The only thing mages need in PvE is for CoE to merge with CoS, and even that's not really necessary as any raid with 2 or more mages is getting CoE anyway. 15% more stamina doesn't even come close to matching the value of a single immunity shield. I don't even know what you guys are going on about anymore.

It was really nice to do competitive damage for awhile, especially since we were overshadowed by seed of corruption on the AoE front. Now we aren't going to be top(or even competitive) in either, especially with the loss of arcane talents to make AE better.

My guild frequently raids with 3 or 4 mages in the raid, and for us this is going to be a big hit. We lose one of our warlocks damage curses for elements, and 2-300dps from each mage.

I really hope WotLK brings some added value back.

No. Any raid with 3 or more Warlocks and 2 or more mages is opening the door for coe. It's a bit more specific that way. I do agree though that the curses need to be merged and I would go farther to say they need to include nature damage.

Still, the IB is meaningless. What fight is the mage in danger of dying on? Gorefiend. Can we iceblock? No. And yet a Warlock can eat 2 bloodboils if need be and heal through it. I really can't think of a scenario where a competent mage is going to go "yay iceblock" very often in pve. I mean one of the examples in this thread was we could avoid the 30% pushback while static charge is on us in Vashj. Really? That's the change the mage forum is so happy about?

Either way, besides the curse, my biggest pain right now is spirit stat allocation.

Edit: Of course, funny enough, both of those concerns were fine when I could spec arcane.

And the ~10000 or so damage from the dot...

Firstly, I did not say the talents are good, or useful or anything of the sort. I said they are unique, incorporating some game mechanic that isn't otherwise observed. And I don't get what you're hinting at; rather than have to spec for Evo you now get it as a given and have a shoddy 11 pointer which is situational and arguably useless, much like the one in fire.

Edit: Never mind, left forum without refreshing before went off to SSC and didn't read enough answers to realize I'm repeating posts.

Claiming a buff as a hindrance to a further, different buff you're desiring is like asking for your coffee to not be warm, because you'll order a sandwich later and you don't want the bread soggy.

I couldn't agree more about depending on CoE too much. Even when the numbers support it, it is sometimes hard to get locks to use it with 2 mages in the raid. They really should just add nature damage onto CoE. Would make elemental shamans happy and would offset their recent nerfs. At the same time it would make justifying CoE being up much easier. With the recent nerfs and uproar on the shaman forums, I can't see a better time for them to implement it either.

Well, my point was that you need at least 3 warlocks to make mages DPS compete. How is that making sense design-wise ? We need spriest, shaman, and 3 warlocks to output DPS in line with the other classes. 3 warlocks is quite a requirement which I know EJ will rarely meet. Plus, if that weren't enough, you also need 2+ mages. Sure, not many class can claim to do well with only 1 player (destro locks come in mind due to low ISB uptime), but unlike other classes if we have just 1 player then even if you get 3 warlocks, if you only have 1 mage its better to COA than to COE.

My point really is that if you know well ahead of time you won't get more than 2 warlocks on average, then its mostly admitting you might as well drop your mages for dps classes since mages won't be able to do anything about it - which is very stupid. I can accept low class DPS because a raid lacks synergy (ie: you have no shaman versus rogues with dps warrior+shaman), but the 3 warlocks per raid is not a matter of group synergy, its a requirement that's even worse, something that should not affect a single mage having low dps.

EDIT: And yes, I do believe if we had a merged COS/COE it would fix most mage PVE problems. I don't think anything else would be needed.

Kir: A) I was never 'angry' at Reign. The way I initially interpretted his post was that of a whine. The essential quality of TC forums, as I understand it, is to assess/compare the values of different combinations of gear, talents, spells, and strategies. My comments about his post were put onto paper because (likely due to the poor english) it did not look like he was providing arguments about any sort of valuation statement. No hard feelings involved.
B) You are absolutely right. I misread his post. After reading your post, his response to my post, and his original post two or three more times, I now clearly understand the point he is trying to make.

Reign: The edit to the original post makes all the difference in the world. Not only that, but your second post seems focused and intelligently worded. If I had to cite a reason, I would have to guess that the difference is in the emotional tone of the first post, and the objective tone of the second. In any event, I'm not sure how my original post has any errors in either grammar or syntax (I'm pretty sure the present participle, "...typing in incomplete sentenses..." is correct here), but I should probably apologize for being hypocritical if errors in my own posts exist.

Manyly: I completely agree with everything you assert in your recent, long post. In case it wasn't obvious, you were the "credible source of intelligent information" that I was originally talking about. However, even if a death that iceblock can prevent only happens once a year, the fact that it is now going to be trainable (read: free) means that it is a strict gain for all mages in all cases. That's all I was trying to say. I didn't mean to try to address whether or not free IB fixes any of the problems of philosophy or raid synergy that mages face (it doesn't).

I would like to point out that I notice a lot of your posts provide statements of value for non-quantifiable things. Your assessment of the value of IB is a timely example. It is dangerous to the collection of mages that read this forum, as they might just accept that view as gospel. The fact is that many things nuances of the game (value of IB, value of stam, etc) have values that are negatively correlated with player skill. Simply put, the 'better' a player is, the less they are going to care about these things. I've never seen you play, but I clearly assume that you are very, very good at the game, and thus Ice Block is obviously not going to be worth a lot to you. But for the less-skilled mages reading these threads, who die on maybe 10% or so of non-wipe boss encounters, IB being newly available to EVERY flavor of mage is a huge deal.

The last thing I want to address here is some chatter I've been seeing recently regarding the value of Ice Block. When people attempt to highlight the value of Ice Block (generally to support their argument that IB is a 'big deal'), I read things like:

"You can IB out of silences, for an extra X seconds of DPS"
"You can IB out of poisons or static charges on Vashj"
"You can IB out of watery tomb against Tidewalker"

I will argue that these uses of Ice Block, except in the case of a level of player skill that is so high that it borders on perfection, are greedy and inefficient. A player will have to die in any given encounter a VERY small percent of the time for this type of Ice Blocking to be considered optimal. Essentially, the fact that it has such a long cooldown means that it can only be used once an encouter. Clearly it is better used to prevent the mages imminent death (effectively becomeing a combat rez) than to garner extra dps time (as a pvp trinket) or to debuff remover (we have shaman, paladins, and priests for that).

Manly

I agree for the most part, we are currently, underperforming both utility and dpswise. The dps will be somewhat fixed as fire at least in 2.3, though the TPS is already almost (without CoE) too high for our (my guild) tanks to handle.

What I dont agree about is that you seem to be under the impression that this is our fix, and our only fix, to all our PvE related problems. This was obviously not their intentions with the addition of IB, it is merely a survivability buff for the mages that needs it, and even for the ones that claim they don't need it - for those moments when you actually have bad luck or when learning a new encounter. It is far from necessary out of a PvE perspective, but I still consider it a nice addition.

However, trainable IB is obviously more of a PvP targeted change, and a really really nice one which, I for one, is really happy about. I'd hate to see it not being implemented because people are assuming that it was our PvE fix.

I totally agree that we need more competative dps and possibly have our AoE cap removed (along with other aoe oriented buffs) to at least get SOMETHING that distinguishes us from the rest. I mean, seed of corruption totally negated one of our advantages. Utility is overall lacking, and I really don't see this changing without revamping some of our old roles (water dispenser/ai/amplify/portal boi etc). Maybe allow amplify to be cast offensivly, and have our food/water give some sort of buff that cannot be gained anywhere else? The food from ritual of refreshment that is, and set it to BoP.

Fire (again for guilds who's MT can't keep up) could also use a fix to invisibility, possibly IB+Invisibility which was already suggested.

Arcane was intended to be top dps at the cost of being very mana inefficient. This has not been the case and certainly won't be the case in 2.3, thus there will surely be arcane buffs to come. Good TPS and good DPS at the cost of efficiency would be nice for arcane.

Trainable IB does most certainly not fix our shortcomings in PvE, but it does help tremendously in PvP, and in some PvE scenarios aswell. Don't confuse this with our need for PvE oriented buffs as I'm sure they will come along eventually, at the very least for arcane.

CoE merged with CoS would be a really great start.

Well if I worded it wrong, then that's my fault, but I was trying to agree with you that bringing -any- mages requires 5 of your 25 raid slots (if you're min/maxing). I'm sure most guilds don't have that freedom with raid composition though, but I could see myself sitting out because of it.

I'd still like to bring up that top end mage gear has almost 200 spirit on it. Now any way you slice it, thats 150-200 allocation points that I'd gladly trade for agility,int,crit,dmg,stam. I say agility, because I get more use out of the dodge and armor than I do from spirit.

How, precisely? Assuming a typical 850 sustained TPS tank, and assuming you have 30 yard range (-30%) and BoSalv (-30%), you would have to be doing 1730 dps to out-threat your tank. And I very much doubt a mage is going to be doing 1730 dps on a single-target mob, ignoring the odd AB-spam burst. I don't even think (Akama aside) it's *possible* for frost/fire to break 1700 dps?

I'm baffled why you think this, to be honest. Seriously, as a raid leader, why would you bring any Mages? I don't understand it, personally. Hunters do more/equivalent dps, can misdirect your tanks to make aggro solid from the start of every fight, and more importantly are FAR less subject to dps loss from pushback and having to move to avoid aoes. Not to mention, on the rare fight where resists are an issue for Mages(Supremus/Illidari Council), Hunters get to ignore them.

Warlocks do not have simply 15% more stamina, they have higher base hitpoints(this allows them to do things like wear items with 0 stam, which increases their dps, btw) and their set itemization is better because stamina is their primary stat, whereas instead of making stamina our primary stat(this would make sense), we instead get the last 5-10 points of int on every item as its highest stat just to... I dunno, waste item points? That extra int provides 0 benefit for raids. Not to mention the additional value wasted on Spirit.

Warlocks on average have 11.5-12.5k hp in raid gear, raid buffed. Mages have 9.5-10k. That's 25% more hp, not 15% more stamina. And that's when they don't even have to try to gear for stamina at all. Soul Link also allows them to do things like tank aoe mobs(in fact, I know a Warlock who specs and gears to tank instances, and can tank heroics), and they don't even sacrifice any significant dps in a demo build. Mages just die when aoe mobs target them. All the avoidance in the world doesn't mean crap when the(keeping in mind that SoC is now superior to AE) class next to you can simply tank stuff straight up.

More importantly, up to 3 Warlocks provide a raid-synergistic curse and they provide soulstones which are additively useful regardless of how many locks you have, as well as up to 3 different types of healthstones.

I mean heck, even hunters provide 3% damage to their entire group, or Expose Weakness which is plenty of dps added to melee. Sorry, Vontre, you're going to have to justify stuff like "I don't even know what you're going on anymore".

As far as I can tell, every other dps class adds(usually multiplicatively) dps to other classes in the raid. Mages don't. Yet Mages don't have more dps than those classes than do. How can a class that does the same dps, yet provides no multiplicative damage boost be desirable? Even assuming we have COE, what's the point? Mages drain from your raid, they don't add anything.

Don't ask me seriously :o

I've been focusing on PvP since release of TBC, only just got back to raiding recently. Thus my gear is horrible. I have 990 fire damage and 32 crit unbuffed, and 13 hit or so. I don't get CoE, yet I'm close to threat cap in alot of encounters :P

Everything I've seen would suggest that we do have more dps than other classes. Actually right now. And we'll do more post-patch. We are the rogues of ranged dps, we don't need synergy because we make the best use of it. And we have the widest and best array of control abilities too.

I've seen Hunters and Warlocks both exceed 1800 sustained dps. As far as I'm aware, even after patch, the best we're getting is 1800-1900 or so, and that's based on a spreadsheet, not real.

The only thing changing for Mage dps in the patch is the coefficient unnerf, yet there was an analysis done of WWS logs for 10 top guilds, Mages always did the least dps by a fairly large margin.

WoW Forums -> Hyjal DPS Analysis

The coefficient nerf will bring us near-par with Warlock dps based on those numbers, but it will not allow us to come near Hunters and of course not rogues.

This would be great if more boss encounters required you to control mobs, but only about 10% do.

That post you linked is almost 2 months old by now.

I'm a raid leader (and mage) of my guild - the main reason we have 4 mages on the raiding roster is simply a function of them being good friends and good players. They sit more than any of our DPS classes simply because they don't bring the same blend of utility/dps/survivability that shadowpriests/locks/hunters bring. Hopefully 2.3 changes that, but I have my reservations.

Also, I'd take 15% stam over a single 5-minute immunity, even though the immunity is pretty useful situationally. We'll see how fights evolve in Sunwell I guess?

WWS reports lower dps for fire mages due to fireball dot uptime. The report was based on dps, not damage done. It was also based on a whole 10 wws reports. It's good for a laugh at best, if you'll notice that report has Manly using his experimental arcane/fire cycles which he said were no good.

A few things

1- skills. I don't claim to be a super player. I messed up a lot and also have learned from it. When it comes down to it, I just play a ridiculous amount of time. I suppose 200 days of /played is somewhat an indication of this, given that I never AFK when I play. In fact, I started to learn a lot more when I joined EJ and went from being 'the top mage' (in other guilds) and actually the tables were turned and suddently I was playing with players better than myself. I do my best to play well, and as such I believe AM spec is by far and wide the most enjoyable spec, since it requires more attention to your play if you really want to push the envelope. But putting those details aside, my claims about IB uses shouldn't be related with skills or anything like it. I do agree with you that a higher sklilled player probably doesn't relies much on IB. But I think that from what I have seen, in EJ, we always go for the safest and most reproducible boss strategy possible. I know for a fact that if you give Gurgthock the choice between a risky strategy and just 'pad it up' with heavy stacking of healers -versus- using a balanced raid and safe play, its obvious he's gonna go for the latter. If every raid worked that same way, where we 'avoid player skill' and instead rely on the soundness of the boss killing strategy specifically tailored to avoid player screwups, then the relative value of ice block will naturally die down.

I wish I could say I never cratered on archimonde. Or that I never pressed the windows-key on archimonde as a doomfire was headed my way. Or that on my first port on shahraz I got that wonderfull port directly behind the tree in the small room to the right that you cant see anything unless your camera is directly on top of you. In case you ask, it got me soo confused despise having been warned about it that I still didn't respond to it and consequently died. Hey I made all of those mistakes. Yes, IB could have helped. But I mean, you make those mistakes once or twice, then you learn to avoid them. I think thats how it goes with everyone. But then again, we also wear max stamina gear on archimonde and always have stacks of fire protection pots, and make sure to not use potions or gems to mitigate doomfire damage if it becomes an issue. We also enforce PVP trinket on every player as well as give a shaman to every group. In addition to all this I also have WOTF. Sure, IB could help, but at that point, I have a hard time to say it is truly needed or a matter of skill and screwup mitigation.

2- Wasted itemisation points. I would like to avoid the discussion about 'wasted itemisation points'. I am not saying the issue is real or not. I do have a guenine intention to make a post about coe being too narrow and proposing cos/coe as a possible fix. If I am to bring this up, the first thing I want to avoid is having the thread turned into a whine or trying to ask for too many things. I don't think blizzard is as likely to respond to a big post about all the mage problems rather than just one suggestion that is well detailed. I think what I am trying to say here is that I want to only list my 'strong arguments' and avoid the smaller ones because all the 'small arguments' end up doing is getting lots of nitpickings done / sideline conversations about the things that don't really matter. Yes, itemisation in TBC as a whole is lacking. Yes, sockets are one of the most stupid invention ever made (or to be more exact: their stupidly low ilvl cost and their ability to dodge exponential ilvl costs of stacking one stat). Every class suffers from this. It's not class specific. Even if we did lose 200 spirit points from tiered gear, then what? We gain some dmg some crit some stats. It won't really rebalance the class.

3- AOE. We could discuss at great length comparing SOC versus mage AOE. I believe that if you get less DPS than warlocks doing SOC, you aren't using your strength as advantages. Our strength in AOE is low threat (ie: AOE more aggressively/earlier) and bigger range (and AEing while jumping increases it further fyi). In my experience arcane mages always rape meters on AOE because we play extremely aggressively. I even extensively rely on tranquil air totem and am the first to point out when it isn't down. I would even use [Prism of Inner Calm] if it didn't have an ICD. I could also use the crappy -threat potion since its a -threat given to all mobs that isn't being split across the number of target (yes that's not very known fact :P ). Fire mage AOE is about on par with warlocks SOC. It's all about playing your strengths out.

4- firespec 'threat' problems. Please keep in mind that tanks gain a really substansive threat boost due to the new expertise ratings. Enough in fact to pretty much cover the 'gap' that never really existed. I think a derail on this is too soon to be speculated. We need to see the real impact in a raid setting to conclude anything.

5- arcane spec dps, 2.3 and mana issues. Yes, I fully agree that the proper way to balance arcane is to increase its DPS and lower its DPM. That is the cost to high DPS. And yes, we are very far from having anything close to that. Arcane has serious mana issues because the spells we have suck balls scaling-wise. Mages always had mana issues. In early wow, magery was mostly a matter of stacking as much int as possible. 13k mana pools (in T1 no less!) were not uncommon. That was one of the first signs that mages had mana issues. Then they made evocation free to all mages because it was required to have. To this day clearcasting is still arguably a must-have talent. Now they increased arcane talents to get 15% more mana and its still not enough (as the recent blue post admitted). And thats not to speak about the fact that mages need the absurd mana regen from a shadow priest.

Arcane spec scaling is basically fubar. The spells don't work in 2.3. AM never worked in the first place, it was only working because of MSD+TLC+ashtongue which is pretty telling about just how bad the spell is when really its DPS comes from those 3 items. AB is borderline unusable. Sure you can do AB rotation for the sole sake of dodging the need for COE, but that's not really a choice you are making, or a matter of personal preference; all it's doing is acknowledging the narrowness of COE and why cos/coe should probably be merged.

OK, but I'd still like to see how we can do 2000dps, because I would consider that to be the absolute minimum for Mage dps to be said to be better than other ranged classes. I still haven't seen a single post from you stating how or why you think Mage dps is higher than other ranged classes in more specific terms.

I honestly want to believe that Mages do more dps, but you haven't said even one single thing to prove it. Even your spreadsheet seems to blatantly disprove it, since it does not give numbers any higher than any other ranged dps class I've seen actually play or in WWS, and spreadsheets over-report real dps.

(I wasn't really basing my argument on that report, just trying to come up with something better than "what I've seen" because I think arguments based purely on what you've personally observed in your guild or whatever are useless)

I was mostly basing this off the WWS reports Manly links me. I've done very little cross-class theorycrafting as it tends to be messy. As long as that CoE is up mages should be hitting very hard. A mage who's that well geared, around 1500 spell damage after raid buffs, will see ~8% more damage from fireball. The spellcasting fix is also a ~3-6% increase to haste, probably a little more since 100% stopcasting might not be reasonable. This is more ~7-13% for scorch, which is a big deal as scorching is a significant factor in fire mage dps.

I just opened up my spreadsheet and equipped a mage in the best gear available, matched all his socket bonuses with blue quality gems, and gave him a shaman/bloodlust. The result was 1952 fire dps estimated, or 2000 dps from straight fireball spam. So the spreadsheet supports it.. though I've personally never seen 2000 dps from anyone, not nearly geared enough. Except on Shade of LolAkama.

Edit: This kind of thing is extremely hard to prove statistically, no one really has access to a substantial worth of valid data. Except Blizzard.

counter-argument
4.2k dps
Wow Web Stats

(yes this is me being nitpicky and sarcastic)