Eyonix has been posting up changes that are currently destined for patch 3.1, and Mages got there turn on Thursday.Here they are:
MAGE
First Impression? Bah. Compared to the other classes it looks like we haven’t even been given any time.
The addition of a full scale Replenishment to frost mages is a nice touch, I always thought it odd that the Improved Water Elemental talent had a very weak clone of Replenishment.
The other three “points” are a joke really. Not even a suggestion of how they might implement the three goals they stated, which is kind of lame. I think the goals themselves are nice, but throw us a bone Blizz! At least let us have a glimpse of how you think you can accomplish them.
The Ice Lance shatter combo in PvE would go a long way to making frost interesting to play in raids, perhaps they could do this by changing the way Ice Lance interacts with Fingers of Frost. Perhaps make Ice Lance a guaranteed crit when FoF is up and make it not invoke the GCD. Of course this may be OP in PvP, perhaps make it also invoke a 3 second cooldown on Ice Lance to stop it being used twice in rapid fire mode for massive burst.
More survivability for fire mages in PvP is a nice change for those who raid fire and enjoy casual PvP, I’m interested in how they could do this, perhaps a change to Molten Shields.
Making Spirit more useful and interesting. A+ if you pull this off. Mana regen isn’t particularly exciting and it would be nice to make spirit a more offensive stat for us. Perhaps changing Student of the Mind to transfer a percentage of our spirit to a damage stat, this may involve placing SotM higher in the tree to facilitate other specs getting it more easily, it seems that most raiding specs other than FFB dip into Arcane as far as TTW so this could be a viable option.
Anyway I’m no class designer but that’s my 2 pence. For those who want to read the list straight from the horses mouth the link is here.
