I'm trying to design 5-man teams for the Arena. The unknown I'm running into is whether or not Mages (and other magic users) will have enough mana in the Arenas to kill everyone on the other team. If they do, then something like a 5-mage Arena team could work. If they don't, then I'll have to relegate them to support roles and mix them in with melee.

Just to recap, you can't use potions or flasks in Arenas, so you can't get a boost that way. Also, there's twice as much stamina on TBC items than today's items so just because mages might be able to own now doesn't mean they'll be able to do so in the expansion.

In an attempt to illustrate the issue, I made my first WoW drawing:




I'm not familiar enough with Mages nor am I good enough at math to do a rigorous hypothetical, but I invite anyone familiar with the numbers in TBC to comment or theorycraft.

<removed simple example as it was too simple>

To be honest i find the question kind of silly. If a mage could not kill another class that was "AFK" that would be fairly broken. No? I think it is safe to assume that every level 70 mage will be able to do more than 15k damage before going oom, so you can safely say they can kill the warriors if the warriors just stand there... *shrug* I might be stupid, but I don't really see the point here.

My mage alt has precisely one epic (Zandalar bracers) and a bunch of blue +dmg gear that adds up to 260 +damage. She has just under 5000 mana when buffed with AI.

According to Theorycraft, her average fireball hit is 1100, including crits, and its true mana cost is around 300 per cast. So without pots or Evocation or mana gems or anything she can get off 16 fireballs before going OOM, for a total of 17,600 damage.

Scorch improves things even more - with the debuff fully up it ends up with a DPM well north of 5, meaning 25,000 damage or so before going OOM.

So even my crappy little level 60 blue mage could kill an AFK level 70 warrior in TBC, assuming she didn't get many resists (although in reality I'd probably have to wand the last third of his health away - how embarassing).

Mind you, I have heard a few people complain that mage PVP rewards are full of +stam and +resilience instead of +damage and +int, and that going OOM is a bit of a problem. Can any TBC people comment?

I've never played as a mage before and I don't know their damage capacity. And while I know there will be twice as much stamina on gear in the expansion, I don't know how many hit-points various classes will have.

If it's too simple a question, then deal with the harder one: will a mage-heavy group be a viable mix in an Arena. Say three mages, a warlock and a paladin. Will those mages be able to do approximately 25K in damage before going out of mana?

Going for them is Blessing of Wisdom, Curse of Elements and whatever additive effects they might be specced for.

Working actively against them is overkill (damage done beyond what was necessary to kill one person), the opponent's healing, the mana for spells like Blink, Counter-spell and Iceblock and resists.

Five warriors standing there was just to reduce the complexity of the problem.

As I intend to 5 box the arenas, (1 priest 4 mages) - I too am following this very closely. I have taken this team to warlord before (at the same time) so to say it is effective in pre BC pvp is an understatement. As it is now, the first target gets gibbed (pom/pyro x4), fire blast if need be. Thus any fights is just about instantly down a healer and is then a 4v5, which very quickly thereafter turns into a 3v5 and so on. If they stand too far together - Blastwave+AOE Spam takes out the rest. If not, 2x4 Fireblasts or 4x scorches + 4x fireblasts usually gets the job done on all but warriors, warlocks and sometimes hunters, who sometimes nees a followup aoe.

The larger arena look a bit complex, so LOS may be an issue and some stupid combos (5 pallies, 5 rogues) might be able to beat my combo but the way HP is scaling concerns me - especially given the mage sets seem to have little more than a ton of health on them - with little to no crit or damage. What are they thinking exactly? I suppose I can always get PvE gear...... doesn't make a lot of sense though. The aoe stuns are going to be interesting too (I have a growing feeling that I am going to despise warlocks now too.) But really - are a lot of warlocks actually planning on speccing 41 destruction for shadowfury? Is that going to be THE pvp build, or does unstable affliction have more going for it?

Perhaps a better combo for arena would be 4x warlocks 1x priest. Just 9x dot everybody (also drop 4x unstable afflictions on the main tank or healer) and run away, cackling gleefully as they tick at 2k per tick for the next 5 seconds before they are eliminated. Sure you lose the AoE but the hit points, PETS, and everything else might make up for it. You try mass dispelling 9 times (decursive is broken too) and see how far that gets you.

I guess the real question is a bit premature as nobody is 70 yet but how bad are these new HP scalings? Are warriors going to be able to get 12k hps without the use of flasks, etc? Will warlocks sit around 10k? How hard is everybody hitting for? 2k crits are not uncommon for me right now (times 4 - which usually means you get instantly gibbed) but it looks like an all +crit build is being gimped too, atleast against warriors.

Anybody able to shed some light on what these changes will mean to pvp and in particular my somewhat unique case?

At 67, I can get 6400 hp unbuffed, with just blues and greens from the outlands. I expect if I was level 70 and had access to pvp/stamina gear I could easily top 10k.

We used this combo to great effect in 30-39 WSG. You can blow the entire enemy team apart with AOE if you catch them in the tunnel, it's brutal.

It's targetted Warstomp with damage component added. It still got cooldown, it still got casting time and taking it blocks access to quite important PvE option (DS), which rules it out for many warlocks.

If you can manage fighting Taurens, you can manage SF warlocks as well. ;)

I am also curious about this since Rogue/Mage are more or less burst DPS whereas Hunter/Lock are a more constant dps. I think more constant dps will prevail in longer battles. So where does that leave the burst dps classes?

Here what I think will happen:
Yes, all casters will face mana problems - mainly DPS casters who dont alter their playstyle. Arena fights will focus now more on endurance, rather than outright burst damage.

Mark my words, I think we'll see significant reliance on wands in TBC, especially in Arena matches. Infact, "Improve Wands" type talents will become more popular.
I forsee people intelligently using Wands that supplement their spec.
- Fire mages will use "Fire damage wands" (thus benefiting from Improved Scorch).
- Shadow Priests and Warlocks will use "Shadow dmg wands" (thus benefiting from Shadow Weaving, Improved Shadow Bolt, etc)

-

Mages gonna do just fine.

No such things as mana problems. Besides is 5 vs 5 .. not 1 vs 5 fight.

Right now it takes 3 frostbolts to kill me from a half blue / half epic mage . Think 2 more frostbolts wont run him oom.

Besides the stamina increase is 50% not 100%

Can we retitle this thread "Best practices: Magic-users having enough mana to last in the arena 5-mans?"

For the sake of argument, we're putting survivability aside. And I seperated apart Rogues because while they're both burst DPS, energy restores at a categorically different rate than mana does. I left hunters out because they're a mix of mana (shots) and constant dps (arrows/bullets). My question was more along the lines of whether Arena 5-mans will qualify as long or short battles and how will Mage's mana endure.

I doubt they will be able to last the entire arena battle, but why should they? They bring to the table tons of control and survivability, and burst damage as well. Once you kill 1-2 people, you've practically already won, you don't need to last the entire battle.

At the admin's request, I will no longer post any "best practices" threads.

So the answer is no.

Let's talk about specifics. If magic-users are the damage dealers of the group and they run out of mana, you can't deal any more damage. So if the Mages run out of mana and they've only killed 2 people from the other team, then you've already lost.

It's far, far too early to start "designing" 5 man teams on this kind of basis for a whole panoply of reasons, not least that the mechanics, talents, and even the arenas themselves at level 70 are still relatively incomplete.

It's kind of like saying "how would you structure your raid for this boss we've never seen?"

IF magic users are the sole damage dealers, and you're unable to control the enemy team via sheep/nova/kite, and you havent killed any of them after your entire mage team is OOM, then yes, you will lose. However, if you've killed 2 people already, making it a 3v5. Why can't you just control them until you evocate, or gem, or whatever else? Hell, you could probably frost nova them, run away and drink a tiny bit.

I just dont understand what the problem is with this. If you don't kill someone before your entire group is out of mana, you obviously didnt focus fire, or counterspell/polymorph. This isnt a problem with the mage class, its a problem with the player not knowing what to do or being outplayed.

A warlock will never,ever ever be out of mana in the expansion. And to add icing to the cake,he will be using your life to replace his lost in tapping ^^

Honestly,high end arena i expect fights to be more or less 4-5 shot fests (much better then 1-2) mana will only be an issues in healer versus caster/healer.

I life tap when ever I can in PvE, I have never ever ever lifetapped in PvP... It would have to be a very special situation for me to consider it... One guy left and CCed with me completely out of mana maybe.. nah I would still probably just keep them feared and regen normally.

Unless significant changes to Pallys are made I'm not seeing how the arena is going to be anything but Pally v. Pally. As a Mage with good damage gear I can do 25-30k damage before OOM if allowed to cast. The problem in PvP is with the nice new casting bar and all of the stuns available mages are now sitting ducks trying to do anything but Fire Blast, PoM/X, or AE. I don't think in all of my arena matches in beta so far that I've been able to cast more than a couple of spells.

Pallys are doing 9-1.4k damage on instant cast nuke now, they still have both stuns, bubble, plate, and heals oh and the ability to hit cloth for 5-1k melee damage too. The way it stands now 5 pallys can nuke/stun/bubble and before the bubble ends they can kill the mage while you can't do any damage to them. At 70 with more PvP gear I can probably buy more time but with Pally having access to all of the plate gear they'll be at 12-16k health meaning they'll have plenty of time to decide when to bubble and heal back to full meaning you're going to have to do ~25-30k damage to kill a single one.

The problem with the increase of health is as you increase health equally across all classes the classes with more damage mitigation recieve an exponential increase in surviviablity. Let me do some really basic math here.....

500 DPS incoming...

WoW1 PvP Mage: 5000 health, 10% mitigation - 11 seconds
TBC PvP Mage: 9000 health, 15% mitigation - 21 seconds

WoW1 Warrior: 8000 health, 60% mitigation - 40 seconds
TBC Warrior: 15000 health, 65% mitigation - 85 seconds

So its pretty simple to see that time to live is doubled for both basically, the number to look at though is the delta between the TTL for the 2 class examples, that amount of time has also doubled from ~30 to ~60 seconds. This is the first exponential problem.

The second is the ability of the more sturdy classes to coordinate and burst damage. This was seen in Guild Wars quite a bit, the most effective offense there is a hearty group of Warriors spiking damage to take out cloth/caster types first. We'll have the same issue here as a 5 pally team can have 3 offensive spec pally and 2 healing pallys (for the mitigation against physical damage). Even though the team won't be able to put out the sustained DPS of a class of DPS teams they have large damage powers with cooldowns that can be effectively used in a spike to kill off the squishies first then once the fight is down to 5v3 or 5v2 the hard targets can be finished off at the leisure of the dominating team.

If you're playing WoW for competitive PvP you're in the wrong game (but I don't believe most WoW players want competitive PvP, they want to stomp on noobs and feel good about it), Blizzard has never done a solid job of balancing PvP play. The PvP in WoW1 was a joke, no great teams existed that I ever saw play (and maybe I'm just a clueless noob). All of the "top teams" I came up against made what I would consider serious errors in their tactics coming from the background of GWWC level organized PvP play (I ran into 1 team that would require careful planning to deal with but all the rest of the "great teams" haven't really had a good match yet to show them what good really is). They also aren't going to make significant changes to the core of the game to balance PvP out either as it isn't really the core playerbase of the game (look at the number of PvP vs. PvE realms). The other problem with WoW PvP is in order to deal with metagame shifts you can't just reroll a new character, you have to go spend ~200 hours of time (with the 1-60 levelling and then raid gearing) to get a new class geared up to the level to be competitive in high end play (this assumes you have all of the raids on farm and can bring a new alt in to gear them). So if today the best team is 5 X, 2 Y, 1 Z and then tomorrow its 5 Z, 2 Y, 1 X you either have to replace half of your team or half of them have to level up a Z to switch from X to Z.

The good news for WoW PvP folks is if you get X (X being # for that BG, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15) people communicating and coordinated you'll win 75%+ of your matches which is good enough to have a good time. That won't make you into a top team, only having the min/max class setup, top gear, and then after that hurdle is done top notch movement and coordination as well. Because of the amount of time required to min/max class setup and gear properly you won't see many great arena teams, they'll be few and far between once you get up to the 5v5, the 2v2 and 3v3 maybe as it won't be too hard to build chemistry in the very small settings.

I don't think mitigation will increase in TBC, since it scales with level, just as the armor value of the items scales with level.
Tanks are already able to reach the mitigation cap of 75% with current gear and all buffs available, it would make no sense if TBC made that even easier, especially with the higher HP values.