This feedback primarily concerns War Mode World PVP and Mage defensives. I’m not attempting to speak to instanced PVP (e.g. Arena/Battleground) or PVE with this feedback; instanced PVP gets a lot of coverage elsewhere. Also, I’d hardly claim to be a top, expert player, but here’s my input nonetheless…
Changes to Mage defensives had the design philosophy outlined as so: "Developers’ notes: We’re making some adjustments to Mage defensives with the goal of improving Mage survivability as a whole […] " - Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek PTR Development Notes
12.1 seems to substantially reduce a lot of aspects of Mage defensives (rather than improve them), particularly for Frost mages :
- Mass Invisibility cooldown reduction is a pretty substantial survivability reduction in War Mode World PVP.
Tougher for me to factor this against an extra barrier charge for Fire/Arcane as it’s very situational as to how much Mass Invisibility comes into play for a given encounter, but it’s unambiguously a substantial cut for Frost mages. This doesn’t seem consistent with the “goal of improving Mage survivability”. Mass Invisibility has a lot of uses (and it’s one of the most powerful Mage PVP abilities)- whether as a defensive interrupt/target drop, or to gain environmental advantages in World PVP, or to leave combat entirely, or to perform the same tasks for allies. Reducing availability is a massive reduction. Particularly, this seems to try to push the cooldown into the range where it’s not likely to cycle in most World PVP encounters.
- Reductions in snares (slows) are also survivability reductions for War Mode World PVP (particularly for Frost mages).
All snares were reduced in effectiveness in 12.1. However, Frost is disproportionately impacted compared to most classes, as the ability set of Frost is heavily reliant on slows to be able to operate effectively. While across-the-board snare reductions also mean less snare impact on mages being snared by others, mages had among the strongest toolkit to escape snares already, meaning that they also benefit disproportionately less than other classes, from the standpoint of snares on mages reducing their ability to move about the battlefield. This doesn’t seem consistent with the “goal of improving Mage survivability”.
- Reductions in Ice Barrier are also an unambiguous survivability reduction for War Mode World PVP, for Frost mage, where Ice Barrier loses 5% strength with 12.1, compared to 12.0.
(The patch notes make this somewhat non-obvious by neglecting to mention explicitly that the redesign of Barrier drops the 5% bonus that Improved Barrier provided.)
This is a strict defensive reduction and so the fact that it’s a cut to survivability doesn’t appear to be likely to be a point of disagreement for anyone. This, also, doesn’t seem consistent with the “goal of improving Mage survivability”.
- Reductions in Temporal Realignment (automatic Alter Time) are also an unambiguous survivability reduction for War Mode World PVP.
There are several components to this. First, Temporal Realignment’s healing less up front means it’s less effective at mitigating burst damage, which I estimate to be among the most important properties of any defensive in World PVP. Secondarily, the heal over time component of Temporal Realignment is a Magic buff, so it can be stripped by Magic dispel types, which makes it even more ineffective. Temporal Realignment had several niches before (versus manual Alter Time activation), one of them being against classes that can remove Magic buffs, but now that niche is also substantially reduced.
It’s worth nothing that on bulk, for other PVP segments, Temporal Realignment appears to be infrequently selected based on publicly available talent build data (e.g. Murlok data), which makes the reduction here particularly curious. (For World PVP, I think that this matters more- I tend to believe that Temporal Realignment is weaker in arena type environments (that are inherently more predictable and less chaotic) than World PVP where encounters can change dramatically based on NPCs or other players or environmental characteristics being leveraged; that is to say, it’s likely to be more obvious when a burst is coming and manual Alter Time use is preferable in arena type environments than World PVP.)
- Glacial Bulwark reduces Ice Block cooldown by 30 seconds, in addition to its prior behavior of granting an extra charge of Ice Block, with the prior behavior of the extra charge of Ice Barrier moved elsewhere, out of this talent.
(The patch notes don’t document this change anywhere.)
This appears to me to be a marginal convenience improvement for Frost, but not really a substantial survivability improvement in many World PVP encounters in my estimation.
That’s because it’s not likely for most encounters to run long enough where Ice Block is going to regenerate during the encounter. I tend to expect that World PVP has the largest potential to benefit from this change (compared to Arena/Battleground), as it’s more plausible to have longer engagements in World PVP and thus WPVP is most likely to benefit from a cooldown reduction. Even there, however, I think that this still goes into the category of reducing the time between engagements at “full capability” as opposed to helping with a single engagement.
It’s worth contrasting this with the cooldown of 12.0-era Mass Invisibility. A 60 second cooldown is reasonably low enough to be potentially possible to cycle through in a long World PVP encounter, but pushing the cooldown out much more than that (e.g. by another minute) tends to put things out of the engagement time of most skirmishes. There are, of course, exceptions (multi-minute crate battles etc.)., but these tend to be much rarer. I’d estimate that this is, effectively, the same sort of territory that Ice Block remains in, even with this 30 second cooldown reduction.
- Extra barrier charges are unambiguously a survivability improvement for Arcane/Fire.
Getting an extra barrier charge is certainly better than not and is a clear improvement, in isolation. If this change was on its own, Arcane/Fire would unambiguously be in a better place in 12.1 than 12.0 from a survivability standpoint. However, it’s not clear to me that that outweighs the total reductions to Mage survivability elsewhere, though this is likely to be situational. Barriers are more broadly applicable, but Mass Invisibility (for example) can dramatically turn the tide in an encounter if used in precisely the right way and right time, in a way that barriers typically can’t, and Mass Invisibility takes an availability hit. That’s not really the fault of the barrier change, but it certainly makes it far from obvious that even Arcane/Fire are actually better off in 12.1 than 12.0 for World PVP.
Taking a step back, that’s a whole lot of reductions that are all layered together and landing at the same time. There are some marginal improvements (e.g. Ice Block cooldown for Frost) and some definite improvements (Barrier charges for Fire/Arcane), but I have a tough time seeing these being consistent with “the goal of improving Mage survivability as a whole”, when taking all of those changes together, as a whole set. It may be worth revisiting the PVP impact of the sum total of reductions being thrown in along with the barrier charge changes.