There is no reason for the Fire Ball Explosion skill to be a separate command when you would just usually press RMB after Fire Ball/Sage's Rage anyway to cast it. After the Mana Absorption change went through, you either have to put it on the hot bar or use spacebar after a skill in order to use it. This added another additional skill for Wizard & Witch where if you want to fully utilize a certain ability, you would need and have to place it on the hot bar along with other numerous skills that are in our entire kit just to be efficient. Therefore, indirectly hurting our way to cast an ability with a quick Forward Guard in situations, despiting the whole point of the skill is to give you mana back while quickly blocking incoming damages.

My eyes are bleeding

Gonna have to hard disagree here, the change is very beneficial since you can use RFB in a more convenient way w/ the sustaining buff than hotkeying it, plus it isn't extremely slow like when you DO ordinarily hotkey it.

About mana absorb, you can still hotkey it from awakening, and if anything, the spacebar input is better given you cancel any staff skill instantly.

Didn't mean to cast blizzard? Space bar. Want to cancel out of that earthquake you cast? Space bar. We had ways to cancel staff skills before via Hellfire/Magical Evasion/Teleport, but now we got ANOTHER cancel AND a beneficial change to fireball explosion.

It's also pretty useful for succession, considering you can cancel the end-lag on certain skills like Blizzard, Meteor, and Earth Arrow, which can then be chaincast off of too.

totally shocking that it is super useful to succession. :)

I totally and adamantly disagree with OP's point. I frankly wonder if it's a trolling attempt.

If you were Awakening Caster, you were supposed to have Fireball Explosion in hotbar already and Mana Drain too. Now, you can most definitively remove the Fireball explosion one and gain one quickslot.

I just came back from a couple months break and the change to Mana Absorption to be with SPACE is really tripping me up because of muscle memory. I play succ but this is honestly annoying me.

Also I noticed Prime Blizzard: Domain no longer persists after the cast. Also an annoying change. It was so nice that it kept going while you were performing other skills.

Though, precisely because some like these changes and others don't - and I have had this multiple times with various classes (for example Dark Knight), I really wish that we could set our own keybinds for skills. Them randomly changing them is simply annoying for some (like OP and myself) and if you could set skills to your own keybinds, no one would have to complain.