Here are some quality of life changes and slight buffs, that would make all mage specs much smoother to play.
Dragon’s Breath - Disorient effect no longer breaks on DoT(damage over time) effects. Also DB should be un-nerfed to 4 second duration in PvP, needing 30% haste to land a DB into Ring of Frost, without a gap in the CC, is a bit unnecessary.
Blink - Shoulder have lower GCD timer or be off GCD. Mostly a PvP change, allowing you to get another spell off before enemy melee players can instantly connect on you, while you’re still on GCD from Blinking.
Ring of Frost - break on damage threshold slightly increased or adding RoF into the Rigid Ice talent, preventing random crits from utility/setup spells, such as DB, Blast Wave, Radiant Spark or just random DoT effects, to break the Freeze effect from Ring of Frost shortly after it’s application.
Also RoF should have a “higher” hitbox on the Z-axis, so knockbacks into RoF are more consistent, especially on uneven ground.
Conjure Mana Gem - Instead of crafting a Mana Gem item with 3 charges, rename the spell to “Consume Mana Gem”. This removes the annoyance of tracking Mana Gem charges and saves an extra keybind.
Concentration - Instead of causing you not to consume your next Clearcasting proc, adding another buff to track, make it so Arcane Blast can proc two Clearcasting procs at once.
Touch of the Magi - Should be castable while in Mass Invisibility without breaking it, also the explosion damage shouldn’t break Mass Invisibility. Or add back Charged Up as a choice node with Touch of the Magi on shorter CD.
Supernova - off GCD, but no longer does damage, just utility button.
Mass Invisibility - no longer breaking from random damage like, Nether Tempest, already travelling Arcane Orb, mid-air traveling Arcane Missiles, Meteor DoT, Meteor cast before landing, Arcanosphere channel time, Ring of Fire DoT, etc.
Arcane Surge - should be a choice node with old Arcane Power and no longer provides a damage buff after it’s cast.
Presence of Mind - castable while casting or fix the spell queue bug with PoM, so you can hardcast Arcane Blast into PoM instant Arcane Blast macro, without a gap.
Arcane Mastery: Savant - should increase the damage of all spell school instead of only Arcane spells, keeping Meteor, Ice Nova and other non-arcane spells more viable.
Subzero - bonus 20% damage on Frozen targets should also work on Fire and Arcane spells, instead of only Frost spells.
Frostbolt - shouldn’t be available to Fire and Arcane, there’s no reason to ever use it.
Shatter - should be available for all 3 specs. Most fun mage mechanic in PvP, very minor for PvE, aside from questing.
Meteor - should deal reduced damage after hitting 5 or more targets, instead of splitting evenly between all targets hit.
Snowdrift - should be placeable ranged AOE(similar to blizzard), instead of AOE effect around the mage.
Of course some of these are direct buffs to spells, but they could be adjusted with damage tuning if they become too strong.
Overall, these changes would mostly boost Mage’s performance in unorganized group content(such as Solo Shuffle), where usually Mages would struggle at lower rating, due to their partners constantly breaking their Crowd Control abilities.
Mostly agree with these suggestions, but have several notes and additions:
Frostbolt should be kept for all 3 specs. It can be used to deal damage / snare if you are locked on major school for Fire and Arcane. Its damage is minor, so that is not a big benefit, but possibility for example to get kicked as Arcane and still slow enemy flag carrier with Frostbolt (as he can be out of range for Cone of Cold and Blink is locked) can be useful. It should also be buffed for Frost to make Frostbolt oriented builds more competitive with Ice Lance builds.
Snowdrift’s mechanic of staying in it for 3 consecutive seconds = frozen has one major flaw - it means that if enemy rushes out of it for literally a second, you lose all of its buildup and often the remaining duration is not enough to build it again, so he can safely run back into it while it is still active. I would suggest for Snowdrift to apply a stack with each its hit that lasts for several seconds, is undispellable and if enemy reaches 3 stacks - he gets frozen. This would still allow to run / jump out of it to prevent getting the stun as a counterplay, but would not allow to just run back into it after that for remaining duration and stay not punished.
It should also not get negated by freedom effects, as they have nothing to do with stun management.
Ice Nova root should last longer. With 2 seconds, it often ends by the time your following Ice Lance reaches target, especially with low Haste and decent distance.
Concentrated Coolness placement of Frozen Orb should be merged into baseline Frozen Orb or Everlasting Frost talent. Possibility to place Orb to prevent getting CC broken or missing with it and losing it entirely is a huge QoL change.
Ebonbolt needs a buff - it is an inferior option in PVE and has too low effect in PVP for its cooldown and cast time. Making it cast faster, lowering its CD and / or increasing its damage should help.
Ray of Frost needs to stop being affected by CC reduction from PVP set bonus. It is not hard to achieve - cap its movement speed reduction at 90-99%, so that it no longer can root. Reducing its CD to 45-60 seconds to make it align better with other Frost CDs could also be helpful.
Blast Wave snare should get affected by Frigid Winds. Most likely it is just a bug, but if it states all snare effects, there should be no exceptions.
Blazing Barrier, Tempest Barrier and Diverted Energy should get unnerfed in PVP. Times of Fire Mage mega survivability are gone, these nerfs are no longer warranted.
Flamecannon PVP talent should get unnerfed back to 5 seconds duration. With 3 seconds, it can be broken by any accidental movement and even using Blink puts your stacks at risk.
Glass Cannon PVP talent should provide either bigger buff, other effect or have lower health penalty, as currently it is not worth it. All it does is makes Fireball hit about as much as Frost Mage’s Frostbolt in PVP (as Scorch is barely used) and to achieve that you lose 15% of survivability and a PVP talent slot.
Arcane has probably too many mandatory output nodes, especially after Crackling Energy change, so could use a bit of point cost reduction or merging of some nodes in its tree (like Improved Clearcasting to base node) to make its utility more accessible.
Foresight is currently very risky to utilize, as you have to stand still for 10 seconds to get its bonus. It should be changed to provide 2 seconds per 5 stationary seconds and stack to 2 times. This would keep its uptime similar, but would make its bonus more accessible and less risky, so more competitive.
Harmonic Echo has a very large radius and easily breaks CC, making it much less utilized in PVP than it should be. Making it not hit enemies affected by breakable CC could be helpful.
Sure, I could justify Frostbolt for fire in Shadowlands, but now it’s pretty much NEVER worth pressing, it’s just bloat in our spellbook at this point.
If it had stronger snare or was like rank 1 Frostbolt in classic with 0.5sec cast, it would be useful, but now it’s best purpose would be to bait kicks on frost, which you can do with other spell as well.
As for snaring someone running away, you should’ve already snared him before committing damage globals, with Slow, and if he’s close range, you got a billion other buttons that are more useful. So realistically, Frostbolt would be only useful to slow someone that’s 15-25yards away from you, and they don’t have LoS near them AND they are running away AND also you’re also not slowed, because then arguably it’s better to just run at them
It is very niche, but it is better to have an ability that you rarely use and use it once per day when stars align than not have it when it could be used. After all, if some people never use it, they can just not bind it and that would be very similar to not having it at all.
Though, if Blizzard would make it more useful for Fire and Arcane, I definitely would not mind. This would be preferred to just outright removing it. Similar boost can be done fo Fire Blast - it is very niche for Frost and Arcane.
Wouldn’t you rather have a useful ability in it’s place though? I’d rather have unused dead spell be cleaned from the class and open spots for new stuff, instead of been cluttered with niche crap that’s worth using in a 1/10000 scenario and it’s effect isn’t even impactful.
Rule of Threes, Arcane Familiar, Nether Tempest, Accumulative Shielding, Frostbolt…there’s just too much crap that does nothing, and Frostbolt is probably the worst of it.
I’m really tired of having dead spells/talents for 6+ years and having no spec customization cuz of it, either fix it or remove it.
I would not mind that, but I just doubt that if they remove Frostbolt they would give us something instead. They removed anti-DoT PVP talent and did not replace it with anything, just removed it as if never happened.
Though, if they replace mentioned by you abilities with something actually useful, I could support that. However, if they would simply remove Frostbolt and give nothing in return, I would rather keep it.
ToTM does not do damage on application, so it does not have any reason to break Mass Invisibility, which states that it breaks when dealing damage.
As it is off-GCD and MI would be broken by other damage abilities anyway, it is not OP either.
As for Arcane Surge vs Arcane Power, I suppose the viable option is to keep Surge with current values, make it a choice node with Arcane Power with old values and make upgrade node improve damage bonus and duration of both. This way, people can still play with current Arcane Surge or pick old Arcane Power, depending on what they prefer. If Shadow Priests can pick between old CD (Void Eruption) and new (Dark Ascension), Blizzard could give Arcane similar treatment.
You can already do it kinda, since it’s off GCD, it’s just awkward if you don’t macro it, which you don’t wanna do always.
Besides look at camo for hunters, they can use traps and a bunch of other spells without breaking camo. Mass invis used to be more like this, but got a series of undocumented nerfs over the years.
The AP buff being gated behind a 2.5sec cast has put a lot of drawbacks for arcane in PvP, also I don’t think it’s healthy design to have such overloaded abilities, that both do high burst AOE damage, gives you mana regen, AP, rune of power.
Look historically at ret Wings or dh Meta for example, they often land in a weird spot where they are either super overpowered or bottom tier, because their cooldowns are so overloaded and do everything, that it’s hard to make the class good outside of those cooldowns, cuz during them they become complete gods.
Meta gives increased damage, really good self sustain and a mini bloodlust for 30seconds, Wings similarly gives increased damage, higher self sustain, more resource generation and crit chance for 20sec.
TLDR - Cooldowns that do everything are not good for the game, cuz it forces the designers to heavily balance the classes around them and that often brings way more negatives than positives for the class.
