Pbj here–
I just wanted to give some feedback about the state of mage and why it really seems to struggle vs other classes in SoD.
Simply put;
FFB/SFB got buffed and now a very large portion of our damage is behind these spells. Just like many other classes got new main rotation abilities (and most of them are good, like rogues and mutilate.
Cool, but why does mage just feel different? I think the main reason is we have many runes that are ‘new spells’ that do not have the room to work there way into ever being pressed. (Noting: certain spells are niche like living flame, arcane surge → drinking or as bad as ice lance never being pressed at all)
How to do anything about it?
- Part One: Blizzard has been already doing it-- that is retro-actively making runes interact with our talents. But mage is far from complete. Is it really wild to let spell frost bolt to have a 36 yard range? arcane warding to affect ice barrier? ignite apply fire scorch debuff? They don’t seem very big asks, just like most of the other classes in the game have this already (like applying % dmg increase debuffs automatically)
Ok so that’s nice, but does it fix anything? Well sort of… Lets hold that and lets see where do mage runes mage succeed? brain freeze, hot streak, overheat, missile barrage, fingers of frost come to mind… What do all these do? Interact with our existing spell book. Hmmmmm, a theme seems to emerge.
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Part Two: Experiment time. Lets try to make some of our existing ‘dead’ runes applying a new mindset towards runes and make them interact with base spells. Keeping in mind this could be done in a million different ways by blizzard, this is just to get the point across.
ice lance → reduces the cast time of your frost bolt by an additional .5 seconds and provides rank 1 frost bolt to cause xxx% more critical damage arcane barrage → when you start casting an arcane ability you instant send out an arcane ability, on a 2 second cool down frozen orb → instant cast blizzard on x cooldown deep freeze → chill affects on frozen targets stun the target for x seconds living bomb → your flame strike is now instant cast on x cooldown however applies a living flame to the hit targets causing damage over time icy veins → enhances your frost armor to provide 10% spell haste and causes winters chill to trigger a chill affect at 5 stacks arcane surge → mage armor enhances your arcane damage and mana consumption by 100% but reduces healing done by 100%. living flame → molten armor cause living fire to burn your target over time for x seconds and allows fire damage over time affects to critical strike.
Sounds pretty fun to me. Thx for reading. --Pbj
TLDR → Blizzard please make runes interact with our talents and spell book instead of being separate abilities to cast. thx bye. also maybe considering making molten armor and arcane blast baseline core spells. (just like commanding shout)