I have grown used to the incantations now; I prefer to use them instead of putting things on my bar. But I do miss the chill playstyle wizards used to have before the volley era and the changes that followed. The current incantation wizard is great for people who want to press a lot of buttons; you'll press more buttons than a bard in a given gameplay session.
My favorite iteration of the Wizard out of everything I have seen and played was during the transition to the rework, when Reclaim had no CD, and we still had the free volley that was left on the cast bar. That allowed us to volley and reclaim and generate some damage while recovering some mana. We could swap between nuking and then refilling our bar. The math worked out the same whether you sat and med or stood and cast volley + Reclaim, as far as mana regen and damage over time went. It was oddly unique that way. Then you could choose to be active or be chill, and it didn't matter either way because the damage over time was the same. And then we still had the spell haste buff we could give to people. Casting 4 resists on everyone in the group is so tedious now. 4 button presses per resist (with incants); that's so much compared to 5 casts of spell haste. We also can't trade it with other people, and we can't put it on ourselves ahead of time to prepare for a pull/fight.
However, they are still viable to just put the spells on the bar and be limited in the total amount of spells you can cast and just run with the 1-5 spells you absolutely need. So that still exists, but it feels inferior to play for me now. All of that isn't even my biggest gripe with the Wizard.
We do great burst damage, but that isn't the meta. The current gameplay journey from 1-60 is about sustained DPS over long periods. When you get in a group and pull mobs constantly for an hour or so. Over long periods of time, our DPS falls off hard compared to other classes (speaking as a level 60 wizard with BIS gear pieces, except for a few slots). If you calculate the damage of the Wizard over a 10+ period of time, you'll find their DPS is roughly around a similar amount to that of a Monk, which is not great right now. A really high-end Monk will do about 100-120 DPS; a really high-end Wizard will do about 90-113 DPS over a 10 min period (depending on resists/fizzles/need to use CC instead of DPS/overkilling low mobs). A really high-end archer will do somewhere between 100-200 DPS. If we drop all our mana on a single target, then yeah, for 1 mob we can do like 500+ DPS, depending on crits, but there's never any mechanics or reasons to do that, and when would we have the mana ready to do that in a moment of need anyway?
The meta is continuous damage, and that is something we are not great at. And there are no mechanics that require the level of burst a wizard can give. It is a great tool with no real use. Because we are constantly starved for mana, we never have it when we need it for those moments when perhaps a pull goes sideways. You need to keep some mana for evac, yeah, and then 10 spells will OOM you at 3000 mana with 300 mana per spell cast.
The kind of burst wizards can deliver is useless in the current meta. It's great if you want to steal someone's kill, but that's not the gameplay anyone wants and goes against PnP. It's great DPS, but zero mobs or mechanics need that level of burst, and even if they did, we would be too mana-starved to deliver it when it calls for it.
We have an invocation spell to deliver some mana, but it needs to be % based and not flat mana-based. It scales poorly as you get more gear. The invocation spell is also needed constantly to keep up with the sustained DPS. The problem is that you end up increasing their DPS on the sustain; you feel like you need to decrease the DPS they can do in a short burst, and I disagree.
I think that you can limit the amount of burst potential without toning down the spell damage. You can either give us more tools, like invocation, to grant us a CD to restore our mana for an emergency evac or a moment where it calls for the class to burst down a mob or two. That would give us a mechanic to get enough mana to get the job done even when low or OOM. Or you increase our passive mana regen, which will up the continuous flow of mana for sustain, but that's not going to give us burst mana for burst needs. That means we'd have to save invocation for those bad moments, and since we wouldn't need it for continuous sustain, maybe that would be possible.
Idk, after like 700+ hours of Wizard, that's some of my feedback.
TL;DR: Incantations are my preferred way to play, but it's really busy at times compared to the chill playstyle it used to have. At the top end of gear endgame, we do about as much dmg as a monk and less than an archer/rogue/Ele over long periods of time. The problem is that the game meta is focused on continuous damage; there is no need for burst.
