While Snowdrift indeed can be decently used as a defensive stun, the biggest gripe of people that want to have something like Deep Freeze is - they want a reliable and unbreakable offensive CC, as Frost Nova(s) and Freezing Could could serve the niche of defensive CC already. Lack of offensive CC means that Mages can have trouble with getting kills on their own, as not only people, especially in Dragonflight, have many ways to survive / negate your burst, but even the 100-0 playstyle, which was a solution for Mages in earlier expansions, does not work as good anymore, as health was increased by 40% and damage was not increased.
You can try to use Snowdrift as an offensive CC, but there are multiple issues:
- It requires you as a ranged cloth wearing caster to stay within melee range of target for several seconds, which is counterintuitive and makes this stun hardly useable in some forms of content, like Epic BGs (where to stun you would need to rush into enemy frontline and then they might kill you faster than the stun procs) or against caster cleaves in arenas (where running or even blinking in wizard wars up to your ranged enemies, especially following them behind pillar to stun, is quite risky).
- Its stun build-up is for some reason removed by snare / root break effects. That is strange, as they should have nothing to do with countering stuns.
- Even if Blizzard would fix that, Snowdrift is still not hard to counter - enemies can leap / port away, use a knockback on the Mage, melee can run out of it for split second to negate it entirely and then even safely run back, as it usually would not have enough uptime to build up its stun second time.
While Snowdrift having counterplay options and downsides is normal, it is just badly suitable to be an offensive unbreakable CC. The problem is that there is just no alternative to it, it is the only non-racial option Mages have access to.
As a result, while it is true that it is taken by Mages, that is often because such conditional stun is better than none, not because the ability itself is that good. That does not mean than Blizzard can’t or should not give Mages a more suitable offensive CC, especially since Mage’s current state already made Blizzard move away from their old principles, like making Combustion undispellable and creating Snowdrift itself.
Rogues and RMP should not be a justification for keeping Mages away from getting their own CC. Mage is a dps class, not a support class akin to Bard, so it should not rely on any other DPS class to succeed, especially if that is a single particular class. Blizzard should take into account how changes to Mages would affect RMP, but just that. So, if they would give Mages some personal tools, but nerf RMP synergy to compensate and keep its power at close to current level, I suppose many Mages would gladly accept that.
Though, I understand that some people could like even current implementation of Snowdrift and would want to keep it. The solution is simple - move Snowdrift out of PVP talents (I don’t think that giving Frost a PVE stun would shake things much, especially seeing its current DPS position in raids / Mythic+) and make it a Frost Mage tree capstone as a choice node with Deep Freeze. This way, people who like Snowdrift can keep and play with it and people who want an offensive CC can get it as well. They would not be able to get both and that should be a viable compromise, allowing to just pick a preferred tool.
