Mage Revamp Suggestions

[Rilas13]

So these are my ideas for what I am seeing a lot of complaints about(and my own personal griefs coming back to Mage for the first time since Wrath) with our current mechanics and what seems to be a lazy setup.

Obviously this is mostly just for fun but I think a few very clever ways to improve the specs and our talents that seems universally despised. Not sure if or how I would change frost and it seems to have its own niche so I focused mostly on talents and a bit with Fire/Arcane Mechanics.

Fire-New resource: Heat. Fireball and Inferno Blast build up heat(maybe crits can create more then non-crits). At max you have increased damage and can instant cast Pyro, or a new fire spell with an AoE equivalent. If you stay at max heat for more then a few seconds you begin to take heavy damage. Remove Hot streak.

Arcane-Turns Arcane charge into a Resource(this seems like a no brainier to me, it is already there this just makes it clearer to see your charge). I kinda like the idea of Mana Adept, but seems poorly executed. Love some ideas how Arcane could be modified without RoP. I don't play Arcane though so if you think it should be changed please voice your ideas.

Talent changes:
lvl 15- Replace Blazing speed with a passive Arcane to get a chance to clearcast when casting Arcane Blast, Frost Bolt, or Fireball. Blazing speed just felt weird in this space. most talents are a choice between three things to the same goal. While most level 15 talents have a speed factor Mage has a casting focus. This is fine I just think it should be consistent.

lvl 30- unchanged.

lvl 45- Replace Ring of Frost with Flowing Winter: target is affected with a slow debuff; debuff will jump to nearby friendly targets. After 5 sec targets will be frozen in place for 5 seconds. Limit 10 targets. Nearly the same thing, but I this gives an opportunity to hit extra people and its one less thing to worry about placing.

lvl 60- Give every Mage greater invisibility by max level. Replace the talent with Nether Rift: After sustaining heavy damage, you gain an arcane shield halting x% damage and cause your next blink to make you invis. Resets the CD on Blink. I am still a little iffy on this one so other ideas are welcome!

lvl 75- One option gives you the Mage bomb of your spec. Other two options are Good old fashioned Blast Wave at the foot of the caster. And Frostfire Spark: You place the spark on the ground with 10(?) charges. Any hostile targets come near the spark it will slow/burn them for x seconds. If there is another unaffected target nearby when the time runs out it will jump to the new target with a refreshed timer. Cannot jump more then 3 times.

lvl 90- Removed all old talents(damage will be scaled appropriately without maintenance buff). Archanized Core: Create a focus point on a target, making 30% of all direct damage spells to also hit the target for x seconds(Beacon of light for damage instead of healing essentially).
Nether Attunement: teaches Ionize to Arcane, Burning up to Fire, and Frozen Core to Frost. Ionize: you Ionize the air around the target, increasing spell damage received from all sources by x% for y seconds. Burning up: You stay at max heat for x seconds without taking damage(so a CD to spam pryos for a few sec). Frozen Core: Merge with your Water Elemental for x seconds, granting increased damage, and cast while moving.
Lastly Cosmic Redirection: Grants you to hold more Arcane charges, Heat, or buff your Water ele permanently(this last option was to put in a passive benefit that just doesn't require another button on your bars).

Anyway the level 90 talents seems like a much better alternative then our current setup. Let me hear your ideas!

[Orrin]

It's too late for that. I think by now developers already done major part of the ground work on class design

[Polarthief]

Fire-New resource: Heat. Fireball and Inferno Blast build up heat(maybe crits can create more then non-crits). At max you have increased damage and can instant cast Pyro, or a new fire spell with an AoE equivalent. If you stay at max heat for more then a few seconds you begin to take heavy damage. Remove Hot streak.

Anything with self-damage is just bad. Putting more pressure on the healers because of self-error that isn't fight-mechanic based is very sloppy design (read: Life Tap). With that part excluded though, this does make for a good groundwork that would need some fleshing out. Also, Crit should probably give more, akin to Destruction Warlocks' Embers.

Arcane-Turns Arcane charge into a Resource(this seems like a no brainier to me, it is already there this just makes it clearer to see your charge). I kinda like the idea of Mana Adept, but seems poorly executed. Love some ideas how Arcane could be modified without RoP. I don't play Arcane though so if you think it should be changed please voice your ideas.

Might as well make it a resource at this point, though keeping it as a debuff makes it easier for addon purposes. Idk, it could go either way really, but it's not that big of a change other than having a bar instead of a buff with numbers.

lvl 15- Replace Blazing speed with a passive Arcane to get a chance to clearcast when casting Arcane Blast, Frost Bolt, or Fireball. Blazing speed just felt weird in this space. most talents are a choice between three things to the same goal. While most level 15 talents have a speed factor Mage has a casting focus. This is fine I just think it should be consistent.

This is where you lose me. Blazing Speed and Icy Floes are both part of mobility. PoM kinda is but not to as big of an extent. I don't see how a clearcast proc would be on the same line as mobility. All 3 talents have to deal with casting while moving, or getting to your location faster (Blazing Speed) so you can begin casting once more.

lvl 45- Replace Ring of Frost with Flowing Winter: target is affected with a slow debuff; debuff will jump to nearby friendly targets. After 5 sec targets will be frozen in place for 5 seconds. Limit 10 targets. Nearly the same thing, but I this gives an opportunity to hit extra people and its one less thing to worry about placing.

Seems a bit broken in comparison because it's guaranteed and won't miss, plus there probably wouldn't be a cast time either (even if there was, it'd be broken compared to Frostjaw).

lvl 60- Give every Mage greater invisibility by max level. Replace the talent with Nether Rift: After sustaining heavy damage, you gain an arcane shield halting x% damage and cause your next blink to make you invis. Resets the CD on Blink. I am still a little iffy on this one so other ideas are welcome!

This one's a bit weird, but I'm all for having that amazing cooldown baseline!
Besides that though, would the invisibility triggered by blink be a Greater Invis (so 90% less damage)? If so, this would need a huge cooldown, somewhere around 3-5m.

lvl 75- One option gives you the Mage bomb of your spec. Other two options are Good old fashioned Blast Wave at the foot of the caster. And Frostfire Spark: You place the spark on the ground with 10(?) charges. Any hostile targets come near the spark it will slow/burn them for x seconds. If there is another unaffected target nearby when the time runs out it will jump to the new target with a refreshed timer. Cannot jump more then 3 times.

A DoT vs Blast Wave vs some weird new spell. This seems like a bad idea because almost everyone would pick the DoT.

lvl 90- Removed all old talents(damage will be scaled appropriately without maintenance buff). Archanized Core: Create a focus point on a target, making 30% of all direct damage spells to also hit the target for x seconds(Beacon of light for damage instead of healing essentially).

A bit useless for any fight with a single target. Perhaps if you attack a target with Archanized Core already on it, they would simply take an additional ~15% damage, just to have some use on single target?

lvl90- Nether Attunement: teaches Ionize to Arcane, Burning up to Fire, and Frozen Core to Frost.
Ionize: you Ionize the air around the target, increasing spell damage received from all sources by x% for y seconds.
Burning up: You stay at max heat for x seconds without taking damage(so a CD to spam pryos for a few sec).
Frozen Core: Merge with your Water Elemental for x seconds, granting increased damage, and cast while moving.

(Ionize) Erm... does that include damage your allies take? If so, I'd start over on that one...
(Burning Up) Seems a bit broken for PvP, but would definitely be fun to machine gun Pyroblasts!
(Frozen Core) Cast while moving seems a bit broken. Also, is this a permanent effect, akin to Warlock's Grimoire of Sacrifice? If so, 100% on board for it.

lvl90- Cosmic Redirection: Grants you to hold more Arcane charges, Heat, or buff your Water ele permanently(this last option was to put in a passive benefit that just doesn't require another button on your bars).

(Arcane) Would more Arcane Charges necessarily be a good thing though? That would tank mana pretty badly at higher levels. Also, remember when we had 6 charges back in early MoP? It was a mess.
(Fire) Again, would this be a good idea? You said you only get increased damage and the instant Pyro at max heat, so raising the ceiling on heat would be a bad thing, wouldn't it?
(Frost) Meh. There's plenty of times where he isn't even casting. Any amount of extra DPS that relies on that squishy bastard isn't a good thing.

- - - Updated - - -

It's too late for that. I think by now developers already done major part of the ground work on class design

To be fair, he did say for fun, so I critiqued him, for fun.

[LocNess]

Yeah, unfortunately that is why I gave up on my Fire Redesign, at this point I doubt there can be any drastic change like that if they weren't already working on it.

[thesmall001]

They admitted they went overboard with giving Warlocks too many fun new things. It was harder to balance and set a baseline for other classes that is just unreasonable to meet. You can't have a resource system unique to every spec. It just diversifies each class too much. Stuff like Icicles for Frost are as far as you'll see things go. (And anybody who's worked with Mods also knows UI design is a pain in the ass for the Dev Team.)

I think Mages suffer the same problem as Warriors; they're not broken or bad, they're just outdated and successfully built on a very old design. Since that design was never utterly borked it's never needed overhauling. Warlocks (and to a lesser extent Paladins and maybe DKs) were really, truly broken from a gameplay perspective from the outset. They were a muddled mix-match of abilities and mechanics and it was literally an easier solution to just tear down that mess and build from scratch using the templates that have become more clearly defined with time.

Moving forward, I don't see as much a place for traditional Pures in Raiding without them gaining more Hybrid-Utility; whether that's Off-Tanking, Group Control (Buffs/Augments) or Off-Healing, especially looking forward at the Mythic model for Raiding where the tools you bring will matter and the classes that don't bring those tools just aren't as fun or useful. So...

If you're looking to pitch ideas for Mages then I'd suggest looking at what you already have (remember, they're trying to REDUCE the total number of actives per spec) and stating how those things can be as SUBTLY changed as possible to make them more useful. That's how you pitch ideas; small changes with big potential. Major glyphs and talents are a great way to go because those are highly subject to change. Augments to existing spells that may reduce your damage but boost your utility are great concepts and easier to implement and the world won't end if a glyph is added that nobody uses compared to if a core ability is changed and the class completely breaks because of it.

The key thing, as a community, is to use ability ideas as a way to identify issues you are trying to address. I looooove arm-chair designing and doing 4th Spec concepts and just coming up with totally new things but I've come to realise WoW is not the place for that, with WoW you should want to identify the problem areas or the things you find fun and find a way to address and build upon those, respectively.

Just some constructive advice.

[Polarthief]

They admitted they went overboard with giving Warlocks too many fun new things.

There's a difference between "fun new" things and "utility/cooldowns/reasons to bring a Warlock of a Mage" things, the latter being more of the truth.

[thesmall001]

There's a difference between "fun new" things and "utility/cooldowns/reasons to bring a Warlock of a Mage" things, the latter being more of the truth.

I'd 100% consider those to be fun, new things :P Personally I find having a raid spot to be more fun than any spell or ability!

[Styxz]

snip

The Warlock changes exposed design issues in other pures imo. I think, in general, all pures are in about as bad a spot as locks were pre-mop. Rogues are in the worse spot as far as design goes. Talk about dated LOL. Hunters just really need some QoL adjustments. Blizz could look to that last talent in their 100 tier and expand on that design.

Mages are so close. We just need a shift in overall philosophy for the design of our specs. They need to decouple crit from fire and work on a more interactive play style. Arcane has tons of potential, but we've yet to see a mana adept iteration that feels...realized I guess is the word. Frost was better in Cata imo, but needs the least work of our specs. Maybe expand a bit on the icicles and we're golden, maybe a non-pet option as well.

[Polarthief]

I'd 100% consider those to be fun, new things :P Personally I find having a raid spot to be more fun than any spell or ability!

The irony here is Warlocks got all of those. Fun new abilities, useful abilities, and the raid spots.

[voltaa]

Arcane charge isn't a resource already? It shows up as one in my elv classbar.

As much as I want clearcasting back, it would never work as a talent since it would be 100% mandatory, no exceptions. Your talents across the board are too powerful, being subjectively "more fun" or "more interesting" is one thing being a god class is another

[mrgreenthump]

Arcane charge isn't a resource already? It shows up as one in my elv classbar.

As far as I know, it is still a debuff(But can't be dispelled anymore??, so it's essentially a resource).

Also what comes to clearcasting, sure it made some gameplay when you actually tracked it, but it got removed as most Mages just ignored it and casted away as normal, so it essentially was a standard mana reduction.. Now it would be different if you meant something else with clearcasting, maybe something towards the old T2 set bonus. But still it would make absolutely no impact on gameplay, which is 1 of the biggest problems Mages have at the moment.

[PomPyro]

POM + instant Blizzard