So with season of discovery coming and experimenting with potential new archetypes for existing classes, and since I have nothing better to do (okay, that’s a lie) I’m curious to hear other people’s brilliant, fun, crazy or stupid, pie in the sky ideas for this system. It’s not necessarily “I want blizz to add this”, but just a let’s have fun, what if… for this system.
Let me start - Fire Battlemage
Now this is a character archetype that is near and dear to my heart, one that I like to try and recreate in pretty much every RPG I play. What do I mean by battlemage? A wizard or a mage who dives into enemy lines, causing havoc with blade and spell, either avoiding or reflecting enemy blows. This is a class archetype that NPCs have had pretty much since vanilla, or before with units like spellbreakers in Warcraft 3 (whom mages have spellsteal from), yet hasn’t really ever been available to players.
Runes -
One-handed specialisation
Given this is mage we’re talking about and have literally 0 talents or abilities for melee, and cloth gear is all we need to bridge the gap and it probably has to be quite heavy handed, while keeping in mind the base damage gap of caster and melee main-hands. So here’s what this could be -
You gain 100% of your spell hit as melee hit
You gain 100% of you spell crit as melee crit
// less is possible, if we want people to use at least some amount of melee hit/crit from enchants and weapon, but as a cloth wearer you have limited number of ways to get these
You gain melee attack power equal to 100% of your intellect
// just a tiny bit of extra damage to your autos
Arcane Explosion now has 10 second cooldown
// it occured to me that if you’re not chain casting spells, you would probably be able to spam Arcane Explosion (though you would probably run oom) and we do not want that
Searing Strike
Requires melee weapon
15 second cooldown
You strike your target with your weapon, dealing weapon damage + 50% spell damage as fire. Your next 5 attacks deal extra 120 fire damage at lvl 60. The extra damage can crit.
//the goal here is to both give you a mage flavoured melee attack, as well as give your melee attacks some oompf. limit to number of attacks should make it largely weapon speed agnostic, since you will make 5 attacks in 15 seconds no matter what speed you use. Could potentially trigger Ignite and Arcane Concentration?
Dragon’s Breath
30 second cooldown
Deals (roughly full flamestrike damage) damage in a cone in front of you, roughly 60% done instantly and 40% over next 8 seconds. All targets hit are disoriented for 5 seconds, dragon’s breath DoT won’t wake them up.
//good old dragon’s breath. This is something other mages might want as well given it’s extra source of CC
How would it play -
The playstyle should be simple, get in, use Searing Strike as your primary damage, while using Dragon’s Breath as extra damage/CC based on what you’re doing. Pepper in other Mage instants, like Fire Blast, Arcane Explosion and Cone of Cold as mana permits. If needed and you talent into it, you can be your raid’s Improved Scorch upkeep. It also might be feasible to go Presence of Mind + Pyroblast with this, since Combustion won’t do much for it.
Is this a terrible idea? Maybe. Tell me exactly why it’s a terrible idea if you want.
I’m curious to read terrible ideas of others /laugh
