I was really disappointed when I saw that frost ward and fire ward were already cancelled as one of like 4 returning abilities for mages. I have several reasons for wanting wards back. One is they’re simply fun to have in your spell book. Do I really need a reason for wanting two colorful self buffs that aren’t overpowered? The second is they’ll bring back a bit of what mages are supposed to be. What makes mages different from other casters is they combine high damage with defense and control. Control is still there, but where’s our defense? We don’t have armor spells anymore, while barriers are really nice, it’s a fraction of the defensive power we used to have. Wards are the defense mages should have, they should be able to counter their own elements. I also feel like wards fit the theme for mage changes in shadowlands which is merging the basics of all three specs. Imo this was done very badly, but at least wards makes it look less bad when your bar has more colors of other specs. I’ve noticed when people look at the class changes they see wards as useless because we have barriers. Wards have several reasons to exist alongside barriers. They go above the barrier to protect both health and the barrier against specific elemental attacks. They also have separate cooldowns than the barrier, allowing you to have a bit of flexibility for defense against some enemies. I’m also pretty sure as arcane the wards have a lower mana cost than barriers, so you’re supposed to use them instead of barriers if your opponent is casting a spell of that element. I also feel wards would be extremely fun in PvP, so they can just be added for PvP and very specific PvE purposes. If that sounds dumb, we’ve had spellsteal since vanilla and outside one raid in Burning Crusade I can’t think of a single useful situation in PvE where it is used. I use spellsteal as often as I can and it’s never turned a fight around, but it’s still a fun ability. Why can’t wards be there for the same purpose? I think mages are supposed to have a ton of dumb fun abilities of varying degrees of usefulness, wards would fit in fine in the spell book.
Yeah I want mage armors back.
While I’m not excited that they’re not making it through the unpruning, I kind of think that the overlapping shielding is kind of odd.
Instead, I think a good route would be the wards to, instead of a shield, they applied like a 50% damage reduction from those sources while active.
I just can’t see any point in bringing back Frost Ward and Fire Ward. If they were to do that, they should also add Arcane Ward. The reason they removed those spells from SL Alpha is that all three specs already get absorb shields and don’t need element specific absorbs. I think bringing back the secondary effects of the mage armors would be cool: Arcane mages could take less damage from damage over time spells, Frost mages could take less damage from melee and ranged attacks and Chill melee attackers (and possibly freeze them), and Fire mages could cause fire damage to melee attackers that could potentially trigger Ignite.
If they wanted to put arcane ward in the game they would’ve used mage ward, which was a spell that absorbed arcane, frost, and fire. Adding separately fire and frost was a conscious decision, or they forgot about mage ward and just wanted to add something from classic to the game.
I guess I wasn’t thinking about that. I guess they have niche use which isn’t a bad thing.
My main complaint is that they are very niche (even in PVP) and yet require keybindings for them to be effective. It’s not like a fun ability that the mage has available to use every now and then.