First off some good parts of the set:
- It works for all mage specs
- It brings back evocation as a relevant spell
In practice the set bonus feels absolutely horrid to play. Here are the main concerns:
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Mages will require special setup in a pre-pull timer or lose a substantial amount of damage. This goes beyond pre-rage stacking, it is basically mandatory. If a pull timer has to be cancelled, it could mess up the whole tempo of the fight at a lose of 40% damage.
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Ripe for abuse. The buff stays up on logout, so if you evocate, then log out before a pull, you can reset the cooldown and still have 25 seconds of the buff. You can then refresh the buff with only 1 tick of evocate. You could stack the buff on pre-pull, logout, and then have ~20 seconds of buff on pull. This could be refreshed with 1 tick of evocate.
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If a fight lasts longer than two minutes, having to spend 8 seconds channeling evocate to not lose damage feels awful. It is theorized that some progression naxx fights could last over 5 minutes. Having to evocate multiple times in a fight would feel awful.
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Mages already have great burst damage, and are dependent on cooldowns. Adding this set bonus makes it worse. The damage difference in a 45 second fight, versus a 5 minute fight will be large. (Especially for frost mage)
Suggestions
- Reduce the cast time and lower the damage amount
- Cast while moving
- Remove cast time and lower damage amount, make it just a buff that stacks up on use
Other Thoughts
- The 6pc t3 for frost feels very weak compared to other classes. FoF uptime is already pretty high, maybe add another damage multiplier for non-fire spells?