The only trolls I see on the forums are casual players crying about losing an RP pet that anyone who played frost seriously celebrated the demise of.
The devs have no reason to waste time and resources on talent changes to appease casual/RP players. Mage is not a pet spec. The elemental was a callback to old WC3 and we’ve evolved since then and the devs realized mage is not a pet spec.
RIP Bubble/Welly/Whatever … you ain’t gon’ be missed and I hope you never come back cause you were always the worst thing about playing frost till you were gone.
We can say this stuff on repeat, but they’re just going to say the same thing. They’re too afraid the Elemental will become mandatory and they’ll have to do something other than Ice Lance their way through fights.
It really shouldn’t matter though. No other spec has been held back because people were worried they might have to play their fantasy. Heck mages with water elemental was more recent when wow launched than locks with demons (wc1). This is doubly ridiculous when you see we already have 2 non pet specs.
And 2 lock specs can wiggle out of demons too. Both aff and demo. There’s lots of non pet ranged damage options.
In practice the pet should have always been stronger. Active abilities have generally been balanced to be stronger than passive buffs on principle.
That’s the only thing in your post that is worth mentioning. Mages are absolutely not pet classes. They were never built around their pet, have almost never had any interaction with their pet (at most ranged nova was used for pvp). If you think having a little passive minion following you around makes you a pet class I suggest you give both BM and Demo a try, and see what an actual pet class feels like to play.
To make Frost into a pet class they would need to redesign the entire talent tree, and you’d find that for every Frosty who enjoys the new spec, you’d have 100 leave to play an actual caster.
It was never a choice, expect for a very brief time in Legion. It was a cooldown in early wow, so irrelevant as a “pet”, virtually no one played Frost in WotLK or Cata outside of pvp, and as soon players were given the choice to get rid of it they did, even when it wasn’t a dps gain such as early Legion. As for the player base, even those doing content where their dps didn’t matter didn’t take WE - the stats show no one took it, even the players who took other “fun” talents. It was a terrible idea to move it from a cooldown, and a great idea to add it back as a cooldown. Honestly the best choice Blizzard has made for Mages since removing RoP.
This is false. LW was the only of the 2 that scaled AOE damage meaningfully at all because it increased icicle damage in legion (icicles were affected by splitting ice, and icicle damage was based on frostbolt). Additionally it was the only of the two that scaled AOE in any way with mastery → splitting ice basically doubled the mastery output of Frostbolt when it was filler. WE was strictly ST. In fact that’s been a major pain point of the two: splitting ice, a necessary talent for M+ up till DF had strong interaction with LW while WE had none. WE only won over LW when the bonechilling bonuses were just that high (noIL). I personally was using WE all throughout legion, felt required to take LW as an M+ player. Mage’s job is to do damage. Taking stats based on usage without considering damage differences is short sited. I’m not the only mage who has commented on the damage difference.
Mastery buffing FO didn’t come until BFA.
Source? I doubt many people were taking GS and RoF for “fun”, but both saw lots of love.
Also why are you spending your time attacking long-time frost enjoyers when you recently switched sometime during or after BFA? Shouldn’t you be asking for tempered flames or some other LI fire build back in TWW? I’m guessing your fingers couldn’t handle the fire gymnastics and that’s why you switched. I’d more than support you there.
This is false. They’ve done this with unholy dk, you don’t need to lean into pets to make the non pet option work. They just need to put the pet options lower in the tree and the other bottom nodes on the other side that are non pet viable.
I mean just going off of unique mages who have made comments here within two weeks, i’m not sure this is true (valerio, me, icy, Nathon, vs you, aedred and some rando, this isn’t counting the pro pet alts either), . My previous comments about survivor bias are proving true. Lots of people coming back to their mages wondering what happened here. Bomb magic’s reddit post was showing reality.
You keep trying to Jedi Mind Trick this into the discussion but the reality is that the pet’s biggest issue was that it wasn’t active. It was an external source of damage that had minimal interaction (at best) with the Mage. You’re a smart guy, surely you can see why that’s horrid design.
Yes, they could have redesigned the pet and the talent tree to make it more interactive. They could do a lot of things. But there’s only so much time and resource available and since there are already two classes that fill the pet niche they (rightly) decided to keep Mages in a different lane.
More options are not always better, contrary to another commonly hand waved fallacy often used around here. When there’s a limit to how much you can do, it’s better to try to do a few things well than a hundred things poorly. Blizzard can’t get balance right very often as it is, and the more playstyles they try to incorporate the harder that job becomes. Keeping a particular style alive solely for “class fantasy” just isn’t worth it.
I’m sorry “perma Bubbles” didn’t make the cut. I really am. But there are good reasons why he didn’t whether you want to accept them or not. It’s really really REALLY time to move on now.
The opinions of seven dudes on an internet forum isn’t in the same universe as definitive of anything.
Similarly,
The words “reddit” and “reality” should never be in the same sentence.
And no serious frost mage wants to see the talents reworked with an entire line dedicated to a pet most of us who played frost seriously never wanted in the first place.
It was off and on. Like one expansion it’s nova gave you procs, the next it did nothing, next expansion they add an a ability to help with procs, the next they take that interaction away. How “active” the Pet was compared to a flat +x% is just semantics. I mean, it basically played like any other pet spec; you had one or two buttons to push that made the pet actually do anything and the rest was up to AI.
Still shows there’s a majority on either wanting or indifferent to us having the Perma Welly in this forum, and Reddit is just as valid as WoWhead is just as valid here on concerns with the game.
Wouldn’t say that’s entirely accurate. Welly became permanent because serious Frost Mages were using it, myself included.
Depends on how you’re defining “valid.” If you mean in the sense that people’s opinions are valid regardless of which forum they are using to express them, then sure. No argument. But then by extension you must also accept that there will be dissenting opinions in a public forum that are also valid and have a right to be expressed which, no offense to you or anyone in particular, the pro-Welly side seems to have a problem with. I say that because a common reaction is to say we’re just here to rain on your parade and sabotage your chances of getting your beloved Bubbles back.
Now, if you mean that Reddit or Wowhead or this forum is “valid” in the statistical sense thereby implying that the majority shares your particular position, as Nelluced seems to be doing, then that is absolutely and unequivocally not true. All we know is that some number of vocal posters support the permanent pet. There can be no conclusions drawn as to whether that is representative of what “people” in general want.
The only somewhat valid data we have is from Blizzard themselves saying that when given the choice, the overwhelming majority of Frost Mages took Lonely Winter. The possible reasons for that have been discussed ad nauseum here and don’t need to be rehashed. Agree or disagree with the decision Blizzard made with their data, it’s time to let it be what it is.
I just know that i passed a mage on my glacial tidestorm on a different nonnmage character and he stopped dead in his tracks to watch me. I’m going to make other mages ache for as long as this persists.
I’m fine if there’s a non pet option for frost, as long as it’s kept balanced and the complexity is the same. It was criminal lw had better splitting ice scaling and it was a passive buff. That’s not how blizz normally does things. If something is cludgy fix it. Don’t nuke fantasy.
I don’t understand though people coming in swinging against the class having access when archmage could have up to 3 at once. It’s part of the lore, if you don’t like it, don’t play it.
If i didn’t feel forced to take lw as a M+ player for so long i’d have a much eaiser time accepting this. Also it’s strange beta feedback specifically called out the scaling differences as favoring lw and then our dev decided to take the usage numbers seriously without rebalancing. I certainly hope that it was a new guy who missed that phase of development and not an antagonistic dev. In any case defending design decisions made with bad data sets you up for unfavorable treatment in other issues down the line. This is a very self defeating stance to take on defending a spec design choice for a spec you don’t normally play, it could have massive ramifications down the line if the community accepts behavior like this.
This thread was created by a dummy account, boosted by a handful of other dummy accounts, necroed at least twice, and being kept alive by just a few users… honestly what are forum moderators getting paid for?
I get that people were upset by the removal of Bubbles as a permanent pet but it’s obvious at this point that it’s not coming back, just let it go folks.
Do you think it’s possible that it was a design decision based on a number of factors and not deliberate persecution from the devs against users of the Water Elemental?
Not a casual Frost Mage here. Ilvl 524 and 2500+ IO. I want a frost elemental pet. Mage as a whole isn’t a pet class. However the frost elemental is a huge part of the Frost mage identity. All anyone is saying is to add the pet back in, however make it so if you don’t use it you’re just as powerful. So that both parties are satisfied. Also coming on this forum and just assuming we are all casuals is more of an insult to you. Shows you’re just a person full of assumptions… and we all know what those kind of people are. I’ll give you a hint. First three letters.
Given it was balanced well enough, ~5% lower at best according to napkin math of logs, before they buffed it from 15% to 25% in 7.1 along with a set bonus that practically invalidated Water Jet, only to reduce it’s power when they removed permanent pet. It’s kind of hard to believe the devs regardless cared about Frost since Ghostcrawler given they’ve quite literally snuffed Glacial Spike since its inception too. Not useable in Legion, NoIL in BFA sure, but garbage in SL and garbage in DF until the rework of “push all the things” and current set bonus. They can’t seem to wrap their heads around making Frost anything other than a poor man’s Fire and figuring out how to make Shatter work outside of the Flurry WC window takes too much effort.
The whole point of a game forum is to discuss ideas and concerns for the game itself. If you don’t like a specific discussion than just leave and join another one that concerns you. Instead of being rude.
I am not being rude and it’s not a discussion when it’s a completely one sided echo chamber. A 9 month necro bump, however, is rude and disrespectful to everyone else using these forums for legitimate discourse. Especially when the thread, the necro and about a dozen other threads on the same exact topic were already made likely by the same person. That’s actually not only rude but against forum policy.
And for the record I have been ignoring it but enough is enough.
Given the feedback and their response to it, another potential explanation is they didn’t want to put in the effort to balance it. That doesn’t look much better either. It’s fairly feasible, because they did kinda give it back in the sense that now if you play frost you must use it. Maybe that was how they were trying to satiate the pro pet crowd. It just feels awful if you’ve been wanting to use elemental but you’ve been stuck with lw for years and it makes its way back in an implementation we hadn’t seen in over a decade, and you want to use your elemental all the time and be effective.
After trying really hard another explanation is that maybe they thought including both pet and shatter mechanics would be too difficult to manage simultaneously in the class design. They should have been honest instead of pushing us one way or the other and pretending it’s what we wanted if this is the case. I think they could have still kept it by giving the welly interaction with shatter and giving the non welly people an alternate button for managing it (or heck, change an existing button based on whether or not you have it, we have plenty of bloat). Demo has buttons you use on your bar that are actually the pet. Completely tangentially i don’t like the soft cap on crit that shatter forces. If you get unlucky with secondary rolls you can end up significantly behind other classes. Usually an end of expansion problem with an easy fix (convert overcap to crit damage).
Now here’s my question: how are we supposed to interpret them ignoring feedback saying it was imbalanced but them pretending it was when they made the decision? You don’t find that a little weird in any way at all? They know most mages want to do damage. Any sane person would know lw would be significantly more popular.
Valerio is a unique person in this debate. Are you saying that they should have made an entirely new thread? People seem to get pissed about that as well. I try to only respond when a non regular person pipes in or i think the non elemental camp is throwing shade when they shouldn’t.
A discussion is when 2 opposing opinions are discussed at length. Which is what is happening here. Not only that but I don’t see an echo chamber, If you read any of the discussion you would see that both parties are discussing specific facts to support their opinion, exact percentages, specific talents and actions that could potentially be taken etc
Both sides are incredibly valid. 77 posts to a forum wouldn’t have been made if people didn’t believe it was at least worth discussing in the first place.
“Legitimate discourse” is completely subjective and just because you believe it isn’t, doesn’t make it against forum rules. It’s just your opinion.
Fact is somebody had a valid concern about the future playstyle of their class. There’s no better time to bring up and discuss these changes than before a new expansion. That is likely when their suggested change might get implemented. I am personally happy that somebody is bringing it up because I agree with them.
Also again it’s just your opinion. It is blatantly obvious that a lot of people disagree with your opinion which is why the discussion is continuing to happen. So maybe let it happen instead of casually insulting everyone involved in the discussion.
No the “discussion” continues to happen precisely because of exchanges like this when different people politely ask the 5 or so of you to stop dredging this up. But I see it’s an exercise in futility so I will go back to ignoring this thread again and putting it on mute this time.