From Xaryu, Venruki, Raiku and Aeghis mage podcast about dragonflight mage talent trees. Original post on the Dragonflight Alpha forums, here: Regarding Mage Talents Trees in Dragonflight but it was brought to my attention also posting here may be beneficial for people to be able to reply.
Yesterday I had a constructive conversation with AWC Champion Raiku, AWC Champion Venruki, and Multi Rank One mage Aeghis discussing our thoughts about the state of Mage Talent trees in the Dragonflight Alpha from a PvP perspective. You can find that conversation here: https://youtu.be/91mGcJJRr10
As this chat was over two hours, I wanted to summarize the largest points of feedback:
- Fire Mage Tree
- We all seemed to agree that the Fire Mage tree was one of the better designed trees.
- We enjoyed that there was an ‘instant cast’ playstyle option, and an option to mix it up with the hard cast style of pyroblast play via the ‘Tempered Flames’ pyroblast talent, amongst others.
- One point of confusion is the necessity to talent ‘Hot Streak’ when Hot Streak is so fundamentally ‘Fire Mage’ and it seems impossible to play without. Perhaps Hot Streak should be baseline.
- We agreed that the right hand side of the tree including living bomb, flame patch, and other AoE talents, is overall generally weak. Perhaps this makes more sense from a PvE perspective.
- Improved Scorch, although a seemingly exciting talent, it does not seem strong enough to use.
- Arcane Mage Tree
- We also generally enjoyed the Arcane Mage tree, there are a lot of meaningful talent choices that seem exciting to talent and really spice up the gameplay.
- One of the overarching exciting themes about the Arcane Tree is that there are so many powerful choices to talent, and you can’t get them all. Therefore, you have to make meaningful choices, such as, choosing between Arcane Harmony or Radiant Spark or Slipstream vs. Charged Orb.
- One criticism is the relative weakness of Mana Gem and Cascading Power in relation to Evocation and Siphon Storm
- Perhaps the largest point of feedback for the Arcane Mage Tree is the necessity to talent Rule of Threes, when in PvP, Rule of Threes is a DPS loss. If talented, you will need to make a macro to literally cancel this ability because you want to spend mana to generate more opportunities for clearcast procs. Because of this, and because Rule of Threes was rarely taken as talent pick for the past few expansions, it makes Rule of Threes an obvious choice to move to another less mandatory place in the Arcane tree
- Similarly, Arcane Familiar hasn’t exactly been a hot pick over the years, and it’s blocking the tree from other exciting picks such as Arcane Tempo.
- Frost Mage Tree
- We all collectively did not enjoy the Frost Mage Tree, for these reasons:
- There seems to be one style of gameplay that’s being pushed.
- There doesn’t seem to be much change or evolution from current mage gameplay.
- There doesn’t seem to be a variety of exciting options to spice up the gameplay.
- Our biggest criticism is that nearly all of our power has been baked into Icy Veins. This results in a style of gameplay that revolves around using Icy Veins as the only way you can do damage. However, in PvP, when Icy Veins is used, everyone runs to the pillar and waits until it goes away resulting in an unenjoyable experience for everyone.
- We agreed that Frost Mage has a lack of offensive initiation — in the sense of being able to push in aggressively and initiate an offensive ‘go’. Spells like this might include Frostjaw or Deep Freeze. Without these spells, there is no reward for pushing into combat, and subsequently, breeds a playstyle where you spam Blizzard, Frozen Orb, and wait for dampening to kick in while you run, kite, and AoE your opponents to death.
- A minor point of feedback is that Blizzard is a cast, rather than a channel. This makes the gameplay of Frost Mages in PvP simply ‘unfun’ to play against. A rotation of Frozen Orb, Blizzard, and kiting makes Frost Mages absolutely infuriating to fight. And in a similar sense, frustrating to play, because there is simply no way to initiate and burst.
- A major point of feedback is how much damage is baked into Frostbolt, and the variance of the Frostbolt ability itself. Frostbolt with no modifiers may do 1% of someone’s life bar. Frostbolt with all modifiers can do upwards of 20% of someone’s life. This means longer cooldowns, Icy Veins, are mandatory to force a kill in PvP as a Frost Mage.
- A general theme throughout our conversation was the lack of damage from Frozen Orb in comparison to previous expansions, the size of Frozen Orb (being so large) makes it almost unusable when trying to simultaneously CC enemies in PvP Combat, and the procs Frozen Orb give aren’t scary enough to push enemies back.
- Fingers of Frost and Flurry aren’t scary enough compared to just casting Frostbolt.
- Glacial Spike doesn’t ever seem to be worth the loss of DPS from Icicles, and Ray of Frost doesn’t seem to have much of a use-case with the amount of damage it does, both of these talents seem to be pretty dead.
- We would like to see more damage into Frozen Orb, more damage into Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze, and abilities to initiate so that Frost Mage isn’t forced to play so defensively (Frostjaw and Deep Freeze). This would bolster Frost Mage gameplay, think MOP or Cata Frost Mage design.
- We all collectively did not enjoy the Frost Mage Tree, for these reasons:
- General Mage Tree
- The general Mage Tree was our least favorite tree across the board.
- The largest problem with Mage in PvP is how tanky they are. We are no longer glass cannons. The General Mage Tree has almost all defensive options.
- Slow, blast wave, mirror images, improved mirror images, cryo-freeze, tempest barrier, improve frost nova, arcane warding, master of time, alter time, accumulative shielding, diverted energy, greater invisibility, flow of time, frigid winds, grounding surge, and winter’s protection are all primarily defensive options.
- In other words, the majority of the Mage Tree makes them into tanks, instead of making mage into a glass cannon with exciting spells to sequence.
- Our suggestions to replace these abilities are: Blazing Speed, Improved CS (4 second silence), Frostjaw, Improved Alter Time (including buffs/debuffs similar to MoP version to make alter usable aggressively), and Deep Freeze. And/or other exciting to use, more aggressive options that help the offensive initiation of Mage and play into the glass cannon style we’ve all come to love and enjoy.
- We all seemed to agree that Master of Time would fit a bit better in the Arcane only tree, not the Mage talent tree. Master of Time felt like a great perk in the Arcane specific toolkit. Slow also seems to fit better for Arcane specifically. Frost Mages have more than enough slows, and Fire Mages having to cast Frostbolt is a very fun and interesting trade off. Fire Mages with slow would make Frostbolt never worth casting in PvP.
- Additionally, we agreed that Dragon’s Breath should remain a fire only ability, not available to all mage specs. Similar to Master of Time, Dragon’s Breath feels out of place for Arcane and Frost. Instead, respective CC choices such as Imp CS or Deep Freeze would fill this shoe better. Regarding the cooldown of DB as a Fire only spell, 45 seconds seems too long. We agreed 25-30 seconds feels appropriate.
- Ice nova and Meteor also both seemed too weak outside of their respective spec trees, without modifiers or combos to make them worthwhile.
- Shifting Power has been the source of power that has made mage so difficult to balance. Removing it completely may be the best option moving forward.
- We enjoyed two things about the tree collectively: Blast Wave and Master of Time. However, we agreed Master of Time would be much better suited in the Arcane tree.
I leave these points here in hopes that some insights can be gleaned from some of the most seasoned mages in the world. And so that this feedback can be considered when developing the second iteration of these talent trees in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you for taking the time to read, if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up. And if you’re a dev, thank you for all of the hard work you put into this game. The only reason we take the time to have the discussion about these trees, and write a forum post like this, is because of our deep love for your game and we want nothing more than for it to succeed.
From my own point of View (Raiku) I would love to see Shimmer and Ice floes not being tied together and instead making them on seperate spots (Early Legion mage) in the talent tree allowing for both options to create a more mobile /fun gameplay and removing things like Flow of time tempest barrier, Diverted energy allowing mages to be squishier but being able to do more plays and being more mobile.