I couldn’t be more disappointed. Where do I even start?
Let’s start at the bottom. Evocation and mana gem are at the bottom of the tree, why? If you look at other classes, they have some of their most powerful cooldowns at the bottom. You have to dedicate your entire tree to have the option of choosing evocation and mana gem. And then the other options are arcane orb, and kyrian arcane mage from shadowlands. Arcane orb should be baseline, we’ve been asking for that change for years. What abilities are even baseline for mage? Half of the talents are taken up by abilities that have been baseline for the entirety of WoW.
And then to come up with almost nothing new/interesting except changing our major cooldown slightly into one that does upfront damage on a long arcane cast, which is one of the major weaknesses of the spec. (having to cast everything and on 1 school)
Supernova, Arcane familiar and Nether tempest look just about as boring as they always have, apart from when nether tempest wasn’t limited to 1 target and was a good spell. Nice job bringing back those dead talents, though!
Presence of mind is still somehow only allowed to be used on arcane blast.
Every single quality of life change made to arcane over the past 3 expansions has now been removed and added as a talent, such as mana return on arcane barrage, arcane barrage hitting extra targets per charge. This kind of stuff should be baselien, and Blizzard should have been capable of coming up with interesting new talents or passive effects for arcane, a spec that’s incredibly boring/uncompetitive to play in Shadowlands except for the 1version they are maintaining into Dragonflight (Kyrian)
Also why is mage retaining all of these boring healing talents on the general class tree. Mage’s shouldn’t have healing on every single ability (blinking, extra shield healing etc) they should have extra mobility so they are harder to hit, but take a lot of damage when it does happen. Blazing Speed, Deep Freeze etc would have been much more meaningful choices.
It’s not even hard either. All Blizzard had to do was theorycraft for more than 5 minutes. Instead, every baseline ability is now a talent choice and there aren’t even interesting passives that buff any of the abilities. For example, there could be a talent for slow that affects an enemies casting speed. There could be a talent for counterspell that gives it a blanket silence. There could be a supernova choice node that turns it into a black hole (mentioned by many mages on the forums). So lazy man I’m so disappointed.