Feedback: Mages

In Development The War Within Beta Test
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Arcane Talent Feedback

Utility / Quality of Life talents

  • I think the current Evocation talent is so far when you build mostly on the right for something so essential to Arcane mages. This should tbh not be a talent but a base spell and Siphon Storm should be the only Evocation talent when you want to spec into it.

  • Slipstream desperetely needs to be a base passive for each spell (Evo and Missiles). With how it’s going right now why would anyone take that over Eureka or Surging Urge just to reach the following talents and even when having leftover points why would anyone take that instead of the other more important talents there is.

  • Chrono Shift was also mentionned previously but I would like to add that Arcane always really felt slow, the only way of playing Arcane and feeling fast is the AoE build for Mythic+ that tbh looks much better now that Arcane Barrage is targeted, but this should be a baseline talent or at least should be added to an end talent for AoE builds like Orb Barrage.

Damaging talents

  • Generally it’s kind of weird because when you want to build for an AoE build you need to spec fully on the bottom right but also on the top left? It doesn’t feel really good. It doesn’t make sense that we learn Arcane Orb as second talent and first talent on the left but have to go all the way down to Orb Barrage on the completely opposite side.

  • Aether Attunement is massive for AoE builds, at least for the part of firing at up to 4 more enemies. Maybe it’s asking for too much for AoE builds but that part should be also put somewhere else so that we again don’t have to spec in the middle for every build as well as fully right for AoE but also left just for that.

  • Prodigious Savant is I assume just bugged but doesn’t currently have a reason to have 2 levels as both gives 20%.

3 Likes
22

Here is Frostfire Mage feedback after heavily testing it (from Frost Mage PoV since Fire PoV was already posted above).

Frostfire Mastery - good starting talent and I am very glad that you cannot cancel its stacks for optimization purposes. However, specifically Frost has an issue that without Frostfire Empowerment procs and with bad RNG for Frostfire Infusion procs you sometimes can not stack Fire Mastery to full before it resets, especially if you actively use Glacial Spike and Ray of Frost. That is not a fault of the player, who plays the rotation “correctly” and as such should be addressed.
Suggestions:

  1. Buff rate of Frostfire Infusion for Frost only.
  2. Significally buff damage of Fire Blast for Frostfire Frost. Currently its damage is so undertuned that it might be a dps loss to use even despite granting a stack of Fire Mastery. With Fire Blast doing meaningful damage it would also be a potential stacker for Fire Mastery each cycle, since its base cooldown matches the cooldown of Mastery cycles.

Imbued Warding vs Meltdown - decent choice node that gives options between more sustained survivability increase of Imbued Warding and more mobility and reactionary survivability in form of Meltdown. However, Imbued Warding still has several issues. Firstly, it for some reason no longer affects Mass Barrier and does not mention it in tooltip - is that intended? If yes, it should still buff at least shield applied by Mass Barrier to Mage himself to be in line with normal Barrier. Secondly, Blazing Barrier is just extremely weak compared to other spec barriers - it has lower shield value, weakest additional effect and is nerfed in PVP on top of that. That causes Imbued Warding provide much lower value (25% of Blazing Barrier’s value) than Spellslinger’s Reactive Barrier (up to 50% of Ice Barrier’s value) and should be addressed.
Suggestions:

  1. Remove PVP nerf from Blazing Barrier in general, it is no longer justified since Blazing Soul is long gone.
  2. Buff Blazing Barrier in general (for example increase its backlash value to at least equal or higher value of Shaman’s Lightning Shield / Evoker’s Blistering Scales and it could also reduce physical damage taken while active like in Legion - these buffs would bring it in line with barriers of 2 other specs, since both of them have 2 additional effects already - Ice Barrier has highest absorb value and passively snares and Prismatic Barrier reduces magical damage taken and duration of harmful magic effects). Other option is to buff value of Blazing Barrier granted by Imbued Warding for Frost.

Frostfire Bolt - contrary to many I like its new animation and the spell in general. However, it has its issues as well. Firstly, its velocity is likely faster than Frostbolt’s which can negatively impact shatter combos. Secondly, it still did not inherit Frostbolt’s PVP modifier which makes it strictly worse than Frostbolt in PVP - you both deal less damage with it and get locked on 2 schools if interrupted instead of 1. All of that should be addressed.
Suggestions:

  1. Make its travel speed match speed of Frostbolt to preserve shatter combos.
  2. Make it inherit Frostbolt’s PVP modifier.
  3. Additionally buff its damage (only in PVP) to justify using it and risking getting kicked on 2 schools over just using Frostbolt with other hero specialization and risking only 1 school lockout.

Elemental Affinity vs Flame and Frost - can be an interesting choice, but Elemental Affinity currently is bugged - it does not affect Fire Blast (Fire spell) but affects Frost Nova, Ice Nova and Ice Floes (Frost spells). As for Flame and Frost, it is just inferior in most cases - Frost usually holds Cold Snap for additional Ice Block and would not waste it to reset even Dragon’s Breath and Blast Wave and Fire needs to literally die and waste his cheat death to trigger it for usages. As such, bugs of Elemental Affinity should be fixed and Fire and Frost could be redesigned.

Isothermic Core - visually cool and powerful talent. Meteor currently falls last and after all comets, which is not very nice, since it reduces synergy with Ice Nova / Freeze / Frost Nova shatters, all of which can break or expire before it even hits the target(s). To address that, consider making it fall in the middle of their sequence instead. It is also a non-optional Frostfire spec talent that kinda makes Comet Storm for Frost and Meteor for Fire mandatory and not all people like that. As such, it could use a choice node alternative to let people pick the preferred “Frostfire AoE boosting” option.
Suggestion: Make it a choice node with talent that would make Frozen Orb (for Frost) and Flamestrike & Flame Patch (for Fire) deal X% additional damage as Fire / Frost damage with according frostfire visuals. That would both create a good AoE boosting alternative node for people who don’t want to take Comet Storm or Meteor (as both Frozen Orb and Flamestrike are frequently picked already) and make Frostfire Frost better synergize with tier set, which currently heavily favors Spellslinger with his Frozen Orb boosting / resetting talents.

Severe Temperatures vs Thermal Conditioning - decent choice node between a talent better suited for Flurry based playstyle (where every Flurry combo boosts next Frostfire Bolt several times) and Deathborne playstyle which continuously uses Frostfire Bolt. However, Thermal Conditioning can be undertuned in some cases - with max stacks of Slick Ice it would drop cast time of Frostfire Bolt below GCD, making part of its effect wasted. That could be addressed.
Suggestion: Change Thermal Conditioning to reduce cast time of Frostfire Bolt by 5% (which would turn its base cast time to 1.52s with max stacks of Slick Ice and close to GCD) and also increase damage of Frostfire Bolt by X% constantly to compensate for the cast speed bonus reduction. Such change would still keep the option competitive, but would make it more compatible with Slick Ice.

Frostfire Infusion - decent effect and small “Frostfire Lances” launched from you occasionally look good. However, like mentioned above its proc rate could be boosted for Frostfire Frost only to help with Fire Mastery stacking and bring its proc rate more in line with Frostfire Fire, who has much higher number of spells used per minute.

Excess Frost - decent effect. Its only issue is that being tied to Flurry which has 30 seconds base CD is heavily misaligned with cooldown of Excess Frost itself, which has around 12 seconds internal cooldown. You can reset Flurry with procs, but that is still often RNG based and situation where you have Excess Frost and no Flurry charge to use it is still possible. As such, consider reducing base cooldown of Flurry to 25 seconds - that would not affect its availability much since it is frequently reset, but would allow to better align it with both Excess Frost cycles (that have around 12 seconds internal cooldown) and Fire’s Phoenix Flames availability frequency, which have similar base 25 seconds CD.

Excess Fire - unlike previous talent, being tied to Ice Lance it is available to spend immediately, but has other issues. First one is already mentioned issues with Fire Mastery stacking for Frost outside of Frostfire Empowerment procs with solutions suggested above. Second one is the proc itself - Living Bomb for Frost has much lower value than for Fire, as Frost does not have multiple damage / power boosting talents for it like Fire does. Also, for some reason Excess Fire Living Bomb does not spread to enemies hit, making the effect even weaker. As such, to address that consider buffing damage value of Excess Fire Living Bomb for Frost only and consider allowing it spread to X nearby enemies hit.

Frostfire Empowerment - good and powerful proc, but also has some issues. Firstly, tooltip says that it increases damage by 100% while buff’s description and effect instead make it guaranteed to crit. Which effect should it have then? If we were to pick I would prefer 100% damage increase, since it is much more compatible with Shatter for Frost and Combustion for Fire. Secondly, it does not apply frostfire snare and damage over time effect to cleaved targets, which might be an oversight, but also could be intentional.
In addition to that, consider making both the affected by proc Frostfire Bolt and its explosion larger, since they are barely different from normal Frostfire Bolt cast. That would give this proc a bit more oomph and make you feel like you lauch a Frostfireball (which it kinda already is mechanically).

Flashfreeze Burn - decently powerful capstone effect which both allows affected by Frostfire Empowerment Frostfire Bolt stack to max and reset timers of Mastery stacks and provides initial burst. Things that could be changed are tooltip (not the Frostfire Empowerment stack itself gives you Frostfire Mastery stacks but used with it Frostfire Bolt instead) and maybe a small boost could be given to Frost’s version, since Icy Veins are available much less frequently than Combustion.

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There’s no reason to have ring of frost and ice nova as a choice node. Frost mages need access to both talents…

8 Likes
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I wanted to include it as a part of Frost feedback post coming later, but on its own this should be highlighted as well.

Ice Nova is not a utility spell for Frost, it is a rotational spell. You AoE shatter with it Comet Storms, Glacial Spikes and other big hitters and it is a part of your dps rotation. Making you pay for that with being constantly locked out of Ring of Frost is one of the worst decisions ever. The decision is even more questionable since RoF and Ice Nova were available simultaneously even before Dragonflight.

If that choice node decision was made to make the tree symmetrical - just put Ring of Frost instead of one of the Frost Nova talents below their choice node that people don’t use much anyway, this will keep the symmetry.

If it was a decision to nerf Mage’s utility in general - making Ring of Frost a choice node with Mass Polymorph would make much more sense, since they have quite similar niches. That might require a CD reduction / range buff to Mass Polymorph, but it kinda needs it anyway to even be picked much already.

6 Likes
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(Very) Short Arcane Mage feedback:

Aether Attunement requires us to consume Clearcasting 3 times in order to proc the buff, but once we do so we don’t immediately have another Clearcasting available to cast Arcane Missiles. In fact due to the way Clearcasting is generated, we might not get another Clearcasting proc during the 30 second buff window, wasting the buff.

Please consider making it so the Aether Attunement buff lets us use Arcane Missiles without Clearcasting.

Arcing Cleave is locked behind Resonance, even though Resonance doesn’t do much without Arcing Cleave first. Please consider switching the position of these 2 nodes.

5 Likes
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My feedback is very small and humble: Please, blizzard, make sunfury spheres smaller on gnomes.

When we get 5 of them they take the whole character, to the point it clips through the floor :frowning:

2 Likes
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Frostfire Frost feedback

Did some testing on Frostfire Frost and have some feedback:

Gameplay

The ST and AoE gameplay are essentially the same as current Frost. The Hero tree doesn’t introduce anything new that majorly changes how we play and that’s ok, it still feels fun enough for me. I think the Hero tree brings in just enough small variety to make Frostfire interesting while not being overly dramatic in gameplay changes or complexity.

From testing out various different talent builds and combinations, I’m finding that currently the non-GS builds (both ST and AoE) are only about 3.5% behind the GS builds. It would be great if they were closer so that non-GS builds are also competitive. I actually found through testing them that I missed not playing GS, as not having to hold Flurry for GS felt more fluid and faster gameplay.

Although, I am finding that I will need multiple weakauras to track stacks of Frostfire Mastery, Excess Fire, Excess Frost, and Frostfire Empowerment in order to have a more comprehensive idea of how I’m progressing. However, I don’t see this as a deal breaker and if a player didn’t track anything except Frostfire Empowerment procs, which is the most important, then they’d still be fine which is good design IMO.

Excess Fire and Excess Frost

The Ice Lance button glows when you obtain Fingers of Frost but it also now glows when you obtain Excess Fire. Similarly, the Flurry button glows when you obtain Brain Freeze but it also now glows when you obtain Excess Frost.

I found the additional button glowing for Excess Fire and Excess Frost to be confusing and unclear. These glowing buttons have always historically been used only for FoF and BF, so to suddenly add in additional effects to this made me unsure of whether I had FoF/BF or not when the on-screen displays were not there. I’d recommend not glowing the buttons for Excess Fire and Excess Frost.

Perhaps make a small flame or frosty visual effect around our characters when we obtain Excess Fire or Excess Frost, to better visually show that our characters are ebbing and flowing between these as Frostfire Mages. I’ll likely create visual display weakauras anyway for the Excess Fire and Excess Frost buffs so I can see them easily without need to look at my buffs.

Frostfire Empowerment

Proc rate

The current proc rate feels a little too low. There are often quite long droughts when it doesn’t proc at all and this doesn’t feel good. I was averaging around 2-3 ppm in ST, and 4-5 ppm in AoE. Perhaps balance the proc rate so that ST spells have a higher chance of proccing it to balance the droughts.

It would feel better to have a higher proc rate in general so that it’s more noticeable to the rotation or make it so that it procs way more often during Icy Veins, similar to how Spellslinger gets more Splinters during IV, so that we’re keeping Frostfire Mastery stacks on average higher during our major cooldown.

Visual display

I like how the Frostfire bolt button glows when you obtain Frostfire Empowerment. However, given that this proc is changing the spells functionality by making it instant cast and giving it additional benefits, I feel that it would be more impactful to also add a visual on-screen display for it as well just like the FoF and BF on-screen visual displays so that players can track this easier. You don’t even need to create a new graphic for it, just re-use the old Frostfire graphic for Brain Freeze when old Frostfire bolt existed.

Frostfire Frost’s actual rotation barely changes from the standard Frost core rotations (ST and AoE), so Frostfire Empowerment is essentially the main interactive rotational change for Frostfire Frost Mage and being able to have a visual on-screen display when it procs would further visually show players how this Hero tree is distinct and that this proc is important.

Currently Frostfire Frost from an on-screen proc visual display perspective looks identical to current base Frost and without seeing the glowing button I sometimes don’t even realise I have Frostfire Empowerment during my rotation, so an additional visual display for this would make me feel more distinct as a Frostfire Frost Mage rather than just a normal Frost Mage.

For me personally, if no visual displays are implemented I’ll be manually creating a weakaura visual display to add in the old Frostfire graphic for when Frostfire Empowerment procs cause it will be easier to track for me visually.

Tuning on Hero talents

The damage from Living Bomb and Meteor via Excess Fire and Isothermic Core are weak and don’t feel impactful. The Living Bomb and Meteor from these two Hero talents need higher tuning to feel more important. The Frostfire fantasy feels missing in the damage regards, as it currently feels like my output is 99% Frost with an occassional guest appearance by Fire.

Bugs

  • Frostfire Bolt does not contribute towards Bone Chilling even though it chills the target the same way as Frostbolt.
  • Frostfire Bolt does not appear to benefit from Deep Shatter even though it directly replaces Frostbolt. Either that or it’s Piercing Cold that’s not applying.
  • Time Anomaly - When it procs Brain Freeze it lights up Flurry but it doesn’t actually reset the charge on Flurry; this is impacting testing quite a bit.
  • Time Anomaly - It appears that if you have already Brain Freeze naturally and are not capped on Flurry charges, then Time Anomaly procs a Brain Freeze, nothing happens. You hear the TA audio sound indicating TA procced but nothing actually happens. It should probably always give you a Flurry charge if not capped on charges even if you currently have BF and haven’t used it yet. This might be due to the previous TA bug.
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Here is Frost Spellslinger feedback after testing.

General feeling - it became better after changes to Spellfrost Teachings, but still seems very passive and chaotic (as multiple talents throw splinters at random targets nearby instead of your current target). You just do your regular rotation, Splinters passively form and turn into Splinterstorms, you occasionally get Orb resets… and that’s it. This tree still could use some additional interactivity for player himself.

Now more detailed feedback about each talent:

Splintering Sorcery - Frost splinters generation from Flurry was nerfed, so I’m not sure why Frost splinters deal less damage than Arcane. Might no longer be justified.
In addition, their animation is still not distinguishable much from and can stack on the screen with regular Icicles. Maybe it would be better if just like stated in Spellslinger’s tooltip splinters would just immediately “splinter” from spells cast and fly into their target instead of hovering in air for some time before launching - that would match the fantasy of barraging enemy with projectiles and make them more distinguishable from Icicles.

Augury Abounds - automatically activates Splinterstorm when you use Icy Veins and doubles generation of Splinters for its duration, is decent. For better visualization it could immediately launch 8 splinters in arc shape instead of current hovering delay before they fly at the target - that is both better looking and allows to get more immediate usage from their Winter Chill stacks for Frost.

Controlled Instincts - unlike Arcane version maintaining Blizzard to get cleave from Splinters can be annoying, especially if Blizzard would expire right while you are channeling Shifting Power to launch splinters and they stop cleaving or in similar situations. As a solution I agree with one of previous posters - cleave from Frost Splinters could also be active for several seconds after Blizzard expires to address that.

Splintering Orbs - currently has a strange mechanic that Splinters generated by Frozen Orb are launched at random enemy targets nearby including enemies that are not even in Frozen Orb radius. It would make much more sense if splinters would be launched at enemies that triggered them, especially if you try to stack them for a focused Splinterstorm.

Volatile Magic vs Unerring Proficiency - both options are underwhelming for Frost currently. Volatile Magic does very low damage even compared to Arcane Splinters and Unerring Proficiency both provides too low bonus per stack and requires too many stacks which might stack longer than Ice Nova itself has cooldown (as Ice Nova is frequently utilized for AoE shatters holding it is not optimal for Frost). Consider for Frost just buffing Volatile Magic to damage level of Arcane Splinters and reducing number of stacks for Unerring Proficiency with higher Ice Nova damage bonus per stack to address that.

Reactive Barrier vs Phantasmal Image - decent survivability increasing choice node, but it seems value of Reactive Barrier is much higher in modes where Images are quickly killed / dissipate, for example open world and PVP. Consider buffing Phantasmal Image a bit to make it more competitive there.

Slippery Slinging vs Look Again - decent mobility increasing choice, but is also heavily imbalanced between choices - Alter Time movement speed constantly has some value and is tied to a commonly picked talent while Displacement boost both frequently does not provide much value (as displacing 40+ yards away can make you out of range from your target and longer duration to activate it does not matter if you activate it early) and is tied to a talent that is currently frequently skipped in PVE. Displacement and Look Again could use boosts to address that.
Suggestions:

  1. Move Displacement to a more reachable position in general tree, for example it could switch positions with Accumulative Shielding.
  2. Look Again could also make Displacement have some bonus effect - increase movement speed by X% for Y seconds / trigger no GCD when activated or something else. That would make this choice option more competitive.

Shifting Shards - randomly sending splinters at targets in 40 yards radius is not very good, since it can aggro additional enemies in PVE and break breakable crowd control effects in PVP. To address that, Splinters from Shifting Power could be launched at current target if any is present / enemies hit by Shifting Power if no enemy targeted and at random targets only if both these conditions don’t trigger. They should also not be launched at enemies affected by breakable crowd control effects in all game modes.

Force of Will - is a very generic node and almost overlaps with Tome of Rhonin. It is a boring stat stick for Frost and it has very low value for Arcane who usually doesn’t have much crit. Consider replacing it with something else that would add mentioned above player interactivity to the spec - that would address both tree being too passive and this node being too generic and not very useful for Arcane.

Spellfrost Teachings - more interesting after the rework, but still has some issues. It has quite low proc rate in single-target situations and it does not show that Orb is reset in any way and that could be improved.
Suggestions:

  1. Make it highlight Frozen / Arcane Orb keybind when triggered or even have a separate UI sign near your character when activated.
  2. Boost it for single-target situations, for example via making it have a bad luck protection mechanism that guarantees a proc after launching X splinters without getting one. Such mechanism would not affect AoE sutuations much where procs are more common, but would be helpful for bad RNG windows in single-target situations.

Splinterstorm - an interesting effect, but being passively launched has its issues - for example it can proc when you already have Winter’s Chill stacks on target making part of its bonus wasted and so on. Some people still like the passive option so it could be preserved, but maybe you could add a more active alternative for people who want to control it better.
Suggestion: Make Splinterstorm (passive) a choice node with Splintersurge (active off-GCD ability with similar effect). That would allow each player to pick the preferred option - passive but with risk of wasting some of the benefits or active and more controlled, but with additional management required.

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Continuing the discussion from Feedback: Mages:

My current feedback and largest request, please let us cast arcane missiles without having a proc. I understand in wanting arcane missiles to feel more impactful, but they don’t.

Lastly, presence of mind should interact with more spells, and I would welcome a change for it to make our next two or so spells, immune to kicks and interrupts. Since our entire kit that is meaningful is on the arcane school (Poly - cc, Barrier – defensive, and our entire offensive school).

PS:

Arcane Surge should have a lower cast time, when compared to other mage ultimate skills (icy veins, combustion), and even abilities like Eternity Surge from Evokers. Doesn’t feel… surgey. lol.

Thank you,

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Got the chance to play frostfire mostly still building WA and stuff for the others, and just based off of feel alone ignoring number tuning entirely:

  1. I don’t feel the fantasy on either frost of fire. Just not enough frostfire happening I feel I feel like I am mostly playing frost mage or fire mage and occasionally see something frost of fire appear and am like oh I guess that’s cool… I really feel more visual spells need to appear to really make me feel this fantasy.
  2. Taking meteor on ST fire mage just feels bad, and I get we have firefall, but still does not feel the best. On frosts end meteor not proccing off of glacial assault also feels bad even if a smaller meteor happened or like a living bomb procced, but now this is kind of lame.
1 Like
31

Fire Mage Feedback: Bloated Fire blast

The main thing not pointed out properly yet is the multiple functionalities of fire blast.

Currently, fire blast does these:

  • Give a crit to convert into hot streak (original intent)
  • Spread ignite (because automatic spread was scrapped for whatever reason)
  • Buff with Feel the Burn
  • Consume Lit Fuse to apply living bomb
  • Sunfury - call down meteors and refund half its own CD
  • Frostfire - Apply another living bomb whenever you get frostfire mastery

This is veeeery overloaded, and you must admit it just slowly started putting on more and more hats. When you actually play it, by far you prioritize it as a hot streak converter. Back when that was its only role, slightly adjusting when you press it in order to maintain Feel the Burn was some type of skill expression. Now, it’s really ambiguous whether you would rather maintain mastery buff, spread ignite after a fat crit, or apply living bomb. At best, the other roles are seamless, but way too often you end up munching living bombs.
The best solution as a player is to constantly maintain 1 stack off cooldown in order to make sure living bomb can be applied.

Given all the new procs that have been added (frostfire mastery, scorch proc, phoenix flames recharge, plus its CDR with a good change to from the ashes), it seems very unnecessary to keep making it do all these extra things.
Specifically, would be far better if ignite spread automatically how it did in legion, and living bomb would just apply by itself, instead of being a buff and then consumed.
You can even keep feel the burn in this context, as an extra skill expression, and maybe the hero talent interactions as well.

Kindling and Unleashed inferno CDR:
Both of these existing separately makes no sense.
Sun King’s blessing turns fire into an uptime spec, and Kindling just reinforces it. But since it also combines with unleashed inferno, it becomes a burst AND uptime spec.
Given that with a known uptime on your target, the CD of combust is predictable with a small margin of error anyway, I don’t see why not just reduce combustion’s CD and get rid of kindling. We can have unleashed inferno as a cooldown that requires a bit of planning and mastery to make sure we cast as many spells into it as possible for a double-dip reward (more damage AND more CDR).
In practice, the combust CDR from kindling just makes it so that you know how long to realistically expect on it, but you can’t exactly tell the remaining CD while it is on cooldown (you can guess with some quick feely math with experience).

Highest priority spells
This is particularly true with frostfire.
A player can easily figure out that the top priority could be to not munch hot streaks. But everything else, even that, is a bit ambiguous even on single target. Here’s an extreme example:

  • Frostfire empowerment proc
  • Scorch proc
  • Flame’s Fury (phoenix flames recharge) proc
  • Lit Fuse
  • Hot streak

What do I press? Yes, we start with a hot streak, but everything else now wastes something else. You are now deciding which waste is the least impactful.
These sorts of decisions, although create some type of depth, don’t feel great.
But the best I can think of to at least slightly reduce such cases, is to again, reduce fire blast functionalities.

1 Like
32

Very well said.

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A few more…

Flamestrike:

It’s a MUCH better button now than it was in SL for instance, but it has one main problem - your mouse is restricted to a point on the screen considering how frequently you press it. Please make it targetable instead. Meteor is a great example of an ability that is perfectly fine being ground targeted.

HOT STREAK TIMING
This is becoming more and more obvious as we get more instant cast spells.
You HAVE to move around or jump while casting as a fire mage because way too often the hot streak buff is registered after your pyroblast input, making you have to cancel a hardcast with movement. In legion this was fine, and fireball->fireblast->pyroblast->chain fireball made a very satisfying closed loop. Now, that loop is broken most of the time, and late triggering of hot streak becomes frustrating.

As far as closed loops… Meteor:

Someone already pointed out it “feels bad”. More specifically, the hot streak gameplay is such a closed loop that its hard to add other GCDs to fire. Phoenix flames being a guaranteed crit (finally) is actually good. When you are casting fireball, and notice you don’t have a heading up or a hot streak, you just chain with a phoenix flame. That works.
Meteor disrupts your loop.

Even worse is that it is a very high payoff button, especially for frostfire (which benefits from playing sun king’s blessing). It does [high damage by itself, casts comet storm, applies living bomb]. This means you REALLY want to make sure it crits, so you want to use it inside combusts, again, in particular as frostfire.

That creates a negative synergy because with SKB you are very reliant on going through a lot of hot streaks, especially during your combust windows, in order to get to the next window, and you WANT to cast meteor inside combust, but that costs you one potential pyro for the next window.
With how man new guaranteed crit buttons fire has now, it’s very easy to get to the next combust window, but again, just “feels bad”.
But I’m saying this without a proper solution in mind. If meteor consumed hot streak for a guaranteed crit, the decision-making of when to cast it for a huge payoff is completely gone, so maybe it’s best left as it is really…

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Class Tree Feedback

  • Incanter’s Flow
    – This talent was originally design as an alternative to Rune of Power as a passive choice but the cycling damage amp has always felt a bit off. It’s weird that sometimes you might just be doing 8% less damage if you cast a spell when this happens to be at its 1 stack compared to 5 since playing around it isn’t really worth the headache.
  • Incantation of Swiftness
    – I just feel like this talent lost most of its attractiveness when Greater Invisibility started replacing Invisibility. Before, even though it was a 5 minute cooldown, we could use Invisibility as a substantial speed boost, but now this is tied to one of our greatest defensive cooldowns and I don’t think there’s ever a world where we don’t talent into Greater Invisibility, ever.
  • Ice Block / Ice Cold
    – Ice Block has always been a very iconic Mage defensive, and while we sacrifice its immunity to talent into Ice Cold, its off GCD nature, the healing from Cryo-Freeze and the ability to continue dealing damage are very valuable when the immunity isn’t needed for specific mechanics. That being said, Ice Cold is a very point-heavy investment since not only do we need to pick Ice Block for it to be useable, we also need to invest 2 more into Frigid Winds, 1 into Ice Ward or Freezing Cold and then finally 1 more for Ice Cold, when 3 of these don’t do anything for the spell we actually do want. So why not make it a choice node with Ice Block since this is a prime example of what a choice node should be?
  • Spellsteal
    – The only problem I have with this spell is its heavy mana cost and how it can straight up lock us from performing our DPS rotation if we need to purge multiple enemies. At least one of 3 things needs to happen, mainly for Fire and Frost Mages: lower the mana cost of Spellsteal, increase mana regeneration or severely lower the mana cost of Fire and Frost spells.
  • Reduplication / Reabsorption
    – Neither of these are used much since they are both very weak and very niche.
  • Mass Polymorph
    – I don’t know when this has ever been used by anybody besides to troll my group when getting mind controlled in Echo of Neltharion.
  • Diverted Energy
    – I think most of the reason this is rarely picked is that it costs 2 points for not that big of a reward. Maybe if it cost only 1 point for the same results it would be picked more often?
  • Ring of Frost / Ice Nova
    – Now this has been mentioned several times already but it’s very important so it’s worth mentioning again. Frost Mages get absolutely screwed over by this choice node since Ice Nova is a substantial throughput talent since it enables for AoE Shatter combos, meaning all this does is hurt Frost’s utility by making it practically impossible to ever talent into Ring of Frost. Please, revert this change.
  • Improved Frost Nova & Rigid Ice
    – These are never picked in PvE, simple as that, so please consider replacing one of them with either Ring of Frost or Ice Nova.
  • Dragon’s Breath / Supernova
    – It’s very good that Dragon’s Breath is more accessible, but I think that Supernova was put in the wrong place, and even had its cooldown almost doubled to match Dragon’s Breath’s. It would’ve fit a lot better if Supernova was put into a choice node with Blast Wave instead since they both achieve practically the same thing.
    • Since Blast Wave is primarily used as an AoE interrupt, and that Volatile Detonation is ignored since to avoid knocking enemies back too far, I think it would be very fitting to do one of 2 things: incorporate Volatile Detonation into Blast Wave and have it as the spell that knocks enemies back and then have Supernova just be the AoE interrupt, or keep Volatile Detonation as a follow up node for both and add a line that it increases Supernova’s knock up effect by 50%.
  • Frigid Winds & Ice Ward & Freezing Cold
    – These are all slow and/or root talents that are useless in most situations but are still required to path to Ice Cold. Worse than that, Frigid Winds can straight up be undesirable in certain situations where the extra slow might be detrimental for the group, like in Sanguine weeks in M+.
  • Displacement
    – This has a few problems. First of all, it’s not off the global cooldown even if we’re playing Shimmer, making a lot less attractive as an option. Second, it’s in a VERY inaccessible place that makes it incredibly hard to justify picking it, especially since Spellslinger makes use of it with the Look Again talent, making it incredibly hard to ever pick this talent as well.
  • Accumulative Shielding
    – Not only is it anti-synergistic with how we use our barriers most of the time since we usually cast them before taking a big hit, it’s also underpowered.
  • Time Anomaly
    – With the death of Temporal Warp, we all thought this was going to bite the dust as well since it was only ever there to serve as an alternative for when we can’t make proper use of the double lust. Even the devs admitted that it can be frustrating and I think that frustrating shouldn’t ever be a design goal. Even though there is now a non-RNG alternative in Inspired Intellect, I still hope that Time Anomaly will be removed.
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35

Hello again, looking forward to the next few weeks and actually getting to try out the Hero Talents and reworks.

Flamestrike and Reticle casts.

While I understand the appeal of a targeted skill shot, and the skill expression it brings, the raw number of reticle casts fire has to do when playing Flamestrike and meteor is exhausting. It’s situationally handy, like when you wish to Flamestrike the ground to extend a Sun King’s Blessing between pulls; but by and large it is a point of frustration. Between low ceilings and foliage, and trying to use mouseover utility, you are actively fighting for your cursor the entire dungeon. You can easily cast over 500 Flamestrikes across a dungeon, and that is just a massively disproportionate amount of time doing these skill shots compared to any other spec in the game. I recently saw discussion for Shadow Priests and a targeted Void Crash- an ability that is used far less often than ours. I would love to see the ability to toggle (or macro) a targeted vs reticle for this ability.

Phoenix Flames

Phoenix Flames has become a staple ingredient to fire with this rework, with a number of talents and our tier set revolving around it. Since it was introduced in Legion, Phoenix Flames has slowly been pruned of all the sub effects that made it an interesting and purposeful talent.
This rework is doing a lot to address this gradual pruning, however the core function of the spell is prone to travel time bugs. Phoenix Flames already has a base travel speed of 50 yards/second, which is slightly slower than our other spells that sit around 45 yards/second. This, combined with being calculated on hit and it’s frequently abnormal pathing can create very unintuitive delays or heating up munches, especially when dealing with larger hitboxes or excessive haste effects. Dorovon was kind enough to document some of these bugs back in 2021, and they hold true to this day.
https://github.com/SimCMinMax/WoW-BugTracker/issues/804

Sunfury

I absolutely love this talent tree, it’s everything I could ask for in regards to fire aesthetic. My primary concern with it is the rate of Sunfury Sphere generation competing against our cooldown timings. As it stands right now, we struggle to regain the baseline three spheres between combustions, which makes the Rondurmancy talent dubious at best. We never really seek to delay our cooldowns, and at current timings we won’t be seeing 5 sphere combustions.
This is also very impactful when it comes to wipe recovery in raid and dungeons. Dungeons we already suffer from dying before resetting a combustion, now that is going to be even more heavily impacted by the loss of our orbs and our inability to quickly prepare them. This could also bleed into progression raiding, causing us to either do a lot less damage on pull after a wipe, or ask for very lengthy timers between pulls.

11.0 Tier Set

I am very reluctant to play yet another Phoenix Flame tier set, particularly with the reworked talent builds. This tier set is going to lock us into a LOT of talents to support it’s throughput, and extinguish any hope of variety and exploration of the competing nodes. This is already an issue with the Abberus tier set, and is only going to get worse with the width of the new talent tree and the number of PF focused talents contained. This is particularly impactful when playing Frostfire, as you are also locked into Meteor, and potentially Deep Impact to support the hero talents. While I actually do love this tier set, it’s visual effect is amazing, please reconsider this choice at least for an initial set so we have more freedom to experiment with the talent tree.

And just stepping of my Fire mage soapbox for a moment, there are some glaring issues in the Arcane tree when it comes to throughput versus utility. As it stands right now, Arcane has to make a choice between damage affects and quality of life such as Slipstream or Chronoshift that makes the spec fluid to play in the high movement and knockback prone raid and dungeons that exist. This could be solved relatively easy by either A) making these quality of life affects baseline, or B) Making them required pathing/a choice node leading to vital talents. The pathing as a whole in the reworked arcane tree is very segmented and disjointed, forcing commitment to specific portions of the tree with no in between. Flexibility is very much dead in this iteration, which is going to impact Arcane’s already lackluster pick rate for competitive content.

Again, cheers for the work this far, and I look forward to what is to come.

xoxo
-Degen

3 Likes
36

Spell slingers art is hard to see and feels like a ripoff of frost mastery. Both talent options available to arcane seem to be centric to fire or frost respectively and arcane feels like it’s getting shafted. The phoenix is harder to proc and control with arcane than with fire and the splinters blend into all the other spell effects going on and are harder to proc than they are for frost. Honestly Arcane needs a dramatic overhaul and to be reconstructed from the ground up. its burn/sustain phase gameplay is a headache and makes them flavor of the month depending on what the raid fights are,

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I’ve really enjoyed Frostfire Bolt, thematically, and play style, it’s all very reactive and enjoyable, I don’t think I’m playing the build that would be deemed most effective but I’m not giving up being able to chain pyroblasts together for anything lol. I still wish that the procs while pyroblasts were free during hyperthermia wouldn’t munch your hot streak procs so you could always guarantee that final pyroblast either way just as a QOL change.

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There is 1 bug and there are 5 Hero Talents that don’t feel like they interact well with Arcane’s design/gameplay. And you could dump these into “weak in power” and “confusing/unclear” category.

Bug

  • Prodigious Savant: It is currently a 2pt talent. But rank 2 does the exact same thing as Rank 1, at least according to the tooltip. Rank 1 = 20% buff to certain skills affected by Mastery, Rank 2 = the same 20% buff to certain skills affected by Mastery.

Spellslinger (Arcane)

  • Spellfrost Teachings: Probably pretty sweet in AoE, but not noticeable in ST. Primarily used as a builder at the start of the pull, and then when necessary to build charges back up, but due to new tier set that’s less frequent. So basically I never notice if it’s been reset, because it’s hardly ever on CD. And the 50% buff still makes it incredibly weak compared to other options. That combined with travel time means I just end up never using this talent.
  • Controlled Instincts: Similar issue as above. Probably pretty sweet in AoE with Orb Barrage and 2 charges of Orb. But forgettable in ST. I’m not actively trying to sync up CDs with this talent/ability. Travel time and weak throughput make it not worthwhile.
  • Splintering Orbs: Same. If it meant that you fired 2 Orbs because they “splintered” that’d be pretty cool, but it’s just minimally utilized because again, I’m not looking to use Orb on CD.

I think for Spellslinger modified how orb worked, and those talents shot out an orb and provided those benefits, but as it stands there are 3 talents that provide little to no use in ST, but are probably cool in AoE. Even with those, it feels like Spellslinger is currently more powerful than Sunfury.

Sunfury (Arcane

  • Glorious Icandescence: Still a similar issue in that it’s tied to Orb. Not an ability I’m thrilled to press. It’s travel time + the delay of meteors means it not really a “get back to full charges quick” button that it might be meant to be. That and it’s not regularly worked into our rotation (unlike Fire Blast for Fire). If calling down meteors was tied to using the ability (rather than hitting the target) that might make that feel better. Fire Blast can’t miss, Arcane Orb can, and that would suck.
  • Arcane Soul: Cool sounding ability, cool in what it does, but it still feels like it’s missing something. I like that it procs CC, but if you’re already at/near max stacks it feels like a waste. Can’t help but compare to Hyperthermia for Fire which is a joy to spam Pyro or Flamestrike and squeeze in a bunch of those after Combustion. Maybe if your CC during Arcane Soul extended Arcane Soul for a little bit, that would be a feels good interaction. But I feel forced to press Barrage as quickly as possible and ignore CC stacks.

In general there have been a lot of new and interesting changes to Arcane, but Orb just doesn’t feel good. Maybe if it had 2 charges baseline, or hit a little harder, or had some other interactions, then sure. But currently it’s use in the Hero Talent Trees feels…meh.

Somewhat related is the shortened Siphon Storm duration to 20s. The extra 10s meant we had time to build to 4 charges, and get a few stacks into (newly named) Aether Attunement. Now it feels rushed and desynced. At least just to start the pull, after is fine because you’re already at max. Could be a skill issue and just a matter of learning a new rotation rather than trying to repeat the previous iteration.

Meant to keep it short and sweet, thanks for taking the time to read! Hope it gets considered.

2 Likes
39

To expand on this, I actually have updated my combustion rotation to include this PF delay bug. Once you are 20ish yards from your target and you have at least 75% haste, you can do this:

  1. start with no heating up or hot streak
  2. cast phoenix flames #1 → heating up
  3. cast phoenix flames #2 → hot streak
  4. cast phoenix flames #3 → during its travel time do step 5
  5. cast pyroblast spell queue to consume hot streak
  6. phoenix flames #3 lands → heating up
  7. pyroblast lands → hot streak
  8. cast second pyroblast

In a more direct explanation, do this by smashing the spells as fast as you can:

have 75% haste/be 20 yards away → phoenix flames three times → pyroblast twice

This is extremely repeatable and I have incorporated it in to my gameplay because it removes 100-200ms gaps in your combust window every time you phoenix flames.

I’m not going to lie it’s kind of fun to do intentionally as it speeds up the combust sequence, but it seems like this should be fixed as this goes beyond acceptable skill expression limits in my opinion. The heating up contribution of phoenix flames should happen in time to be used before the next GCD turns over.

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40

So one thing that I need addressed before any changes happen to Spellfrost Teachings. Multiple mages are proccing splinters for each other. I can generate entire splinterstorms completely afk. This seems to be heavily influencing how this feels in cities. The feel of this tree inside a dungeon vs in town is extremely different.

9 Likes