I look at the Mage talent tree and all I see is a load of garbage blocking the way to talents I actually want.
Every talent should be desirable, it should be a hard choice between which routes you take.
The ones that I take most issue with are : -
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Diverted Energy - Seriously, 3 points to heal 6% of your max hp over the course of your barrier being depleted, it has zero effect if it doesn’t get consumed or it gets dispelled.
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Temporal Velocity - That speed boost needs to be 25/35% per point if it’s only gonna last 2 seconds. The boost to Alter Time also seems odd, as you don’t actually have to take Alter Time to get this talent.
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Accumulative Shielding - effectively reduces your barrier cooldown by 1.2 seconds for every second that it stays active, has a maximum reduction of 4.2 seconds if your barrier stay active for 20.8 seconds. In most cases your barrier won’t be staying up for that long and if it does, it effectively nullifies the talent (why refresh your barrier if it hasn’t broken?).
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Rigid Ice - 180% of nothing is still nothing.
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Flow of Time - 3 points to decrease the cooldown of our only baseline movement ability by 10%, I’m not saying it should be more, but it defintely shouldn’t take 3 points.
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Shifting Power - Even now it’s only really good for Fire and that’s with Unity and conduits, even then it’s not used for the damage it does (which is pathetic), only the cooldown reduction.
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Mass Polymorph - just what we needed, a third incapacitate effect, an AoE version of simoultaneously one of the best (no CD CC) and worst (clears debuffs, fully heals the target and breaks on damage) CCs in the game.
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Remove Curse - It’s nice to have but not a necessity, however, by locking Spellsteal and RoP/IF behind it with no other branches to reach them, it is effectively mandatory. So much for player choice.
We should be looking at talents and picking the route that we think will best suit us for a given situation, instead we have to pick the least worst.