Wat? I’m losing touch, what does this mean? 
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Yeah, that one’s a source of confusion.
In D&D, enchantment is the mind-affecting school. In WoW, it’s often taken to be the school of putting any kind of enchantments on items or people, including ones that in D&D would fall under transmutation, abjuration or illusion.
There’s also the school of evocation, which isn’t listed in in-game books in Dalaran and so there’s disagreement among mage RPers on whether it even exists. It’s a mess.
those schools are all just dirty kirin tor propaganda anyway
down with dalaran
The way Lintian sees them, they’re a useful abstraction like, say, musical notation or biological taxonomies — not having a real, independent existence of their own but helping bring order to the study of a chaotic field of knowledge.
But of course that’s what her mentors in Dalaran want her to think.
It would be awful if WoW had a hard set-in-stone magic system because
- it would likely suck because blizzard were never good at designing hard rules in their worldbuilding and good for them, honestly
- there would be MORE arguments about interpretation and power levels since people will still headcanon and bend the hell out of it, but with more canon text to use as ammunition
- i would still headcanon and bend the hell out of it and selectively ignore parts i don’t like and i sure don’t wanna get called out or lore-quizzed about it
- seriously, the fact that wow isn’t bogged down by some bloated over-designed labor-of-love hard magic system, is one of its true blessings and i love seeing what people come up with
i mean, you’re an RPer, use your
imagination
kinda messed up that the kirin tor arrange the different types of elemental slavery they perpetrate into neat little categories
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Those schools were derived from how the Highborne(and thus the High/Blood Elves) classified spells, no? 
And we’re happy to believe they’ve corrupted that system to it’s current, restrictive form.
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Mage Roleplayers have set themselves the impossible task of trying to find rules for a magic system so soft you can spread it on toast. It’s like trying to build a skyscraper out of sand, though it doesn’t stop the non-stop discussion of how they’ve “solved” whatever trivial question they’ve been asked (then usually being wrong about it).
Disagree. Where WoW is concerned, headcanon and wild interpretation tends to follow lore which is bare-bones or absent, and there tends to be significantly less dispute about anything which Blizzard has bothered to set in stone as far as ‘guidelines’ go, even if there will always be people who miss out on them.
WoW doesn’t need a hard magic system, but it could do with an attempt to provide the bare bones of any magic system at all, though. A bare-bones soft magic system would provide all the creative freedom people want and still make the way magic works in the setting feel more coherent and give everyone a framework with which to build their ideas on instead of wild theorising.
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I’m an Evocation exists guy if only because there’s metric tons of NPCs with ‘Evoker’ in the title that throw fireballs and what not.
Hell even Queen Azshara herself is supposed to be the most powerful Evoker of all time iirc. So Evokers exist, so Evocation has to exist.
There’s a bit of a blurriness about how it fits in relation to the other schools but in my circles the agreement was that it exists as a ‘blunt instrument’ of all the magic schools, often used for a foundation of wielding magic before getting into the more finesse stuff. Some people just choose to go all in on that one ‘school’ because it’s a hammer, and most of your problems these days look like nails.
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There’s the Sub Zero spec that freezes things solid and at peak performance turns the sea into a glacier.
There’s the spec that can light a candle or escalate to a tactical nuke.
Then there’s the spec that outright laughs at reality, time and space and shatters people down to their constituent molecules like Dr Manhattan if you HHHHNNNNNGGG at them long enough.
Inbetween lie the novelties like vanishing from sight, turning annoying people into monkeys and stealing other casters’ magics.
Mages are horrifying.
I wish any part of WoW was a labour of love at this point.
This, along with Magic as Math and the Aszuna mage academy and its simple geometric spellcasting leads me to think stuff like a “mere” fireball is relatively uncomplicated but if you want to alter time or teleport across continents you need to take the extra credit uni classes.
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Sometimes, I wanna make a Mage that just throws random smart words straight out of Thesaurus with obscure meanings explaining his theories about mundane stuff like how nutritive conjured food is healthier to the body on the long-term but then use Norf FC like vocabulary to explain complex concepts and procedures just to mess with the Mage community.
If I was to just do the former… I wonder how long I could make it until people realize I’m just faking it.
I will admit that my imagination when it comes to Mage stuff is pretty limited, I honestly prefer something has solid bases or a clearly define pipeline that then leaves the rest to you halfway through the journey.
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wdym u just described half of the mage rpers???
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Pretty much.
Dalaran requires it’s magi to have licenses for portals (Yes, but only Kirin Tor magi!) and a different license for ‘XL’ portals. Notably because they require a ton of power, and a misstep can lead to disaster.
You’re so unused to WoW these days that you even call guilds FCs? 
That said, I’ve had a lot of fun in the Dalaran community. Magibabble comes to me naturally (thanks to my tech background, perhaps) and I actually try to keep it internally consistent and make it make sense to myself (so I can explain it IC when pressed). I also enjoy using mundane metaphors to explain in simple terms how spells work.
I’m sorry Lintian, but this isn’t the kind of FC you think of.
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…I googled it and now I wish I hadn’t. My eyes.
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Idk what kind of FCs you were referring to but I guess you found the relevant information after Hethes’s response.
“Free Company” (FC) is the term for guilds in FF14.
gonna start having my mage talk about mana colours
if we can import DnD why not import MtG, they’re owned by the same people after all
So, when dya think the patch will hit?
I’m expecting the 28th/29th.
Hit around the same time as New World to stop more people jumping ship.
Waiting till FF comes out makes 0 sense…
Perhaps somewhere in between, but the damage would be worse by then. Hype only persists so long, and a minor patch isn’t strong.