Ideas - How you change a spell to make it lovely.

[Renoblade]

Hello there,

who didnt already thought about changing the way a spell works or looks?

I like to start a list of ideas here just for the fun of the creativity.

1.)
Arcane Missiles
Channeled 5 .
change: manacost for each missile.

2.a)
Arcane Barrage (Charge)
Instant, no cd.
cast Arcane Missiles to Charge up with missiles. Maximum of 5 missiles.

2.b)
Arcane Barrage (Release) (sorry no new name)
Instant, 3sec cd.
Fires all charged missiles at your target as a big focused volley.

3.)
Arcane Barrage (Volley)
Instant, 3sec cd.
Fires all charged missiles at an area of targets as a spread volley.

4.)
Focus Magic
Instant, 3min cd.
Focusing the Mages arcane energies to increase the Mages raidmembers casting speed by 6%

[Töasty]

So you want arcane to play like a rogue? Basically arcane barrage combo points?

[coolcatchris]

^^no, he wants to make up fun spells. lighten up.

[Renoblade]

i wanted to have more fun than simply chain spam some casts. so the idea was to make the spells itself more fun. (different than all the talent changes ideas)

so instead of going ABx3 , MB+AM / ABr
this could go like ABrCharge+ AM , ABx3 ABrRelease /AM depends on movement.
so you use your Abarrage like before while moving, but it does fire saved missiles if you had charged it before.
this is only a very smal change, but makes a huge difference for the ultimate Abarrage uses.

[Töasty]

^^no, he wants to make up fun spells. lighten up.

I wasn't being negative, asking for an explanation. It still don't completely follow the idea of the rotation. It seems like the arcane release would have to do a ton of damage, if you are spending GCDs stacking charges that do no damage. Would probably be way to overpowered in pvp, as you could just stack 5 charges and wait for someone to come along and unleash them all. That's why I was asking about whether or not it was like combo points. If it was some kind of stackable debuff that was put on the target that increased arcane damage done to the target or something like that, it might be more viable for pve.

[Renoblade]

ah i see.
ok i try to point out what i would do with ABarrage spell

you have 3 spells. (charge, release, aoe) one is just like a selfbuff that you use before you cast your normal Arcane Missiles.
if you have cast the AM, you now have these 5 missiles in your Barrage "loaded". pos you have a magic buff on you with 5 charges for 15sec or something.
so this can be cleaned or whatever.

then if you wanna shoot something you can just use this second (release) shooting bunch of missiles to shoot as one shot. with ABarr (release)

yeah in pvp it would hurt a lot, but you had to use AM some time to load it before.

in PvE the use of this is just for incoming movement that you can predict and load the spell before (pos with MB) and use it while moving.
this doesnt sound as great in pve as it could be usefull in pvp.

[Recompence]

Glacier- Mage launches a glacier at opponent doing "X" damage per lrank and freezes opponent in place for 8 seconds. Once glacier breaks it does 30-45 per rank frost damage to nearby enemies.

[Beaavis]

Mirror Image - All Mirror Images will duplicate all active buffs, icons, and carry items visible to other players.

[kinky31]

i'd change 2 things.

first the evocation mechanism..
evocation now heals the mage for 60% of his health in addition to the mana effect (yes glyph could be used for something else or even removed) but..listen to this u start channeling evo,if u move/get interrupted u get an "evocation" buff which lasts as much as evo lasted at his max duration minus the channeled duration, for example if u channeled for 5 sec then u get 3 secs of the buff since evo lasts 8 sec (without haste ofc).
u regen both mana AND hp only when u channel it, from the moment u get the buff u regen mana ONLY!
not too OP for pvp and pretty useful for pve as we are the only class that has to stay still to regen mana at the cost not only of dps but we risk our lives too..sometimes..(a nerd will come now and say "a good mage knows when to evo" which is true but we all have faced tight and hard situations")

the other change could be at mirror images.maybe something like priest's shadowfiend= getting a percentage of mana with each attack

i like the evocation idea a lot so /discuss it plz

[Willem]

ah i see.
ok i try to point out what i would do with ABarrage spell

you have 3 spells. (charge, release, aoe) one is just like a selfbuff that you use before you cast your normal Arcane Missiles.
if you have cast the AM, you now have these 5 missiles in your Barrage "loaded". pos you have a magic buff on you with 5 charges for 15sec or something.
so this can be cleaned or whatever.

then if you wanna shoot something you can just use this second (release) shooting bunch of missiles to shoot as one shot. with ABarr (release)

yeah in pvp it would hurt a lot, but you had to use AM some time to load it before.

in PvE the use of this is just for incoming movement that you can predict and load the spell before (pos with MB) and use it while moving.
this doesnt sound as great in pve as it could be usefull in pvp.

If this would work how I am thinking it would work, it might help to give Arcane PvP a stronger "set-up" situation, a la Frost's "Shatter Combo."

So here is how the situation goes in my head:

1. You are casting your Abarr's and AB's here and there just as part of your normal whompin' ass in BG's/Arenas.

2. You get a MB proc.

3. You cast your MB empowered AM on some fool, and for each missile that fires, you get one stack of "Arcane Static Charge" (or something like that) that will essentially stack up to 5, one stack for each missile successfully fired (if you are stunned or feared or something halfway through you will only get as many "Static Charges" as the number of missiles you got off. This works on non-MB'd AM too, only MB makes it more effective for obvious reasons.

4. Next time you cast ABarr (as the OP said you could have the stacks clear after 10 or 15 seconds so you couldn't save them up and "ambush" someone in PvP), you unleash the "Static Charges," which would add X amount of your AB's normal post-spellpower-coefficient damage (so that it will scale nicely).

Example time!

Let's say your ABarr normally hits for 3k after taking spellpower into account. You are in a situation where you managed to get all 5 missiles off from AM, and so you have a 20% bonus damage increase on your next ABarr from your "Static Charge" buff. This being that, for the sake of simplicity, we'll say there is a 4% damage bonus per "Static Charge" stack. So that 3k Abarr now turns into a 3.6k Abarr for 10 or 15 seconds after having casted AM, the "Static Charges" being consumed after having casted an Abarr of course.

I don't know if that much extra damage would make the spell worth casting in PvE, but the numbers could be tweaked accordingly so that it is worth casting in raids, and so that it adds sufficient damage in PvP to make casting AM a little more attractive, without making the "Arcane Shatter Combo" too overpowered.

In summary, if the OP intended to the idea to work out as I've detailed in the above steps 1-4 plus the example, then I think he's got something great going here.

[Willem]

i'd change 2 things.

first the evocation mechanism..
evocation now heals the mage for 60% of his health in addition to the mana effect (yes glyph could be used for something else or even removed) but..listen to this u start channeling evo,if u move/get interrupted u get an "evocation" buff which lasts as much as evo lasted at his max duration minus the channeled duration, for example if u channeled for 5 sec then u get 3 secs of the buff since evo lasts 8 sec (without haste ofc).
u regen both mana AND hp only when u channel it, from the moment u get the buff u regen mana ONLY!
not too OP for pvp and pretty useful for pve as we are the only class that has to stay still to regen mana at the cost not only of dps but we risk our lives too..sometimes..(a nerd will come now and say "a good mage knows when to evo" which is true but we all have faced tight and hard situations")

the other change could be at mirror images.maybe something like priest's shadowfiend= getting a percentage of mana with each attack

i like the evocation idea a lot so /discuss it plz

I think this would encourage you to get interrupted while you are channeling Evo.

For example, people would start timing their Evo to cast right before a timed raid AoE hits. No raiding Mage is going to have the Evo Glyph anyhow, so the real benefit here is that your Evo would turn into an "Innervate," and thus you could keep your 60% mana regen going without having to stop DPS for 8 seconds.

Situation:

1. Mage looks at DBM. Damage incoming in 2 seconds.

2. Mage hits Evo. Gets 1 second off before being hit by the AoE.

3. Evo turns into Innervate for the remaining 7 seconds.

4. Mage continues DPSing like normal, while enjoying the benefits of the Evo regen.

See, while Evo is a very effective mana regen, one of the most common complaints I've noticed from the Mage community regarding the spell is not about how much mana it gives back, but how much dps time is lost during the channel itself. Personally, 8 seconds is not a big deal to me, but I'm not in a top raiding guild doing Ulduar am I? I'm doing heroics and such.

The min-maxers would abuse it for sure, so unfortunately, I don't think it would work.

Mages have, however, been asking for Evo to just turn into Innervate in terms of mechanics, to no avail of course. Having Evo work like Innervate would be something that I myself would like to see, but don't realistically see happening unfortunately.

[Renoblade]

Hi Willem, is that example how you see my change, or how you would change it?
i think that your idea with the charges are not bad, but i had a different thought.

with my ABarr idea there would be no initial damage on ABarr.
you use it just to save your arcane missiles and release them later (1 target or aoe)
i see that the usefullness isnt as great in pve as in pvp, where you can use this like a shatter burst.

regarding the evocation... well, few ideas:
1.) You take less 30% damage while casting and increase your damage for the next spell by 15% each "tick" (4 ticks) (or something less for few sec)
2.) Evocation is for charging up yourself with power, increase your damage of for 3 spells by 50% AND gives you "innervate" on activation.
(disrupting prevents the dmg buff, not managain)

hmm i think 2nd would be bad for pvp, cause you cant inerrupt the innervate, only dispell.

[coldethyl]

every time i try to think of a way to change a spell it comes out OP,but I think i found a realistic change that could be made to the talent hotstreak.

they wont let us have crits from living bomb count towards the hotstreak proc,it seems there pretty adamant about it.but what if hot streaks stacked?

sometimes you are finishing your scorches or casting a living bomb before the casting a hot streak pyro and the timer will reset to full.I would like it if they allowed hotstreak to stack up to 3 casts in que.

so instead of overwriting the buff with a new buff it just adds acharge .im not saying allow us to throw 3 pyros at once,but one at a time spaced by gglobal cooldowns would be fair.