For short:
Monkey mage alone. Monkey mage die too much. Monkey mage need tank. Water Elemental is gone. Monkey mage want water elemental back to tank.
For long:
I have been trying to get back to my mage after playing as healer and then Evoker for a few weeks. I had forgotten how fragile and tricky mage can be.
Mages have tons of utility spells. If you use them properly you can actually be very tanky. But there are limits to this. In PvP you can kite and wait out your cooldowns. In single player pve however, like in the Delves, things get much messier. There is usually very little space for us to kite and we end up waiting for a few minutes for our defensive cooldowns to refresh. It made me think…
In Warcraft 3 we had water elementals that we could use as fodder while we fought. WoW never really found a proper use for those iconic elementals. For a long time they were tied to the frost specialization, but later they were removed except as short uptime during burst phases. So I wonder what would happen if we had optional tank pets as water elementals. I think it would help us mages a lot in solo play and make it easier for new mages to get used to the class more safely. Also, I miss the aura that pet had around the mage. It is an iconic look in my opinion.
After thinking of this I thought of “well what if I want a dps pet.” That got me stuck for a while but it was only a small setback. Because why not have a phoenix pet for dps.
I don’t think mage should be pet dependent. I like not having pets most of the time. But I would prefer having the option of a water elemental to tank my mobs and maybe bring back some WC3 nostalgia.