Yes the good old AB spam I had back in BT was really something. I have trouble seeing however how mana adept in any form close to the currrent would supply any balancing like the old burn cycle. Some people have posted ideas of having mana adept increase damage the lower your mana goes to aproach what arcane used to be like. The problem with this is that it would turn your manabar into a big obstacle. Starting way below your top dps would mean arcane terrible at bursting. Well unless raids started waiting or mages to drain their pool to a certain percent before starting fights but the logistics of something like that would just be painfull.

In short I believe mana adept is the right way around atm, but the tools to make it fun seem to be lacking. Perhaps adding some talent similar to improved scorch would help. If there was a free spell that dealt decent damage arcane could gravitate more towards a playstye revolving around pouring mana into costy burst at the oportune moment and using more free filler spells when it isn´t the oportune moment. But I guess wishing for a brand new spell at this point is just dreaming, not to mention that that big burn spell isnt really there either. A channeled arcane beam of some sort would be fun though. (No not like AM, that fires volleys. I´m talking about a proper beam. Or possibly more like laser blasts that make the sound the moonraker laser in goldeneye did.) Yes, a free channeled spell a bit like drain soul but with a more arcane feel offcourse and then a big thick ray blast costing a lot to mix into the rotations. You hearing this santa?

While I would love to see an arcane proc or talent that mixes up the rotation (multi-target barrage would be quite interesting), I'm not particularly optimistic that any drastic changes will happen before Cataclysm is released.

To the end of providing at least some management of mana (and the ability to even influence the "mana adept" mastery), I think there is a lot of balancing of mana costs and damages that needs to be done. In particular, Arcane needs a burn cycle - on live, it doesn't really have one. As Logix pointed out above, there really isn't a selection of reliable cycles. On live, short of just AB Spam, the highest DPS cycle is sustainable indefinitely, once you include the Mana regen buffs, Evocation and Mana Gems.

Arcane needs at least the following cycles for Mana management to be meaningful:
1) A main cycle. Should be sustainable for a minimum of 10-15 minutes once regen buffs/Evocation/Mana gems are included.
2) A "regen" cycle. Should allow you to regen mana. I see this a doing less dps at 100% of the mana adept bonus than the main cycle at, say, 50% of the bonus.
3) A "burn" cycle. Definitely not sustainable - even with Regen buffs and Mana gem this should make you go OOM in less than 2 minutes (the evocation cooldown). It also needs to do enough damage so you want to use it as often as possible - it needs to do more damage at 50% of of the mana adept buff than then main cycle does at 100% of the buff, for example.

Currently, Arcane has a regen cycle - ABx1, AM. It also has a main cycle. It has at least 3 cycles in between the two. It doesn't have a "burn" cycle - AB Spam uses tons of mana, but does only a little bit more damage.

My suggestion to help modify the cycles would be to change Arcane Blast. Make the initial damage lower, but increase the damage buff and mana cost. Stacking the AB debuff to 4 would give you a nice fat chunk of damage when you cast AB/MBAM, but would make you go OOM quickly.

Obviously, the exact numbers would be subject to tweaking and balancing.

This is no longer accurate in Cataclysm.

As I showed in this thread (post #420), there is no reliable cycle that will exist below ABx2 (and that was with the 100% chance to proc MBAM on a ABr, without that, even the ABx2 cycle will no longer be reliable).

Since AM is now a proc, and ABr is now a 5 sec cooldown, you, in fact, can only use ABx3ABr and ABx4ABr as your only two reliable cycles (given even a modicum of haste).

I stress the phrase reliable cycles since that is the entire point of having a tool. As I stated later on in that same thread, the entire idea behind "mana management", imho, should revolve around using the right tools at the right times.

The mage should be busy worrying about which tool to use at what time and for what purpose, and not be busy worrying about getting his tools to even work in the first place.

This is why basing cycles off of the uncertainty born out of an AM proc just wont work in my mind. What's the point of controlling your mana or altering your cycles when you are still a slave to the RNG-gods? Whats worse is that unlike the RNG of fire (hot streak), Arcane mages don't even have any method to alter the RNG of MBAM. I.e. its not like you can gear or glyph in a certain way to increase your chance to proc MBAM (not that I am advocating doing this, just pointing out that not only is RNG for Arcane mana mangement or cycle management bad, in my mind, but RNG which you can't even influence just makes it worse).

Currently, Arcane mages have just 2 reliable cycles (both of whose existence scales negatively with haste). Which is the reason I mentioned in my previous post in this thread that its all well and good saying "mana management will be born from altering cycles to play with Mana Adept" but that idea comes crashing down when you realize that you don't really have a choice of reliable cycles to alter in the first place.

Your other point though does make sense, i.e. the delta between the "burn" rotation and the "regular" rotation should be significant enough to be clearly noticeable (which, as you correctly pointed out, is not really the case right now). While a valid point, I do feel that it is a little further along in the discussion from where we are right now. Right now we are still trying to figure out the basics. Numerical balancing of cycles (and through extension, producing the payoffs like you mentioned) will come later imho, when Blizzard starts its "numbers balancing pass" on the classes.

Apologies - I should have specified that Arcane has a regen cycle on live. You are absolutely correct that this cycle does not exist in beta as AM itself is the proc, not MBAM, and AB-ABarr doesn't work because of ABarr's cooldown.

I do think that the basics of the arcane rotation/talent tree need to be rethought. Having a proc that is required, and not just desired, can break a rotation. Can you imagine if fireball could only be cast after a scorch crit? It would break the fire rotation entirely. My fear is that, like WotLK, we might not get that arcane redesign until patch 4.1. In the interim, what can we do to adapt arcane to have meaningful rotation choices?

As for what to do with AM... What if AM didn't consume the AB stacks? Or, what if AM itself added to the AB stack? That way you would be expecting to use ABarr to drop the AB stack, and AM would be a desired addition that didn't break the rotation if it didn't proc. (would depend on ABarr cooldown)

Aikiwoce I wouldn't get too concerned about what he is saying for ret pallies as the whole context of the pally discussion is around there being free GCD's in the rotation. Given that context what he is saying takes on a whole new meaning and I would be very reluctant to compare Ret goals to Arcane given the different philosophies between melee and caster design shown by that thread.

On a totally different note however I finally realised what had been concerning me most about AM becomming a proc, especially for lower mana rotations.

It is the interaction between the proc and latency. Specifically the fact that when chopping a rotation short for mana consumption you must decide your breaker spell in advance. However Missile barrage procs on cast completion so for a short, low haste rotation of AB AB <Breaker> you need to decide during the second AB cast if you want to hit Arcane Missiles or Arcane Barrage. This isn't a problem on live because you can just mash Arcane missiles and if you get a lucky proc well groovy you go faster. However with Arcane Missiles only activating on a proc you can't do this safely without either writing a complex macro, risking clipping your Missile barrage or loosing 1/2 a second or more each rotation waiting to determine if you can Missile barrage or Arcane Barrage.

Currently

AB - AB - AM casts fine
AB - mbarproc AB Cast Mbar works fine
AB - AB - mbarproc - Cast mbar works fine

Under the new cata model

AB - AB - AM won't work so you must hit Arcane barrage
AB mbarproc AB Caste Mbar works fine
AB - AB - mbarproc ...

What do you cast, given that many many raider will have bad latency of 200+ms one way they must assume that they won't proc and cast Arcane Barrage possibly wasting a MBar proc or they must mash the AM button, hope they get lucky and if not wait 1/2 a second to determine if you should instead cast Arcane Barrage.

This is a moderate dps loss in the first case and a potentially crippling one in the second as you basically are slowing down your roatation by about 15% and not casting continuously is a massive dps loss for any caster.

This makes it even harder for players (especially those on 200+ms connections) to show skill.

Basically the change to AM as a proc is causing all sorts of trouble all over the place.

Another thing that should at least be mentioned is the fact that as it stands the arcane masteries don't really work together as they are currently structured, spell haste and mana adept just don't seem like they will play well together. There is an inherent trade off to haste value in that you do more damage but burn through mana quicker, which is fine currently. In WotLK this works because our final goal is to burn as hard as needed at all mana levels to maximize damage output without completely running dry. Once our damage starts scaling based on our mana level we are much more likely to concern ourselves with dpm issues as well dps. Once this starts to happen the haste and spell crit/spell power relative values will start to shift, likely lowering the relative value of haste. Unless there is some very gentle scaling with mana adept it is quite possible that haste will not even be a good stat for arcane mages to stack. There have been a lot of comments about how our current selection of spells and talents don't currently work together well with mana adept, but it should just be pointed out that even the other arcane masteries don't either.

It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure it wouldn't be easier to just replace the mana adept mastery entirely or at least completely revamp the functionality. Even if they can tweak the numbers of our damage spells and mana regen, revamp the talents, and get the arcane tool set working together such that mana adept is both interesting and fun you will still run into the situation where an arcane mage with a pocket druid will be flat out superior to one without said innervates. At that point would we be overpowered with a druid or underpowered without one? We ran into this situation before with disc priests and arcane mages and Blizzard seemed to want to try and avoid this in the future.

Arcane Resource Sytem?

A suggestion for burn/manareg cycles would be to use a similar resource system like the moonkins do. Arcane Blast could stack something called Arcane Instability, which increased the damage and mana cost of arcane spells by xx% and reduces damage(?) and mana cost of non-arcane spells by yy%. Casting an Off-school spell would allow regeneration of mana but also reduce the amount of Arcane Instability. This would somehow remove burst, because damage builds up slower - on the other hand, we still have AP&Managem.

Do we need ranged AoE?

I tend to say yes. Fire AoE looks pretty fun to me and I am think of something along the line of ABar changing the Fire Orb into something like an Arcane cluster bomb, causing Arcane Explosion on all target in the vicinity (similar to the Ick/Krick ability)

The same idea had occurred to me. The problem with a stacking defensive buff is that right at the beginning is probably when you are most vulnerable to being one-shotted (or at least becoming a serious burden on healers' mana), especially with the expected nerf to tanks' AoE threat. The defences of current melee range AoE damage dealers like rogues and warriors are already in place at the start, as they are designed around being toe-to-toe with the mobs. PVP considerations probably also come into play.

Also, it doesn't seem very 'magey' to me to be running in with the cutlery-wavers to do AoE damage at point blank range. Part of the flavour of playing a mage is, in my opinion at least, hurling damage from afar, and I don't particularly see that Arcane AoE should be any different.

A simple change would be the ability to burst Arcane Explosion from a target other than the caster. One way of making this more interesting might be to have it not damage the target itself, forcing you to switch around targets in order to even damage and threat. Another might be to require it to be cast on (and burst from) a friendly target (which might be the caster herself, tank, or melee).

How about letting the Arcane Blast (De)buff also increase the chance to have Arcane Missiles proc, maybe at 5-10%/stack? This would still leave the random element in, but vastly reduces the chance of sitting at 3/4 stacks like a hot potato and still not getting a proc. Having a higher proc chance than the initial 40% on later casts would help a lot in there.

Especially with the change to Blastwave, Arcane Explosion is now our only PBAoE - and instant, at that. I just don't see the benefit in changing it to a targeted or ranged AoE when we'll have Flamestrike, Blizzard, and Flame Orb. If ranged AoE becomes/stays a problem for arcane, then really the most simple solution would be a talent that converts one of the existing ranged spells to some kind of arcane damage (like Frost has to make Flame Orb > FrostFire Orb). Blizzard > Arcane Storm, for instance.

And my biggest concern with the current incarnation of the Arcane Mastery is that it really doesn't reward mana management - whether you do high / low consumption cycles or just figure out a happy middle ground that takes you low as soon as Evocate is ready, I don't think the mastery will be able to affect a difference. Besides just making you feel weaker the longer you fight, of course (which while purely psychological is still a powerful deterrent imo). I do like the goal they have for Arcane, and I hope some more beta pushes come out to show us if any iteration has been done on it.

It's not that I dislike casting non-Arcane spells due to the color of the graphic on the screen, but more that I would dislike the 25% damage hit I will take while casting non-Arcane spells due to Arcane Specialization.

Either a VERY convincing mechanic would be needed to encourage the casting of cross-school damage spells, or the Specialization bonus would need to be changed.