Now look at this:
What a beautiful block of ice! And it even has a lovely designed freeze/break animation.
(see here).
Why don’t the mages have it? It’s been waiting in the game files since BFA. Perhaps this version could at least be made accessible with a glyph?
I think that would be pretty… cool.
There are a myriad of beautiful animations and spells that belong to NPCs.
Do you remember Khadgar using his glorious magic during WoD?
I do. And it stays with me a lot 
My guess is that players have historically had less spectacular effects because giving all that NPC bling to player spells would wreak havoc to the FPS of lesser machines during raids and such.
But, with the technology available now to minimize spell effects that are not your own I wouldn’t mind seeing a little bit of polish on our spells.
I wish it was an ice cube, a literal cube, clear and shiny.
I wish the frost fire talent that let you move during it didnt let you slowly ramp up speed. I wished that it would just preserve your current direction and speed on activation.
All of Jaina’s spells from her raid encounter in BfA were glorious. It’s what the entire Spellslinger tree should have been based on. What’s a more perfect way to bridge Arcane and Frost than Jaina’s toolkit? Such a missed opportunity!
Yeah, that might have been a valid concern back in the day but the technology is there now (and has been for a long time) to minimize any impact on performance.
I remember him combining arcane, fire, and frost into a single nuke. Only 18 months before the head-goomba decided that “fire and frost make water, and mages don’t use water” before removing FFB.
But yeah, if you look at all the amazing spell-graphic assets that exist in either WoW or Diablo and compare it to what players actually get, you sometimes wonder why the designers hate us.
I’d like to believe that mages do use water spells, but we are so adept at it that we freeze the water into ice crystals using cryo magic. Similar to Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat. Pulling the moisture from the air around us.
Either way, npc spells are cool, player spells need an update.
Really not into the idea of any new animations until they start giving us glyphs as an option to keep the old ones that some of us prefer.