Mana Shield Revamp

Classes Mage
1

Aside for some debatable utility in PvP this is currently a fairly useless talent.

Thought I’d throw out an idea to make it viable, perhaps even in raids.

General Idea (tooltip): Prismatic Barrier now has unlimited duration and absorb. In turn it causes your mana to drain when you take damage at an ever increasing amount. Devastating attacks will drain your mana even faster. Be warned, if you hit 10% mana Prismatic Barrier will explode!

If your interested here are the dirty details:
Primary Change: Mana Shield now also makes Prismatic Barrier have infinite hitpoints so long as there is Mana to draw from as well as infinite duration. You would of course be able to turn it on and off at will.

Nerf, to balance now possibly OP talent: Mana Drain increased from a flat 50% to a range of 25%-125% of damage absorbed. The amount drained will ramp up as you take damage and then peter out when you are not taking damage. This will be tracked with a debuff. Any attack which would be equal to half of your health or more will automatically drain an additional 25% of damage absorbed.
(so if your debuff is at 0 stacks you would take 25%+25%=50% if damage absorbed, if your debuff is at max stacks you would take 125%+25%=150% of damage absorbed)

Optional additional quirk for fun: When/if the shield (your mana) is depleted, you explode dealing 25% of your health in damage to yourself and 15%-100% (scaling up with number of targets struck) of your health split among everyone (allies and enemies) in a 6 yard radius (not including yourself).

Disclaimer: exact numbers are just generalizations. Everything would of course be tuned for balance.

2

Just restore the knock back it had on WotLK when destroyed. That was awesome!

2 Likes
3

Meh I dunno, the whole concept of a manashield made arcane somewhat viable in pvp at the beginning of the xpac, since upping the mana cost it rendered the whole spec trash in pvp. So how about bringing back the shield how it was ?

2 Likes
4

Bringing the the shield back to how it was has two issues imo.

  1. Blizzard is unlikely to straight up reverse a change. Don’t know why they thought is was OP, but they did
  2. The current iteration, even with a reduced mana cost, still costs us valuable gcd’s and mana on every recast.
1 Like
5

I would just like to see mana shield make prismatic barrier toggleable. using a global to turn it on or off. no max absorb. just you lose mana instead of hp at a 1:1 ratio like you would health.

1 Like