PvP Wishlist for 9.1.5

Classes Mage
1

Arcane:

Honor Talent: “Empowered Missiles”

- Arcane Missiles is only usable with a clearcasting proc. Clearcasting is now undispellable and stacks up to 3 times, Arcane Missiles damage is now modified by arcane charges. Clearcasting no longer reduces the mana cost of Arcane Explosion.
	      ***Replaces Arcane Empowerment***

Honor Talent: “Displacement”

- Replaces Alter Time. 20 Second CD resets the cooldown on blink and leaves a beacon to displace back to when you use blink.

Frost Mage:

Honor Talent: “Piercing Ice”

- Fingers of Frost now has a reduced proc rate. Ice Lance damage increased 35%.

Frost mage:

Honor Talent: “Early Frost”

 - Reduces the cast time of your next Frostbolt by 0.8secs This effect can only happen once every 8 seconds.

Talents:

    -Revert Incanter's flow nerf in PvP.

-Make Arcane Orb, Comet Storm and Meteor baseline.
2 Likes
2

The removal of Displacement really killed my enjoyment of Arcane, I would love to see it return.

2 Likes
3

It made for some sweet trick plays

1 Like
4

i really don’t need even more frost pvp talents to choose between… early frost and concentrated coolness baseline pls and maybe allow chilled to the bone to deal damage on break

5

Mediocre ideas.

Empowered Missiles makes the Arcane Harmony legendary useless for PvP. Keep it as:

Arcane Empowerment: Increase the Clearcast proc rate to 2.5%/250 mana, reduce all mana costs by 35%, increases Arcane Missile damage and mana cost by 5% per Arcane Charge. Clearcasts still don’t remove mana cost of Missiles/AE.

The idea being a net-gain for Clearcast procs (just under 49% on Missiles) to use Missiles more frequently without wrecking our mana. The fact we can currently have long strings of casts without getting a Clearcast proc makes this talent fun and worth using, especially in BGs where you might have long strings of uptime.

Displacement: Teleports you back to where you last Blinked from and resets the cooldown on Blink. Only usable within 10 sec of Blinking.

That’s the original spell description. It just needs to be baseline for Arcane again, so no need to add it as an honor talent.

Netherwind Armor, Prismatic Cloak, and Dampened Magic (return it, please) need to be merged as a singular talent. There are too few situations to take either talent, and even fewer to take both. Call it ‘Arcane Supremacy’.

Torment the Weak: Slow reduces the attack and cast speed by 25%. Affects up to 2 additional nearby targets.

Master of Escape: Greater Invisibility removes all physical and magical effects. Reduces cooldown on Greater Invisibility by 1 minute (was 45 seconds). Dealing damage will cancel the effect.

Make it not pull you out when taking damage for a change.

New PvP Talent - Nick of Time: Time Anomaly can also cast Prismatic Barrier or reset the cooldown on Blink/Shimmer, Greater Invisibility, or Alter Time in addition to its current effects.

Makes Time Anomaly a much more desirable talent for PvP rather than just another generic damage increase.

Temporal Shield removed

New PvP Talent - Permanence: Duration of Slow and Polymorph reduced by 25% and the cooldown of Prismatic Barrier increased by 15 seconds, but your spells can no longer be dispelled.

Chrono Shift: Slow is applied to targets hit by Arcane Blast or Arcane Barrage and increases your movement speed by 50% for 5 sec.

Changes the talent to be like the old Torment the Weak without changing much.

6

I’m sorry but most of those suggestions are just not good… You’re trying to make arcane mage a sit there do nothing damage tank. I’m under the impression you don’t pvp that much or at least don’t understand much about it. I have tens of thousands of games played as arcane since WoD so I very much know what I’m talking about.

Your ideas are strictly to make arcane mages sit there doing nothing but channel missiles which is not fun gameplay. And making “Arcane Harmony” useless in PvP isn’t true whatsoever, it would make your barrage feel even bigger.

Your burst would go:

1)Get clearcasting proc x2 (or 3 if you can)
2)Orb / Touch of the magi / Get 4 arcane charges
3)Do insanely big damage with your procs into a big barrage

Then displacement will not be coming back baseline without us losing alter time. That’s just common sense.

Having netherwind armor, prismatic cloak and dampened all into 1 talent is too overpowered.

Torment the weak change is a good idea, not sure about 25% but I like the concept of it.

Master of Escape is also too insane, 1 minute cloak vanish essentially that is just way too broken.

Having an honor talent that’s based on an optional talent with under 1% choose rate above 1800 for all brackets (2s, 3s and RBGs) is completely impossible.

Temporal shield is 1 of the best defensives arcane mages have that also requires skill and knowledge to use properly, I don’t know why you’d want to remove it.

Having your spells be undispellable is also a ridiculous concept, I’m sorry but that sounds like an idea someone who’s never played WoW pvp would come up with.

7

I’m sorry but most of those suggestions are just not good… You’re trying to make arcane mage a sit there do nothing damage tank. I’m under the impression you don’t pvp that much or at least don’t understand much about it.

I’ve literally been a higher rating than you’ve ever been (2900 lol). Ring of Frost was added into the game because Affx and I suggested the spell. I used to explain to Hansol about how to make Fire work (back when he used to argue against Crit stacking in favor of haste to get an extra Living Bomb and Ignite tick). That said, I haven’t played much since mid-Cata, maybe a month every xpac. I’ve played SL a bit more, but haven’t seriously pushed for Glad since I have literally 0 people to play with.

Your ideas are strictly to make arcane mages sit there doing nothing but channel missiles which is not fun gameplay.

To each his own. Blast being the defacto “I’m nuking you now” can be spiced up to Missiles.

And making “Arcane Harmony” useless in PvP isn’t true whatsoever, it would make your barrage feel even bigger.

Actually, I genuinely thought that the buff had a duration on it, so that’s my mistake.

Having netherwind armor, prismatic cloak and dampened all into 1 talent is too overpowered.

Yes and no. Prior to it being removed, I used Dampened Magic only a handful of times, and Prismatic Cloak even fewer. It had its place in BFA and Legion IMO. They could also give it the Triune Ward treatment and reduce the effectiveness of all 3 for balancing. Remember, there’s more to PvP than just Arenas.

Torment the weak change is a good idea, not sure about 25% but I like the concept of it.

It’s reverting it back to the old version of it when it applied a movement slow, attack speed decrease, and cast time increase. Could be 20%, but anything under won’t really make it feel noticeable.

Master of Escape is also too insane, 1 minute cloak vanish essentially that is just way too broken.

True, then reduce the CD by only 30s instead. Hunters already have Survival Tactics on a shorter CD.

Having an honor talent that’s based on an optional talent with under 1% choose rate above 1800 for all brackets (2s, 3s and RBGs) is completely impossible.

I’m assuming you’re referencing Time Anomaly. Think about what you just said and then look at it again.

Temporal shield is 1 of the best defensives arcane mages have that also requires skill and knowledge to use properly, I don’t know why you’d want to remove it.

Because the general idea here was to buff some defensives without going too overboard with the amount of damage removal.

Having your spells be undispellable is also a ridiculous concept, I’m sorry but that sounds like an idea someone who’s never played WoW pvp would come up with.

There was a time where Mages had 30% dispel resistance - Priest/Paladins could also just nonstop spam Dispel/Cleanse since there wasn’t a CD. Shamans/Druids couldn’t even dispel magic effects.

  • You can’t dispel Cyclone (Mass Dispel aside).
  • You can’t dispel Freedom if Unbound Freedom is talented (so much for being ridiculous).
  • You can’t dispel Avenging Wrath (used to, but they cried too hard about losing their 3 minute CD instantly).
  • You can’t dispel Solar Beam
  • AMS
  • IBF
  • Death’s Advance
  • Rune of Spellwarding shield can’t be dispelled
    etc.

There’s a lot of undispellable abilities in the game. Most of them are listed as Physical, but the point still stands. Genuinely, give me a single argument as to why Avenging Wrath can’t be dispelled/stolen anymore, but Icy Veins can get fücked the second you cast it?

The idea here, of course, being that having such a strong talent reduces the duration of your CCs in the first place to balance it out. Shields have a longer cooldown. But you won’t need to worry about losing a 3 minute Icy Veins or a 2 minute Arcane Power instantly on an unlucky Purge. Fire is in a unique position where losing Combust immediately sucks, but not terribly game breaking since you can get Combustion back fairly quickly.

Furthermore, you saying it’s ridiculous is amusing, considering literally every single melee has multiple ways to negate slows and snares. Half of the classes already have an offensive dispel (Priests, Shamans, Mages, Demon Hunters, Hunters, Warlocks, and Warriors to a small extent).

Something you might have noticed is that I’m specifically trying to avoid adding more damage multipliers to the game. Arcane’s survivability has always been hit or miss, depending on the expansion. It’s damage potential has always been pretty consistent.

What’s not fun or interesting to most people is just throwing random damage bonuses on top of already strong abilities. Upping utility makes the game more fun, and makes Mages feel more unique. Look at Sharpen Blade, for example. Mortal Strike is a strong ability. Just giving it a 25s cooldown to do 15% more damage isn’t interesting. The additional healing reduction component makes the ability more impactful than the damage, but the damage is put on there for arbitrary reasons. Again, give me a single valid argument as to why it even needs that 15% damage increase, when Warriors are already the hardest hitting class?

8

i am extremely interested in both sides of this discussion so please keep it civil and don’t resort to a flame war so i can learn things 🥲

9

So here’s my take on things:

We can’t keep adding damage multipliers the way we have ben. It’s not fun, it’s not interesting, and it’s part of the reason why most healers have said that SL is the least fun expansion to heal in because of how stressful fights can suddenly be. You will find exactly 0 people who say “Yeah, getting hit for a 30k Divine Toll is pretty balanced for the class as a whole.” You can either baseline buff the abilities (and reduce the damage multiplier) to make damage more predictable, or we need to start adding damage caps in PvP (such as no more than 35% of your health in 1 hit)

That’s not to say burst damage windows should be removed, and that’s not to say that no abilities should have damage multipliers. But I feel like we’ve shifted a lot of attention to buffing already strong abilities but leaving the weaker ones behind. There’s a reason that, generally speaking, all 3 Mage specs have multiple talents that are basically useless outside niche situations. Example: I’ve never seen anyone ever take Ice Ward. Ever. I’ve taken it for Torghast exactly 1 time. It’s too niche for general gameplay. If it didn’t DR with itself then maybe it would see more use.

I think one of the best things to do for Mages isn’t to keep buffing damage but to increase their utility. Early Frost is an example of a flavor perk that I liked when it first came out, but Tinder is Fire’s equivalent and adding it would make it feel boring now. Giving us Frost Jaw and Deep Freeze back, however, would feel infinitely more impactful than a cast reduction on Frostbolt.

Mages have never had less utility than this xpac.

10

I’ve been 3200 on multiple characters and over 3k in 3 seasons… And I’m sorry but I seriously doubt you came up with Ring of Frost. You agree that you haven’t played much recently, the game is completely different to how it was back then. 2 glads, 1 in wrath and 1 in cataclysm are fairly irrelevant to the game now since it is so different. So yes you are lacking experience currently.

“Spiced up to missiles” My missiles idea genuinely does make missiles a nuke. It just puts a limitation on it so you use your toolkit more than stand still spamming it and nothing else.

Putting passive tankiness into the game is just a bad decision in general, then you end up with a slow dampen meta and games that never end. That’s why Netherwind Armor, Prismatic Cloak and Dampened Magic should not be combined, Spells like Temporal Shield should be the way tankiness is implemented since it requires skill to use well.

And yeah I know slow used to reduce cast speed and attack speed, it was a good spell back then.

I don’t think mage should have a cloak vanish just because hunters do. Mage is a slippery caster yes, but through kiting and CC. Not through getting re-stealths mid combat, having your own reset button also makes teamwork matter less since you can coordinate re-stealths mid game with your healer dispels for example.

Time Anomaly is an OPTIONAL talent, adding an honor talent for an optional talent is so unrealistic and impossible, Blizzard would never do that. My ideas are realistic because they don’t strictly make your character broken / overpowered while also giving a different playstyle.

Yeah the problem is the game is completely different to how it was back when there was spammable dispel and 30% dispel resist. If mages had undispellable poly right now what do you think they would do?

1)Sheep off-target
2)Get teammate to set up a stun / some sort of CC on healer
3)Ring of frost healer
4)Stun kill target
5)Win the game

Now this already does happen with RMP but you have to coordinate it a lot better and it requires fire mage Dragon’s breath (Which is also overpowered and it’s own problem but I’m not trying to nerf other specs but make the ones I like more fun)

You can’t dispel cyclone but druids have to be close range and if it’s a resto druid it’s at risk of dying, my main comp is RMD so I know all about cyclones and polymorph and swapping them for insane CC chains.

Not being able to dispel wings while people can dispel icy veins is very dumb you’re right but I’m not talking about undispellable buffs or debuffs. I’m talking about undispellable spammable CC. Even if you reduce the duration of polymorph by 25% it’s still 6 second poly → 3second poly → 1.5second poly for over 10secs of undispellable CC, now let’s add an rdruid cyclone onto that which is the same duration. That would be over 20secs of undispellable CC, the only stop being interrupting the chain but that would also be impossible since the other team can’t get out of any of your CC. It would be even more broken in 2s and RBGs because 2 mages could polymorph 2x enemy healers and your team could focus the 3rd.

Yeah there’s has been a melee mobility creep and purge is very very strong against mages, but making things undispellable doesn’t even stop that, play a melee and put up hamstring or whichever slow you want, the gap closers aren’t affected by slows so they are never not on their target unless you’re putting in extensive effort to kite. Which I do as an arcane mage and I’ve found great success with it without undispellable slow.

That’s where you’re wrong at the moment, arcane survivability is at an all time high. It’s arcane damage that’s a complete struggle. I’m currently 2700 in 3s (I got that 2 weeks ago but haven’t played since I have no fun with the current playstyle of arcane) and I know all about arcane’s struggles in doing damage.

Yeah warrior’s sharpen blade realistically doesn’t need a damage modifier, but that has nothing to do with arcane mage and their damage. Adding more utility to the game is good in the form of counterplay, not just throwing stuff in because it sounds cool. Your ideas are very cool, but they’re so impractical and impossible with the current game due to how it’s evolved.

11

The problem with damage multipliers is that when they all stack up WITH your cooldowns they’re insane. Divine toll and Final Verdict do solid damage (nothing crazy) without wings up, but add wings to the mix and they can 1-shot anyone.

Cooldowns are way too strong and need to be nerfed while base damage needs to get buffed. The game is strictly cooldown trading, go watch the AWC and you’ll hear the casters all talk about how important cooldown trading is and if they overlap then they have to play very careful and defensive til the cooldowns rotate back up.

I disagree, mage utility is very high right now. Spells like Alter time, nova and sheep spam

Fire mage has Dragon’s breath and ring of frostthen when those run out they have shifting power to bring them back.

Arcane mage has Mass invis, arguably the best honor talent in the game. It has chrono shift, a spammable 60% slow and if you want you can pick supernova which you can use to interrupt enemy mobility or casts.

Frost mage has ice nova, ice wall, water elemental pet nova and if you consider it utility ray of frost ends up rooting people towards the end (and does good damage) it also hits people through line of sight. Blizzard can also be used to keep enemies in combat when drinking behind pillar and it repeatedly slows them and can shut off escapes.

I’m all for adding more utility but I’d rather it be to counterplay other mechanics rather than just to make mage a pure support class for hard hitting teammates.

12

Oh boy! Rating shaming intensifying. Almost as fun and valid as log shaming :unamused:

13

Not rating shaming, he said he was higher than I’ve ever been so I corrected him. :slight_smile:

14

I’ve been watching and seen both of you do it. I started caring less when it first popped up, but now this means nothing now that you’ve added on to it.

15

I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make?

16

It’s turning into “my rating is higher, so your opinion is invalid”.

That’s the type of discussion that leads nowhere just like when people do the same thing with logs “my logs are higher so your opinion is invalid”.

Ideas to be thrown around to improve things for arcane is great. Keep it going. But, when it devolves into a dick measuring contest it ceases to be an interesting discussion.

1 Like
17

I’m not saying his opinions are invalid because of rating. I initially said MOST of his opinions come across that he hasn’t played much lately which is true, he said that himself.

I even agree that torment the weak change he came up with his a good idea and quite a few of his ideas are cool. But most of the changes just aren’t viable or they’d make arcane better in the wrong ways.

18

Then please do it without the rating one ups. Its not needed. If ya disagree, fine.

But that isn’t needed :confused:

19

He brought up rating first and I have the ability to shoot that down entirely so why wouldn’t I? :slight_smile:

20

I’ve been 3200 on multiple characters and over 3k in 3 seasons…

Great! Then you can respect the fact that I’m not a 1400 player who’s never done PvP and we’re both competent players.

And I’m sorry but I seriously doubt you came up with Ring of Frost

So I was tempted to reinstall Skype to literally go combing through chats with someone literally over a decade ago, but ultimately I don’t think I have the info for Skype anymore since it didn’t use my email address, and frankly I have nothing to prove. If I were in my 20s again, I’d be showing you every SS and email to prove it. The only thing I can say is “it’s true”. We had it worded differently back then though and specifically used the word ‘coalesced’ in the spell description.

You agree that you haven’t played much recently, the game is completely different to how it was back then. 2 glads, 1 in wrath and 1 in cataclysm are fairly irrelevant to the game now since it is so different. So yes you are lacking experience currently.

Second Mage on a second account. I was Gladiator from seasons 1-11 and quit mid-season in 12. At the time you couldn’t have both factions on the same server, hence the need for a second Mage. I believe that’s sufficient dick measuring, yeah?

That said, fundamentally, nothing has really changed. Setting up CC chains and go’s are all the same - the only difference is that every class now has multiple ways to counter and multiple defensives to rotate through.

Putting passive tankiness into the game is just a bad decision in general, then you end up with a slow dampen meta and games that never end.

We already have that. We saw how some of the games at AWC were going. However, I feel that’s more about the nature of how much off-healing and self-healing players have right now. We’ve all seen the games where the Feral Druid has more healing than damage.

I don’t think mage should have a cloak vanish just because hunters do. Mage is a slippery caster yes, but through kiting and CC.

What kiting? Arcane can kite melee mostly because of Chronoshift, but Frost and Fire definitely don’t kite like they used to, unless the enemy is entirely out of CDs. Literally every single class has an anti-kiting mechanic. Something to keep in mind is that you can effectively ‘Cloak/Vanish’ as a Mage right now if you’re a Dark Iron Dwarf. Notice how few people play Dark Iron despite that racial being really strong for PvP?

Spells like Temporal Shield should be the way tankiness is implemented since it requires skill to use well.

Let’s just be real. Temp Shield and Alter Time are both crap-shoot abilities. If the enemy team/player doesn’t have an offensive dispel, or if you have a lot of dispel protection behind them, then both are great. If you use the ability skillfully and get an unlucky dispel, then it’s just a wasted CD. Both are very close to how Karma gets used, except they don’t make people stop targeting you.

I’ve had plenty of situations where a clutch Alter or Temp Shield saved me while my healer was CC’d, and I’ve also had 4 shields and 2 other buffs up and and then watch Alter Time just get blown away in 2 GCDs.

We’ve seen how Blizzard hated how tanky Arcane was when we had Mana Shield. We don’t need to be that unkillable, but it would be nice if we were immediately the target every time.

Time Anomaly is an OPTIONAL talent, adding an honor talent for an optional talent is so unrealistic and impossible, Blizzard would never do that.

So is Shimmer. Shimmer is an OPTIONAL talent, and Prismatic Cloak affects it. The PvP talent could have easily been only set to work on Blink, but they specifically incorporated it into Shimmer.

There’s no need to be obstinate about it, either. Blizzard could easily do it and make certain talents more viable. Have you even seen anyone take Ebonbolt this entire xpac for any situation? What if they incorporated the old Frost Jaw ability with Ebonbolt? Suddenly people would seriously consider taking it, even if it meant losing out on some hefty Ice Lance damage.

Yeah the problem is the game is completely different to how it was back when there was spammable dispel and 30% dispel resist.

I mean that ended in Wrath. Cata was when everyone had a dispel, but you didn’t have to play significantly different since we were rotating CCs on healers most. As I mentioned before, fundamentally the game is the exact same. The only major difference is some classes hit much harder and have better defensive abilities.

If mages had undispellable poly right now what do you think they would do?

Do the exact same thing we do today? Nothing would change except that it would force a trinket from the sheeped target.

Even if you reduce the duration of polymorph by 25% it’s still 6 second poly → 3second poly → 1.5second poly for over 10secs of undispellable CC, now let’s add an rdruid cyclone onto that which is the same duration.

But you just said:

You can’t dispel cyclone but druids have to be close range and if it’s a resto druid it’s at risk of dying.

So what’s the difference between a TSG vs RMD in either scenario? Sheep Pally 3x > Clone off 3x > Bash + Clone Pally 3x > Sheep off 3x? The game clearly isn’t in a vacuum, but in that situation there are 2 people who literally cannot do anything except Trinket, Bubble, Sac, and AMS - assuming you don’t have to deal with a Mass Spell Reflect or random stuns.

It would be even more broken in 2s

You already have that kind of strength running Mage/RDruid in 2s. Between Bash, Cyclone, and Poly, you already can keep the healer CC’d and the kill-target from getting heals pretty easily.

Your ideas are very cool, but they’re so impractical and impossible with the current game due to how it’s evolved.

It’s almost like… the game can keep changing. Like someone could say “Hey, let’s shake it up a bit.” and make some changes that players always adapt to.