Love me some lightning! Awesome!
Aww there goes my fire shield build 
but the new skill looks awesome!
Does this skill keying off Static mean Static is finally going to get its much needed buff? Manual activation is so weak its never worth doing. Just its LB autocast spec has any value.
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New Skill, New Build. Thanks Guys.
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sounds amazing!
sounds like a lot of fun! thanks! Keep up the good work.
Now my Shatter Strike SpellBro has a lunge equivalent. Much fun to be had.
Although the interaction with Static charges has me pondering options.
Looks nice!
My Spellblade uses Fire Shield, but could use this even more.
Out of curiosity, what is the idea behind removing Fire Shield?
It was ####/boring.
More than likely it’s because it was kind of too much along the lines of Flame Ward. Maybe Mage had too many “buff” type skills that were kind of similar to each other, and a lack of mobility skills (which really is just Teleport, which is pretty much a staple regardless of your build). This is nice because it gives another option for a mobility skill.
I think there’s only 1 class that has more than one mobility skill (Sentinel, Shield Rush, Lunge, Smite with the Descend node & kinda Volatile Reversal), every other class has 1.
While not a full class, lich mastery has reap + transplant 
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Yup, I thought I was missing something.
Flame Ward & Surge are intended to effectively replace Fire Shield and Ice Ward. The latter were okay as effects, but not great examples of active skills. They’re among the oldest skills in the game, and we have been periodically pruning skills as we add new ones. Both skills were implemented at a time in the game’s life when we had a small number of skills - and even fewer trees - with many of the skills we have today not yet supported by our systems.
We know that both Ice Ward, before it was removed, and Fire Shield were used in a lot of builds so we’ll be watching how this plays out from a class balance perspective and be making adjustments as needed. Some of their effects will be available from other sources, such as class passives and specialisation tree nodes - in fact, a few already are.
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A little sad that Fire Shield disappears, but the new skill looks cool. And also the fact that Static Charges are mentioned makes it interesting to see if Static actually synergizes with this in one way or more?
About Surge it self, I do hope this get the Scaling Tag with Dexterity as well as the current ones. As this currently is the case for all the spellblades attack skills - possibly something else then just the 4% dmg increase per point such as the current Intelligence scaling?
Cool ! Can we see this new skill in a video? How does it look like?
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Well, this discussion began a significant time ago, before Flame Ward as I remember.
As always, I did my own suggestion about it. I can even see something of it here 
(Is this a fit of pride? 
).
Are new skills going to be a thing in this game over time or is this just merely swapping one skill design for another?
They will add new skills. If you look at the skill screen for each class, each column is supposed to have 6 skills in it and I think the only class that has that is the Sentinel (though that does include the stances). Every other class will need a few more skills to finish them off.
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