Feedback: Mages

[Linxy]

This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Mages in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Apex Talents

Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.

To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:

• How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
• Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
• Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
• Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?

For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.

Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!

[Linxy]

Class

We’re taking a pass to reduce button and aura bloat in the Mage core tree. We’re also consolidating defensive power to simplify the landscape of Mage defensives and make them more approachable. In Midnight, Barrier spells should be potent, consistent, and reliable. Mirror Image and Invisibility spells should now be able to be used for their utility instead of tacked on defensive benefits. We’re also removing Shifting Power. Shifting Power was uniquely powerful for Fire Mage and substantially less interesting for Arcane and Frost but it came with its own set of tuning challenges that made it difficult to balance their cooldowns appropriately with its existence. Fire Mage will be getting some spec-specific adjustments to make Fire Blast more accessible to compensate for the loss of Shifting Power. We’re also reducing Shimmer’s power to help make the decision between Blink and Shimmer feel like more of a meaningful choice. Players who want to maximize uptime and display mastery over an encounter and its mechanics should feel empowered to express that through Shimmer, whereas progression and more reactive Mages should enjoy the increased availability of Blink.

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Arcane

In Midnight, our biggest goal with Arcane is simplifying the decision-making around when to Arcane Barrage by reducing the number of effects and folding the remaining ones into a new resource called Arcane Salvo. Arcane Mages can talent into different ways to generate Arcane Salvo and should expect their Hero Talents to provide some unique behaviors that might augment their cadence of Arcane Barrage drastically. We’re also removing all effects that refund Arcane Charges when you Barrage while adding some new and unique ways to regain charges throughout the tree to help reinforce the Arcane Charge climb as a core part of the Arcane Mage experience. Lastly, we’re introducing a new area damage spell called Arcane Pulse that will replace Arcane Explosion when learned. This spell features a 40 yard range, ramping damage, mana cost, and area effect per arcane charge, and should feel like an intuitive and powerful option when doing rotational filler in AOE.

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Fire

With the reintroduction of Phoenix Flames and the addition of Hero Talents, Fire Mages have had an easier and easier time generating Hot Streak. This impacts the tuning of Pyroblast and Flamestrike and the pace of Fire’s combat in extreme ways. In Midnight, we are heavily increasing the damage of Fire Mage’s premier damaging spells like Pyroblast, Flamestrike, and Meteor while reducing their access to guaranteed crits by removing Phoenix Flames. We’re also changing Kindling to be a flat cooldown reduction on Combustion to reduce how punishing imperfect uptime can be. We’re increasing the cost in the Fire talent tree to access Ignite spreading functionality to help make the Ignite spread playstyle more distinct from Fire’s other builds and damage profiles and also make it easier to tune around. In Midnight, Fire Mages should be casting Fireball more often, and in exchange, will see significantly increased damage coming from their Hot Streak consumers, Meteors, and Combustion windows.

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Frost

Frost Mage is receiving a gameplay overhaul in Midnight targeted at simplifying their rotation by removing competing spell priorities and giving each spell a much clearer place in Frost’s rotation. In Midnight, Frost Mage features building and spending debuff gameplay centered around two reimagined mechanics: Freezing and Shattering. Frostbolt and Flurry apply stacks of Freezing and Ice Lance consumes them to deal significant bonus damage. Alongside this core mechanical change, we’re doing an overhaul of Frost’s talent tree targeted at reducing button bloat, reinforcing rotational clarity and priorities, while also removing a significant number of auras. One such change is the removal of Icy Veins as Frost Mage’s burst cooldown, now being replaced with Ray of Frost. Our vision for Frost Mage in Midnight involves a consistent damage profile with smaller peaks relative to the burstier specializations of Arcane and Fire, but a higher consistent damage output. We feel that Frost Mage has historically been deemed as the more approachable of the 3 mage specs and we like that for Frost’s identity, Our goal for the rework is for that perception to continue while also offering new Mastery for those players who heavily invest in playing Frost.

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Frostfire Hero Talents

The Frostfire Hero Talent tree added many auras, most of which you were incentivized to track and play around. It was also filled with damage procs, many new damage events, and provided an influx of Brain Freeze and Phoenix Flames charges to Frost and Fire respectively. In Midnight, we’re reworking the Frostfire Tree completely to let its gameplay more directly enhance and elevate the gameplay that exists within the Fire and Frost trees instead of overwhelming it. We’ve also moved Isothermic Core to the capstone location and integrated it more deeply into the tree’s talents, since the community has made it very clear that it is a fantastic visual spectacle and an exciting moment gameplay-wise. In Midnight, Frostfire Mages should have more intuitive rotational priorities, less auras to track, and punchy, big moments of damage and excitement with Frostfire Empowerment and Isothermic Core.

[Ulsaki-turalyon]

So some of the concerns I have at the moment, obvious caveat that I need to test these out more and play around with builds:

• General mage utility pruning seems very aggressive. I’m not sure why Blast Wave and Mass Barrier had to go, though there might be need for less stuns in content like M+. Since skips became deprecated in M+ design (not a bad thing), Mass Invisibility was largely irrelevant from the introduction. So this is just a de facto removal of Mass Barrier, rather than shifting the utility around.

• Talent bloat: There seem to be several two pointers which don’t really need to be, such as Master of Time (5 sec Alter Time CD reduction per point)

• Near useless talents: I struggle to imagine any situations where Improved Remove Curse or Improved Spellsteal would serve any practical function.

  • Improved Remove Curse increases the cooldown by 250%?! In exchange for saving a single global cooldown. The only time this might be even slightly useful is Affix removal in M+, and even then classes should be self dispelling since you can’t rely on a mage being around.
    • Edit: Possible suggestion: “Remove curse also removes one harmful magic effect from the target”. A really nice utility theme and fits in with the whole “master of magic” thing. Actual curses are very situational. In fact in Halls of Atonement one mob ability was a curse in SL but was made into a magic debuff in TWW.
  • Improved Spellsteal: A double spellsteal is rare, and if needed to remove stacks it would usually be desirable to remove them ASAP anyway.

• Water Elemental talent: I am a fan of making this an option, however its placement in the tree seems to suggest it is a central ability and if you do not pick it up you are “wrong”. I don’t ever want to see the WE and the moment I was able to talent out of it I have always done so. I heard some discussion that theorycrafting shows it to be a very small DPS change but in game this is not clear to the player.

  • If the goal is to make this an optional talent, turning this into a choice node similar to how it used to be between Water Elemental and Lonely Winter (some spells get a damage buff) makes the design intent more obvious and might be a chance to consolidate a few nodes.
    • Edit: I would bring back Lonely Winter as a choice node, to make it a optional choice to players.

• Cone of Frost is clearly intended as an AoE damage boost, but this goes back to an issue of making mages go into point blank range as part of damage rotation (a big no no for a ranged damage spec). Being able to convert Cone of Cold into Ice Nova is a welcome improvement on retail, but means having to go all the way over into the mage tree to pick this up. I don’t see why Cone of Cold isn’t removed and just make Ice Nova baseline.

  • Tangent: Dragons Breath (and Blast Wave, currently removed) had this issue as well, where mages had to be close range in M+ to allow them to stun/knockback as part of interrupts and general utility. Supernova can be used instead, but as a knockback vs. a disorientate it is mechanically different.

• Having Blizzard now an option to auto cast at the target is welcome. However auto casting completely disables the ability to manually place, which can be sometimes desirable from a gameplay perspective.

  • Suggestion: Spells which auto cast at a location should revert back to manual placement when there is no target selected.
  • Additional note: Personally, I feel auto targetting is required due to gameplay issues caused by the UI. For example, in some instances it is very difficult to actually target the enemy, and many players have also experienced casting an AoE spell in the wrong location such as on chandeliers due to camera issues. In other words, I feel like I am forced to give up the ability altogether to manually place to resolve gameplay and interface issues outside of my control.
  • Additional additional note: Frost mage AoE has always felt frustrating in M+ because I can cause packs to split, mobs wander out of it when tank is pulling mobs around the dungeon (usually to grab multiple packs). I think something like Frost Bomb following targets around is far more preferable for this game mode.

• Ray of Frost being the major CD to replace Icy Veins. I am not a fan of this. For starters it’s a channelled spell, so any interruptions or forced movement can be hugely punishing. The reduced cast time does make this slightly less risky compared to 5 second channel on retail, but I would still be worried about potentially losing large amounts of damage particularly due to random mechanics targetting.

Some other thoughts:

• I’m in agreement with removing Shifting Power. Obviously the main issue seems to be balancing cooldowns, but I always felt this was awkward gameplay. I’m glad to see it go.
• I assume Icy Flows is being reworked, as I see that as an integral part of mobility.

[Hiyorin-argent-dawn (Hiyorin)]

Perhaps minor to many in the grand scheme of things. But the reworked icicles talent having icicles hovering over me 24/7 even outside of combat is very visually disruptive. And it is extremely disruptive to role players.

[Ulsaki-turalyon]

General Frost design goal feedback

It’s stated that the desire is for Frost to have a fairly flat damage profile. However this provides far less utility in the modern game. A bursty spec still does the same average damage, but with the additional utility of being able to take priority targets down. In other words, a bursty spec has far more use. The question needs to be asked on what Frost’s strength is. 2 target cleave is situational (in fact “fake cleave” such as the first Priory boss seems more common!). Doing the same damage profile throughout the fight is not a compelling strength, it is in fact a significant weakness. The added ramp up time via Freezing stacks just makes this even worse.

Freezing stacks loss on target death can be very punishing, as well as punishing swapping. One solution might be to have them explode on target death (edit: or expiration) for AoE damage. It could jump targets I suppose, though I find the frost explosion idea more thematic.

When I ask the question “what does the new Frost bring to the modern game and do well”, so far I think the answer is quite lacking.

More talent feedback

Frost Conditioning - Useless for non-frost mages. I also am struggling to think of a substantial use case for this. I have encountered situations where a double block with no CD would have been useful, but can’t think of a case where going from 30 to 20 seconds would be worthwhile.

Hand of Frost - there seem to be way too many talents for this.

Comet Storm - at the far end of the tree for Frostfire’s capstone talent. This forces a lot of investment in specific points. I’d also prefer it’s kept as a separate spell instead of being tied in to Ray of Frost.
Suggestion: Move this to a more central place in the tree, move it back to being a separate spell.

Isothermic core was a pretty impressive spectacle in TWW, but it’s now going to be far more infrequent as it’s tied to Ray of Frost usage. See comments on Comet Storm above.

Water Elemental - I added a comment in my post above, but I’d make this a choice node to provide design clarity and allow players to opt in to using it or avoid it entirely without punishment.

Improved Remove Curse - In addition to above, one option here might be to remove a harmful magical effect from the target. Would be a good piece of utility and fit in with the mage theme of being a master of magic. (It always felt a little weird that I can steal magic off a target including some very powerful and fun niche buffs, but can’t do anything to a friend dying from a magic debuff right next to me!).

Defensives

Mirror images seem to be being used as a key mage defensive, but they are not good enough to justify this. The images last only a few seconds. Originally MI was a damage cooldown. What is the design goal here, because they’re a major cooldown that is not a particularly useful defensive and not a particularly useful source of damage. Threat is largely irrelevant in the modern game. They have the utility of a 30 second defensive CD but with a 2 min CD.

The design goal needs to be clarified here, because it’s the sort of thing that looks and sounds like a damage cooldown, as per their original introduction in WoTLK, but in practice it’s not. It does not have a clear purpose and just seems to do multiple things badly, while the implication is that it’s a major cooldown that should do exciting things.

Invisibility’s loss of damage reduction removes a huge mage defensive, and is now limited to mostly dropping target and maybe situational uses (I probably use the spell foremost to drop combat especially when bugged). Dropping a target can be a powerful defensive especially on channeled abilities or when the attack does not switch to another player.

Misc feedback

• Can we get an updated visual for Ice Barrier? Blazing/Prismatic Barrier visuals are way ahead, they were shiny and fancy when they were added but Ice Barrier was never updated and has been unchanged since, what, vanilla? Making a blue version and throwing in a few ice particles should be a quick job for an effects artist.

• Having icicles hovering around my character as Frost out of combat is distracting. Only display these in combat?

[Eteriy-mirage-raceway]

Glacial spike needs to be its own ability or give us the option to as a chose talent. Frost already miss 1-2 rotational abilities. Feels like something is missing in the rotation. The pruning was a bit to much. Give us the option to choose more active abilities in the talent tree.

An most importently! Please give frost new spell visuels for Ice Barrier, Frost Nova, Ice Nova, and cone of cold. Those visuels a waaaay outdated compared to other classes and specs. Ice Barrier especially is still the old vanilla visual!

[Voleth-stormreaver]

Give a 2 choice node for Meteor just like Flame Strike. Either target location or on target.

[Banken-alonsus]

Overall I like the changes for mages, particually Forst Mage. But I really, really don’t want to be a pet class. Please, consider how Water Elemental is implemented. Either bring back Lonely Winter and make it an alternative to Water Elemental, or make it a powerful cooldown.

[Ludideo-tarren-mill]

Frost mage is amazing after a long time, keep it

Arcane mage is mid, needs more work. Give arcane mage an extra blink since it needs to choose between blink or blink back

Fire mage is horrible - revert it completely, it was the most fun caster in the game why change perfection? all the fun from the spec is gone hyperthermia, phoenix flame, scorch, blast wave, living bomb it all needs to come back. keep blast wave for fire mage only

[Ragua-burning-legion]

A little about myself, I have been playing wow since Vanilla, and had ever only 1 Main the Mage.

My guild usually clear Mythic Raids towards the end of a patch cycle (sometimes on the very last week) so while we are technically hardcore we are also not really, and we more focus on play what you like and have fun, the boss will die in the end mentality.

I rarely post in the forums, usually during Betas.

Till Legion I have played all 3 specs (usually switching based on FoM) but preferred Frost as back then it was the only one I felt had some sort of core gameplay that just works

The Legion did 2 things, it forced you to pick a spec (which I LOVED the idea) and they overhaul the specs and with the rework of Combustion I fall in love and from then consider my “main” spec to be Fire (this changed back to frost last expansion due to Fire changes but I still enjoy both all in all fairly equally)

I don’t play Arcane a lot, I never managed to vibe with it.

Ever since Legion every expansion (apart from the last one) you tried removing Phoenix Flame on the beta/launch and then return it afterwards, and you are doing it again.

Now basically I understand, PF is just a poor man’s Fire Blast with no identity and I am completely fine with it being removed. also I am on the side who likes the removal of all the CDR and going back to 1.5 or 2 Min rotation is appealing to me in a way

when all the CDR and SKB came in Shadowlands I overjoyed for the change but after 3 expansions I am tired of it, and since the draw back is the Combustion just doesn’t feel good anymore.

Yes it has its instant cast rotation* (will get to it after) that is fun but its damage is meh. While we did complain that Fire had an issue with being “no dmg outside combustion” by having insane combustion uptime you had to kill the “dmg in combustion”

All of this I am fine with. My problem is that it is not FUN to combust, regardless of damage.

and its all because of 1 Spell, Fireball….

Killing Both PF and Scorch just makes me not enjoy pressing the button. and this is something people complained about every time you removed PF.

Combustion MUST have move while casting, otherwise it is very hard to play it, I am playing from the US on a EU servers (as I recently moved) I have lag of 100ms its not a big issue, but with combustion it can become one

Pressing fireball spam while trying to squeeze a pyroblast is annoying sometimes. Year of Combustion made Fire mages drink a lot of coffee and keep moving (or jumping) during combustion to make sure they cast the Pyro between each cast… the Fireball is killing it.

I would also argue that Scorching pre the War Within was Fun at 30%. The Extra movement while at the end of the fight was one of the best thing Fire had and It was enjoyable and I hate to lose it (and we sort of did because scorched was so bad for most of War Within)

My Suggestion - Do what you did with Glacial Spike , CHANGE Fireball to be Scorch during Combustion and maybe even in the sub 30%. Make it Moving while Casted and maybe also lower its cast time (like I said I will prefer both Combustion and Sub 30% but I think Combustion Move while casting is a MUST)

I care less about the actual Damage and don’t mind loosing a few % for the fun and mobility of Fire proper.

And I am sad that if things will continue like they are now I will just not play Fire next exapac and will feel bad about it, cause it is a spec I grew to love.

PS I did not try Frost yet, I am a bit scared to try as Fire was so bad and I have a natural aversion of Arcane.
but once I did I will try to summarize what I feel

[Mortos-kazzak]

Last post (Ragua) was mine, I did not notice I was not logged as my Main

[Syrin-hellscream]

Always visible icicles are terrible. No option to hide it, they are large, blocky, bright, constantly moving and the spinning is distracting. I was in my house trying to set things up and it completely ruined the immersion.

Please don’t do this to us. Or at the very least, remove them out of combat.

[Earelith-ravenholdt]

make Ray of Frost castable while moving… I cant imagine casting a 4s channeling spell with a 1min CD … its not a filler spell like mind flay that does not matter if you have to interrupt it.. its a major CD… make it cast while moving with a talent option like Void Torrent from priest.