Mana - huge issue
Mages went from im a burst class to let me helplessy tickle you and die in pvp.
Im running a 12/0/39 build, figured frost will be the way for MC given all the fire immunities.
Ill give a run down based on the way i see it in pve, given that fire damage is a no go cause of immunities. - Frost / Arcane perspective
Head runes.
Advanced warding - Cool, dont want to be a healer sorry, has its uses deffinitely, dont see myself using it in pve as dps, will pick it if im in a pickle and need to heal some dungeon perhaps. Not really the type of player on board with mages being healers kind of thing, i want to dps thats why i choose a mage
Temporal anomaly - just weak previous rune has more utility than this, dead rune tbh.
Deep freeze - Obvious pick
Chest runes.
Chest would like to see fingers of frost moved to perhaps legs/hands, soo its possible to stack crit cause half of this build is based around crit and without crit the damage is just abysmal.
Regeneration - not a healer.
Burnout - Competes with Fingers of Frost - 15% crit say no more, this rune is key to many builds even working cause of the procs theyre based on and how bad mage damage is without crits.
Enlightment - no, just no. dead rune, loses against other choices
Waist - Im running missile barrage, it locks me out of frostfire and spellfrost - please make these baseline or something, this brings us to another problem, if you try and pick brain freeze its no good without any of these runes cause it procs from frost spells but the effect is it gives you a free cast of a fireball/spellfrost/frostfire. Its absolutely nuts and useless the way it is right now. You need to commit hard to get this rune to even work, soo its a dead rune.
Hotstreak most definitely belongs here, like i said previously the frostfire and spellfrost should be made baseline and there should be some cool 3rd rune thats a frost proc killer rune, like you have with hotstreak/missile barrage.
Leg runes.
Icy veins - cool, too long CD - TBH this should be a permanent effect not an ability, overall mages should have their cast times slashed by 0,5 sec minimum tbh given this meta and what other classes have. 1 second off each would be too much cause it would be gcd level nuts, but 0,5 would improve mage live ALOT
Might aswell scrap the other runes in the leg department, arcane surge is a meme spell, mass regen no thank you, i dont want to be a healer. Living flame is useless, take away a few situations cause of its duration and travel speed.
Legs need a proper redo, from the ground up!! Worst category of runes
Feet runes.
2 of them are good, brainfreeze needs an update like i mentioned above, the way it is rn makes it simply bad and you need to commit hard to make it work and even then the proc chance is meh instead of 15% should be 2x that tbh if the theme for mages is going to be PROCS PROCS PROCS
Wrist runes.
Balefire - mixed feelings, cool idea, doesnt work in reality, neither does it pump hard or play into most builds/synergise. Requires a runeslot where you need to sacrifice 5% crit or blinking twice in a row deleting your mana bar
Speaking of blinking twice deleting your mana bar. Displacement has to reduce the cost of blink SIGNIFICANTLY, in its current iteration its just bad, you have a choice of being annoying and dying soon after cause youre oom and a free kill or not being annoying and dying with slightly more mana but close to being oom.
Hands
Rewind time - Doesnt synergise with this build, its an arcane healer thing, remove the beacon requirement and it will become solid
Icelance - very weak, doesnt scale well, loses out to living bomb in pvp, requires targets to be frozen and even then its still weak damage instead of proper burst
Arcane blast - doesnt synergise with this build, the main proc generating spell is frostbolt
Living bomb - fire immunity makes it a no go
Overall hand runes are very lackluster and weak in an MC scenario
Back
Overheat - fire immunities
Arcane barrage - Its super bad, should be moved the hands department, since its an icelance type spell only that it hits for next to nothing. If you want to keep its damage laughably low atleast make the proc chance 100% Or buff the damage x5, also its range is superbad
Frozen orb - cooldown is too long imho, bugs on terrain, stops in place, has the speed of a running player, needs to be faster imho other than that pretty cool. Could do more damage tbh. Its like an AOE arcane missiles in terms of damage only on a 60 sec cooldown which makes it not soo great
If you got this far, runes need an overhaul, this is just my 5 cents on comming up with some sensible frost build for mc and how the runes just dont synergise well and how many of them are simply bad.
Runes should also benefit from cast time reduction / spell pushback protection.
Cost of spells should be reduced, mages run out of mana way too fast, other classes dont have these issues. On top of that we dont even do nearly enough damage to warrant us going oom this soon. Mages feel weak, neglected, runes arent thought out well enough.
Mages overall need a dps boost on their spells soo that when they hit, they hit hard cause it already takes forever to cast them, its a class that hits with casted spells has no dots soo every cast matters and it should deal a tonne of damage, every cast should be meaningful and blast. A blanket spell cast time reduction would also be welcome, and looking at classes ranges and making them more or less even. 30 yards on spells as a mage feels very bad when you have spriests with powerful tallents that make their spells 10 yards or more range over a mage
Anyways thanks for comming to my ted talk.
Copy of my post from the SoD forum.
PS. Mages need love, devs said theyll rework this class it keeps feeling like its being neglected. I want to be able to blast and enjoy PVP and right now at the mages current state we’re at the bottom of the barrel unable to compete in pvp at all. Please adress this and make mages a feel good class, its not fun to have to cast for 3 seconds just to see a wet noodle number pop up on your screen or to get two shot in pvp. We’re an OG dps class yet it feels like roleplaying some NPC mob in pvp scenarios just waiting to get whacked. Mobility, Damage, Mana, Survivability are all really bad.
Inb4 but frost, etc
You need to spec deep into frost to get iceblock preventing you from having a blanket CS just to have the fraction of survivability of a shadowpriest that he recieves from runes. Also the damage is simply not there, icelance is a meme, and procs are something you will rarely see in a pvp scenario cause of their low chance and reliability on successful casts
Inb4 but you have heals
No spell pushback protection on arcane blast, cast times again, and you need to sacrifice damage to get them and you’re still not even remotely a threat in pvp, theres no burst in arcane that could go toe to toe against other classes in pvp
Inb4 just go fire if you want damage
You have no survivability, 3 second cast times, you rely on RNG to do meaningful burst damage which you often dont get to see cause of how short fights are and how squishy you are overall. Also in team fights you run oom very fast youre not an asset to a team youre a liability cause of your very limited mana and high spell costs
I am on the brink of rerolling and abandoning this class for good despite the months invested in my mage if nothing changes, playing a mage in pvp and pve just feels bad and is depressing and frustrating, not really the things you want from a game thats supposed to be fun and engaging
Mages need more variety and solid runes that would make for good choices and engaging gameplay. Solid as in, do i want to perform well as a healer, or do i want to perform well in pvp but give up healing, or do i want to blast as dps in a raid and bring buffs and have some cool procs kind of thing