Class design team, please play this game.
I can’t believe how happy I was playing a Mage.
It was like I was in TBC again, with never before released content. But I wasn’t in WoW. I was in a new mobile game… Diablo Immortal.
Where I now have an actual mage, who is a master of elements. One that has amazing spells and mobility. With impactful spells of choose from that fit a play style I want, without changing specs.
It lives up to the lore of what all mages were suppose to be in WoW.
Just a side note. Scorch works like a TBC pyro blast but its an instant cast!!! I can’t believe how much fun I had in the first few minutes. Its like an TBC arcane mage with new cool spells.
(Added 6/4 I should also say that there is one spell that I’m not liking in diablo mobile; Ray of frost, because it feels too powerful. But if you play Mage without it, it’s great fun and dynamic. This spell could use a nerf to a shorter channel or longer cooldown, or just removed and then the play-style would be closer to perfect."
Why can’t WoW mages be like this? Blizzard obviously knows what players want because they were able to create a mage in the true sense in Diablo Immortal.
I think the warcraft design team needs to play this game. Just to see how cool this is.
I hope talent trees make this possible, but it’s more than that. Its not having mobility in WoW, being stuck without blink feels awful in comparison to being a caster with mobility.
You guys got to play this game. totally impressed. Its a throw back in terms of graphics but who cares. The gameplay is awesome.
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honestly they need to give mage baseline 2 blinks. Every melee class has 3-6 gap closers lmao but mage still has 1 blink
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Yeah that won’t be OP along with Frost Ray etc lol. This is a horrible idea. 2 completely different games and genres. Just because it works in that genre doesn’t mean it will in an MMO. And to add, how you think any of this reminds you of TBC makes me think you never played TBC. This doesn’t remind me of anything in WoW let alone Vanilla/TBC. If you were a fire mage using Arcane Blast you likely were benched and not welcome to raid in a guild in TBC.
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ray of frost is too powerful in Diablo. If you play Mage without it, its more fun and dynamic. So far, it’s the one spell that could just be nerfed to a long cooldown, shorter channel or removed. The knock back is good enough.
I’ll update the OP to reflect ray of frost. It’s a fair point.
Why master of elements? Play elemental shaman…
Mage is about magic. It seems you want to prune the 3 specs and just make one who can cast powerful spells from all specs.
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That’s not really an argument considering modern WoW took a lot from D3 design. I mean, of course baseline instant cast [Pyroblast] isn’t gonna fly, but a lot of stuff could be taken from games like Diablo when it comes to abilities, especially the visuals.
5 Likes
I partially agree with the OP - Mage in modern WoW is very outdated:
- In PVE our best DPS is tied to standing in / near stationary Rune of Power, while many fights require lots of movement.
- In PVP for example Fire Mage best DPS talents are the same Rune of Power and Flamecannon, which with recent nerfs to Flamecannon require to be almost completely immobile for best performance and keeping the stacks / buff. With the amount of gap closers and root / snare breaks current melees have, this leads to a strange situation - logically you would want to stand in Rune of Power and be almost immobile to keep Flame Cannon stacks for best performance, but doing so in PVP is often just signing your own death sentence, so you literally need to play suboptimally (run out of your own Rune of Power, break your Flamecannon stacks yourself) just to survive.
- Against ranged classes in PVP situation is better, but Mages are too vulnerable against dispel / purge spam classes. They can strip you of almost every and any buff and defensive ability that you have (even Ice Block) and it costs them just a bit of Mana and several GCDs to do so.
As a result, i think that Mage needs not only moving its baseline abilities / talents / conduits / legendaries into talent trees as they did with DK and Druid, but also decent amount of ability / talent changes and even entirely new ones:
- Unnerf Incanter’s Flow in PVP and buff it to 5-25% damage bonus to make it more competitive with Rune of Power.
- Unnerf Flame Cannon stacks to 4-5 sec duration, so that you can carefully move for 1-2 seconds at least (or use Blink) and keep the stacks.
- Create optional talent for Rune of Power that allows to relocate it in Vesper Totem way with 4-6 seconds CD (so it can be used 1-3 times over its duration). If you enjoy Rune of Power being totally stationary, you can just not take it.
- Return Triune Ward as a class / PVP talent in Dragonflight.
- Make at least one defensive for every Mage spec undispellable, even by Mass Dispel.
These changes could be a good start.
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Yes, I think you get what I’m saying. Its about the play style of mobility and knock backs that makes it fun and challenging. Instant casts but with longer cooldowns, and having synergy between those special abilities to help kite, stay alive and use multiple forms of magic. That part was how the game was originally intended. There wasn’t 3 specs of mages. There were 3 talent trees that had synergy between them. We were mages.
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Seeing the preview DF talent trees, we can hope so as well. Seeing that all DK specs have access to Blinding Sleet disorient and all Druid specs have access to Skull Bash / Typhoon, we can expect that all Mage specs would have access to Dragon’s Breath, which could be very helpful for Frost and Arcane, as they could receive a cover for their Poly / Ring of Frost cast. They can also put some offensive abilities in general tree and might provide possibility for Arcane Mage to spec into some other school offense in the class tree and have something to use when being kicked. We shall see.
Unironically I know what you mean, although Diablo Immortal hasn’t impressed me that much, Wizard fulfilled exactly that mage class fantasy, a master of the arcane that can shape it to be as versatile as possible, what’s worse is that Evoker is probably going to fulfill said fantasy better than mage.
Our characters had years of training, became archmages, wielded Aluneth itself but noooo, we still use our magic like novices, too afraid to branch out of “specific elemental schools” as if they were set in stone.
Also… Wizard has a much better sense of style than our mages… Come on Blizzard, grandma dresses lost their appeal in the early 2000s, as soon as people stopped talking about Gandalf on a daily basis, give me some stylish robes fit for an adventurer, not a scholar that reads dusty tomes all day long.
Also, Diablo’s Blink looks so good, wish we left that short lived hole in reality whenever we blinked.
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I don’t there’s any doubt about it, going off what we’ve seen for a few expansions now. Boomkin does Arcane better than Arcane does, and similarly Destro feels more like a Fire Mage than Fire does.
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This sounds fun to me too though. Is the idea of fun in WoW a scary, unconventional concept?
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I play all the diablo games and I have often though the same, it has a lot of cool systems and skills that i dont think would be game breaking in wow.
Like gambling for items, I feel would be a cool addition with valor since the pool of items is soo large. We kinda got that recently with the valor box but Diablo has it broken down into slots to gamble for, but I guess that’s in support of playing multiple characters and wow isn’t in the best spot for that yet.
To me it doesn’t, I like the concept of specs. Fun is subjective.
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Right on. No need to rib on the OP then who provided their definition of fun too. It’d be cool if all definitions of fun could coexist peacefully in the World of Warcraft.
Despite mages being elementalists by nature (fire and frost, to be precise), I almost feel like specialization would be more interesting to be sliced another way. Thermal magic covering fire and frost, manipulation magic covering arcane and spacetime, and conjuration focused on big chonkin’ golems that is a tanking specialization.
But WYSIWYG. They’d just add new hero classes they can sell as expansion features or via cash shop.
I got a mage to 20 and I thought it was the most boring of all the classes :shrug
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I mean, hey, you slap a teleport and blink on Evoker and we’ll get ourselves an actual mage class that this game sorely lacks.
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o.O Shhhh, the paladins might hear you.
Oh yeah? Played a lot of Evoker have you?
>We’re told class uses all the elements from the Dragonflights which includes Arcane, Fire and Frost and the gameplay trailer showed them mixing different elements into a single attack.
>Class is literally called Evoker, if the Evocation school of magic rings any bells to you.