So from my recollection, the metagame from 2012 was based on a few 90s, magma, fireball, and rays. There were plenty of other useful spells but this was the basic template a mage used for offensive fighting. Bolts are unique in that they have application outside of pvp as farming tools depending on the mob's armor weakness. This left a few spells that really didn't have application to anything. some examples: Field Aoes which were inferior to toxic/volcano: -flames of vengeance (some may argue for the blind, but I think icestorm trumps it in every situation) -acid rain -wall of fire -death fog (I know some people used it for blind) 50 nukes which you may argue could be all used as secondary to fireball, though I thought Lightning Strike had a knockup which made it preferential: -corrosive blase -shards Greater magic stuff: -missile fury -rend -venom Random other stuff: -tornado -disintegrate (I recall this was inferior to all 90 nukes) -earthquake -meteor strike (huge nerf with arcane jewelry if I recall, change to acid damage?) -mana blast -blizzard (some used to be unique, no benefit that I can recall) I left out debuffs as I suppose you could make an argument for any of those having a specific use case. Feel free to comment on any of these spells to tell me why I'm wrong and how they could be used. So does the team plan on changing any of these down the road? I know it could change the meta that we all know and love, which could be risky, but at the same time should there be useless spells? Should all spells be viable, or at least have some advantage over the other similiar options?
Great post. I would think that it makes sense to over-time rebalance abilities that are not useful at all.
I'd love to see most of the spells you mentioned buffed to equal the superior choices. Disintegrate for instance didn't have a knockup and only did HP damage, so it should do a couple points more damage than Inferno. Blizzard wasn't bad, it did lots of stamina damage but what sucked about it was its travel speed. Too slow. Mana Blast was good for breaking magic reflect, but it shared a GCD with Field Aoes, which is retarded. I think Icestorm should be kept how it is, it was used frequently, just not for damage. A bump here a nudge there and we'd see these inferior spells being used more.
I started reading, and I thought "this post is going to be terrible and exhibit this guy's lack of dfo knowledge". Then you proceeded to list a bunch of spells that actually are near worthless and need to be addressed. +1 you've got the right idea.
