Tier 2 (Level 30) Shimmer is a very powerful replacement to Blink. While it removes the ability to Blink out of stuns, the mage can now be highly mobile without having to stop casting. It feels amazing to use, it doubles the mage's "burst" mobility, and it is, in all but the most Patchwerk of fights, a DPS boost. The issue I have with Shimmer is that it's just too good. Compared to all of the other talents Shimmer competes against across all three mage specs, the only one that stands a chance is Arcane's ability to walk during Arcane Missiles and Evocation, and that comes down to personal preference. However, is this because Shimmer is too good, or is it because the rest of the talents are too bad? A full analysis would be too long for this post, but I would venture to say that Shimmer is the outlier here, but the other talents are somewhat to blame, especially for Fire. Shimmer needs to be toned down, and a good possible fix would be to remove its charge system. The ability to Blink mid-cast is much more interesting and impactful than having two charges. Plus, two charges is especially powerful with the shield-from-Blink legendary and the heal-on-blink trait for Fire. I can soak mechanics with Cauterize, and I just need to Shimmer twice (staggered out) to live quite easily without help from a healer. I did this on H KJ progression towards the end, and I feel the large amount of survivability I had as a Mage was out of character. Blast Wave is a relic from an older time, where it was an integral part of the Fire Mage's AoE. Now, it stands as a low damage spell with a powerful, but very limited slow. This spell feels very out of place here. The other two talents stand as forms of survivability, but this one only really helps kiting. Shimmer also lets the mage kite, but it has the added benefit of being usable to avoid sources of damage like fire, void zones, etc. Its theme works well, as it's effectively a show of the explosiveness of the Fire Mage, as well as emphasizing close range combat, but within the context of the current game, it doesn't really have a place anymore. Mages are expected to stand far away (generally), and even if the mage Blinks forward to hit adds with it, they will not have a way to escape besides walking since they couldn't take Shimmer. I have a few suggestions for the design of this talent. First, let the mage cast it on a target, and have the AoE occur from there. I believe there was a patch where it worked like this, and even the tooltip has a remnant of this (40 yd range despite being cast on the player only?). This would let the mage apply this CC from relative safety. Second, swap this talent with Frenetic Speed. Frenetic Speed also doesn't fit its row very well, but these talents actually make a lot of sense in the others' row, as I'll discuss later. Third, remove the damage so that it doesn't compete with Ring of Frost and Ice Ward simply by virtue of doing damage.
The third option of the row, Blazing Soul, is a neat talent but flawed in a way similar to Blast Wave. This talent actually has potential to be a lot of extra survivability, since 40% of the mage's damage could be as much as 600k HPS in heavy AoE situations. This seems almost broken, but the talent is majorly held back in a few ways. The 8 yd range ensures that this talent is niche, since many fights require the mage to stand far away as they will get targeted by ranged-only mechanics. For example, if ranged were too close for Spellblade Auriel, many problems could occur if a melee managed to get a frost enchant. Even if the mage could stand in melee without issue, hardcasting Blazing Barrier is a straight DPS loss for rather minimal gain (my barrier gives me about 8% of my max HP). Plus, this tiny shield would be refilled almost instantly during periods of real damage, and would likely sit at full for quite a long time. If the shield doesn't break from one instance of damage, but it's a constant stream of this small damage, AND the mage can stand in melee, then this talent can be potentially rather powerful. However, this effectively would never happen. My suggestion would be to remove at least one of these restrictions. This could be achieved in a few different ways. One way would be to simply remove the range restriction, or make it much more lax, like 20 yds. Another would be to let it refresh the duration on Blazing Barrier as well, meaning the barrier could persist for long stretches of time when not damaged, potentially removing the need to even think about cast ingit again in a fight. A better version of that solution would be to make it a passive that replaces Blazing Barrier, so that it functions similarly to a Frost DK's Permafrost talent, where their autos generate shield. A final way is making it overfill the barrier, to 300-400% or so. This means that casting Blazing Barrier would lead to a much stronger shield of 24-36% of the mage's health (at least at ~920 ilvl), so pre-planning for a damage spike would lead to significant results. Ideally, I'd like to see the range restriction removal and the overfill implemented. Summary The tier 2 talents are simply dominated by Shimmer. Shimmer's power needs to be reduced, preferably stripping its charge power away. Blast Wave does not fit the tier very well, but could fit tier 5 well by swapping with Frenetic Speed, a mobility boosting talent. Blazing Barrier has a nice idea, but suffers from restrictions too much for it to be picked, so lifting these restrictions by removing the range requirement and allowing it to overfill Blazing Barrier (or other fixes that I went over) would make this a talent that fills its niche exceedingly well.
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Nicholas PorterMMO-Focused Archives
November 2018
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