I’m illustrating there’s way more to this story than even just RP points out. it’s also just bad to erase content and features. Is it good to make glyphs suddently useless? Is it good to erase something an encounter was designed around?
Pet biscuits. Still not as big as the combat pet, but less tiny anyway, and again we’re talking about RP.
You must be joking. The biscuits aren’t permanent and require doing pet battles to maintain. No thank you. I almost settled for this but this is a terrible solution. I have to grind in order to just get bubbles to follow me around? And occaisionally open my inventory to embiggen him too? lol. It’s still not the same and doesn’t illustrate the fact there was some mages that used them as their primary attack methods. Archmages in WC3, Modera and Felstorm in Legion
. I liked my pet. And I think it’s hilarious that for the most important part of their rotation the non-WE camp is forced to use a pet with actual utility. Ironically the devs could have used the WE debuff they implemented for IV to make WE competitive with LW. The only thing they’d need is to make waterbolt affected by everything increases target count of any of the spells that are buffed by LW. Then they could have just had splitting ice ice lances or fractured frost affected frostbolts prioritize targets with the debuff. Obviously the debuff would have had to have been a little less strong that LW to make it work, but they got so close then did something random that broke old content. Like WTF.
The OP is about the WE itself. Not just RP. I wouldn’t have bothered with this game if I knew that the devs weren’t committed to keeping the expansion of this class’s fantasy they’ve so unceremoniously erased. I feel gaslit as a WE fan that had been useing LW because WE was just unviable.
There is alot of lore on the WE and I think those of you who are arguing against it should go read it. It is out there on Wikipedia for all to see it’s history and was considered to be integral to the mage, like it or not.
Patch 4.0.1 (2010-10-12): Water Elemental made into a permanent pet when specializing in the frost talent tree at level 10. That would be more than half the life of this game (WOW started in 2004), not 20% as mentioned by one poster. Based on what I read he was rendered much less viable when his freezing ability was removed. Was he too strong for the other classes?? Is that what really happened to him?? A rework would have been the intelligent option at this juncture. And like it or not, you are correct Nelluced, all the haters will have to deal with the WE whether they like it or not…or refrain from using Icy Veins. Just goes to show “be careful what you wish for”.
Much of your info is incorrect, according to Wikipedia. The fact that it is part of the lore of the ice mage (since 2010) should be a good enough reason.
So they can work on coding important things, like turning the Dalaran Hearthstone into a toy?
I agree, RP is not the most legitimate reason. But if you would read my recent posts you would find that WE is part of the lore of the ice mage since 2010. 13 years. Wikipedia explains how WE came into being and why. That’s reason enough for me.
I mean, we can argue from both sides until we’re blue in the face, but the reality is that it is gone. The devs don’t read these forums, so if you want it back go spam their social media. The rest of us will go on with our lives, in a forum with a dozen less irrelevant threads.
This is true. Assuming they’re not malicious they would have seen the feedback saying LW and WE weren’t competitive at all in open beta and not given us such a garbage explanation for deleting it to begin with. We get a pretty tp set though! Thank heavens our mog designer hasn’t quit yet. I’m trying to get into other classes, but I’m not sure I care enough about wow.
It might be easier to commit to a different class if they were more public about which classes are worked by the same (devs) and guaranteed that devs never swapped classes. I want the hell out of dodge after that. I still like my mage but I’m not sure I like this.
Blizzard has the numbers.
All we have is interpreted numbers from unofficial sources.
For example compare Lonely Winter to Lone Wolf.
Lonely Winter was virtually the death of WE.
Lone Wolf wasn’t the death of Hunter pets on MM. Many Hunters including myself still ran pets with MM because it’s fun and part of the theme.
Sure, 70% of the spec taking a talent could be contributed to balance.
But what if it was like 93%? That isn’t just balance. Even people that don’t care for numbers don’t want the WE.
This whole debacle kind of reads like the typical scenario with a kid, where you go to giveaway / throw out their toy then all of a sudden they want to play with it.
Except the damage numbers weren’t nearly as bad for hunters. I think every time i simmed in sl i was 15-20% lower using we on the dummy. Try a 25% damage difference and get back to me. Lone wolf is a canned 10%. Not only that but because there were talents that only buffed abilities that lonely winter did, it was that much more punishing to take bubble boy. Bubble boy’s single target auto attack doesn’t stand a chance when it has to scale against splitting ice damage buffed 25%.
I personally ran lw pre df because i felt worthless in content without it. In df i changed my mentality a bit.
I guess this game just doesn’t want my money and isn’t designed for me.
That’s how i feel about locks. All their pets were temporary in wc1 and they didn’t even feature in wc3. Yet somehow they’re the pet class. ARCHMAGE COULD HAVE 3 OUT AT ONCE.
Wow mage looks more like d3 wiz these days.
I’m sorry all you care about is numbers in an rpg.
I don’t care only about numbers. I care about how a class feels. I do know that mage was not built to be a pet class since we had almost zero interaction with the water elemental once it was out. Warlocks and hunters were designed to be pet classes and have plenty of tools that tie into their pets.
And somehow, what we have is more a D3 wizard in the end. I feel the same way when it comes to FEELING and the fact there was no interaction. But it should have gone the other way. underutlized abilities from D3 were what was buffed. I don’t know why they decided to do that instead of do what you say here. We already have 2 other sparkle throwing specs. They didn’t have to homogenize it more.
It does NOT FEEL RIGHT losing access to an iconic ability and having foreign abilities shoved on us.
By the way the unholy DK spec rework from DF is amazing. It brings back and honors the WC3 feel while also building on it using abilities they’ve had over the past 6 years from various sources. Their dev did an amazing job both improving the spec, its feel and building on its fantasy.
Meanwhile we don’t really have much new of note to talk about, just a back and forth on our core design and them FINALLY fixing broken mastery scaling + them making d3 abilities more attractive that we’ve had since ever that no one was also using. Why weren’t they pruned?
I find it funny someone in the anti-WE camp was asking me to list mages that use WE. Show me famous mages in wow using GS and RoF from the past. I’ve only been here since legion (but also played all the RTSes) and I don’t remember either of those. what is this class?
If you enjoy the class good for you, but it doesn’t feel grounded in its fantasy at all. And I’m sorry for assuming you were a B- mythic raider who’s been running frost for being happy our fantasy was obliterated. I’m still curious what aspects of the frost spec you feel connected to as it relates to the rest of our lore. All of the legion Frost mage companions had elemental pets shown on the war table. Jaina is pooping them out left and right. We have them running around hall of the guardian and even other elemental types we’ve never been able to summon. I’m just curious what you feel connected to as it relates to frost and the rest of our lore.
I thought B- because frost has rarely been our strongest spec in the last 6 years. I thought mythic raider because most of the people who seem to want elemental gone are high end players. I guess your history shows otherwise. You don’t raid much at all.
If we don’t get our permanent water elemental anymore, I don’t see any reason at all why NPCs who have them/are them should still be able to be in game. Bye bye all these https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Water_elementals (This is a joke, but seriously, all or nothing with the removal. Every water buddy must go (after 15 seconds of being summoned).
I just want to say that I agree with OP. Prior to getting browbeaten during Shadowlands on multiple threads; going through a lot of effort to find that recount was useless for frost mage (downtime correction mistake); and hours on hours of testing on target dummies and reviewing actual damage; I only ran water elemental builds.
During BfA I was able to do azerite talent builds that made water elemental + glacial spike perform very reasonably. In Shadowlands, the only build that worked at all was lonely winter and no glacial spike. Recount told me I was doing OK, but after reviewing the actual damage done, I found that I was consistently lied to by recount to the tune of 20-30% dps. (Total damage was OK, but the dps indicator kinda said: if you could fix your lost time you would be doing better than everyone else.)
Anyway, yeah, the justification got confused and talked itself into a corner. The bigger problem all along (for frost) is the need for the party to work with the frost mage or it makes like 50% dps. That, I feel, they fixed.
Numbers aside, I liked the Water Elemental, I miss having it; though minor, it has adversely effected game play. Also, I feel like the decision to get rid of it was arbitrarily made.
I thought one of the main reasons behind the larger talent tree was to give players more choices on how they want to play their characters; talents were to be meaningful but not detrimental, they should not feel “mandatory”. The removal of the Water Elemental is counter to this philosophy.
Lonely Winter or Water Elemental, it was quite literally a choice we had and now it is something we mandatorily have to choose if we want Icey Veins from that side of the tree.
And I do not dig the whole “Mages are not a pet class” argument. Frost mages have been one for 10+ years and if you want to cite lore reasons, you may want to have a chat with Khadgar and Jaina first.
thats debatable. i think frost should have been a pet class, but it never was one simply because theres nothing that leads back or enchances water elemental in any way like how demo lock does or bm/surv does
Dadgar uses an Arcane Familiar (though it is more “light” than pure Arcane, based on its colour) if I recall that awful intro quest in Shattrath. He can also conjure a bomb made of all 3 schools, and teleport people as arcane barrages so he’s not exactly a good example. Jaina does use a Welly, however it’s a non-permanent summon. Literally exactly what we have now, only better because well, major lore character…
Incorrect. Even if you wanted to count all the years we’ve had access to Perma-welly (arguable given it was only actually used by players* in Mists and WoD), Frost was never a “pet spec”. The only time WE had any significant interaction with the player was during WoD when they had Water Jet. You could also argue that you used it for Freeze with Frost Bomb in Mists, but that was only really a thing for challenge mode. Outside of that, it was just some passive damage that you could ignore in almost all PvE situations. Historically even non-pet specs for Hunters and Warlocks have had more interaction with their pets.
Regardless of whether it was used, or whether it was useful, I can see the disappointment in removal of choice. There were better (and just as fun) ways to buff IV, such as re-introducing multistrike during IV or just adding a % int gain to it. They could even have left WE in baseline, and then make LW a talent similar to old G-Sac so players could run with WE or ‘sacrifice’ their pet to gain the benefits that LW give. Essentially, removal of WE was the solution to a problem that didn’t exist.