the below is all my opinion - not fact.
I’ve been playing mage since Wrath and the specs has hardly changed since Cata. It feels like it played the same for 8+ years now.
I like arcane surge and the random buff talent, nice spells, they add some interest to an otherwise stripped out class. But those are the only really new things.
The current talent tree seem to just pack in old covenant and lego abilities and not considered gameplay. A Dragonflight mage will still be playing the same WOD mage but will let of a toolkit, which is just bad.
The base mage talents feel terrible, having to spend point and mages spells like counterspell seems wrong as its the Only interrupt we have. and we have no stun, can we have deep freeze back? No idea why shatter is in there too, not much use for fire or arcane. Shatter should have been the first from talent as its core to the current gameplay. shatter will likely be shipped for fire and arcane if it stays there. Arcane just feels forgotten. Its like you don’t know what to do with the mage as a whole.
Just converting our existing specs into trees and reducing our options isn’t good enough when out trees have considerable updates, new spells and new/different gameplay styles.
Here are some of my suggestions:
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give use back deepfreeze as a dps cooldown and a stun .
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add FrostFire Bolt back into the frost and fire trees. Make it a small dot you need to manage for frost, and for fire it can set off the shatter (if it stays in the base tree).
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let arcane have mana gems as standard. Hell, give all the spec their baseline toolkit back.
There’s so much that could have be done, whether is a spec change or introducing new spells, old spells, and/or new gameplay options.
My opinion is that mages have been stale for years and the hope of a revamp in Dragonflight isn’t happening right now with the current state of the trees. There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way mages should be looking at. I ask Blizzard to rethink all the trees and provide different plans for alternate gameplay options in each of the.
This also sums up my feeling toward the class, having to pick talent we already had and not get anything new or interesting. In a less ranty way (sorry).