launch Arcane Orb.
  • Arcane Tempo now just grants 2% Haste passively, instead of stacking Haste based on Arcane Barrage usage.
• New Apex Talents: Touch of the Archmage. This is a set of talents buffing the strength of Touch of the Magi:
  • Touch of the Magi accumulates an additional 5% damage and has an additional charge.
  • Arcane Charges further increase the damage of Arcane Blast, Arcane Pulse and Arcane Barrage by 15/30%.
  • When Touch of the Magi explodes, it leaves behind a pulsing rune at the explosion location, dealing 25% of Touch of the Magi's damage over 6 seconds to nearby enemies. Does double damage on your main Touch of the Magi target.
• Arcane Pulse is a new talent, which replaces Arcane Explosion when talented. Deals AoE damage to all enemies near your target, reduced after 5 targets. Each Arcane Charge increases its damage, radius and mana cost. This allows Arcane to be fully played from range even on AoE.
• New talent: Overpowered Missiles — Gaining Clearcasting has a chance to cause your next Arcane Missiles to be Overpowered, causing it to deal 100% increased damage and strike 3 additional targets at 50% effectiveness.
• Nether Precision has been removed. This talent was a very impactful buff which was played around a lot, like making chaining Arcane Missiles very unfavorable. With its removal, chaining Missiles might become much more common again. Which is a great quality of life buff, as channeling spells are difficult to properly queue up without losing ticks, unless you follow it by another channeling spell.
• Evocation has been changed to now only grant Mana. Previously also granted Intellect and Clearcasting.
• New talent: Charged Missiles — Consumes Arcane Charges to increase Arcane Missiles damage by 80%. Note: This currently consumes one Arcane Charge per wave, meaning that after you are out of Arcane Charges the remaining Missiles do not gain the increased damage. Choice node with High Voltage.
• New talent: Orb Mastery — Casting Arcane Orb with Clearcasting fires 2 additional orbs, consuming Clearcasting.
• New talent: Aegwynn's Technique — Casting Touch of the Magi grants Clearcasting. Choice node with Arcane Echo.
• New talent: Overflowing Insight — Arcane Blast and Arcane Pulse deal 15% increased damage but their mana costs are increased by 25%.
• Aether Attunement has been updated: Now a 2-point talent, letting Arcane Missiles deal damage to 2/4 additional targets, at 50% effectiveness.
• Reverberate has been updated: Arcane Pulse now has a 50% chance to repeat its explosion at 30% effectiveness. Note: the extra explosion grants an Arcane Charges.
• Surging Urge has been renamed to Mana Bomb and updated: Now increases Arcane Surge's damage by 50% based on mana spent.
• Presence of Mind and Slipstream are now a choice node.
• Arcane Orb and Mana Adept are now talents instead of base abilities. Improved Prismatic Barrier has been moved to the Class talent tree.
• Arcane Blast no longer has increased chance to proc Clearcasting, but the proc chance of Clearcasting has been buffed across the board to compensate.
• High Voltage has been reworked slightly: It is now a flat 30% chance to proc, instead of a ramping chance. Overall, this maths out to roughly the same amount of procs as before. Also increases Arcane Missiles' damage by 10%.
• Impetus now causes Arcane Pulse and Arcane Blast to generate an additional Arcane Charge, but no longer increases the damage.
• Arcane Barrage now replaces Fire Blast when speccing Arcane.
• Arcane Blast now replaces Frostbolt when speccing Arcane.
• Many spells have had their damage tuned to account for all of the changes.

Spellslinger overall has not received major changes, but more targeted tuning due to the changes to the spec tree. Anything previously referring to a buff affecting Arcane Barrage has been changed to use the new Arcane Salvo buff. And Splintering Sorcery now just procs directly from Arcane Blast and Arcane Pulse instead of Nether Precision due to its removal.

• New talent: Attuned Familiar — Arcane Familiar has a 50% chance to conjure a Splinter when it attacks.
• New talent: Infused Splinters — Direct damage from Splinters has a 15% chance to grant a stack of Arcane Salvo.
• New talent: Archmage's Wrath — Arcane Surge damage increased by 30%.
• New talent: Polished Focus — Casting Arcane Barrage at 20 or more stacks of Arcane Salvo refunds 5 stacks.
• Look Again has been changed: While in combat, Blink summons a Mirror Image at your previous location.
• Shifting Shards has been changed: Gaining Clearcasting conjures 2 splinters. Now a choice node with Attuned Familiar
• Force of Will has been changed: Arcane Barrage conjures an Arcane Splinter for every 5 stacks of Arcane Salvo consumed, rounding down. (so 4 will give you no Splinters)
• Signature Spell has been changed: Touch of the Magi now grants 4 Arcane Splinters.
• Reactive Barrier has been changed to only absorb 25%. (from 50%)
• Unerring Proficiency and Volatile Magic have been removed.

The core mechanics of Sunfury remain mostly the same, however, most of the buffs are simplified a bit to be more direct, instead of potentially being played around. For example, Burden of Power simply makes Arcane Blast/ Arcane Pulse do more damage, instead of being a proc after reaching a certain amount of stacks.

• New talent: Ashes of Inspiration — When your Arcane Phoenix expires, grants you Lesser Time Warp, granting 20% Haste for 10 seconds.
• New talent: Spellfire Salvo — Arcane Salvo can stack 5 more times.
• New talent: Pyrocosm — Arcane Missiles has a 10% chance per hit to summon a Meteorite. When a Meteorite lands, it has a 5% chance to proc Clearcasting.
• New talent: Explosive Potential — After casting Arcane Surge, your next Blink will cast Blast Wave at your previous location. Choice node with Lessons in Debilitation.
• New talent: Time Twist — The cooldown of Alter Time is reduced by 10 seconds. Choice node with Merely a Setback.
• Codex of the Sunstriders has been changed: When your Arcane Phoenix is summoned (when you press Arcane Surge), it consumes all Spellfire Spheres, increasing the damage during Arcane Surge by 2% per stack. It also casts one exceptional spell during its duration for each Sphere consumed.
• Merely a Setback has been changed: The effects of Prismatic Barrier last 8 seconds after it is removed.
• Glorious Incandescence has been changed: Now drops a meteorite for every 5 Arcane Salvo stacks consumed.
• Memory of Al'ar has been changed: No longer extends Arcane Soul based on exceptional spell casts. Arcane Soul is now always 6 seconds long. (was 2 baseline + exceptional cast increase). Arcane Soul was changed: Arcane Barrage during Arcane Soul now also grants 5 stacks of Arcane Salvo and does not consume Arcane Salvo. The old effects remain, so it also still grants Clearcasting and 4 Arcane Charges.
• Sunfury Execution has been changed: Increases Arcane Barrage's damage by 15% to enemies affected by Touch of the Magi.
• Burden of Power now pasdsively provides Arcane Blast and Arcane Pulse damage instead of being proc based.
• Ignite the Future was removed.

• Mage Arcane 12.0 Class Set 2pc — Each Arcane Charge increases your critical strike chance by 1.0%.
• Mage Arcane 12.0 Class Set 4pc — The critical strike damage of your Arcane spells is increased by 10%.

The first tier set of the expansion is a bit of a simpler one, most likely due to the large amount of other changes to the class already happening on expansion launch. It is a passive effect increasing your Crit Chance and Critical Strike Damage. However, there might still be some optimizations around the tier set, as the bonus Critical Strike Chance is tied to Arcane Charges, you will ideally want to sit on 4 Arcane Charges when using spells you might previously not care about Arcane Charges for, like Arcane Missiles.

As it is still early on in the development process, and we have not yet been able to test everything (like how mana sustain feels in seasonal gear), it is currently very difficult to say how the actual optimal rotation will play. However, based on findings so far, we can provide some early thoughts on how the rotation might be impacted:

• Instead of tracking a multitude of buffs to determine Arcane Barrage usage, we will now only be focusing on a few main aspects: Arcane Salvo, your mana level, Arcane Charges and your cooldowns. It is too early to tell how exactly Arcane Barrage usage will play out, but it will be based on fewer conditions than before, but perhaps not significantly easier.
• Building up Arcane Salvo is currently very quick on the Alpha, with limited ways to immediately recoup 4 Arcane Charges. This makes it likely that we will be spending more time rebuilding Arcane Charges, as sitting on max stacks of Arcane Salvo, especially with all of the bonus damage it is currently providing is very punishing. With certain talents providing us ways to make a single Arcane Blast provide multiple charges, we will likely see a combination of spells like Arcane Orb for the first 2 Arcane Charges into Arcane Blast for the last 2 be a common way to rebuild charges. Both Hero Talent trees also offer some way to speed up Arcane Charge generation, but the instant 4 Charges after Arcane Barrage seems mostly gone, at least on single-target.
• Having 2 charges of Touch of the Magi opens up all kind of possibilities. How we will utilize this optimally is anyone's guess at this point, however, it might make us chain them during Arcane Surge as a way to both regain 4 Arcane Charges, and to further increase our burst damage.
• The removal of Nether Precision completely changes how we think about using Arcane Missiles. Previously, any time you used Arcane Missiles, you would never (unless capped on Clearcasting) want to cast it again, since you would be wasting the very powerful Nether Precision stacks. Now that this is gone, chaining Arcane Missiles is much less punishing. Arcane Missiles does provide the new Arcane Salvo buff (and a lot of them, if combined with certain talents), we will probably still not just chain them blindly, but it will be much more flexible in terms of usage, as we no longer have the hard sequence of Arcane Missiles -> Arcane Blast/ Arcane Barrage.
• The AoE rotation now having a ranged ability ( Arcane Pulse) as our main method to build charges, which in and of itself also scale with Arcane Charges, is going to be quite a new thing to adapt to. Previously, in AoE you really only had Arcane Barrage as your main damage dealer, and everything else was just used to generate Arcane Charges (or to do cleave/funnel damage via Touch of the Magi or similar abilities). Arcane Pulse might change this approach, where just like on single-target, we use Arcane Blast as a major portion of our damage, Arcane Pulse might do the same on AoE.