I want to say Legion. Honestly it’s a poor talent, but most of the Frost ones are. Could easily just have added Water Ele to IV as a cooldown and buffed our damage by 20%. End result is the same, without the talent needed.
I don’t recall any Frost Mages being upset that they couldn’t use Water Ele any more though. It was somewhat heavily disliked ever since it became permanent, and the only real interaction it ever had outside of pvp was during WoD although that spell could have worked without Welly.
Fire still has that phoenix though. It was a spell, and it still exists. Phoenix was also kinda Kael’s thing, no other Fire Mage uses one.
Mages are already suffering with lower player numbers because of poor design. Making all 3 specs into a pet class (especially if that pet offers nothing other than aesthetics) isn’t what the players want. If they did, there’s Hunter and Demo locks.
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Yes and there are people that play bm hunter no matter what if they are bad for a bit or not. Now lets not get it twisted. I think mages deffintly need to be looked at but imo if you give one spec access to a pet like frost the other two should have it also.
The mages I knew thought the water elemental was the best thing blizzard did for the class to that point and praised it as so good and helpful in pve and pvp. I have always liked fire spec since vanilla due to the stun you could do with fire. Then they took that away. Sorry for the long post.
I just kind of want all the mage specs to be equal in ways. To me I find frost boring. Yes its a safer spec with how it slows and when you get the frozen target you get nice crits. But I just like fire because it does a lot of damage and has a good amount of burst possibility esp when you get hot streak after hot streak and are launching pryo after pyro.
At this point blizzard imo should either remove the water ele from frost. Or go with it and give both of the other specs a familiar like frost and make them baseline not talents.
I don’t know why but it did bug me that when I finally really started playing mages one spec got something that could help them with the extra slow/freeze and the other specs didn’t
The current version of the water elemental is little more than a glorified visual DoT. It lost the channeled ability, Water Jet I think, giving up what little reason I had to pay much attention to Drippy. The ranged Frost Nova can be helpful, but that plus Bone Chilling don’t really justify giving up the power gains from Lonely Winter. As it stands the water elemental is underwhelming both functionally and thematically.
Lonely Winter was introduced in Legion, but if I remember right people kept using Drippy until around Tomb of Sargeras. I think that was when an item level was reached where Lonely Winter started to scale better than the alternatives.
I would much prefer the water elemental be turned into a powerful cooldown rather than remain an underwhelming, mostly passive, ability. Jaina’s elemental in HoTS, with it mirroring her spells for a percentage of her damage, was fun. Maybe look into something like that? I think that sounds more interesting than Icy Veins. Replace two underwhelming abilities with something that might actually be fun.
I disagree with the idea that if one mage spec has a pet then the other two also must have it. Pet AI in this game is pretty bad. Look at Denathrius. People are still asking for them to fix that fight for pet classes. I would not want the devs to potentially cripple one or more mage specs simply because they can’t justify allocating the time to figure out how pets will react to things like inaccessible platforms, portals, etc.
I would potentially not be against something like Kael’thas’ Phoenix from HoTS. If it worked more like how it does in that game, a temporary AoE damage ability that offers some additional secondary value, then you could potentially avoid some of the pet AI problems.
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I’d be OK if Fire had a [Summon Phoenix] spell, but I’d want it as a temporary guardian much like [Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger]. Don’t really know about Arcane though.
The only case I would personally make for Arcane is to allow the spec that was once the utility based one into a master of… Utility. Imagine if Arcane could for instance turn mirror image into a DPS cd that copies some of their attacks?
The problem with making Phoenix a cooldown spell is that they’d have to take away from Fire’s other cooldown to balance it out. Then there’s the potential issue of desyncing Pheonix if the timer doesn’t match, or whether it scales with combustion/trinkets etc. It’d be a cool visual, but the only way I could see it working is to have it as a competitive talent agaisnt combustion in the new trees. Combust with a lower CD and higher short burst potential, pheonix with longer CD and AoE. I’m not opposed to specs being given more options, especially when it comes down to their big CD.
They tried in past expansions and it was failsauce because of tuning. Since MI is now a damage reduction it also doesn’t work. That said, it wouldn’t be difficult to give Arcane a new spell that summons an AoE Arcane ele (say on a 60s timer, but not massive burst) as part of its standard rotation. There’d be ways to make it work as a passive pet.
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As someone who always takes lone winter because I don’t like pet classes, I wouldn’t want to take the equivalent in the other two trees. so no please I beg you.