Although I love Sunfury and will probably play a Sunfury Arcane Mage, I feel they haven’t explored all the fantasies of the real Sunfury. The spec completely lacks mana management and lacks arcane identity. When you look at the talent tree, you have more fire stuff than Arcane for both specs like comets and the Pheonix which have more fire spells than arcane.
I think a good design would have been to of course keep the actual Pheonix, and make Sunfury Arcane very mana-dependent, and give tools to recover it, like mana drain (but it only drains life from enemies and gives mana, for pvp balancing), or something more dangerous like Life Tap. We also have new mana management tools like Mana Adept baseline and Energized Familiar, so it can help.
Sunfuries in BC played with dangerous energies: fel, void, Dangerous Arcana, and it would have been interesting thematically to explore this, to have a kind of “mad mage” archetype.
I hope that in future expansions, when they probably add 10 levels for hero talents in each expansion to reach 30lvl as for the class and spec tree, they’ll go further into this aspect.
Always wanted to have Kael’thas’ kit from HotS in WoW.
They should’ve given us a mechanic like Verdant Spheres where you enhance your next spell when you activate it. Instead we got passive and boring Spellfire Spheres…
I love your idea for mana dependent gameplay even fusing it for Fire Mage Sunfury. It would give us something more to look forward to than extra Combustion windows…
Gravity Lapse is such a failed implementation from the start. It should’ve been a single target stun and perhaps multiple if you Verdant Sphere it (if it was implemented in the first place)… not to mention it deals damage so you can’t chain Polymorph on the target… DOA talent. It competes with khmmm… 2 whole spell steals (amaaaaaazing )
Instead, we just got a very cool-looking Phoenix that does its thing, we get some stat boosts out of it alongside few seconds of Hyperthermia… and that’s it. That’s the whole talent tree…
0 creativity from Blizzard on this hero talent, it had so much potential just to be tainted like this…
Banish as well from WC3, where the target takes extra magic damage and makes it immune to physical. You can use it on yourself, teammate or enemy.