Hey, I usually don't play mage (warlock myself) but I saw this thread on the frontpage and wanted to jump in and see what everyone thought regarding "pure casters" in WoD.
For me MoP had been extremely underwhelming because of all the instant CC and lack of casting + CD stacking.
Now looking at WoD it seems like they are bent on destroying any form of CC, even if it requires skill to pull off. Warlocks and Mages are notorious for having access to some of the few casted CC spells that are not on cooldown (Fear and Poly), and these require coordination and setup to pull off. Comps such as MLD are by far the ones that require the most coordination to get the most out of them.
That's not to say that some versions of them are not retarded (see fire MLS back in Cata which required you to only DoT tab and Combust), but weaving all different DRs and cross-CCing your opponents into a kill is maybe the most interesting thing this game has to offer imo.
If you look back at comps like Destro/Fire/Rdruid back in Cata, you can see how much intense coordination and cross-CCing is required to get a kill off. Fear x2 the healer all while cloning x2 the DPS and then swapping between the two, using a Dragon's Breath on the third to prevent interrupts and then Shadowfurying the healer to let the mage poly him all while the Druid now clones the first DPS and the warlock fears the other one that's about to get out of the Dragon's Breath, etc... This takes SKILL and coordination to perform and I'd really hate to see it go.
With the changes they're doing to DRs, it seems impossible to tactically CC a team as deeply as we could. CC in MoP was retarded but only because of all the instants that they added since the previous expansion and changes to dispel. When you see radical changes to the way in which CC works such as making Death Coil, Dragon's Breath and Polymorph share DR, it's just ridiculous... I honestly don't see the point in playing a Mage or Warlock if you can't kite and CC your targets to get a kill. That's what both of these classes are supposed to do to begin with.
I'm all for removing some retarded CC that takes nothing to pull off, but Blizzard seems to fail to realize that when we had access to different DRs and instant CCs before MoP, they came with a consequence:
-Death Coil had a 1.5 minute cooldown to CC a target for 3 seconds
-Dragon's Breath could be broken with any form of direct damage
-Deep Freeze required a Frozen target or a charge of FoF
-Fear was one of the most countered CCs in the entire game
-Dispels did not have a cooldown and could be spammed indefinitely
The way towards which the game is gravitating at the moment makes playing a CC-based caster very boring in my opinion. We do not have access to indefinite self-heals or "out of role" abilities like druids and shamans. They've stripped us of so many CC and kiting tools that we might end up just spamming rotations most of the time. Even if both classes end up being viable or overpowered, that would not be interesting gameplay, which is very disappointing.