Since there is no mage thread on the European side (why are there no official blizzard feedback thread for most of the classes?) I thought I’d share some of my thoughts.
Arcane
I will mostly echo the sentiment shared by Porom and others on this thread here.
The changes for Arcane in 11.0.5 really did not need to happen, it has turned a very fun iteration of Arcane into a pretty unenjoyable one. Aethervision as it is now does not in the slightest help to recreate how double dipping Nether Precision worked, if anything it has complicated Arcane Barrage conditionals as it is another Barrage damage modifier that lasts for 30 seconds which you very much want to consume with other damage buffs. What we had with double-dipping Nether Precision was alot less complex and more fun to play.
You state that you are happy with Arcane and that you want to reduce the complexity of conditionals for Arcane Barrage but the changes stated for 11.1 does not help with that. The only thing I found positive for Arcane was the new tier set, which brings some well needed consistency.
Frost
I think changing Fingers of Frost to not consume Winter’s Chill is a bad idea. This might bring a situation where you want to spam FoF mainly into Winter’s Chill and hold FoF without it, not to mention the possibility of alot of icicle munching which feels really bad. Also, Winter’s Chill duration on target is way too low for you to get rid of your FoF procs first before consuming it. You will without a doubt need to track Winter’s Chill aswell. I suggest not going through with this change as I don’t feel it makes sense for the general Frost gameplay and resource management.
I don’t mind the Blizzard changes, but consider swapping talent positions so that one can select Coldest Snap without picking the Blizzard talents for some encounters, and tune Blizzard so it doesn’t become a priority cast in single target.
On frost, I consider the winters chill change to be simply quality of life. You don’t have to spend all FoF charges if you have something better to cast, even now, so it’s just bonus charges where they would have been consumed despite the lance already being buffed.
I think they just dont really care what their playerbase has to say.
Frost
Please increase the Winter’s Chill duration to at least 9 seconds.
By having FoF not consume WC you eliminated the feels-bad problem of munching proccs and introduced a new problem of having your WC stacks run out before you can consume them normally. The munching now happens on the WC side instead of the FoF side which feels just as bad if not worse.
But additionally you now also have to care and play around Glacial Spikes cast and travel time while monitoring the WC duration so you dont accidentally send an un-shattered Spike because the WC expired mid-cast. This also feels extremely bad and makes optimized frost gameplay unnecessary stressfull.
The very obvious solution to these very obvious problems would simply be to increase the WC duration. Therefore, please increase the Winter’s Chill duration to at least 9 seconds. Thank you.
Yeah, true. It does help with the proc munching and after getting the feel for it some more I don’t mind the Winter’s chill change as much so I could get behind it, I guess I’m getting too worried about potential degenerate applications. But yes, the duration of it needs to be increased definitely. There are some good points being brought up on the NA forums for frost aswell.
Jesus christ. No, this makes it even worse and moves barrage conditionals to something even more cursed worst case scenario (debilitation, harmony stacks, aethervision etc), not to mention barrage benefitting from Nether Precision was probably one of the best changes for Arcane coming into the expansion. Doing this change also doesn’t make sense for any of the hero talents, especially in AOE. What is the vision here? The splinter generation in aoe will be drastically lower, and the clearcasting stacks gained during Arcane soul will be less of use. Please, revert this change, even what we had before was better. Just playing Sunfury on the ptr feels so cursed right now.
This is nice, but as many have pointed out, having it increase icicle damage aswell feels really bad. If you have 4 stacks and generate just one extra icicle (think talents like Splintering Cold) the stacks will be reset for some quite lackluster damage and you will lose out on alot of damage for Glacial Spike. Consider removing the icicle damage bonus and only have it increase damage for Glacial Spike and make a choice node for potential non GS builds. Otherwise I think it works well, having it give a stack on each tick of a flurry hit is a nice touch, as you get 4 stacks from a bolt + flurry.
The Wintertide change at the same time means less damage from FoF into frozen targets, it would be good if ice lance damage was increased to compensate for the standard builds and to make it more competitive against boltspam builds. It would also help spellslinger.