Despite some of the growing pains I sincerely believe the glyph system provides the skeleton of a truly amazing class design. The concept of a class with a spell for every situation and constant access to every bit of utility in the kit feels very wizardly and at the same time fun to play with a high ceiling for skill expression
It feels like such a huge waste of potential that almost half of the combos we currently have go to different flavors of nuke most of which are pretty interchangeable, lacking mechanics to make them uniquely suited to a specific usecase.
I think the class as a whole would greatly benefit from having each type of spell have a clearly defined usecase it was designed for. If it were me perhaps something like:
Flashes: mostly about quickly, flexibly, and most of all cheaply applying their statuses. Your ideal spell for finishing off an enemy with a sliver of hp or applying a single missing mark without wasting much mana. Reduce the mana cost significantly and probably the damage even more(the goal is not mana efficiency but low net cost). Improve the ice snare and maybe even consider taking these off the GCD
Vollies: its for stacking up marks of magic, no change needed
Spikes: likewise for not getting resisted, that's a fine usecase as is though how hard they are to resist might be tuned
Surges: most mana efficient nukes when reclaim isn't available. Maybe just improve efficiency to that effect. The arcane status effect could bea cool niche especially in combination with lightning flash if it were buffed a bit. As the defacto most efficient option with reclaim on cd these would also be a great place to address Wizard's concerns about being invented to stop DPSing so monster lives to next reclaim: what if each appropriately leveled surge landed reduced the remaining cooldown on reclaim by a few seconds? Or Alternatively surges instead of generating one mark consumed a single mark netting the same mana as reclaim of a similar level to rank of spell
Fireball/iceblast: these are openers and your spiking tools when you're pulling out the stops and dropping your mana bar to blow something up, even accounting for cast tile they should be your best way to frontload damage. Maybe increase both mana cost and damage even farther- making fireball consume marks of magic but get triple bonus damage from marks could be an interesting way to increase damage and provides a reason to stack marks between reclaims. Might also be interesting to make iceblast not benefit from marks at all but buff its base damage and improve it's snare to make it focused as an opener or blast of choice if needed right after a reclaim
Novas: make these AoEs about statuses for when things get too close. Make them cast faster and swap arcane status effect for a short duration version of arcane shackles(maybe 10-15s). Perhaps swap lightning nova ministun for a 25% chance of a longer stub(maybe 1.5-2s) on each targets hit- something that would be more useful defensively in a group AoE comp
Bursts: primary AoE damage spells, maybe just make them a little less mana inefficient
Storms: most mana efficient option but takes time and limited to one at a time fire and forget at start of fight if your group isnt using mezzes, make them more efficient. maybe consider a secondary attack speed slow on ice storm to give it a bit of defensive utility in an AoE comp
More monsters with a weak resist against a specific element would also help a great deal.
And with 4 glyph combos devoted to resistance buffs I'd love to see a reason to cast them in combat, maybe a short duration(3-5s) damage absorption shield against the relevant type of damage when cast? Feels appropriate for a wizard to raise a fire ward when the dragon is about to breath on the party.
What do you all think?
