Ion's Thoughts on Permanent Water Elemental Removal

Classes Mage
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I’m tired of hearing about it and I don’t care about the fate of the water elemental, but I take issue with this. The forums are a place where players should be allowed to freely discuss the game. In this particular case, this is a thread clearly devoted to water elemental. Everyone should be allowed to use this thread to talk about water elemental (even if their opinion is “I’m glad it’s gone”). To quote Blizzard’s own Forum Code of Conduct:

These forums are here to provide you with a friendly environment where you can discuss ideas, give game play advice, role-play, and converse about any other aspects of Blizzard games with other players.

The issue, however, is exactly what Tuckletuts brought up: This conversation has spread like a plague from this thread into many of the other threads in our forum. We had a fair amount of activity in the last few days, but around this time last week, I think 4 of the first 10 threads were explicitly about Water Elemental and about 4 more of the other 6 had a comment referencing it.

To quote the Code of Conduct again, here are some things that are against the rules:

  • Excessively communicating the same phrase, similar phrases, or pure gibberish
  • Creating threads for the sole purpose of causing unrest on the forums
  • Creating threads about existing topics
  • Creating a separate thread about an existing topic for further discussion in more than one forum

So please, continue to have your discussion about the elemental. You have every right to. But please also realize that we don’t need to read a post about it in every thread. I recognize that this is an important conversation for some players, but the amount of bloat that has appeared in the forums about it (and all the weird nicknames it’s suddenly gained) is making players who are indifferent to the cause start wanting the elemental to be permanently gone just to spite the players who keep posting about it.

I’m an arcane mage. This fight doesn’t concern me. Please let me be ignorant to it.

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Scrolling through the last 7 days I see:

1 necro of a really old Jan thread.

1 on the hero talents (which is legitimately different)

This one (the main conversation). Only one of those bumps could have been spam, the first. I’d hardly call that excessive. The person who necro’d it was different than the people who responded. Though I also hate necro threads.

Though, keep in mind, as people gradually trickle back after the rework, you’re going to get some natural level of some rando just barely learning about it and whining about it, just like we get a trickle of “New X mage, need help” threads. in fact we have I think more of those than discussion on WE. A good moderator would aggregate the thread if the people making the new posts are legitimately different accounts.

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The fun part is that not all of the posts about the elemental mention it in their topic - at least one of them is a bait and switch (there may have been another but I don’t feel like reading all the posts again). I may have miscounted and it may be only 3 dedicated threads, but they’re all notably authored by the same person.

New players coming back are fine. Necro’ing some older threads are tolerable. It’s a problem when the same 2 or 3 players are making new threads / the same post repeatedly. There are a handful of names now - who I won’t mention - that when I see that they’re the one posting, I know exactly what it’s going to be about before I read it.

Regarding moderation, it’s pretty clear that the Mage forums are unmoderated and I’ve never seen one of those “Community Council Members” say anything. If there is active moderation here, I would’ve expected to see a certain few names quietly disappear from the forums over the past couple of years, but that’s not the case.

Regardless, I’m going to shut up now. This thread is about the water elemental. I’ve shared my grievances about seeing too many posts about it, but this thread shouldn’t be stopped from talking about it.

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The Jan one was not. It was originally asking for a pet tank.

I do appreciate your honesty. I think I found another that was talking about blizzcon q and a, but it’s also talking about that as well so it feels somewhat distinct. Probing back further the next thread was from someone other than them or Nelluced, one of the most prolific responders (nelluced doesn’t make a lot of threads on this forum, just responses).

The risk to our class is for whiplash. If i had to guess, we’ve had 3 distinct devs i know of. Mop era and previous who was seemingly pro pet, wod-sl who was anti, letting water elemental rot. I think df is distinct because they didn’t bring back features from legion that would have helped in arcane management. If i had to guess they’re an employee from that company that made spellbreak.

Who’s to say the next dev won’t be super pro pet and throw frost back the other way? If we get a dev who cares about our lore again, it might throw the rest of the community through a loop. The way i see it is that we’ve had devs with strong opinions and the community has had to just deal. The gameplay on mage now is excellent i’m guessing due to the skill of the spellbreak dev. It’d be nice if mages had a dev that tried to find a way to make everyone happy, giving anti pet and pro pet players enough options to not feel like they’re in a constant struggle. It doesn’t help that historically mage hasn’t had a lot of attention since mop, so there’s probably some zero sum game going on the the psyche of the community.

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There is a balance druid pet spec with treants next xpac, or just being hunter.

In my opinion we dont have ENOUGH caster\range classes that dont require pet management.

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I hope so. Treants as currently implemented are EXTREMELY temporary and the tooltips from the preview indicate buffs after they expire so it’s going to be a temp pet class at best is how they’re originally designing it.

I’m processing this through typing:

Evo → 1-2, depending on how you feel if Aug is ranged, no pets whatsoever
Shaman → Temporary 1 ranged DPS spec.
Shadow Priest → temporary
Warlock → 3/3 (I heard aff has a way out of pets these days?)
Mage → 20% of 1 spec
Hunter → All unless you use Lone Wolf on Marksman, but one spec is melee, so 2/2 or 1/2.
Balance → Treants (temporary, not that popular I think + fae dragons also temporary).

So we’re looking at 1 (ignoring aug) + 1 + 1 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 12 total ranged specs.

That leaves us with 5 total ranged all the time “pet” specs with two able to opt out (3 for lock, 2 for hunter, but you can also get out of being a pet class on 2 of those specs). But all of them are pretty much piled onto 2 classes across the 7 classes they span.

5/12 aren’t, only 3 are enforced as pet specs, so you’re down about to 25% of all ranged specs. So it oscillates between close to half or only 25% depending on how you process it (because it’s not enforced on all of them). The only caster specs that are also able to be pet specs are locks. If you’re not into ranger fantasy or dark caster fantasy and want pets, there’s definitely a hole in WoW’s design.

I respect your opinion though, and if all the people who hate pets grab onto this class I’d like to see them just throw the elemental onto Shamans, and let shamans mog the legion artifact appearances from mages (for the people who immigrate and thought you could be a pet spec then). Shamans have already stolen fire elementals. Them owning them is a bit of a retcon. If Shamans got a 4th elemental summoning spec and took them, I’d be okay with that, provided they let the people who thought frost mage could be a pet spec in legion take their artifact mogs with them. I’m sure some people would whine if they wholesale converted ele shaman to a pet spec, they should add a new spec if they decide to do that.

EDIT: I just realized of the 3 specs that are exclusive(or were, survival got changed) RDPS: MAge, Warlock and Hunter, 2/3rds of them are heavily pet based. That’s so wonky. Now I understand why all the rdps pet haters shored up in this class, and it sucks for anyone who likes pets and doesn’t like locks or hunters (or just happens to like mage lore instead). So raid-happy, pet-hating, rdps people ended up becoming mages.

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Like they just added pet back to frost mage for the cd now i have to add 3 more dam keybinds for pet attack pet follow and pet nova. I hate it, frost has enough binds already.

Yea so many range specs have pets now and they are not optional unless you want to gimp yourself

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PVP wise there is no getting out of using a pet. You have to use a pet and be able to manage them.

Sick of pets, make them optional on all specs except where they make sense. Melee only have to deal with a couple of pet specs while range has tons.

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I’m seriously believe the permanent pet should live on through hero talents. It just seems like the perfect chance to bring it back. These talents are optional, mostly fluff and flavor talents, and it’s really the best of all worlds. Everyone fighting tooth and nail against adding it back won’t ever have to worry about using it. (Though that’s always been the case even when it existed in game)

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I agree. For your own sanity though, i’d consider playing another game and/or class at least as a back up. It’s very jarring, whether intentional or not that the wow devs think it’s okay to underpower an ability for a long period and then abruptly sideline it because no one is using it. This could happen to RoF or any other thing more mages actually like. It’s not a good way to build community goodwill.

In this situation you have literal 0 control and the number of sympathizers is low because

  1. this is the only non pet pure rdps class
  2. it’s been probably 6 years since water elemental has been viable in a non boring build (looking right at you bfa no il). Most sympathizers have probably quit, play classic or rerolled by this point.

Hundreds of people on reddit agreed with you but the devs have the final say and they’ll do what they please. Wanton design happens alot in wow and you’re only thing you can control.

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This thread has been at the top of the forums since I’ve posted it, and I’ve barely intervened in it. Obviously it means “something” to a lot of people, even it seems like the sympathizers are dead.

I haven’t played my mage in this game since the change. Only log on rarely on my alts for events and auction house shenanigans. I’ve already adopted the “play a different game” mantra. But I still WANT to play again. That’s why I care so much about the change, because I do love this game and I want to keep playing. It’s in my top 3 favorite games of all time list, and I’ve played it over half my life, but I just don’t have it in me to continue paying unless this change gets reversed or compensated.

I just want an “option”, as there always has been, that will not upset “pure petless RDPS class” lovers. And I’m not satisfied with the response of “well no one used the talent anyway” since they purposefully hadn’t bugged/tweaked/maintained it for 9 years straight and then blamed the players. I don’t see why one party has to lose everything when there’s viable ways to satisfy everyone. Just because a group is smaller or quieter than the others doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be thrown a bone once in a while.

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I can understand you very well.
Have not played my mage since some months too. Only was online to craft stuff :confused:

Its just sad and pathetic that Ion and Blizzard thought the argument = “no one picked it” was a fine explanation to remove it.
Yes OFC rarely people played with it, because it was not NEARLY viable at all.
If it would have been atleast +ok+ and not 30% or more worse than LW then a lot more people had played with the perma pet.

I still hope that we will see a comeback of the pet, maybe with her hero talent trees!
Fore more options and not only 1 boring playstyle! :slight_smile:
Greetings from the EU servers.

1 Like