[Mage] Do you enjoy the L90 talents?

[gallamann]

I will start by saying I like to play alts, gives me some variety, multiple professions... one of those alts is a rogue and what I think Blizzard nailed with rogues in 5.x is the implementation of keeping up Slice and Dice. You blow your first combo to get SnD up, then next combo point(s) you use your main finishing move which refreshes SnD to maximum duration.

That is how I'd like to see 90 tier implemented in 6.0, we have a resource, at start of fight we use that resource to get our buff up (could be different for each spec), then for the remainder of the fight our buff is refreshed by casting a specific spell per spec. Those specific spells could be new spells in 90 tier, that ramp up based upon amount of resource used while at the same time refreshing the spec buff.

[Zavri]

I like the idea behind Incanter's Ward, but they should make the other 2 talents similar but different.

I really really wish all the lvl 90 talents were different type of cooldowns instead of a maintance buff.

One for more passive damage with a decent "cooldown on use" aka incanter's ward.
One for large damage cooldown ( 2-3m CD )
One for raid damage cooldown ( Like skull banner but different / better )

[Dralektus]

My two cents:

I think many people exaggerate how bad the level 90 talents are, but they are all bad. To my mind none of them are better than the situation at 89 when you don't have them at all. People often refer to the level 90 talents as the "superpowers" tier. They should be game changing, giving you a new mechanic, a new ability, a new thing to do that synergizes with the rest of what you did before to make you feel more skilled and more powerful.

If you didn't have to play with them, you might think that the level 90 talents do OK with that, but they suffer from a couple big problems:

1) They are all tied up with mana, a stat that is largely irrelevant for mages other than Arcane. For Arcane it's worse than neutral because they each force a particular mode of mana management on the spec that may or may not work well with the design of the spec depending on arcane's current incarnation, often forcing arcane into one or another just for mana management reasons.

2) They all encourage bad play. Rune and Invocation both provide a significant incentive to avoid responding to unpredictable events while you stay put and try to maximize use of the talent. The shortened evocation cast removes some of the pain, but it is still there. IW can actually encourage you to take unnecessary damage as the only way to get full benefit from it is to take damage. If you aren't in a phase when unavoidable damage pulses are going out all the time, the only way to get full benefit is to go walk through some fire.

Finally, maximizing their use just isn't fun. Evocation and rune if you removed their frustrations boil down to just a "you must push this button every minute" requirement. IW can be a little more interesting as it can encourage lining up abilities for a burst window. However Fire lacks many abilities to take advantage of that and even for Frost and Arcane, the limited power of the buff and the requirement that you have damage to take each time it is available make it hard to find situations where this vision will pan out in practice.

I know that some people find working around the problems fun and they are entitled to their opinions, but I would prefer level 90 talents that didn't gain their fun through the use of skill to struggle against the way the design works against the requirements of raiding.

[foxHeart]

They're completely atrocious. End of story. Having to base your rotation around them is the cherry on top of the shit sundae. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, locks get unique, beneficial spells that are actually helpful. God forbid classes actually get an ability they'd want to use.

[fearist]

fucking annoying when your 10 second CDs proc when your buff is just about to run out get rid of this shit

[Henzington]

Its three different flavors of bad. It was worse in 5.0 when fire had a built in 11% downtime but the change hardly makes it better overall.

[Tahnaa]

Hate them so much. I am used to them, but I don't see why we have to stop what we are doing to maintain these.

[Stingray]

Level 90 talents are the worst thing to ever happen to the mage class since original WoW release.

[jcdommo]

I like that aside from invocation being a menial buff ability that is mandatory to babysit, with the current bug we also get to spam it over and over until it goes up. My record is 3 complete evocations before application, which was a joy to experience.

In 5.4 they should just give us a passive buff at whatever % they expect us to get on average from this crap, and leave the 90 tier blank until they can come up with something better.

[LocNess]

In Cata I thought they sounded awesome. Then I started using them at 90 and they just became a PITA to use. I wish they would just scrap it altogether.

[nickseng]

Is this poll open to all walks of live in Wow? Coz the last time I offered an opinion, I was told to gtfo cause I don't do heroic and thus doesn't apply to me. :S

TBH, I much preferred the earlier version, when using the talents well had a much bigger difference, than now when all 3 gave the exact same buff. I mostly used Invocation, but now it's almost impossible to fail at it. In earlier version, you were actually punished for not using it well.

[Simulacrum]

Combined with the other changes to fire mages in MoP, the L90 talents really put me off the class. My 209 days /played mage with all kinds of fancy stuff is now collecting dust as a result.

[Tisha]

I only use IW. Not because I like the talent, but because its the only one I can tolerate playing my mage with.

The level 90 talents were also one of the major reasons I switched to my rogue to my main in MoP. After 8+ years (and over 800 days played) of having the mage as my main, the level 90 talents pretty much broke the class for me.

[Polarthief]

Is this poll open to all walks of live in Wow? Coz the last time I offered an opinion, I was told to gtfo cause I don't do heroic and thus doesn't apply to me. :S

TBH, I much preferred the earlier version, when using the talents well had a much bigger difference, than now when all 3 gave the exact same buff. I mostly used Invocation, but now it's almost impossible to fail at it. In earlier version, you were actually punished for not using it well.

Personally, I think all opinions are allowed. What people (myself included) get annoyed by is when some people (Lhivera, our class's "MVP") say they absolutely love the talents, but they don't raid, PvP, or do anything with their Mage. I personally want nothing more than to see Lhivera overthrown and losing his MVP status for the fact that he only reports what he enjoys, so he doesn't tell the devs "Hey guys, a huge percent of Mages are quitting/unhappy because of the L90 talents", he tells them "Hey guys, I fucking love the L90 talents and I bet most other Mages do too". Really infuriates me. That said, everyone's entitled to their opinions, but don't ruin the game for the rest of players with bias.

I feel like talents should be based around high-end PvE/PvP, in which case, lower-end players will enjoy them more. If these talents were thought specifically from a perspective using PvP or even NORMAL (not even Heroic) raiding mindset, they'd be thrown out instantly. If they were, said, cooldowns for a group, for yourself, or even something fun like modifiers for Blink (a spell that EVERY SINGLE MAGE casts [and don't you dare say you don't because if you do, you're a liar!]), everyone would benefit. Raiders would have the utility/fun spell they wanted and not be hindered by it, PvPers wouldn't auto-choose IW because the other two are unviable garbage, and non-raiding/non-PvPers would have a fun ability to mess around with/a cooldown to use for themselves (similar to using Time Warp to kill a rare spawn out in the world). Instead, nearly everyone is hindered because of a horrible design choice.

[Nerevar]

I loathe the whole mop talent system. It's small and it's boring. Same goes for the l90 tier of course.

[Vaelkder]

Juggling a DPS buff is fine, the issue is that for every spec other than Arcane the talents are just extremely boring passives. There's no gratification in keeping up such a imperceptible DPS buff. SnD for example is mildly interesting because it makes a noticeable change to how the damage is being dealt; and in addition the fact that it's an instant cast makes it far less intrusive than RoP and Invocation. It needs to be something that more actively (or at least noticeably) increases damage; even something like haste or Crit buff that at the very least make certain events more probable. Just something more than a simple % damage increase.

RoP and Invocation make sense as potential DPS choices for Arcane. Their current implementation cant do that effectively because they still have to interact with the other 2 specs, which limits how they can be designed.

IW on its own is a neat concept, bringing back the old-school IW feel from Wrath. I enjoyed that model but I don't see them ever taking it to that extent again unfortunately because its far too unbalanced. Either all encounters would have to be designed around this (and similar abilities) being used, and Mages balanced around the idea that they could use this consistently. Alternatively they would have to balance Mages without the IW concept and have it as a free dps buff essentially; which becomes problematic because on fights where it could be utilized we would scale way out of control.

Would be nice to see some form of personalized talents for each spec in exchange for this tier. There's little versatility between specs, and yet the three both benefit very differently from various mechanics. To that end it seems unlikely that we will ever see anything to modify our offensive play that all 3 specs can take ambiguously. As it stands Icy Flows is rarely taken due to the fact that few fights require minimal movement on that kind of cooldown; and ultimately on fights that require consistent movement Blazing Speed excels. POM is generally useful in 2 PvE scenarios: building Combustions and Patchwerk fights.

Ultimately this all boils down to a fault of the current design for the talent system. It's logistically difficult to balance 3 abilities around 3 different specs which all play fundamentally differently and expect them to be useful to all 3. This becomes abundantly apparently when talents revolve around damage; due to the state of the game its a rare occasion that sacrificing a worthwhile DPS increase is going to be viable for a DPS class. Its not as big of an issue when it comes to pure utility talents (like the RoF tier or the Cauterize tier) where they can all potentially be used viably depending on the setting. This in turn highlights the flaw that not all of the talents are decent choices relative to each other.

The last paragraph gave me plenty of pause, as I recalled some of the things which Dragon and Akraen had said in the past weeks regarding Mages in general and the Talents specifically.

If Blizzard was to truly make these work, they might have to split the three Mage Specialties into three SEPARATE Classes, with each Class having it's own Specialties. It stunned me to realize this, but when I recalled everything which Dragon, Akraen, zomgDPS, Methusula, Nathyiel and everyone else has been posting, arguing each point in close detail, the idea of three completely separate Mage Classes began to make sense.

When everything is said and sifted, it does appear that Arcane, Fire and Frost Specs have almost opposing imperatives, when it comes to gear, play style, objectives and glyphs/talents.

Now, to really throw a wrench into it all...

If we're to use Lore/Mythology as a base, the argument becomes very easy, as Magic was categorized into different "schools," and these schools were kept completely apart from one another, as one branch could very easily "pollute" another and cause all sorts of horrible side-effects. Fire Practitioners, Arcane Weavers and Frost (Water) Wielders almost never interacted, and therefore they developed completely different "styles" of magic.

This seems to be what the Blizzard developers have done, except that they lumped all three schools into one Class, and we're experiencing the aftermath of that hodgepodge.

There are many holes in my premise, of course, but it could be grist for quite a bit of future thought, both on Blizzard's side and on this side of the computer screen.

I hope that I haven't ruffled too many feathers, but it could be fun, having three different kinds of Mages from which to choose, each with it's own three sub-sets of Specialties.

Cheers!

P.S. For the record, I detest all three Level 90 Talents, as I feel that they hinder newer players, such as myself, as well as make the folks who have played (suffered?) for ages extremely upset, because of the lack of thought put into them.

[Deleted]

@dragon : I think we have a good view of the result in the pool.
-- 63.22% don't like the 3 of them
-- 13.64% like 1 of the 3
-- 9.50% like all 3
-- 13.64% are neutral

[Volitar]

I don't play my Mage anymore but I though the concept of them was pretty cool when MOP beta was out. In actuality they are awful and completely disrupt game play.

[Deleted]

What it comes down to for me is that we pretty much lack 15% dmg, but if you keep up the level 90 talent you do the dmg you are supposed to do. So give everything 15% more dmg for mages and make the talents something els.

[Deleted]

Never liked Rune of Power or Invocation at all. Incanter's Ward is tolerable to play with, but most of the time it just wasn't good enough compared to the other two, so I ended up quitting the game.
Might return if they change the level 90 talents around a bit, and in some way remove the DoT component for arcane. (But I guess that'll never happen)