Game Mechanics A bunch of arcanist feedback+suggestions

This is a long post, if u just wanna read some spell changes go down to the spoiler

It's no secret that arcanist is the least popular mage archetype with riftwalker and lightbender being amazing on their own or together. While this may be the result of riftwalker and lightbender being very strong, arcanist still has many glaring issues that make it hard/bad to play on its own.

What is Arcanist?
Arcanist as an archetype revolves around using spells to generate mana for the mana bank with arcane transfer, then using the mana in that mana bank to release more spells; because of this, arcanist can sustain its mana better than other archetypes, allowing for less reliance on low spellcosts. Transferring mana from the mana bank to the mana bar can be done with the heal spell, which no longer heals the player. The way this archetype plays lends itself to being very bursty, casting multiple spells in quick succession when the mana bank is transferred. This is compounded by abilities like chaos explosion, which release 3 (w/ upgrades 5) of the player's last spells when more than 120 mana is transferred. Some of the more optimal build styles for arcanist are heavy spell builds that rely on the mana bank and chaos explosion to provide mana sustain and additional dps, high damage/glassy builds that aim to kill bosses/enemies in one single quick burst, water builds focusing on using the high mana usage/sustain of the archetype to maintain high concentration and melee builds that use pyrokinesis (one of the few melee upgrades in the entire mage tree). Overall this archetype, at face value, offers an interesting set of abilities for a few different playstyles


Arcanist's Flaws
The archetype has a few major flaws that make it non competitive which I'll cover here.

1: Sustain
The ability tree is all about costs and benefits, many of the abilities, especially major ones, come with downsides, such as locking other abilities (for example, phantom ray locking other arrowstorm upgrades) or changing the functionalities of spells (such as ritualist's mask system preventing the use of uproot). In Arcanist's case, the major cost of the archetype is the removal of heal spell's heal, requiring the class to rely on other forms of healing (lifesteal , health regen, greed). This Downside is too harsh for the benefits the ability provides (better mana sustain and some later upgrades) since building mana sustain into a build is easier (and often comes pre-paired with damage IDs) than building high life sustain into a class that is glassy and relatively close range.


2: Item Pool
The item pool of wands as well as other items in the game doesn't suit arcanist. What I mean by this is (1), that the wands in the game generally don't have life sustain built into them (there are of course exceptions but they are mainly late game/mythics), which can hamper many Arcanist builds that need a source of sustain.

But •WhiteWolf•, can't this just be built in with the other 8 pieces that makes up a build? Well yes but not effectively. This is (2), other items, Mage's stats are designed with heal spell in mind (or vice versa if you want to think of it that way), that's why it's not a very tanky class by default, whereas classes like warrior and assassin who don't have access to built in healing have higher base defences and access to defence boosting upgrades. For the three glassy classes, they each have a form of healing, range or a mix of the two as a "supplemental defence", or a way of ensuring that although they theoretically take more damage per hit, this is mitigated by better healing back with spells or avoiding them with range. So when it comes to arcanist, not having this level of sustain through heal puts it at a disadvantage in the item pool. If both an arcanist and a warrior/assassin are wearing the same armour, the arcanist is still at a massive disadvantage because there is nothing except a slight range advantage to bridge the gap in actual damage taken (this also doesn't take into account that warrior and assassin have damage mitigation abilities that are fairly easy to obtain), so if, as an arcanist, you want to build enough health sustain into your build, barring using mythics like quetz/monster, you will need to make a disproportionate investment into health sustain items , negatively impacting a build's damage potential more than other classes/archetypes.


3: Low Complexity
Arcanist has a total of 7 abilities that are archetype defining (they change the playstyle/identity of the class): Arcane transfer, pyrokinesis, arcane restoration (debatable), psychokinesis, chaos explosion, arcane overflow and manastorm. Comparably, riftwalker has 10 (maybe 11) and lightbender has 8 and several utility abilities that help it hybridise (which, I should mention is something that arcanist struggles to do, especially with its neighbouring archetype, lightbender). I don't mean to say that less "defining" abilities is by default worse, but it does illustrate an issue I have with arcanist: it feels very one dimensional. There's very little use to using your mana bank before you hit 120 mana so you can activate chaos explosion for the burst damage (and getting a mana bank with 120+ capacity requires lots of investment of AP). Pyrokinesis slightly boosts melee damage while nerfing the range in which you hit (this reduces the amount of mana/lifesteal you can get from my experience). psychokinesis, snake nest and sentient snake make it slightly easier to generate mana for the mana bank but even then, Thunderstorm (a riftwalker ability) does a better job at this, quintupling the mana storage of meteor spell since it add 4 additional hits in the form of lightning strikes (burning sigil however does not do this despite being on the arcanist tree). The other arcanist abilities generally increment things like the mana bank, mana generated by spells or spells released from chaos explosion, improving the archetype slightly but not making it more interesting.


<I might add more things later>



How to Fix these problems:
1: Sustain
I'm not against the heal removal, in fact I think it is an interesting idea that could make an arcanist stand out more. In my opinion, fixing it shouldn't hinge upon making the heal removal less severe (like returning the heal but at a lower amount of health healed) as that cheapens it. Instead there should be a focus on adding more alternate forms of health sustain. This could take the form of kill for heal abilities like fallen's Intoxicating blood or a form of resistance spell tied to the mana bank or similar. This would also help with the other 2 problems I've explained.


2: Item Pool
The best way to fix this is to provide better wand options. This is already being done in the form of some recent additions such as quetzalcoatl and framsehift which both focus on nerfing healing and buffing lifesteal. There aren't really any good endgame wands that focus on health regen (except, singu and bonder). Given that water no longer guarantees less healing, a good alternative for arcanist would be -mana sustain to encourage the use of arcanist to cover the mana needed.


3: Low Complexity
The solution to this one is both simple and hard. Fixing low complexity can be done by... making the archetype more complex (crazy, I know). I have several ideas which I'll list below. The aims of them are to better integrate mana bank into play (much more like how corrupted, blood pool and focus do)

Spoiler: Ability suggestions

1: Changing Chaos Explosion
Chaos explosion now casts a burst of the player's past spells, scaling at 1 for every 40 mana taken from the bank. the upgrade changes this to every 20 mana. This means there isn't a massive focus on waiting until the 120 mana needed to trigger it currently and makes the mana bank more versatile.

2: New ability: Mana Padding
When mana is above 80, reduces damage by 20%, instead removing 5 mana per hit
this one could do with some refining. It's meant to synergise with mana overflow and provide a conditional source of sustain, which encourages the use of overflow mana. This isn't OP for arcanist since arcanist generally uses a lot of mana to cast spells so poor play can result in losing the buff. It could replace manastorm or be added on its own

3: combining excess white buffs.
Arcanist has several white buffs that just fill the tree. 3 mana bank buffs, 1 to mana storage conversions, 1 stat--> stat, 1 meteor buff and 1 chaos explosion buff. cutting down on these and replacing them with more interesting buffs improves arcanist's character and also leaves room for more useful buffs

4: New Ability: Ice pulse
ice snake is replaced by a radial pulse of ice that slows down enemies 10% per wave for a maximum of 50% slowness. radius of 8, same damage conversions
this could replace arctic snake or be its own buff. snake nest makes it pulse three times. This is better for generating mana as well as visually differentiating arcanist from other archetypes. with snake nest it should also do decent damage. It should be lower on the tree so that ice pulse + snake nest + windsweeper (+gust) isn't easy to achieve.

5: Changing Burning sigil
Simple Change: burning sigil can charge mana bank. It should only add to the mana bank once per sigil per enemy but it should do this in order to synergise with its own archetype's main ability

6: Changing Arcane Restoration
when the mana bank contains over 60 mana, pyrokinesis attacks should also be larger by 0.5 radius (in addition to the pre existing bonus). This could alternatively be more damage (200% multiplier) instead

Umm yeah thanks for reading this far. Please share your thoughts down below.

TL;DR: Arcanist has a few problems with sustain, item pool and complexity (not all exclusive, they each feed into eachother) and these problems can be fixed in a bunch of ways by changing things (novel, I know)

 

bump10char

 

maybe make it so that after casting a spell you gain temporary damage resistance? It would help with the low survivalability issue

 

I stuck a thread in feedback about Arcanist a few days ago that mostly focuses on making Chaos Explosion more dps-bursty than anything, turning it even more into Arcanist's core damage-dealing mechanic. Still, that thread didn't do anything about sustain.

While I'm fine with Arcanist being squishy, I feel as if its biggest problems are that DPS in no way compensates for this. Still, bare survivability is good, and there needs to be more thought put in by the player to get that damage out. For that, I think your feedback's great!

Maybe something like Ice Snake being cast with a decent amount of banked mana turning it into an Ice Barrier? Now that I think about it, mana thresholds to alter Arcanist's spells beyond just Arcane Transfer and the Main Attack could conceivably double the number of abilities it has at its disposal, both increasing the class' in-battle complexity and playing into a "Master Wizard" theming.

 

yeyeyeyeyye yeees bump

ok but actually the resistance thing i had an idea for that i didnt post: Arcane Shield, upon reaching x mana bank and using transfer gain a force field worth y overflow health that decays by z per second.

 

Bump10char

 

Bump10char