It was said at BlizzCon that these names are a work in progress and that you welcome feedback, so here is mine.
I’m assuming this is largely due to being in early development. However, when you compare to the Keeper of the Grove, they seem off. Keeper of the Grove sounds like a title, whereas sunfury and frostfire sound like half of an ability name and spellsslinger sounds like a class from WildStar.
I think there is an opportunity to use in game mage lore to make better names.
Something like (spitballing)
Arcane + Frost - Scholar of the Kirin Tor
Fire + Arcane - Archmage
Fire + Frost - Thermodynamicist
3 Likes
I like Scholar of the Kirin Tor and Archmage. Thermodynamicist is weird though. My other thing with SotKT is the weird of being that as a horde mage. though i suppose if u rp your sub-spec doesn’t ever have to be what you actually are lol.
I also want to say that I like the current names besides Sunfury. I think its needlessly restrictive compared to the other two. It also seems like it’ll be Arcane’s second spec which would be weird for me.
Sunfury sounds like a blood elf fire mage
Frost fire sounds generic
Spellslinger sounds like some random hedge wizard you’d kill while questing
7 Likes
They have not even explained what are those archtypes, if that even exists for mages in lore as it does for other classes.
Frostfire for frost and fire? A fire mage that also uses frost school and viceversa?
They’re basing them loosely on “heroes” so how about Bloodmage for one.
“Archmage” is already kind of what you are via the Legion Order Hall and doesn’t really describe a special kind of mage but rather a stronger one. But yeah, Bloodmage is an easy replacement for Sunfury.
1 Like
bloodmages can banish and drain mana tho
I’m surprised they didn’t bother with battle mage, or elementalist, which are generally well-liked by caster-enjoyers.
It looks like the intent of the Hero talents is to support existing archetypes rather than introduce new ones like melee Mage. That would take more than just tacking on a few Hero talents I think.
Would be cool though. Giving mages some sort of tank/melee dps build could provide mage players with an alternative to being countered by pillars in arena, and giving them more opportunities for quicker dungeon queues by allowing them to tank.
One can dream 
Like they said at Blizzcon, these are named/based on Warcraft 3 hero classes. Mountain Thane = the Mountain King unit, Keeper of the Grove = the Keeper of the Grove unit, etc.
I guess mages just didn’t have enough WC3 inspirations to choose from. Archmage is too generic and we already have titles for it.
I never thought much about hero talent names. They seem fine to me.