Yeah, I meant 2000 actual dps, under real encounter conditions, Seeing as how hunters can do 1900 dps I'm totally not seeing how "Mages are the rogues of ranged dps". Even if we do have an advantage, it's something incredibly tiny, like 5%. Rogues are rogues because their advantage is huge and evident to everyone. Mages are certainly competitive, but +80dps in perfect gear in the spreadsheet doesn't say "rogues of ranged dps" to me at all. It says "swap out for someone who provides synergy".

Wait a minute. Nobody ever said 2.3 mage dps was not fine. It is fine. It is balanced. However, without COE it isn't. This is the clinging issue.

EDIT: I feel sad saying this but that linked naj'entus report seems bogus. Casters with above 1700 dps on najentus is hard to do with bloodlust, and drums. Its almost impossible without drums. Lots of numbers in that parse don't match every other top parses of najentus. I know I tried my best on najentus and I can assure you 1600+ is already pretty rare from casters, 1700 being mostly unheard of.

RE-EDIT: I am wrong this is yet another side-effect of WWS dps time% calculation poor implementation. I checked a number of parses and basically if you have 100% dps time you have the figures I mentioned, but if you have 90% dps then 1800 is possible. I suppose AM'ing the bubble increases your DPS time but not your DPS, resulting in your dps being diluted. I have found a parse where I got 1800 but then almost every other parses im more around 1600-1650 because I usually keep spamming AM during bubble to generate procs.

I'm saying that it's competitive and balanced, with COE. Vontre is arguing that we have an advantage, however, and that advantage justifies the fact that we provide no group benefit at all, unlike every other class. I don't see any such advantage, and that's my problem.

I agree that Mage dps is fine, I don't think we should become ranged rogues, but I think Mages need some sort of group benefit capability to be really worth having in your raid. Every single dps class does this except Mages and Rogues.

I was saying after the 2.3 patch... take that mage right below the hunter in your WWS and multiply his dps by 1.05. Now we have an advantage.

Edit: Well not quite, but you know what I mean. Probably a very small advantage. Instead of dps synergy we get superior mobility and control. As well as a group buff. People still whine when they don't get intellect, so I assume some people like it, even if we don't particularly have a use for it. =p

No raid synergy?

I say Bring On WotLC Brilliance Aura.

I also stick by my previous post with making frost crits give some kind of funky debuff.

As for the suggestion someone said that this debuff should stack to x5 or it should last 10sec so it can be perma-up, I riposte that I specifically selected 5sec so it -couldn't- be perma-on, and 2% crit size increase to all incoming spells or 2% mob hit chance decrease were suggested so it -isn't- too big. I envisaged a debuff along the lines of druid's Insect Swarm. Remember we're talking about a 11 or 21 talent here, for One Point. Winter's chill gives a perma-up debuff that stacks to 5, causes 0 raid synergy yet it needs 5 points and is a few tiers lower.

And for the sake of God, make shadow priest spells 15% cheaper and their Vampyric Manawhore spell return 15% less... It's getting to a point where everyone except paladins and warriors want one in their group.

Well, uh, that would put him on par, actually, which is my point. Even if that 5% was pure advantage, it wouldn't really be enough to avoid getting lost in the noise of random occurrences . That's why Rogues have(and need) much more than a 5% advantage, to make it clearly desirable to have them.

Turn int into a group aura and double it, then we're taking, imo :P I wish our superior mobility and control were real advantages, but very few encounters take advantage of them, and the mobility only compensates for our pathetic hitpoints(playing with fire so adds insult to injury...) some of the time. Honestly, I'd drop Blink for 20% more hitpoints. In a flash. Wouldn't even think twice. And given the number of snarable/rootable mobs in boss encounters, I'd say that Blink is pretty much our primary advantage.

This.

When I started raiding I wore full crafted gear, spellstrike and spellfire. I min/maxed every single stat for damage. I sacrificed stamina as much as I could if it meant more damage. I ended up with 5.8k hp before raid buffs. I had aboslutely no problem what-so-ever doing gruul, void reaver, mag, and everything before that.

Plenty of other classes with double my hp got hit by orbs, shatters etc. I did spec frost, I crafted by full FSW, and I loved having iceblock. I just never needed it. Manly cited lategame examples, and I don't have similar experience, but all the fights I mentioned have lots of aoe damage.

Iceblock is not needed to survive.

This nit-picking "+5%dps = excuse for utility" is getting annoying, out of hand and pointless gentlemen.

I will recall you a few months back to the blizzard statement that Mages are destined to be AoE kings while rogues are destined to be DPS kings.

Of course, after Blizzard decide as a company to maintain this perspective, one does not expect them to honour it with respect to current content and thus redesign the whole game world to fit that description.

I expect the future Zulaman, Sunwell, as well as anything in the Litch King to make our role less DPS and more AOE than it is now, ending this constant bickering about how one class should out-dps another.

Sancus you argue too much about raid utility from Hunters and Locks. I agree, Locks have too much power in many, many circumstances. This has come about because locks were envisaged with too much potential synergy from the get-go and the shadowpriest PvE viability in BC has made it scale one stop too far. But Hunters? Come on... You only need one bloody hunter for MD pulls and you can't convince me that MD is critical on any bossfight, at least not more than one. MD is at least as useful as having a Poly and an AOE, as well as a ranged Silence. I have yet to see any guild forgo a mage slot for a hunter for raid enrichment.

You know, I really wish that being melee was back to having some sort of disadvantage, but Blizzard seems to have decided that melee should be no more dangerous than ranged. There aren't really any encounters at the T6 level where melee are in more danger than ranged, and I'm guessing they've decided to drop this idea/mechanic entirely.

Only disadvantage of being melee is the threatcap.

You're forgetting that melee can't switch targets easily and incur a great deal of damage loss when they do.

Like High Warlord, Supremus, Akama, Gorefiend, Mother, Ros, Illidan, Archimonde, Kazrogal, Azgalor, Anetheron, and Winterchill are target intensive fights that are not friendly to melee.

I think his point was that the endgame is in no way designed to punish melee for being, well, melee. The damage going out is often times aoe. I don't know about your guild, but our hunters, rogues, and dps war top charts. If anything, I switch targets more than they do (infernals, akama guys) and I lose my curse during the process.

Edit:
Don't underestimate hunter utility. I've been saved by a scattershot/trap many, many, many, many times when someone breaks my sheep. I've done heroics and loved the nature buff. I've seem them help tanks build threat when something awful happens during an attempt or the boss has a threat knockback ability. They destroy ROS phase 1. They do very respectable damage (currently above mages, but that may change). They simplify (even trivialize) difficult pulls like council or High King. They increase their parties total damage.

Well of course you switch targets more than they do; you're ranged. You have the reasonable option. Nobody is gonna make a rogue run across the map to dps infernals. And nobody is gonna stack their raid with 6 rogues either, because that would be suicide. Melee no longer dies outright to cleaves, but it is still very much a disadvantage, the pbaoe doesn't hit as brutally hard anymore but it is still there.

I disagree. All dps classes rely on such supporters. That's not a mage specific issue.
Take away a shaman from a meele group and take away a shaman from a mage group, the meele group will loose much more dps than the mage grp, even assuming both groups would do the same same dmg with shaman. The same is for warlocks. Although there is a difference, because mages are the only class wich really benefits from COE, the other curses help more than one class.
We don't rely on spriests also (in non aoe fights). After 2.3 nobody will cast arcane spells. Frost is easily sustainable without a spriest, even without clearcast. Fire is also quite sustainable without a spriest, especially in shorter fights (~5 min) with chain chugging mana pots, gems and evocation. Sure you loose some dmg while evocation, not being able to use destro pots, etc.
However mana regeneration for mages is still a broken mechanic.

Let's say you get time for 1 extra fireball per iceblock out of such effects.
In a 4min fight you'll be able to use it only once, but if you cast 50 fireballs in such a fight, one extra fb is just 2% more dmg isn't it?

I never said that IB trainable fixes mages viability. Our combination of dmg, group/raid support and survivability is still worse than most other classes. Especially because an additional mage brings absolutely nothing to the raid.


Are you seroius? We are talking about raids here, kiting and ice barrier don't protect you from pushbacks in raids. One of the biggest arguments against fost speccs in the last 30 pages of this thread was that it has no spell pushback prevention.
Let's assume for a sec. that frost would get a burning soul equivalent as iceblock replacement. Remember Vontre's calculation where frost dps was better than fire dps in a patchwork scenario:
Now remove the spell pushback component in the calculation because there would be no difference between frost and fire, change the "WE alive time" to 75% and change the scenario of 2 fire mages against 1 frost mage for ramp ups into a more fair scenario i. e. 1on1 or 2on2 and you will get pretty interesting results I think.

Giving frost a spell pushback like fire would be a pretty interesting thing and would get more interesting as gear gets better because the gap to 2p T4 increases.

Would a pushback prevention being unbalanced for soloing / leveling?
No, IB is available to fire while leveling also and what kiting is for frost, that is range, pyro and fireblast for fire.
Fire sometimes (bad gear when leveling up) needs pushback prevention because mobs will reach you before killed.
Just because frost doesn't needs a pushback prevention for leveling (because of kiting, ice barrier) it isn't unbalanced to add that at all.
Let's be realistic, trees for leveling aren't balanced at all and probably will never get.


Just comes to my mind: When IB is trainable, is there still a reason why frost dps should be lower than fire dps? (From a design standpoint and looking at raids, ignoring pvp and leveling)

I'm guessing your healers were taxed fairly heavily? Gruul yeah, if everyone is acting right, but I mean when I'm starting out bosses I like to have a bit of forgiveness room. Not EVERYONE is going to get it right the first time. And one of the first fights in BT everyone raid wide takes constant AoE damage and an periodic 8.5k dmg AoE. STamina is a valuable stat. I'm not sure where you're going with this.... But EJ is from what I can tell a forum for late game raiding and stamina is a VERY valuable stat in end game raiding

If I had 5.8k hp for raiding before buffs. My raid leader won't even allow me to raid. Its that straight forward.

If this were qualified "for 99% of non-raiders" I'd agree more. I don't think that in a serious raid situation mage durability is broken. Mana gems usually alleviate some of the need for mana pots freeing up health potions (or vice versa with healthstones). Blink makes most AE dodging and other forms of juking out of incidental damage trivial. Fire / frost ward are still impressively useful. Frost nova is a signature skill in AE situations. Mana shield while costly further helps mage survival in ways a lot of classes can't quite match. For solo, small group, pvp etc. iceblock buff is amazing but in raids not a whole lot of the content requires it or even gives a mage a huge margin of survivability.

I know I've seen myself and other mages learn and re-learn how2play with and without iceblock, it's definitely used as a crutch by many.

First, 21 points are 1 pt talents. Pushback prevention isn't something novel like every 21 pointers out of pretty much every class. Arcane gets POM, fire gets blastwave, frost gets (ice block). A spell pushback really doesn't makes sense here. What you can expect is some new spell on a cooldown, just like the rest. It can't be too good on pvp because it wouldn't make sense for the aforementioned reasons. It can be good dps for PVE if the cooldown is long enough (ie: 2-3 min). Or it can be some novelty spell.

It would flat out not make any sense that frost gets spell pushback from talents. The talents are also made to assist you levelling up. Frost is the survivability tree, and as such, spell pushback prevention has no place in a tree devoted towards avoiding damage. Fire has nothing in the tree besides blastwave devoted towards kiting, so it is somewhat assumed that pushback prevention is there so you can keep casting while mobs hit on you.

While this is purely tangential, magery in general is devoted towards avoiding damage. Thats the mage playstyle. We are frail, but to counter-balance this, we avoid taking damage with tools such as blink, frostnova, mana shield, ice barrier or kiting. I would say that anything that reduces the damage we take is stupid at best with that design in mind, but hey we get 2 talents that do that so I guess the developers ran out of ideas (no seriously prismatic cloak/arcane fortitude?). If we were not frail and could have a lot of armor it would be flat out OP. It's pretty obvious in that sense that the overall design philosophy for frost was that you don't need pushback prevention because you can avoid taking damage in very multiple ways:

frostbolt kiting
ice barrier
cold snap
frostbite
permafrost for even better kiting
ice floes (yes even reduced COC cooldown comes into play here)
water elemental (both for its freeze and because he can keep nuking while you take damage, in addition to WE->IB)
imp. blizzard
imp. frostnova
<and not to mention ice armor with frostbite>

(ice block)


I understand that in PVE context your ice barrier isn't really helping much in that department, but check in contrast the fire tree, its immediately obvious that the entire tree is devoted towards increasing your damage. Even blastwave isn't there as a kiting tool, its basically an extra instant attack more than anything else (ie: burst dps). The only way firespec can deal its damage, because all the talents are solely damage increasing talents, is arguably burning soul. There is no way around that for soloing if you were playing using only one tree. Mobs are gonna be hitting on your and you need to keep dpsing them. What do you have? pushback prevention.

If you can't see that it doesn't makes sense that frost gets pushback prevention through talents I fear I cannot explain it to you or that we will ever agree on anything.

My point is not that it provides a huge margin of survivability. My point is that when it IS used to survive, the payoffs are huge, and thus it is a valuable spell (whether you are learning a fight or not).

I have to admit, this is one of the things that annoys me about Fire. There are too many diluted talents. They should really ditch the 3% increased spell damage on Playing with Fire(our dps doesnt *really* justify it, and it's pretty minor anyway) and merge Pyromaniac and Playing with Fire, at the same tier as Pyromaniac.

One of the nice things with a Frost PvE build is that you have enough spare points that you can get improved CS or a couple points of arcane meditation if you are so inclined, or put some points in Impact for pvp purposes, etc. Fire uses up a few too many points for what you get out of them.

That's an interesting point, It IS curious that we have a spell that increases our damage done and taken both by 1% followed immediately by a talent that increases our damage done by 2%... that's a really stupid design, and indicative as a whole of my feelings towards mage talents right now.

It's been mentioned already in this thread that our talent trees make no sense, but ... what was arcane ever really intended to be? It was a GREAT support tree pre TBC but it seems that with 41 point talent builds and people delving deep into them rather than messing around in 2, .... Can someone shed light on what Arcane is supposed to do again?

Maybe you misread or never read the talents in the first place, but Playing with Fire is 3% increased damage done/recieved, and Pyromaniac increase our CRIT rate by 3%, and reduces mana cost by 3%, totally not even close to the same talents.

It makes more sense to make Critical Mass 3% per point, 9% over all, no change deep fire, take out Playing with Fire totally, get a new talent there, and make Pyromaniac 3% more damage done/recieved, and 3% mana cost reduction. Another thing to do is, Re-do the placement of Molten Fury and Pyromaniac, and make Pyromaniac require 5 points into Fire Power, and at the same time, buff Pyromaniac up to 5% total, 1/3/5.

But that is not the point.

What we really need is a change to the warlock class, since they are the biggest buffers to dps overall. Merge CoE/S to one skill, add a Nature and Holy aspect too, can lower the overall damage buff from 10% down to 7-8%, change Malediction to affect CoR by lowering the amount of AP is gives the boss.

Example of what I'm trying to say;
Curse of Natural Elements: Increases Arcane, Fire, Frost, Holy, Nature, Shadow damage by 7%.
Then Malediction: Increases the damage bonus of Curse of Natural Elements by 3%, and lowers the AP granted by Curse of Recklessness by 50.

Makes it so that Malediction is worth it no matter what now, and Shamans/Boomkins/Holy dpsers aren't left out.

Those two changes are a drastic change that would balance the difference of dps classes by so much.

As long as I've been playing the game, Arcane to me has always been the buffer talent tree, which it still is to an extent. All the talents except ONE benefit the dps increase to all skills the same, Empowered Arcane Missiles. This is a huge problem, all the other trees, deep in them benefit mainly that school of spells. The Arcane Tree needs to have Slow removed as it provides no true benefit to the Arcane tree. Prismatic Cloak needs to be reworked too. Also, we could use more Arcane based damage spells, AE, AM, AB... yet none are viable for any real DPS like Frostbolt, Fireball are.