SHADOWLANDS MAGE FEEDBACK
Disclaimer: I do not have alpha access, so I haven’t played with the changes myself, however I have played the class for 6+ years at this point. I have watched quite a few prominent mage streamers, heard what they have to say, and dug into the info on wowehead a fair bit.
ALL SPECS
All the new baseline spells are cool and flavorful to the class, great additions. Really does make you feel like a mage again, not just a fire or frost mage.
Conjure mana gem should probably just be baseline for all specs and not arcane specific. I feel it falls under the same category as the fire and frost wards. Not supper game changing but adds some nice utility and flavor for those niche moments.
Maybe just make shimmer the baseline blink? No one has really cared about the stun break utility of the regular blink for some time and I feel like shimmer got nerfed to 1 charge, not because mage mobility was broken, but because it is really hard to make a talent to compete with it. Then again if you really did think mage mobility was too much, fair enough.
FIRE
COMBUST
Combustion doesn’t work baseline. Combust was reworked in legion from a debuff on a target to a buff on you. This was done in a world where we had Phoenix Flames baseline which let the combust window actually work and feel complete. You were pumping pyros all the way through, which is what makes the spec feel so good to play. At the end of legion Phoenix Flames was turned into a talent, which made the combust window run out of juice 50% of the way through causing you to just spam scorch, which feels real bad. Even on a max geared mage with high haste and crit values, it still suffers from this problem. The way this was fixed was to Frankenstein a bunch of stuff together to create an actual functioning spec. i.e. Hyperthread wristwraps, Memory of Lucid Dreams, and Blaster Master. Without these sources of borrowed power the combust window is back to scorch spam.
Phoenix Flames needs to be baseline to let us actually finish out the combust window the way it was meant to, without having to Frankenstein the spec back together every expansion.
FIRE BLAST
Too much is tied to this spell right now. It’s your hot streak generator, fuel for your combust, a significant portion of your damage, and now it also spreads your ignite. I agree that the ability to have control of ignite spreading is a good idea but it should be on a separate spell i.e. Inferno Blast. With the way fire blast is set up on the alpha it breaks the combust window even more because instead of spamming fire blast and pyro in quick succession. You have to wait for you pyro to actually hit the target so that it will add to the Ignite before you spread it. This adds weird half second gaps after every pyro where you are doing nothing. Also it could lead to a situation where we actually hold all of our fire blast charges till the end of the combustion just to spread the Ignite.
The fun part of fire is the big high paced combust window every 2 min that lets you nuke the world. Those 10 seconds of intense instant pyroblast casts culminating in a huge ignite that burns everything to the ground.
Talent Row 35
Phoenix Flames needs to be baseline and a new talent put in its place.
Buff Alexstrasza’s Fury with more range, or something, so it will actually see some use. It’s a really cool talent and the only thing in the class that modifies or interacts with Dragons Breath. Dragons Breath is cool.
Keep Flame On, but we need to make the other choices on the row competitive with it, otherwise it will be another expansion of never specing out of it.
ARCANE
“We felt that arcane mage damage rotation lacked a focal moment that results in a big payoff. As such, the combat rotation is undergoing a significant redesign that looks to add this while retain the overall flow and feel of the spec.”
Really? All you did was give Touch of the Magi baseline and double the CD of Arcane power. Arcane does indeed need a significant redesign, but this is not it. This couldn’t even be called a redesign, let alone a SIGNIFICANT one.
IDEAS
Make building and dumping Arcane charges more dynamic. You should be going up and down in charges like crazy. Not just build to 4 with blast, then dump once, and build to 4 again. Making Arcane orb and Charged up baseline, will give you more ways of gaining charges which will allow you to go up and down in charges more often and more dynamically.
On top of that perhaps a system that makes arcane blast/explosion have different effects depending on how many charges you are currently at. At 1 charge there’s a chance for your next builder to give 2 charges. At 2 charges blast does a small AoE around the target, and explosion does more damage to your primary target. At 3 charges rule of threes comes into play making the spells free. This would keep the rotation interesting and varied, and you wouldn’t just zone out for 5 seconds while you build back to 4 charges.
Bring back 3 charges of clearcasting, and make Touch of the magi explode damage every time it is hit with a spell. This harkens back to the Hellfire Citadel Arcane mage with the Prophecy of Fear trinket. Banking arcane missile procs and unloading them all into the mark to make big chaotic explosions at the target. This adds some cool gameplay moments and spices up the AoE rotation as well.
Perhaps a new system entirely
Leylines
During combat there is a chance for a leyline of pure arcane power to rip open in the ground. Standing in the leyline can give you a random buff from a multitude of different ones, which have gameplay altering affects that you need to react to. Similar to rogues roll the bones.
Different buff ideas could include:
- Arcane Blast now instantly grants 4 arcane charges. Allowing for Blast>Barrage>Blast>Barrage Type gameplay.
- Arcane missiles now launches twice as many missiles. Changing your main damage source from blast to missiles for a period of time.
- Presence of Mind no longer consumes the buff. Letting you spam instant cast Blasts while in the leyline.
- Arcane Barrage now grants you a random number of arcane charges when cast. This combined with the changes to charges I talked about above would keep you on your toes.
REMOVE THE TALENT “OVERPOWERED” — IT IS BORING AND DUMB — I DO NOT LIKE IT.
FROST
It’s good
Flurry and Winters chill is still messed up. Distance from the target and high amounts of haste let you do weird stuff. IDK how to fix it. Best of luck. 
