Yeah the other sad part about this saga is that it’s not unlikely that most of the mages that love bubbles have already left and their data is survivor bias. The reddit thread for keeping bubbles has positive votes so it’s very likely most people that like mage want it back but who knows how many of them just aren’t playing anymore because of how bad frost has had it:
Lw has been better than bubbles with the exception of no il builds over the years
In legion literally none of our scalable aoe scaled with mastery. Only splitting ice icicles did. Our mastery scales on two target. Woohoo! So much winning!
In bfa frost was only at its peak with no il builds and mastery corruptions, and it was all gs and azerite traits holding it together. Welly was just a side effect of bone chilling being that much better at buffing that damage over lw and back then the choice was between bone chilling and lonely winter. We was a base ability.
Frost just wasn’t that great in sl and when we got tier sets our bonuses didn’t scale with mastery. It had a strong M+ period in the beginning that didn’t take long to get nerfed.
Frost has felt undertuned and ignored for years.
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I’ve seen a few depressed tweets on Twitter lamenting the loss of the pet and deciding to step back from WoW. One that stood out to me was someone who was sad their mage changed so drastically over the last decade that she is 100% unrecognizable in playstyle at this point. Games are weird that way, because you can buy a product you love dearly, and then over time it gets patched and warped into something you don’t even particularly like, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
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I don’t think reddit is the bastion of metrics you think it is. There are plenty of positive threads that involve some really niche things (things that I won’t mention here because they are most certainly NSFW). The fact that these threads not only exist but have somewhat high view count and high ratios is not indicative of the wider population.
For the dozen players who have left because of no WE (honestly a silly reason, given it was only used in 20% of the games life), they always had the option to go off and do open world or RP in Classic. There’s more than enough content to keep them entertained, and they can play Frost to their hearts content.
This is my last update
Part 4:
https://i.imgur.com/ekTRrGV.jpg
I was aiming to get this out in July before patch 10.1.5 but I get pretty discouraged by some negative comments on the official forums, twitter and reddit but I figured I came this far so it’d be silly not to finish. I put down BG3 and I got back to work and finished this. I’m hoping someone finds it entertaining!
I still haven’t touched my mage or her talents since the Water Elemental change. I can’t bear to do it. Brings me too much pain to open up the talent tree and see that my bro is nowhere to be found anymore.
I just my boy back.
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Still missing my dear perma pet 
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I think this recent pass where Blizzard decided to remove a lot of random features from classes was not done well. I think their fear is that the classes will get too bloated but they removed things that gave people a feeling of player identity.
I think a lot of more casual players would like to have their water elemental follow them around because it’s a buddy, and maybe they’ve had this buddy for many years.
I was enjoying playing resto druid and popping in and out of moonkin form, losing that, despite not being logical, made me less interested in playing and indeed now my druid is collecting dust.
I think instead they need to put some added skills, near the top of the talent tree, that are dead-ends, and lower power, but things that a more casual player would enjoy.
Blizzard forgets people play this game for fun sometimes. So many changes go in to control player power and they forget some people are in a fantasy world to play out their fantasy character.
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This and it would be NP to create a small corner in the frost-mage tree around the pet.
Let it be a tank for outside/delves, let it enhance the grp with mana/hp regen, movement speed, let it be stronger with active IV, let the mage heal it with frostbolt (like in the past).
Just some FUN talents+ class identity…like you said!
Some talents+ abilities must not be super OP or important for raids, m+…but just fun 
Pls Blizzard…give us our friend back+ bring more fun talents/abilities!
1 Like