Overkill pruning and destruction of Mage

Classes Mage
1

Mage in Midnight is going to get overpruned and completely destroyed. I finally came back to retail and fell in love with my main mage that I’ve been playing for decades, only to now find out I’ll probably hate it again.

  • Shatter combos removed: Its the most iconic mechanic for frost. Getting rid of it is going to be incredibly bad. The main appeal to frost is being able to setup shatter combos with and getting constant crits. Its what defines a good mage from a bad one.
  • Focus into spamming icelance: Nobody ever asked for this, nobody ever liked spamming lance. At every point in wows history frostmages have been begging for more impactful hard hitting frostbolts. Its probably why I enjoy frost so much in TWW - being able to do big frostbolts(upwards of 4mil with ice form). Instead now we have to pop festering wounds with ice lance. Great.
  • Icicles auto generated: this is a boring and unnecessary change. The skill in properly generating icicles is now gone.
  • Glacial spike: making it replace frostbolt at 5 icicles is going to be incredibly bad for PvP if its long cast time remains. I’d go on any other class and grief frostmages by waiting out for their frostbolt to get replaced by glacial, and then I’d just shut them down with interrupts and CC so they are forced to only tickle me with lances. Incredibly bad design that takes away choice.
  • Removal of Icy veins in favour of tunneling us into Ray of Frost: Removing Icy veins is a bummer, but doing it at the pretence of “moving away from dmg cds” only to slap us with Apocalyp–, oops I mean, Ray of Frost as our main dmg CD is hilarious.
  • If you didnt already think frost is the bad UHDK design but reskinned, think again. We even get Festering Might!
  • Comet storm standalone gone: another bad choice that removes flexibility by making blizzard transform into comet storm.
    -Blast wave removed and now a part of Sunfury: only casts after you combust and blink or w/e. Attrocious.
    -Removal of Scorch and Pheonix Flames: Im fine with Pheonix flames getting removed. Idk about scorch. Seems like an oversimplification again.

Frost in Midnight is just a recoloured TWW Unholy DK. You gave us the worst part about UHDK - festering wounds. They were begging to have it removed, and they finally did, and gave it to us? Why?
Shatter - festering wounds
Ray of frost - Apocalypse
Water Elemental - Ghoul
I might as well download a third party program to recolour my spells and make WE into a ghoul and I can larp as a post legion UHDK

Yes I know its alpha, so things might change, so Please dont fall into the sunk cost falacy trap and revert frostmage back to a more fun form, because as many people have stated not even a day after the announced changes that its going to be bland and boring after a very short period of time.

3 Likes
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These changes will murder frost mage in PvP indeed. If you think melee uptime is bad now, you’re going to be in for an even worse time in Midnight.

Worst of all, permanent pet is back - boo!!! Mage should never have been a permanent pet class to begin with.

5 Likes
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I’m sensing WoD 2.0
Yikes
From the sound of it, i won’t be playing my mage in midnight
And perhaps not play at all, just like in wod

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Permanent elemental was one of the worst design decisions. Nobody liked it (it always gets stuck somewhere, attacks the wrong target, or dies too easily), which is why Blizzard introduced the ‘Lonely Winter’ talent in Legion. Instead of keeping it as a clunky permanent pet, Blizzard could make the elemental more meaningful by having it echo the mage’s spells at lower efficiency, similar to how it works in Heroes of the Storm.

1 Like
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It might end up being better for PvP if you are getting trained, since now you dont have to worry about setting up a strong hardcast shatter combo, but thats about it. It makes frost damage less bursty and more flatlined. Now how fast you can unload icelances into a lot of shatter stacks is your limiting burst factor outside Ray.

Speaking of Ray, it being tied to so much stuff is going to mean that it’ll be the most griefed spell. All it takes is a single interrupt on Ray, which the mage would never want to cancel channeling, and you’ve shut them out of using comet storm, shut them off of big damage, shut them out of procs, and can now only lance shatter “zit” stacks. And this can be outplayed in the most ridiculous ways, like lining, running, vanishing until stacks fall off. Or simply Cloak, Bubble, Ice block, AMS etc removing the built up stacks so the mage has to start all over again.

The skill in finding room for setting up a hard pressuring shatter combo is gone.

Trully awful design. The devs looked at MoP frostmage and decided lance spamming people is “cool”, when in reality back in the day it was the most despised thing about frostmage gameplay and source of numerous memes how weak a hardcasted spell felt next to an instant proc.

The devs took a complete 180 once again and decided to kill what they finally nailed again in TWW after they butchered it post wotlk. Nobody thought frost in TWW was hard in PvE either to make such a change.

1 Like
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Bruh, there is no way in the universe someone can tell what class will be good or trash in Midnight yet.
Calm down and wait and observe.

Alot of melee classes will get micro CC and mobility pruned in Midnight aswell.

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Its very easy to tell if you have a boatload of experience (decades) under your belt, have seen all the changes to the class throughout the years, have played every single class in the game for years.

Tying in frost’s main burst to an easily interruptable spell, that nobody would ever want to cancel since faking it would mean losing out on too many procs and other mechanics tied into it, is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. Screw pvp, its gonna be bad in PvE if an encounter randomly stuns you, transitions or whatever (especially bad for noobs without addon support now to warn transitions and ccs/movement phases etc since their cast will either get interrupted or they’d be forced to move). And don’t trust the devs to make anything without these mechanics, nor shouldn’t they, that would be foolish. Hell I’m not a PvE player but I can tell this is going to aggravate a lot of people.

Sure, lets try overlooking this issue, but the next issue of Freezing/Shatter stacks, aka festering wounds, is that unlike its predecessor for UH DKs, this only lasts for 8 seconds. You might think for yourself “well thats plenty enough time to spend them”. Absolutely wrong. In PvP this is going to be heavily abused by simply lining, stealthing, running away or using an immunity to get rid of these stacks in order to nullify the core of mage’s damage (now that its tied heavily into mastery and talents heavily emphasising it, without taking account the gameplay loop around it). Mage is iconic for its strength in setting up good target swaps. Now that’ll be impossible. In PvE its going to create even more issues with target swapping, targets dying too fast as you try to build stacks later on in the expansion, and with a simple snooze ice lance spam rotation with the occasional button press of comet storm to eat a few stacks – oh wait its tied to finishing a Ray cast top KEK.

These are just the core design issues, there’s many other issues with the spec which I’ve already noted and more to be discovered.

Maybe, just maybe, if the damage is absurdly overtuned to counteract these absurd negatives, it might be “ok”. But it would still be incredibly rage inducing and clunky. There’s a million other ways they could have done this in order to not be as aggravating, such as making Freezing stacks an actual buff, tying in the main “burst” sequence to Glacial instead of Ray, emphasising Glacial more than Ray or making Ray more of a support tool for setting up Glacials, making Ice Lance generate “Freezing” that would be spent by hardcasted Frostbolts/Glacials or instacast Flurries/Comet etc.

Other classes stuns/mobility getting pruned won’t solve the issues of Frost’s core design in Midnight. Even if there are 0 stuns in the game, or even 0 interrupts, these issues would still be just as impactful.

8

we have to remove mechanics from classes cause they are too hard to play. same as from dungeons. doing mythic bosses and weekly +10 keys with 1 button is not inclusive enough. 2-3 buttons is pretty much what you have free on your controller so we kinda getting ready for that port :slight_smile:

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I just hope Mage devs are watching forums and realize that having Ray of Frost as the main offensive cooldown is suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch a bad design.

Please don’t have frost mages stand still for 3+ seconds for a cast that can be interrupted with knockbacks!

1 Like
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