Please give us Mirrors of Torment in DF (and ditch Time Anomaly)

Classes Mage
1

There are so many things wrong with Mage talent trees for DF right now but something I haven’t seen anyone else talk about is Mirrors of Torment (MoT), apologies if I have missed a thread on this.

I was really sad to see MoT go. Sure it was annoying that it relied on the target taking an action which made it clunky (this could easily be fixed too) but let’s look at the facts here:

  1. Fire felt REALLY good on ST with MoT. It gave us a huge amount of Fire Blast (IB) charges which made it possible to chain SKB combusts into the main combust and it felt amazing and really smooth to play.

  2. It was also really good for Frost mage on ST and helped smooth out the rotation with the procs it gave.

  3. It also had some niche uses for Arcane mages although Kyrian generally dominated. I know some arcane mages actually preferred the venthyr playstyle to the Kyrian one (I never tried it so I don’t have an opinion on that).

So it’s a covenant ability that benefits all three of the mage specs. It’s not OP, it doesn’t need its legendary power to be good. Why is this not in the tree? It has more uses than Shifting Power (SP) does! You could make it a choice node with SP if you didn’t want us to have both.

Hell, I’d even take this over something like Time Anomaly. That kind of massively impactful RNG talent has absolutely no place in modern WoW imo. Things like Time Anomaly always feel bad overall because you could be playing absolutely perfectly but another mage could get twice as many procs as you and be competing with you in damage despite not playing as well as you are. DPS should be determined by skill, not RNG and giving Arcane Surge, Combust or Icy Veins uptime is absolutely huge, particularly for fire when you consider it gives you an IB stack too.

I’m not a fire mage main but I have played all three of the specs, most notably fire and I enjoy all three. I also know that other mages who are much better players than me share this view too. I hope they overhaul the mage talents soon because there is so much wrong with them but I’d just be repeating what others have already said before.

2 Likes
2

It’s clunky, it’s awful, dispellible, get rid of it

3

As a pve fanatic I can tell you that from a choice perspective I’d rather keep shifting power than mirrors as Fire. Mirrors are a pure ST ability and will be forgotten fast, while shifting is powerful AoE/cdr tool that can be used in a variety of situations.

Not to mention how incredibly buggy MoT could be, or how miserable when your enemy decides to not attack.

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The bad news is the shifting power as a mage talent is weak sauce. 10sec cdr :pensive:

1 Like
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I’d rather they came up with something else entirely to be honest.

Shifting Power does seem like the worst out of the last 3 talents, if they added the legendary effect, it might be less so.

But it still never sat right with me that we got a melee range AoE ability as a range class… I mean it’s fine for Arcane because they already have to be in melee range, but Fire and Frost don’t.

Mirrors is also a terribly designed ability, it has basically no use on short to medium lived enemies and only indirectly affects AoE damage (FB charges and Arcane Harmony).

If they re-add it at some point it needs some dispel protection and perhaps a cooldown refund if a target dies with charges still active.

Personally what I’d like to see is bombs or novas moved to this slot and made actually decent again.

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I would love to see something like mot stay in Dragonflight but I wish they would change it to thematically fit mage more and make it more reliable.

Like just make it a time magic themed spell, that gives you a buff that procs every 5s for 10s (first proc at cast) and gives you the same effect as mirrors. You keep the playstyle and make it more reliable.

2 Likes
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That’s only true for PvP. In single target PvE, the ability feels good and it’s hard to deny that.

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I personally did not feel that when I was playing around with it. Shifting Power felt more impactful, and it was flashy too on top of it.

Mirror in PvE was just an ability you chuck on an enemy and then forget about it. Its effects are good, but the ability has little to no visual effects to the point that it may as well not exist.

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As a pve fanatic I can tell you that from a choice perspective I’d rather keep shifting power than mirrors as Fire. Mirrors are a pure ST ability and will be forgotten fast, while shifting is powerful AoE/cdr tool that can be used in a variety of situations.

Right but if both were in the class tree or you have both as a single choice node then you don’t have to pick one over the other. You can choose whichever you want for the situation. You will be aware that MoT is the better raid covenant ability in raids for pure ST unless there is some weird fight timing which would benefit a shorter combust CD (quite rare).

You are correct that SP is the better choice in AoE but from a gameplay perspective, MoT feels a lot smoother in ST than SP. As you probably already know, this is because it provides us with steady regeneration of IB rather than a crap ton of IB regen all at once which is better for chaining SKB casts in combust (which looks to be how we’ll be playing in DF as of the time of writing).

Also I would point out that SP without the legendary is not going to feel anywhere near as good as it does right now and MoT’s legendary didn’t really do an anything in PvE since we never got to use it between combusts even with the CDR (at least with Kindling). It would feel just fine without it imo.

Not to mention how incredibly buggy MoT could be, or how miserable when your enemy decides to not attack.

As I alluded to in my original post, this is easily changed. The triggering from enemy actions was an interesting idea on paper but didn’t work well in principle. It would be very easy to tweak the spell so it does the same thing but triggers off of your action(s) or even just after x seconds. They’ve already reworked a number of mage spells for DF e.g. Arcane Surge, Snowstorm/Cone of cold.

The basic idea of giving IB/Brain freeze/clearcasting procs is a good one for all three specs, however, and there is absolutely no reason why they couldn’t include it in the class tree since, unlike SP, it benefits all three specs, even with the jankiness.

Yeah I love this idea. Fits the mage much better thematically and would function better too but I would prefer the first one is delayed because you would very easily overcap on charges for fire since you have to pre-cast mirrors (with IB) and then chain a fireball into combust and by the time you’ve done that you’ll be capped at IB charges and unable to cast more since you always enter combust with a full hot streak already.

No, this is just not true. It feels VERY impactful for fire.

With SKB and 4-set you can build up an SKB buffed pyro and pre-cast it into combustion. At this point if you have SP, you’re going to run out of IB casts VERY quickly and not able to then utilise the next SKB cast you build up during your main combust without hardcasting an SP in the middle of your combust. This imo feels terrible because you already have to hardcast pyro and RoP in your combust as is. It also doesn’t always give you enough IB casts to extend your IC buff through another full SKB cast (it depends where your SKB lands in your combust). In addition you have to use your RoP with SP rather than just using refreshing it when it’s about to run out which gives potentially better uptime on RoP during combust too.

With mirrors, you can cast the mirrors BEFORE your combust starts and then you get a steady stream of IB CDR procs throughout your combustion which allows you to do crazy long combusts. Plus you can cast RoP whenever you need to!

So to summarise:

With SP:
Fireball combust opener (Pyro if SKB is ready) —> Spend IB charges —> Hardcast RoP —> Hardcast SP (with IBs) —> Hardcast Pyro for SKB ----> Not able to cast another SKB in time to further roll IC x2 buff.

With MoT:
MoT (with IB) —> Fireball combust opener (Pyro if SKB is ready) —> Build to SKB —> Hardcast RoP whenever you need to refresh (i.e. not tied to SP) —> Hardcast Pyro (IB CDR still going at this point). —> Enough IBs to keep combust and IC rolling into a third SKB.

MoT makes single target fire so much nicer to play and is recommended on all fights where the CDR

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EDIT: Consolidated replies to multiple people into the post above

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Fire shouldn’t rely on IB generation overflow.

Personally, I liked it better before the tier set, even tho it was admittedly harder to play.

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I guess that’s just personal preference. I liked both playstyles before and after SKB (i.e. 9.0 and 9.2). I can understand why someone wouldn’t like hardcasting pyro and I was put off at first before I got used to it.

However, the old playstyle wasn’t using SKB so if that is likely to be meta (which it most likely will be) then it won’t feel exactly the same as old fire mage without it because you didn’t hardcast in combust before and you also didn’t have an option to extend combust since we were using Fevered Incantation back then.

This would mean we’ll have longer combusts but without the increased IB generation from 4-set. So basically SKB requires extra IB generation in order to be beneficial otherwise you’ll have to go back to the bad old days of cancelling SKB stacks before combust in 9.1 and I hope you and I can agree that felt really awful.

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I am not saying that it isn’t impactful, I am saying it is visually non-existent.

As I said in my post, Shifting Power is visually distinct and you can see its effects as you gain back your FB charges with each pulse. MoT has nothing like that. Which was the entire point of my post.

Its boons are good, but the ability just feels meh overall, not to mention it does not feel as good to press if you do not have the CDR effect on it (which if it gets implemented on to the talent tree you will not have for sure.)

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I am not saying that it isn’t impactful, I am saying it is visually non-existent.

I think that’s a totally seperate issue tbh. I’m not saying that spell visuals aren’t important but compared with spec flow, playstyle and tuning it really isn’t important and can be easily fixed by the art department. Some sort of time themed spell like Madorin suggested would be in keeping with the mage theme and also tie into all three mage specs (who could all use it under certain situations).

As I said in my post, Shifting Power is visually distinct and you can see its effects as you gain back your FB charges with each pulse. MoT has nothing like that. Which was the entire point of my post.

You most definitely can see it though, it looks exactly the same as SP does it’s just not quite as fast (which from a playstyle point of view is a good thing). Again, this is easily fixed by the art department. I’m mainly concerned with spec design, gameplay and tuning here.

Its boons are good, but the ability just feels meh overall, not to mention it does not feel as good to press if you do not have the CDR effect on it (which if it gets implemented on to the talent tree you will not have for sure.)

What CDR effect though? The IB CDR effect is baseline with the spell and that’s the important effect.

On the other hand, the legendary effect which gives CDR on Mirrors of Torment itself when it is dispelled or activated is actually useless in PvE because with kindling you don’t have time to cast mirrors of torment in between combustion windows.

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Yes. The visuals need fixing for it to feel like an actual spell of the toolkit.

The CDR effect I am talking about is the CDR for the ability you get from using FB charges (4 seconds, I think it is currently.)

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The CDR effect I am talking about is the CDR for the ability you get from using FB charges (4 seconds, I think it is currently.)

Yes, look at the 2nd hyperlink in my previous post. I think you mean that one?

If it is that one then it does not matter at all if you’re running kindling and arguably it doesn’t really work even then because you are not likely to be able to cast 2x MoTs in 2 mins and still have time to generate a third, even with the extra IB charges from 4-set and MoT. MoT is a 1.5 min CD so even if you got it down to 45s with the CD (very ambitious in PvE), you still would not have the time to cast 3 in a 2 min window. You would need to reduce MoT to at least 40s TWICE for it to work.

Compare that to the SP legendary which gives us stacking crit & haste as well as the ability to move while channeling SP and I think baseline SP is gonna feel a lot worse than baseline MoT.

Since Blizzard don’t seem to want to give us the covenant legendary powers back (why?) then I think this is a concern with regards to SP but it doesn’t make it useless.

EDIT: I think also SP, whilst pretty, is no more thematically accurate for mages than mirrors is.

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Ok so I’ve been thinking a bit more about this and I decided to just come up with a new MoT style spell that I think would be an improvement on the old one.

Tooltip image

I have included some comments in the notes of the imgur post but I will post them here in case it doesn’t load:

Apologies for the bootleg appearance of my homebrew tooltip (I’m not a graphic designer or artist).

This is a proposed replacement for the Mage Venthyr covenant ability Mirrors of Torment (MoT). For those of you who don’t know, MoT was probably one of the more widely used covenant abilities in shadowlands, despite its issues, but is sadly not currently in the upcoming mage talent trees for the upcoming Dragonflight expansion. This is a great shame because MoT felt pretty good for all 3 specs, a rarity for covenant abilities. In terms of its viability, it was:

  • The best covenant for fire on ST in 9.2
  • The best covenant ability for frost on ST before 9.2 (this is due, in part, to the legendary sucking)
  • A popular and situationally good alternative to the dominant kyrian playstyle for arcane.

Temporal loop does everything that MoT did in PvE but with a strict time based proc rate instead of triggering on the chosen enemy target’s actions. This solves a lot of the problems that MoT had in PvE such as, enemies dying or becoming inactive before the debuff ran out.

Credit to Madorin for coming up with the time magic theme.

Other things to note are:

  • The 45s CD is basically just the CDR of the legendary effect being baked in. However, it allows fire to cast one between combusts if playing without kindling and also lines up nicely with Arcane’s 45s CD on Touch of the Magi, allowing it to be used to quickly build arcane harmony stacks.
  • The initial proc is delayed by 3 seconds for the following reasons:
    1. It stops fire mages from overcapping IB stacks whilst pre-casting for combust
    2. It allows you to use the spell without munching mid-cast BF or CC procs.

I hope if the community likes this then Blizzard will consider adding this to the mage class tree because it needs quite a bit of work and would be a good addition, possibly as a choice node with Shifting power (the only covenant ability on the tree at the moment) or as a possible time-themed replacement to Time Anomaly which is just… yeah…

Hope you like it!

Quezlex

EDIT: It was pointed out to me by someone that this doesn’t include the % spell damage buff effect from the conduit. There is a good reason for that since shifting power does not currently have any additional power baked into it. In the current DF talent tree, it is just the baseline spell and therefore I wanted to follow that design philosophy (apart from baking in the legendary CD to better line it up for arcane mage burst windows and to allow pyroclasm fire mages to cast it in between combusts.)

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No Mirrors. Bring back Frostjaw instesd. And Deep Freeze. Don’t create the damn Classes around 3v3. Its not fun or ever been well balanced. Nobody cares. What matters is fun and multidimensional gameplay and meta’s. Atleast they are moving away from mongo Combustion and trying to create Pyro build variants.

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This is a thread mainly discussing PvE. You’re talking about PvP which has its own talents system already.

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Well PvE side is bad aswell. Return all AoE spells to the Mage base tree. CoC is good but by god there should be Blizzard and Flamestrike aswell. Frostfire Orb and Flame Orb were cool too. Maybe into their respective specs. Return Brainfreeze etc. People honestly don’t remember or know how good our Class was during say Wrath until end of MoP. We had lots of spells, not just spec fantasy.