Before starting this isn’t a whine post - genuinely enjoying mage heals for pve but it’s completely useless for pvp. I actually don’t think its that far off being some what viable though, but as it stands… it’s far to clunky. It would be partially decent if it were original classic, but having every other class with multiple instant cast runes and improved mobility, it just doesn’t work.
The main issues I think are the crazy mana costs and having to set up every big heal.
Regeneration could use a rework. As it stands, it costs too much mana and does little healing alone and then to get full use out of it you need to cast a 2.5 sec arcane blast which often or not, is interrupted, stunned or simply out ranged. A suggestion I might have is buffing the actual regeneration spell. I think it should be similar to the new warlock drain life, where it’s instant and acts as a HoT instead of a channel. And then I’d also half the mana as it currently costs about 10% mana per cast, so you very quickly become OOM if trying to heal multiple. Maybe also increase the amount of self healing this does to the caster / or give damage reduction from it. Yes…mages are supposed to be glass cannon esc, and back in classic that was counted with being more mobile and having alot of CC, but now everyone else has gap closers / escapes, that niche has been made a bit redundant. We need something to keep us in fights for more than 2 living bombs or 1 starsurge. Then if you wanted to prevent mages from just spamming Regeneration as a HoT, have something similar to arcane blast where you get an increased mana stacking debuff for casting multiple in succession on the same target.
Then Chronostatic Preservation… yea it’s alright. Big heal but again requires a set up. Does it really need to have the “charge” phase. At the end of the day it’s just a heal with a delay. Maybe this could just be a more normalised heal, do less healing, quicker cast and cost less mana?
Another interesting idea, I feel like there was a missed opportunity to give us a rune that converted all fire/frost spells into spellfire or spellfrost casts, especially after nerfing the living flame heals (which was never very good for pvp anyway). Yea it was OP and needed nerfing, but nothing was implimented to replace it. Maybe instead of giving us frostfire bolt / spellfrost bolt, which are completely useless by the way, we could have been using adapted fireblast / scorch to provide a more clutch heal with regeneration.
I mean is anyone using them, from what I can see they do less dmg than the standard mage spells. Frostfire bolt - less dmg than fireball / frostbolt, wouldn’t use it with brainfreeze anyway. Spellfrost bolt, same cast time as arcane blast and does crap dmg, better to just use r1 frostbolt and arcane blast… I dont see the point of them? They could just be removed and instead convert all frost - spellfrost / fire - spellfire. With it on this rune slot you then couldn’t use it with hotstreak which works pretty well in terms of keeping it balanced. Brain storming…
Anyway that’s all I’ve got, please discuss if you have your own opinions. Would like to see some positive changes towards mage healing in pvp. And if i’m chatting nonsenses, call me out for it and tell me why!