So, as we’ve seen in the PTR so far, the DPS mage changes are underwhelming.
I would like to focus on small changes to existing runes (as I don’t think we’re going to get any massive changes like pally)
The biggest issue is to me is that Frostfire bolt is overwhelmingly powerful, and this results in conflation of frost/fire specs so that they are very close (not necessarily bad, but the rotation for both specs is very boring)
This conflation of specs is also due to the runes being largely spec agnostic.
Here are my (relatively simple) suggestions to create more unique mage specs:
Remove Frost Fire Bolt. It could be replaced with a rune that adds flat +damage or crit to Frost.
Make Spell Power only affect Arcane spells.
Make Icy Veins only affect Frost spells.
Buff Ice Lance damage to frozen targets
Buff Spellfrost damage
These very simple changes to existing runes + the introduction of orb of frost and overheat will create more distinct Frost and Fire rotations.
Also, please don’t remove Fire Resistance/Immunity from Molten Core.
This made no sense to me. You point out that Frostfire bolt is too powerful and the rotation is boring, therefore remove it. So now instead of spamming FFB, fire mage will spam fireball, and frostmage will spam frostbolt, just like before. How is that more exciting again?
It is definitely too powerful; there’s no reason to use fireball or frostbolt (outside slows of pvp) because FFB is busted.
As fire, by deleting FFB we can actually use pyroblast (they also talked about moving hot streak to another slot, but not sure if that means it will proc off FFB or not). That’s already more interesting.
As for frost, deleting FFB it will let us go into the arcane tree and pick up some stuff there (I’m also hoping for some buffs to spellfrost and ice lance).
I’d just like there to be a more significant distinction between frost and fire mage rotations, even if the rotations themselves are boring, i’d like to keep them unique.
If they insist on keeping FFB, i’d at least like there to be an exciting rotation (unlike what we have at the moment).