For anyone not aware, Zirene posted mage healing updates in the mage discord. My post will be long enough without directly quoting it, so check there for references to what I’m talking about.
I see you’ve pulled the classic, “we’re going to make it so bad, that when we recant and make it just REALLY bad, you’ll be thankful” move.
The new new mage proposition sucks. Period. I would rather you cancel all mage changes, delete all mage tier, and leave us alone for phase 8 than this garbage. Unless you’re planning on making Scarlet Enclave a ten-man experience.
No, we’re not grateful. No, you didn’t listen. No, this isn’t good. Is this your plan to end SoD? Make people not want to play it anymore, so you can move on to other things?
Mass regeneration at 12 seconds is still too long. And the only CDR you put in was with casting arcane power. So, our main ability to heal is now on a 1.5 minute cooldown. After 25 seconds, we’re done. It’s over. If the fight lasts longer, you’d better hope there is no enrage. Or, if there is an enrage, you have to save it for then, and you’d better hope there’s no raid damage beforehand.
Healers prefer consistency to big cooldowns. Changing us from consistent, to cooldown-based, is a BIG NERF. Among everything else here, which is also a nerf.
Mass regen not benefiting or consuming arcane blast stacks is ALSO a nerf. Arcane blast is terrible. If you removed all the gimmicks from it, and made it a cheap spell that did damage, it would be fine. But it increases its own cost, while not increasing its own damage. The cost scales astronomically, and the damage bonus is tiny. To one other spell. So for 6 phases (Naxx infinite mana is its own thing) I’ve been literally casting any other spell as often as possible to dump OUT of the arcane blast debuff. And the set bonus… makes it stay up longer? THAT’S BAD, WHERE’S THE UPSIDE?!
Before we had arcane barrage, if I didn’t get a missile barrage proc for my arcane missiles (BTW naming these all the same combination of two words gets confusing) I would either do nothing until the the debuff wore off, or cast a rank 1 arcane explosion or something to drop my stacks, or else I would run out of mana.
Mana seems to be the biggest issue here. Is Warmth of Forgiveness now our best in slot trinket, simply because we’re constantly shooting ourselves in the foot?
The set bonuses:
2p: again, NOT consuming stacks of arcane blast is a bad thing. Missile barrage is free, so it doesn’t matter how much it costs, but you’re not getting two of them in a row, so WHATEVER you cast next is gonna be expensive.
4p: This is the only change I like; putting the 20% damage reduction to 4p means we might actually get to use it. Although, typically rewind time fully heals someone, so at that point they rarely need it.
6p: The cooldown reduction might matter in a few long fights, but you’re typically still only getting one arcane power per fight. The extended duration isn’t bad, so it’s not a terrible set, except I DON’T SEE ANY POINT TO USE ARCANE POWER. We’re already kings of overhealing. I’d rather have ice block. The CDR from arcane blast should come baseline, not during this weird “you get to feel like you used to for 25 seconds at a time” arcane power moment.
And even with the six piece, assuming around 20% haste (maybe more if you’re MQG during it) you’re getting two second arcane blasts (1.5 with MQG). It still takes four arcane blasts to cast another mass regen, so even with everything, we will still only be HALF as good as we are in phase 7. When casting arcane power, the immediate refresh to mass regen means we can still only heal three groups. By the time the arcane blast cooldown reduction kicks in, the free mass regen we got will have worn off, and it will still be three groups.
Not to mention, we’ll be out of mana. Everything costing more during arcane power, arcane blast buff never wearing off?
And I haven’t even mentioned you’re straight killing frost. They get to deal with all of the mass regen nerfs, AND get an additional 65% healing reduction, since ZG set just straight doesn’t work anymore (it’s 165% → 100%, which is a reduction to 60%, or a 40% nerf, depending on how you look at percentages). For no reason. Frost has always been less healing than arcane, but now? There’s no reason for that. Forcing the arcane power, and having it buff arcane blast makes the difference between arcane and frost even greater anyway, you don’t need to kneecap it on top of that.
And while we’re at it, we’re supposed to heal for damage done. Critical damage? That’s damage. It should translate into critical heals. We’ve been accepting of it not doing that up to this point, but it makes no sense. If I use shatter talents to get a critical hit, I should do more healing. Just one more kick in the teeth frost gets (and any mage who was using spellpower rune).
Again, to summarize: everything about these changes, from the new tier sets, to the baseline changes, is entirely worse than what we’re playing with now. We would be better off if you had left us alone and didn’t give mages a tier set.