For some bizarre reason there’s a subsect of forum users that think the inclusion of an option will force them to use it.
Maybe they’re minmaxers who are afraid it’ll be a viable option one day, and they’ll be forced to use it?
Maybe they’re just selfish and like watching people have options taken away?
Maybe they’re just apathetic and can’t put themselves in other people’s shoes.
Whatever the reason, it never holds water. They need to add back an option for people who preferred the pet playstyle. They can keep it underpowered on purpose, as they’ve done for the last decade or so, I don’t care. I just want the choice to be brought back.
I’ve been thinking this forever, I don’t understand why these selfish people think that more options are a bad thing! This mentality is so weird, if they don’t like the water elemental they can easily select lonely winter, that was the meta talent anyway!
Not to mention you need to grind currency to use it and it breaks easy. I just think it’s hilarious that my monk is a more powerful frost mage than most mages, being able to sustain the glacial tidestorm for so long ; )
Seriously. mages can summon a small one that lasts maybe 30s but my monk can summon one big enough to ride with no time limit.
Only if they make it purely a cosmetic thing, i hate pets on mage. Warlock is the perfect caster if you love to micromanage pets. Ele having nova basically means its required which is annoying as it means you need like 3-4 keybinds just for one stupid spell.
Except none of this is gone: ele still has nova with an approximate 20% or higher uptime depending on talents and shatters on gs/il achieved during iv. It encourages super sweaty gameplay and i’m sure people trying to optimize nova output can do more damage by landing it with a comet storm on freezable mobs in M+. I find it far easier to use a pet’s abilities when the pet is consistently around than not. You also need to cast freeze probably at exactly the time you press cs so team mates don’t break it (or just after the cs cast during the animation). That’s annoying.
Also there’s ways to fix things like this that don’t involve gutting a classes fantasy as demo lock has achieved. Major pet Abilities that matter became class abilities and the pet does the attack when they’re cast so you don’t have to deal with pet controls directly, everything else is just on auto cast.
??? pet was required in pvp for most of frost mage for nearly 10 years because nova was so strong. The problem was it wasnt a choice it was basically required because range nova was so dam good for shatters and burst.
Remove range nova on ele and bake it into nova and then i dont care if it comes back. Range nova means i need a pet move to and a pet attack\pet follow just so i can make sure ele is in line of sight of my target if i wanted to get a shatter off or a CC off, or to move it out of ring of frost, huge keybind bloat just to use range nova.
Easy fix would be to bake range nova from ele to base kit and it would solve the problem.
My point was that the current design isn’t an improvement so defending it from that angle is moot. My other point still stands: fantasy doesn’t have to be deleted, the gameplay around it can be improved. If you don’t like the fantasy of a class, don’t play it. Whining to ruin it for everyone else is just toxic.
Water ele isnt up 100% of the time in PVP like it use to be, its only up when i pop its CD its different and still annoying because it exists but its not as bad as a perm pet.
I can have an opinion on anything i want its the whole point of the class forums, i dont like pet management on mage, you are just trying to gatekeep. Frost mage having water ele and it being required for range nova was annoying for years.
“Gameplay around it can be improved”. The only way gameplay can be improved is to make it optional or purely cosmetic. So ill complain about Pets now, so if they do add in water ele as a perm then maybe they might actually remove range nova from it so its not required like it was for over a decade and was super awful and worst part of frost mage.
Basically just said how it could be improved. The iterations it had over it’s life was how it could have been improved. Guaranteed procs with range Nova from Cata, casting on the move and mastery beneficiary from MoP, FoF from Water Jet like in Legion, guaranteed BF on Water Jet cast like now.
Then of course, what about the players that don’t like the Pet. Make it a choice node. Lonely Winter: You can no longer summon your Water Elemental, but the damage of your Frost Spells are increased by 15%(this seems to have been the most balanced number, though variable can be tweaked). You now have two charges of Frost Nova, and every 30 seconds, you can cast Frost Nova with a 45 yrd range and generates two FoF procs on landing(Or alternatively, just get Freeze as an extra button).
Keep Icy Veins basically as is: Increase haste, for duration Water Elemental abilities have Frigid Empowerment increasing damage by 3% up to 15%.
I actually agree with this. Just make pet a passive dps increase. All spells should simply be done by the caster. I think if anything the WE pet needs to come back in TWW so that Frost can keep up with Fire/Arcane in terms of damage… because so far all we’ve seen is Fire/Arcane getting all the love and doing way more insane dps in Alpha.
If we are going to embrace the passive gameplay here… especially with spellslinger… then make some choice nodes in the talent tree for passive dps either with a pet or without. Not hard.
