I've noticed this change too. Mana tide gets a giant bullseye above it and blessing of freedom is almost invisible due to the chaos in pvp. I agree that these spells should be somewhat visible but each of them approach opposite extremes. When facing good teams that have "/target mana tide totem" macros, none of this matters. It will get nuked asap. BOF is a little trickier since you can't make a macro like "/target player that has BOF and dispell it" so it should be a bit more visible then it is in its current state.

Well, the old wavy feet animation of BoF did look quite bad. Ever since 2.0 most paladin spells have undergone changes (for the better) to make our spells look a lot less plain instead of being carbon copies of each other. My guess is that is what they had intended and the PvP repercussions were the last thing they had in mind.

That said, your complaints about Mana Tide are quite valid. I really don't see why they couldn't give mana tide (or totems in general) totems a bit more health than a lousy 5 HP.

The idea of totems is to be buffs (well multiple buffs actually) but as a counter to there being a lot, they are easy to destroy, therefore the lousy 5hp. I mean even if you buffed it to 100 they would be onehits to almost everyone anyway (excluding caster classes like me who only do 80 damage per swing). And if you give them too much life they end up being an inbalance cause you can't kill them fast enough.

However why they had to give mana tide a big *here a totem* sign is beyond me, even though in the end I doubt it will have much of an effect. Most totems go down in short order in all the fights i've been in against shamans anyways... questionable how much those extra one or two ticks will help.... still, this seems like a slightly silly change.

Spellalert etc is fine. Mods that auto kill totems with auto attacks are not.

After living in a world of magic, it is not too far fetched that adventurers (i.e. your character) can learn what spell each person is casting by noticing their movements or the incantation etc. At least that is how bliyyard, an RPer etc can justify it. So that is fine, its also why the spell name appears in the combat log. However mods that can auto target and white attack kill a totem the second it is placed are just plain stupid.

And yes, spell broadcast is quite common. Even UO had this in the sense that when you cast a spell, words visibly appeared above your head and players learned to recognise the words quite fast (Corp Por!) so I would be exceptionally shocked if this ever changed.

But getting tothe meat of this discussion, the change was unecessary and may help average teams to locate and destroy that pesky totem, however nothing will change for the end game where players would perform the same action anyways,

(edit)
Wow, what tart gave me a negative rep for this? Someone asked why a rogue would know what spell a mage is casting. I gave a plausible explanation and also referenced it to being an RP response or a way blizzard may justify it. Just because you don't like it, don't be a jerk and give unjustified reps.

The solution would be to remove HP from totems entirely. Instead make them "Totems are destroyed if they take damage more then once." Perhaps apply this only to totems such as mana tide. This would scale perfectly with the game rather then give them X health which would need to be buffed every time the players start 1 shotting totems again.

As for BOF, I think it still needs tweaking in terms of grafics. Don't make it a giant bullseye for dispells but don't make it invisible either. It's a little hard to find a happy medium.

Slight derail but is there a mod(like spellalert: X gains X) where i can filter what i want to see as an alert, like in this example BoF.

I'm guessing that the BOF animation got changed because it was exactly the animation of one of the High Elf water nuke from Lineage 2 - the similarity was uncanny. Only difference was color and duration.

You can make more sophisticated macros.

/tar Tremor
/tar Windfury
/tar Grounding
/cast Wand


IIRC, that should still work and stick to the last valid target going from top->bottom. If partial matching is a problem, /tar Grounding Totem,1 might still work.

I'm guessing that wasn't even a factor.