I think its a shame this line was discontinued. It added a different dimension and a bit more flavor to my mages routine. My tank and puller are the same toon, so I always had the opportunity to cast it on incoming pulls. Was an upgrade even debated during past betas?
Without increasing the damage by about 10 fold or the number of hits by alot, its just not worth it. Back when it had upgrades I used it as a pre-combat buff. But if your chain pulling, its not worth the mana compared to just nuking again since the damage can't be focused or crit. Just like the famished flame line or skyfire veil, they were great ideas, but needed to be improved to be practical. Skyfire veil is interesting, but its not worth the constant trouble of recasting and the buff slot to me.
I think even an increase of 2-3 fold would be worth it. Not everyone is chain pulling 24/7, and there are plenty of instances where you can find time to cast it outside of your weave. During TBM I would pull groups of 3-4 with my tank then set him to autorun once close to the group and hit him with mage surge. Basically cast it every pull.
I don't understand, I guess. Why would you cast Skyfire Veil instead of Surge of Shadows? Veil does 2162 damage over 48 defensive proc hits, a total damage of 103,776 damage. Surge does 4121 damage over 48 incoming hits, a total damage of 197,808 damage. And also provides a 3k spell damage shield on spells casted on the person over the 48 hits. Even if you were to have a buff slot available, why would you memorize Veil instead of Surge?
When you say crit, what would a max crit be for this? As far as usage of Surge, it is perma memmed on my solo/box hotbar. I use it on pet right before a named to give a little bit more damage, if I care to remember to. Not the most important spell, and if it does not get upgraded life will go on. But don't poo poo those that occasionally use it- it has some small value...
I'd love it if they had reasonable upgrades. But 3-5 hit damage shields are dumb ideas. As are 2 min buffs you need to keep recasting (skyfire veil). They are just a pain and not fun.
Surge is a 48 hit damage shield. If they tripled the damage on it, it would do ~600k damage. Not bad for a spell that can be cast before you start your main weave. I agree the 4 hit damage shields like Blistering Skin would need a big adjustment to be useful.
For the level 100 spell, it's 48 * 2918 / 2898 = 48, which I'm pretty sure was better mana efficiency than any direct damage spell available to mages even after focus and critical are taken into account, back then. It was definitely used back in the day, so to bring it up to today's standard, we just need to calculate the amount of direct damage increase since 100, and give it a similar improvement. My guess is: 10,000 per hit at level 110 would make people use it again. This spell was never the main source of a mage's damage but it was used because it was the most efficient way to do damage outside of pets and produced no threat. On the other hand, skyfire veil is just bad and I don't know why anyone would ever use it. Same applies to that 4 hit spell they made a while back. Mages used to have a lot of useless spells.
