Mage Class Tree feedback

In Development Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek Public Test Realm
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Once more we scream into the void, knowing that no matter what, the void will not whipser back for it does not care.

On the issues the class faces:

In the great Midnight pruning, the class tree has found itself with spells that are named identically as in previous versions, except they are far less effective and cost more talent points. I gained ten levels, my character gained nothing fun, and instead it’s just…weaker despite having more talent points invested in the same abilities. That’s not fun. The mage toolkit was bloated and some pruning was needed, but what Blizzard did was far too heavy handed.

There are three main areas in which the class tree completely fails in either providing interesting choice or sufficient power:

Defensives:

Going into Midnight Mages lost the damage reduction of Mirror Images (and therefore the related nodes in the Spellslinger hero tree do nothing), the damage reduction on Greater Invisibility (which is now a mediocre sprint, more on this later), Mass Barrier (an entirely warranted removal, especially for Arcane), and a minor passive in Tempest Barrier. Mirror Images is especially egregious, as we now can spend 3 talent points for an ability that…does nothing beyond very minor aggro protection. Which itself is already covered by Greater Invisibility for another 4 talent points. On top of the above, Mages have to deal with having the lowest base HP in the game (10-15% less than a dps DK, Warlock, Hunter or Shaman for example), which is why our active mitigation was stronger than average in the first place. That is no longer the case, and we now have low hp and a weak toolkit on top.

The result is that this class can not survive in challenging content. At the time of writing, Mages occupy 2 of the 3 slots for most deaths in Mythic raid, with Arcane mages dying a whopping 45% of the time they participate in a boss pull. I say at the time of writing because these numbers have gotten worse as the tier continued and players started facing harder bosses, despite the fact that more and more players are swapping to Frost (supposedly, the tankier of the 3) due to the horrific tuning of Arcane and Fire. This same trend of Mages dying more than other classes holds across all skill levels in Mythic raiding.

The most glaring (but not only) weakness in our toolkit is in the ability to survive rot damage. We just sit there and eventually die out, because we do not have the tools to prevent that ticking damage, nor the ability to recover from being at low health. Without having the full DF/TWW toolkit back (because that would be insane), we desperately need Mirror Images and Tempest Barrier to return at minimum. Adding back the MoP era Flameglow, or Legion era Cauterizing Blink, would also be very welcome.
Our active toolkit appears to be designed for a class with a good amount of self sustain and passive defensiveness, and instead we have neither.

Mobility:

The other area that was hit very hard by the pruning was our mobility talents. Ice floes was removed, Alter Time no longer provides a sprint, Shimmer had its cooldown nerfed and its talent point cost increased, and the sprint provided by Greater Invisibility is worse despite costing more talent points to spec into.

None of this was positive, fun nor necessary, because Mage mobility had very specific strengths and weaknesses - we were very good at short bursts of quick movement, we were very bad at sustained movement. Now we are still bad at sustained movement but with the nerfs we are mediocre at quick sprints. The removal of Ice Floes is particularly egregious, because while the choice node of Shimmer vs Ice Floes + Blink was legitimately interesting, Shimmer vs Blink alone is a no-brainer. You just play Shimmer every time, despite the nerf to the cooldown. If anything, nerfing the cooldown further incentivizes us to pick the reset on Alter Time over the passive activation, which would help new players in surviving some mechanics. Frankly, all of these nerfs should just be reverted or at least compensated in some form.

Useless talents:

The last glaring problem is in the sheer amount of truly mediocre (or entirely useless) pad talents that have been added to the tree to fill it out. It is particularly atrocious that iconic abilities like Shimmer, Ice Block, Greater Invisibility and Mirror Images cost 3, 3, 4 and 3 dedicated talent points to spec into, when basically every other class get their mobility or defensives spells for 1 or at most 2 talent points.

The worst culprit of this is Frost Conditioning. This talent does literally nothing at all for two out of three specs, because they can only Ice Cold once every 3 minutes, so shortening the Hypothermia debuff is entirely useless. It is a minor survivability for Frost, but our defensives right now are so weak that if you have to Ice Cold twice in the span of 30 seconds you will die a couple of minutes from now anyway. A talent that at best just delays the inevitable but generally just does nothing is inexcusable. Dishonorable mentions also go to Captured Thoughts, which at best is situational and at worse does nothing because I use my procs immediately anyway, Mass Invis, which is the worst replacement of Shroud ever and does not allow skips, and Mana Confluence, a talent that effectively reads “minor throughput for one of three specs and nothing for the other two”.

Developer statements

I want to go over some of the stated intents by the developers for the class going into Midnight:

“Developers’ notes: We’re taking a pass to reduce button and aura bloat in the Mage core tree. We’re also consolidating defensive power to simplify the landscape of Mage defensives and make them more approachable. In Midnight, Barrier spells should be potent, consistent, and reliable. Mirror Image and Invisibility spells should now be able to be used for their utility instead of tacked on defensive benefits. “ This was an abject failure. Our defensives are not consistent, because they are not enough to let the class survive mechanics, and this makes the class extremely unapproachable. Our barriers are not potent, consistent or reliable, they are just not good enough. Mirror Images provides extremely limited utility at best and is hardly worth picking, we simply do so anyway because the rest of our tree is dreadful so we might as well.

“We’re also reducing Shimmer’s power to help make the decision between Blink and Shimmer feel like more of a meaningful choice. Players who want to maximize uptime and display mastery over an encounter and its mechanics should feel empowered to express that through Shimmer, whereas progression and more reactive Mages should enjoy the increased availability of Blink.“ This was yet another failure. The choice was not blink vs shimmer, it was ice floes+blink stun removal vs shimmer cast while casting. Without the cast while casting, that choice is obvious and we just lay shimmer. “Progression and more reactive mages” (whatever that means) just…run shimmer during progression because on its own, without ice floes, it is better. Always.

This redesign was somewhat necessary but it has turned into an abject failure

On the 12.1 changes:

These do next to nothing to address the above.
4% avoidance is nice except what is and isn’t classified as aoe is incredibly inconsistent, and even if it weren’t it wouldn’t be remotely sufficient to bridge the gap to classes with functional toolkits.
Two charges of barrier for Arcane are welcome, but Frost, one of the squishiest specs in the game going by say deaths in Mythic raid among top players, losing said charges is insane, as is Fire not receiving anything.
Nerfing the passive alter time talent is going to make the game even worse for casual players.
The hp changes will bring us less effective hp than other classes since our base hp is lower, which might increase the gap in defensive ability between us and everyone else.
The issues about bloat and bad/useless talents have been entirely ignored.

24 Likes
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Just want to echo and emphasize about the lack of durability from Mage’s basekit. Mage was also squishy back before Midnight, but was tuned around the expectation that we would have an active response to mitigate all significant damage instance. We lost the majority of those avenue of responses but the baseline was never retuned around the new model.

I think either the baseline survivability needs to be improved to be on-par with other DPS classes, or we need to go back to having defensives available for significant damage instance. 2 charges of barriers baseline for all specs would be a good starting place, if we refuse to buff mage survivability beyond the unreliable 4% avoidance.

6 Likes
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I’ll post my previous rants later, but I really just wanted to say that I’m really tired of this egregious disparity between specs when it comes to survivability. The change to Prismatic Barrier alone makes me think there was some kind of typo or oversight when it’s literally taking 2 charges of barrier from Frost and giving it to Arcane instead of just normalizing it for all 3 specs, but in case that was all intentional, it’s seriously the wrong way to go.

What I think the optimal way to go would be is making 12.0 Glacial Bulwark available for the entire class, optimally taking current Ice Cold’s place and then making Ice Cold compete as a choice node with Ice Block (why isn’t it, seriously? It’s literally what choice nodes are made for), on top of giving us at least a talent for extra stamina like literally every single other class has it.

The 4% avoidance is seriously pathetic. Avoidance doesn’t even work more than half of the time and even when it does, it doesn’t work for all damage. Giving the class that’s struggling the most with survivability in all forms of content a mere 4% reduction against area of effect attacks doesn’t even come close to what we need, not by a VERY long shot.

15 Likes
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I am once again here to complain about the sad state of our defensives.

Frost mage is currently holding steady at the highest death rate in the top 25% of mythic raid logs. The STATED GOAL is to IMPROVE mage defensive situation. So we removed a barrier charge, nerfed the auto-heal (if a mage is sub-25% it needs that health NOW not later), and… gave us 4% avoidance? The most inconsistently applied stat in the game??? At LEAST make it a flat DR.

Why do I, as a mage, have less eHP than a hunter 20 ilvls lower than me? Why does Ice Barrier not even bring me up to a demo warlock literally not even at his keyboard? We’re nearing a point where mage isn’t viable for M+ title range, at all. There is ONE, and they’re dangerously close to that limit. Why does Spellslinger still have no real defensive node? “Be sub-25% health for the same benefit as Frostfire’s baseline” PLEASE get real.

What are we doing here?

If you want us to stop playing, then okay cool. Come out and say it, maybe give mage mains a 90 boost. At least say it though. The insane lack of communication with mages about intent is unacceptable. We get “developer note” and patch notes that contradict each other more often than not.

16 Likes
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In the 20ish years of playing this game I’ve used the forums little if at all. The last few months of Midnight have changed that though.

I’ve never had a point in this game where survivability felt like it was impacting my spec’s viability but it has very much felt that way in Midnight so far.

Playing Fire in higher level keys feels great damage and rotation wise, but there are many times where if I’m not being babysat my healer I can fall over very easily from ticking damage in a way I don’t have to worry about on any of the other characters I play.

I can’t fathom why we are rationing barrier charges across Mage specs right now when all 3 are in dire straits with survivability based on Mythic and M+ statistics.

4% Avoidance sounds nice in theory but as stated, what does or does not work with avoidance is very inconsistent and I’m wondering why it’s so hard to give Mage some kind of stam talent.

I look at Shaman that also has 8% Magic DR, 15% Stamina, self heals, solid defensives, and feel like I’m being spoon fed the tiniest bonuses to try and put a band-aid over our problems but this just isn’t enough

12 Likes
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Having played a variety of other specs this patch has made logging onto the mage so depressing, its the singing payphone meme vs the guy sweating to stay alive when playing mage in challenging content.

With our base HP pool being so low and Barriers being so small even if we give each mage spec 2 charges it isn’t going to up survivability in any meaningful way (As frost showed this tier). Barrier (and mage kit as a whole) was good defensively vs spiky damage (1 shot metas). But with Blizzards current stated design goal of the last 2 expacs being to “smooth” damage intake out; barriers are weaker than ever, at best they equalise our eHP with better designed classes for 1 global before we go back to being lower eHP that healers cant heal to full for the next 30 seconds.

Our wall Ice Cold is half the average duration of other classes walls, and while it is significantly stronger for that duration thats not really important when damage events are lasting 12-20 seconds.

Mage desperately needs either a Stam node/Passive DR node. Or a combination of defensives removed in 12.0 back.

Bring back image wall (images last 15s now instead of 40s from tww)
Add a choice node for Ice cold; “im just cold” that gives 35% DR for 12seconds.
Give us a small Stamina node or a DR node, or hell invent some timey magic that staggers/slows a % of incoming damage. Mage cannot continue forward in its current state.

7 Likes
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The following talents are borderline or completely useless

  1. frost conditioning
  2. mirror image
  3. improved conjuration
  4. improved spellsteal
  5. improved remove curse
  6. master of escape
  7. freezing cold/ice nova
  8. ring of frost
  9. mass polymorph
  10. phantasmal image
  11. look again
  12. lessons in debilitation
  13. explosive potential
  14. charged missiles

With a large number more that could almost make this list, and multiple that could make it in PVE.

This patch very impressively addresses all of 0 of these. 0.

The inconsistently applied 4% evasion buff is a little useless to cover the defensive gap we are seeing, especially when some specs (frost) are actually made weaker on the tree. There needs to be either more mitigation uptime (not power, uptime), or like 10% more EHP baseline.

5 Likes
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Needed to come out to echo some of the glaring issues surrounding Mage at present going into season 2.

Survivability for Mage is at an all time low, and the return of the +HP%+Dam% adjustment will only widen the gap of Mage struggling to survive at points where most other classes don’t even blink. Many classes are having their defensives tuned to adjust to this inflation even ones that have obnoxiously more durability than any other classes. However, for mages a passive more casually suited talent for alter time is being mysteriously nerfed making the mage wait for the healing. Meanwhile more experienced mages will continue to use the blink/shimmer refund talent with nothing new added to it. While Mage did have too many defensive options in TWW, the pruning we received was not reciprocated in our health to adjust for these removals. We need either the G.Invis or Mirror Image DR reductions given back with my personal vote being Mirror Images so it actually does something considering how many talent points have those 2 words in it. The 4% pseudo avoidance buff will be impossible to intuit where it actually will and won’t work and this is disregarding that the percentage is too low to be meaningful given our inability to stabilize ourselves. Even where it does work it will be up to a healer, not the mage, whether we survive or rot out. Mages with a barrier up match the eHP of most other classes just standing there with no resource committed, and you’re removing a charge for Frost and still keeping it away from Fire for some reason?

This leads to the next pain point of the spec. There is simply too much unnecessary diversity in defensives between the specs. Many players will flock to whichever spec is generally performing better be it in M+ or specific Raid encounters. But only Mage has drastic swings in it’s defensive toolkit depending on what the best suited/higher tuned spec ends up being. Frost DK’s AMS isn’t wildly different than an Unholy’s. Subtlety and Outlaw Rogues aren’t locked out of their cheat death because “those specs just don’t get it, ok?”. Destro Warlocks don’t get an additional use of Unending Resolve while the others sit and spin. Keep the spec flair of the barrier’s appearance, but Arcane Barrier with 2 charges should be the baseline for all 3 specs. Make Cauterize/Glacial Bulwark (2 Ice Blocks) a choice node. Finally might give the supremely niche talent of a shorter hypothermia duration use for the other 2 specs despite being a class node and not a spec node.

That will segway into my final gripe currently with the class tree. Way too many of the class nodes are unusable, unreasonably niche, and outright confusing of their intended purpose.
•Two talents that are truly unusable for 2 of the 3 specs in Frost Conditioning and Mana Confluence.
•Return Ice Floes as a choice between Shimmer. Or, if you won’t, make it so that Ray of Frost the flagship cooldown for Frost isn’t completely bricked by a small knockback.
•“Improved” remove curse gives you a 350% cd penalty increase for 2 decurses. Not a good deal! Especially when there is genuinely only 1 fight at present where it would do anything and that dungeon will be rotating out come 12.1. If it costs an additional talent point and has that long of a CD it should at least be for the party/group.
•Mirror Images needs to have its DR benefit reinstated if you are going to have so many talents for it when at present it just a threat drop for either impatient mages or bad tanks.
•For 2 talent points the sprint effect for G.Invis needs to be meaningful. I shouldn’t need to sweat bullets platform hopping on Crown because the speed increase isn’t large enough. I don’t see a 1 minute 60-80% movement speed boost being unreasonable if it costs 3 talent points to do it.
•Reflection is simply too narrow to compete with a second shimmer charge. Especially when a talent for Alter time, which can accomplish the movement purposes of Reflection, will refund you a charge for your trouble.
•Consider adding some utility to Mass Invis outside of being a cheap knockoff of Shroud since most dungeons are being designed so that Shroud isn’t as route warping as it was in the past. Have it be a 5 man speed boost or snare removal. There’s many different little things you could add so I actually want to take it and press it.

I yapped way too much about this but that’s how bad things are now. I know not all of this can be addressed in this short of a window, but changes need to be made.

8 Likes
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Like i mentioned in my fire mage feedback,

The defensive situation is critical and dire

as others have mentioned, statistically, mage is the no1 weakest class in the game rn in terms of survivability with all 3 mage specs being at the top ( even fire and arcane that have the least representation, if you look closely, they die more than frost)

The big 12.1 update does not adress anything. I wont focus on bad, placeholder or boring mage tree talents as previous posters have succesfully adressed , but i will focus on the desperate plea for a revamp in our defensives situation.

Mage was always a very durable class but not without a caveat: you had to be on top of your game in order to survive. You had a plethora of tools to do that , but required knowledge and well timed gameplay.

Moving onwards this has been stripped to the point that even skilled and world class mage players struggle to survive despite their best efforts. In high m+ keys, you need a ton of external assistance because the class CANNOT support staying alive by itself, while others like DKs, DHs and warlocks can go through long periods of time being completely self sufficient or negating most of mechanics.

Mirror Image DR needs to make a come back.
Barrier needs a hefty buff in order to fullfill what was Blizzard intention as per their explanation.
Introducing tempest barrier back will also be welcome , albeit buffed.
Base HP or passive DR would be welcome also.

Double charge of barrier being moved from one spec to another is a joke. You just shifted which spec will die more now without addressing the issue, you just relocated it

6 Likes
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Just to really drive home how truly dire the class tree is beyond just the defensive discussion (which is extra dire), here’s a summary of the individual talents that are problematic and a reason for why they are problematic:

  • Time walk vs Temporal realignment - mobility vs “easy mode” defensive. All this does is punish new/casual players
  • Frost conditioning: does nothing for two out of three specs, does almost nothing for the third
  • Mirror Images, Improved conjuration: 3 talent points for a spell which does nothing
  • Improved Spellsteal: makes Spellsteal worse
  • Shimmer vs Improved blink: Shimmer is always superior, Ice floes was worth considering
  • Improved Decurse: makes Decurse worse
  • Greater Invis, Improved Ginvis, Master of escape: 4 talent points for a crappy sprint which occasionally retargets/breaks spells. Not enough.
  • Improved Frost Nova, Ice Ward: never, ever, ever useful in any form of PvE content like all freezes
  • Captured Thoughts: never, ever, ever useful in any form of PvE content
  • Mana Confluence: does nothing for two out of three specs, mandatory boring throughput for the third
  • Freezing Cold vs Ice Nova: not useful in PvE content like all freezes
  • Mass Polymorph: useful literally in one dungeon ever for a single boss (Morchie/Dawn of Time)
  • Ring of Frost: very niche, works very inconsistently (e.g. doesn’t work on some raid adds)
  • Mass Invisibility: since Shroud skips are limited, not useful in PvE content
  • Reflection: not good enough to outshine a second blink/shimmer charge, which is mandatory and should be baseline in the spell
  • Improved Blazing Barrier: basically does nothing

In total, out of 48 individual talents, 20 of these are in the list above. Of the remaining 28 nodes we have 5 that are mandatory passive throughput, leaving us with 23 talent nodes that actually do something. In an expansion in which we have 34 class tree points.

6 Likes
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skill issue?

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the talent tree problem is the same for a lot of class.
They want a big talent tree so we can get 1 talent point every level.

As if leveling was important. It’s not classic. The game began at max level, not level 1.
So our talent tree could be cut in half and it would be fine.
Easier on the dev part, easier on the player part.

Another idea would be to separate completely PvE talent and PvP talent. That would solve a lot of problem too.

1 Like
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This is an updated version of my previous defensive rant.

The overpruning of our defensives left the class in shambles when it comes to surviving content. Even in open world it’s still kind of a slog, especially when the mobs we’re fighting are not kiteable, but in later bosses in Mythic Raiding and +16 and up keys, our defensive options are far from enough and we need to be constantly babysat by our healers when classes like DKs and Warlocks for example can just vibe without even need to press an actual defensive most of the time when even Barrier is enough for us.

We went from plenty of proactive buttons to compensate the lack of passive tankiness to very limited buttons and practically zero passive options. Healing back up was already extremely limited as a Mage, but now it’s non-existent (Temporal Realignment is a noob trap).

Where other classes got to keep their passive options, even gained some more in some cases or got some compensation buffs someplace else when the defensive pruning happened, we got nothing except a bit stronger barriers and an incredulously mediocre capstone level talent for another 30s off Ice Block/Ice Cold that’s a literal copy/paste of a third row talent. Permafrost Bubble is a super lazy talent and it’s just a disguised third point for Winter’s Protection, but takes a ninth row slot instead. We’re now getting a 4% avoidance talent that just feels like a bad joke at this point.

At this point I feel like Glacial Bulwark should take Ice Cold’s place in the class tree and Ice Cold should be properly moved to being a choice node with Ice Block instead, making a talent that’s useless to 2/3 of this class’s specs now less useless, since it’s still bad regardless (guess which one!). I seriously have no idea why Ice Cold isn’t a choice node with Ice Block yet, since that’s literally the point of the choice nodes design to being with. We also urgently need passive defensive options in our tree and being the only class in the entire game without extra stamina feels awful. Being unique doesn’t mean it’s good in this case.

Mass Barrier was easily the most interesting option we had and our only unique group utility and I don’t agree that its removal was 100% warranted. Instead of gutting it altogether, maybe make it a bit of a lesser version for the group or make it not benefit from Improved Barriers for anyone but the caster. That was a cool defensive we had and the leftover alternative is just beyond useless 99.99% of the time. If even Shroud from Rogues, which is the vastly superior version of Mass Invisibility and is barely used for anything nowadays, ours is just taking up space for nothing.

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Time for the updated mobility rant!

So, let’s start with the completely unnecessary Blink and Shimmer nerfs:

Blink got it’s cooldown increased from 15s to 20s and Shimmer from 25s to 30s. We do always get the Flow of Time talent, which reduces both of their cooldowns by 3s.

We can decrease Blink’s cooldown further by 2 seconds by picking the Improved Blink talent, which is a choice node with Shimmer. So at the cost Shimmer, we spend a second talent point to get Blink to how it was before Midnight.

Shimmer lost its second charge baseline, basically gutting it by more than half of what it used to be on its own if we factor in the extra 5 seconds cooldown. You could consider it to be 2 seconds extra since we’re always taking Flow of Time, but even then it’s still a nerf and leaves it in a very weird 27s recharge timer.

Our middle capstone talent is now between a second charge of either Blink or Shimmer versus a slightly different version of Displacement. There’s the caveat that Blink can have two charges this way, but Shimmer is left extremely underpowered without it, basically ensuring that Reflection is very, very rarely taken, if at all.

Now how about Alter Time? It used to be two points to unlock its full potential, but now the class is so flooded with filler and useless talents that it was broken down into 4 points! Master of Time used to be a single point that reduced Alter Time’s cooldown by 10 seconds and granted a charge of Blink/Shimmer on returning to the initial position with it. Now Master of Time is 2-point node that reduces its cooldown by 5s each, and then there’s Time Walk (recharges one charge of Blink/Shimmer on returning) versus the new Temporal Realignment that heals for a bit on getting under 25% health and consuming Alter Time’s cooldown (noob trap talent).

I mentioned Reflection (old Displacement) before, but let’s talk a bit further about it. Previously, we were able to talent into and still have either the baseline second charge of Shimmer or a reduced cooldown on Blink. It used to be a bit inaccessible to pick due to pathing and making sure to pick the capstone talents, but still possible to do it. Now I seriously struggle to think of a situation where we’d favor it over the second charge of Shimmer or even Blink.

We used to have a bit of movement speed after casting Blink/Shimmer and returning from Alter Time, but now it’s been removed. Greater Invisibility also used to be a 40% for movement speed increase for each point instead of the now 20%. Now, we spend an extra point to reduce Greater Invisibility cooldown by 60 seconds, but we’re not really using it on cooldown.

I saved the best for last! WE LOST ICE FLOES!!! Ice Floes used to be a choice node with Shimmer, and while it was the least popular of the choices, it was a good one and had its “dedicated” fans, but above all, it worked, whereas Shimmer versus Improved Blink doesn’t. It’s ironic that this is the expansion where it’d see the most use if it didn’t get removed, either because of Pyroclasm or a reliable way to ensure Ray of Frost is protected against movement disruption.

This is an extra paragraph just to compare against the new shining toy: Devourer Demon Hunter.

We lost movement speed after Blink/Shimmer, but they still have theirs (Felfire Haste).

Their second charge of their main movement ability doesn’t compete with anything. on top of that, the Annihilator hero tree (the dominant PvE choice right now) gets to pick a third charge!

Other movement options in Voidblade, Vengeful Retreat and The Hunt (although to be fair, in some builds they are used for throughput, but the current build uses the first two as either utility or movement exclusively).

Mastery increases movement speed.

Filler is able to be cast on the move.

Double jump + glide + 10% extra movement speed on glide option.

I know this one specifically is about defensives instead of mobility, but since I’m doing comparisons anyway, their First in, Last Out talent in their class tree is basically Tempest Barrier that got removed from our class tree.

1 Like
15

Now it’s time for the updated “useless talents” rant!

I guess let’s start with Mirror Image since it’s one of the more egregious changes. Mirror Image is now purely an aggro dump tool that takes 3 points to reach its full potential. It was one of our best defensives because it used to have an inherent 20% damage reduction component and last 40 seconds. Now it’s lost its DR and only lasts 15 seconds instead, so I’d argue that it’s pretty reasonable that we shouldn’t have to spend 2 more points to reduce its cooldown to 1 minute. As a comparison, Greater Invisibility’s cooldown reduction talent only costs one point for 60s CDR, but even that would still feel expensive on an ability that’s been as neutered as Mirror Image has been.

Frost Conditioning. It’s not very useful even for Frost that’s literally the only one that can get anything remotely useful out of this talent, but it’s straight up useless to the other two specs. Like I mentioned on a previous post, it would at least do something for Arcane and Fire if Glacial Bulwark was moved to the class tree from the Frost spec tree, but even then the only reason someone might pick this talent is because of how many useless ones we are flooded with.

Improved Spellsteal and Improved Remove Curse are pretty much equally bad. Why would I want to nerf my utility by this much for so little pay off that’s useless most of the time? I sincerely do not see any situation where either one would be even remotely worth the investment.

Improved Counterspell doesn’t nerf our utility like the previous two, but is it really something that I want to spend a talent point on? Counterspell already locks enemies spells by 7 seconds, so the one extra doesn’t feel very useful.

I’m still mad Frost Nova’s baseline was nerfed in Dragonflight to give birth to Improved Frost Nova talent. No one even picks this, especially when it’s now competing with the second charge of Nova. Seriously, make this one baseline again.

Why does Captured Thoughts exist? We don’t want to hold our procs for extended periods of time in combat. Is this for open world? Even in dungeons it’s very rare that we sit on a proc for that long between packs unless some RP is in the way, and if it is, it’s usually way longer than the time we have to hold them for.

Mana Confluence is quite literally a 1-point tax for Arcane only. This talent means nothing for either Fire or Frost, but it’s mandatory for our purple counterpart.

I’d argue that Time Manipulation was nerfed so bad that it’s bordering uselessness right now. It used to be a really good talent before.

Mass Polymorph, especially now that it’s competing with Ring of Frost. Longer cooldown, requires melee range, only affects beasts, humanoids and critters, and heals our enemies.

I mentioned Mass Invisibility before as well. It is quite an inferior version of Shroud of Darkness from Rogues that’s already lost most of its usefulness. It should at the very least apply Incantation of Swiftness to everybody. This way we’d have some useful group utility now that Mass Barrier is gone, even if it’s not unique.

Honorable mentions to both tome talents and both charm talents. They’re actually quite powerful, but are super boring secondary stat increases and critical damage bonus. If this is the kind of stuff we’re going to fill our talent trees with, I’d rather have smaller and more impactful ones instead.

Round of applause for the new addition: 4% avoidance! But why is it here? Because Avoidance as a stat is extremely inconsistent in what works and what doesn’t, doesn’t work on some stuff it should and doesn’t work on a lot of stuff that’s killing us. It’s a useless stat most of the time and the fact that it was chosen as a way to mend our survivability problem is quite laughable to say the least.

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I wish we could seriously do away with the defensive disparity between Mage specs. The deciding factor of playing a certain spec inside the same class been whether I can stay alive or not doesn’t really feel meaningful anymore than it does feel shoehorned.

Glacial Bulwark/Cold Snap and Cauterize should really be put in the class tree and Ice and Blazing barriers buffed to Prismatic Barrier’s level in their respective niches. Blazing Barrier specially is extremely weak and both the damage to melee attackers and Improved Blazing Barrier’s healing been less than half of what Diverted Energy used to be is just embarrassing, with at least the “thorns” effect needing to be removed and replaced with something actually useful and the healing substantially increased.

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I wish we could seriously do away with the defensive disparity between Mage specs. The deciding factor of playing a certain spec inside the same class been whether I can stay alive or not doesn’t really feel meaningful anymore than it does feel shoehorned.

This is a major factor in what makes Mage feel bad to play right now. It’s not a question of what spec has the best damage profile for an encounter or tuning, it is about the fact that defensives for all 3 specs are different right now and that has turned the decision about what Mage spec to play into “which one has the survivability for sufficiently difficult content.”

This is a decision that no other class in the game has to make and it’s ludicrous that we’ve ended up here with Mage

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The spec of the class that has the highest death rate in mythic raid encounters is getting a survivability nerf in the next patch. I’m not sure what to do with this information other than to be perplexed. How does the most intelligent species to have emerged in our universe, that we are aware of, continue to accept such wild incompetence in a such a well measured system as game balance?

Frost Mage dies the most often of any spec in mythic raid . Dev response: “we want to improve your survivability by removing a charge of your primary defensive”. There can be only one of two conclusions from this. Either the folks conjuring these design decisions are absolutely incompetent or they harbor hatred of mage. Either way, they are the wrong people for the job. Please fix.

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I mostly agree with feedback in this thread, here are several additions to it:

  • Removing second charge of Barrier from Frost and giving it to Arcane while technically providing some “defensive parity” for 3 specs did not address the main issue - all 3 specs still don’t have enough survivability in high level instanced PVE content, even 12.0 pre-nerfed Frost did not, and now that all 3 specs have survivability level of 12.0 Fire (higher than 12.0 Arcane and lower than 12.0 Frost) this issue would only escalate as all 3 specs would remain at highest death rate in this content. General health buff does not help since you also buffed damage but not healing, so as a result damage income would be similar, but it would be even harder for healers to keep Mages alive. 4% Avoidance does not help either since it does not affect many lethal things including rot / bleed damage. Nerf to Temporal Realignment does not help either. If you truly want to buff Mage’s survivability to proper level like stated in developer notes while keeping defensive parity between 3 specs you need to understand that all 3 specs should receive survivability level of 12.0 Frost not 12.0 Fire and then should be tuned together up or down based on what would be needed. That means that Improved Barrier should provide 2 charges of Barrier for all 3 specs AND each spec should have something specific in addition like Cauterize for Fire, 12.1 Glacial Bulwark for Frost and something thematic for Arcane like Temporal Shield.
  • General tree severely lacks representation of Fire based spells and effects resulting in “what Frost and Arcane based spells and effects would you pick” even for Fire Mages and Frostfire Frost being a fraud that while supposedly mastering both Fire and Frost magic to combine them can learn and use exactly 1 Fire spell (and even 0 if player picks Supernova for range). General tree needs more Fire effects and many previously implemented Fire based effects (so they don’t even need much designing and implementation time and can be just tuned properly and reintroduced) can be quite fitting for general talent tree like Cauterizing Blink, Flameglow and even Blast Wave on a choice node with already available second charge of Frost Nova Ice Ward (so you pick element and form of effect to deal with melee enemies, can’t have both simultaneously and have same amount of anti-melee tools as currently).
  • Mobility of Mages provided in general tree was also overnerfed when other mobile casters like Elemental Shamans and Devastation Evokers still have their main mobility tools (Eles can still have 15-19 seconds of fully mobile casting when they need to and Devokers can still have up to 30 seconds of fully mobile casting when they need to without losing anything when Mages to get comparable tool Ice Floes already had to sacrifice Shimmer and Ice Floes got just pruned in Midnight). That makes current Mage have too low mobility for its supposed mobile / slippery playstyle (especially Arcane that has a lot of stationary hardcasts and got even more in Midnight as mobile Arcane Explosion was replaced by stationary Arcane Pulse) and should be addressed via restoring choice node between Ice Floes and Shimmer.
  • Many existing talents in general tree are too niche or even harmful and should be redesigned. Improved Remove Curse allows to affect 2 targets within 28 seconds when basic Remove Curse allows to affect 2 within 8 seconds, so you spend a talent point to mostly downgrade your existing tool. Improved Spellsteal is similar in allowing to remove 2 effects over 4 seconds when basic Spellsteal can do that up to 4 times, so even in cases where Improved Spellsteal was supposed to shine like enemy having several dispellable effects among which at least 2 should be removed it is often better to just use regular Spellsteal X times (and regular version allows to remove them faster and target the most desired effect even if first 2 casts missed it unlike Improved Spellsteal), so you once again spend a talent point to make your utility worse. Talents like these should be among first to be looked at followed by talents with too low value (like 2 points to reduce Mirror Images cooldown by 1 minute when Images got nerfed both effect and duration wise and should have received this cooldown reduction baseline) or too similar effect (like Winter’s Protection and its direct copy in 9th row).
  • Mages lack tools to deal with consistent damage and recent death statistics in high instanced content confirms that. They need such tools back via either on demand healing in combat through existing cooldowns like Cryo Freeze or frequent enough minor healing / mitigation like Tempest Barrier or Cauterizing Blink. Depending on whether you address point 1 in this post such tools can be added separately or instead of other talents (like instead of the trolling 4% Avoidance talent) or be a choice node between themselves like choice node between Tempest Barrier (Blink provides a shield effect) and Cauterizing Blink (Blink provides a heal over time effect).
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I really hope there’s been an error in the patch notes because the notes just contradict themselves. You correctly identified that Mages are struggling to survive but then turn around and nerf two defensives. Frost is doing better than the other two specs, but that does not mean Frost is doing well.

By any metric, Frost is still among the squishiest specs in the game right now. It has the highest death % in Mythic raids. Even when the Mage does survive, they typically need the most external healing. In M+, the defensives start to give up around M+20, making it hard to compete even for the easier 1% title.

Two barrier charges are a big reason why Frost’s defensive kit is at least somewhat usable (though not adequate, mind you). The problem with the talent isn’t that it’s too strong by itself, it’s that it’s too strong for only Frost to have. There’s no reason why the three Mage specs need to have large defensive disparity. Moving the barrier charges to another spec does not address this disparity, it just kills the viability of one spec in favor of another. Making all the Improved X Barrier talents provide +1 charge would be a start.

I don’t understand what’s going on with Temporal Realignment. It’s already a fairly weak talent (a manual AT is almost always better than the automatic one) and now it’s getting nerfed for some incomprehensible reason. If the Mage drops below 25% HP, they need the heal right then and not after 6 sec.

I’ve played with 4% Avoidance and it didn’t exactly make a difference. There’s a ton of damage this season that Avoidance just doesn’t help against.

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I cant live keys - I had to reroll to play something to get invited for 1% title

4% avoidance?

REMOVE 2ND CHARGE BARRIER? has anyone seen DH and DK def gameplay and we are removing a barrier from mage?

Invisi and images taking up 7+ talent points to do something that should be done in 2-3?

FROST CONDITIONING IS NOT USEABLE FOR 2/3 SPECS YET ITS IN ALL?

Utter and complete jokes removing 2nd barrier lol

Nothing for fire ???

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