Mage DPS without a shadow priest does not drop to zero. It's quite possible to DPS without one, it's just not as good. I've cleared all of T5 and T6 (recently, mind you) without a shadow priest, and while it isn't ideal, caster DPS without group support is no worse than sticking a rogue or warrior in a shitty group. Mana is not a crutch in the way you're making it out to be.

Manly: You may want to add "how long does Netherwind proc last before it's timed it's self out" to that list. As well as "will Arcane Potency still affect two spells if they leave your hands at the same time?" because with half the spells in a cycle ABarr and the other half partially instant anyway, we're looking at a fairly large sum of Fireball+NW-Fireball or Fireball+ABarr going off on the same Clearcast charge, greatly amplifying the crit gained from Arc. Pot.


Arazan: Your armory links to a character with no rep with either Ashtongue Deathsworn or Scale of the Sands. I'm sorry I have to say this, as it's the kind of thing reserved for WoW forums and other useless places, but this is clear indication you do not raid in 25-mans. In a 10-man it is very reasonable you do not get an SP, indeed it is reasonable there isn't one in the raid at all, but having you quote me and go "whoa, whoa, whoa, Fire mages are entirely dependent on super mana pots, gems on every cooldown, and evocation up until they get the level of gear where they're hit capped AND have crit rates in the 30%s AND be in a group with a shadowpriest" is quite irrelevant.

Firstly, I don't care about how fire mages are before they reach hitcap. You can and should reach hitcap before you're done with Karazhan. My alt lock reached the mage hitcap before I raided once with BoE gear and gemming.

Secondly, you mistakenly assume crit rate somehow magically affects mana. A bullshit-geared mage will have perhaps 29% crit, a high-crit geared mage will have perhaps 5% more than that. That's a grand total of a mousefart more than 1.2% cheaper spells overall. This is negligible.

Thirdly, currently, in a raid, the game is very, very simple:

Do you have an SP? -> Mana is Irrelevant

Do you not have an SP -> There is all sorts of shit you have to compromise on, depending on length of fight and JoW.

This results in a scenario where "mage without SP = non competitive" meaning you won't even get a spot if there's no SP to feed you, unless you're farming some gimp boss where DPS doesn't matter, in which case you won't care about being sub-optimal to start with.

Hence, what I said: While Raiding the Mage Doesn't Care about Mana. This should and will be changed. Whether or not he cares about mana when he's wearing bullshit gear I'm simply not interested; You'll be wearing sub-standard crap for what? One month? Two? You'll be raiding 25s for over a year. How you experience raids at the lowest rung of the raiding ladder is completely inconsequential.

Jarlyn: The difference between Destro Pot/Flamecap is night and day versus managem/evo/Marmor/manapot. It most certainly is possible, no doubt, but it is not competitive.

I think an encounter with for example an add immune to a random element spawning every 30 seconds where you'd be able to use your main spells most of the time, but there would still be a reward to using other spells, would be a good implementation of immunities.

I'm fully aware mage DPS having to use all mana regen consumables + evo is not competitive. My point was that putting in a mage in a shitty group is no worse than putting any other DPS class in a shitty group. Everyone needs group buffs to produce maximum DPS, mages are no better or worse than anyone else in this regard.

Absolutely. And if anyone thinks we're buff dependent, take a gander at what Rogues need to perform their utmost:

i Hunter's Mark
BoK
BoM
BoS
MotW
WF tot
Str tot
Possibly Agi Tot from twisting
Battle Shout
Unleashed Rage
Sunder Armor
Faerie Fire
Blood Frenzy
Expose Weakness
i LotP
i SotC

I was under the impression that a combination of a lot of things make some specs better than others depending on the content you're doing RIGHT NOW:

1. Immunity fights - Molten Core comes to mind, although this is not necessarily a good thing

2. Utility - those Feral Druids provide LOTP and offtanking, that Affliction Lock provides Shadow Embrace and +3% Curse of the Elements

3. Scaling - Affliction vs. Destro isn't nearly as lopsided at Kara/T4 than it is by T6/Sunwell

4. Itemization - before welfare epics made good swords freely available, a lot of Rogues were Dagger because that was what was on-hand. Also, Arcane T5.

I was thinking about this last night. Why should mana be an issue?

Outside of Arcane blast spamming, is there any mechanic in any of the other schools where mana is used for balance? For fire and frost, if you have infinite mana (a.ka. a shadowpriest), you're below a rogue / warlock / hunter. If you don't have infinite mana, you're screwed.
What exactly are they going to change the game so that mana isn't just a huge inherent disadvantage with no upsides to it in terms of raid balance? If all classes were balanced around the idea of "You have a pool of power, once it's gone it's gone" then it wouldn't matter, but given we have 2 DPs classes (and soon to be a third) coming along that don't use mana at all, it doesn't seem right that they make mana a bigger concern for no other reason than "because that's what mana does".

A complete overhaul of the mana dps system could essentially copy hunters, using a Wand Autoshot with mostly instant abilities on cooldowns. I don't think this would be well received but could "fix" the mana problems that Mages face.

Maybe it is indeed intended to replace both Fireball and Frostbolt for max single target dps, and therfore, the 25man spec.. But in 5 mans and 10mans there is room for other spec aside max dps. there could be room for aoe heavy deep fire, survival deep frost or anti magic arcane, depending on encounter and setup, of course only if they all bring at least decent dps. And let's not forget about PvP. All those other specs wouldn't use frostfire bolt but their respective nukes but still would be viable in some part of the game. I don't see the problem of banning frostbolt and fireball from your bars, I'm doing that already, because only one of them is viable for every specc. banning both of them is not a major overhaul in gameplay but a bit more color to mage class. One more possible specc which wasn't really viable before, sounds good to me. If it fixes mage dps as a side effect, all the better.

Increase mage damage, and a fair bit of this mana issue goes away: homogenization of dps tends to hurt those relying on limited resource mechanics in comparison to classes that don't.

And it is time to ease off on the splash damage and put back meaningful differences in risk between ranged and melee classes. This has gradually disappeared in encounter design, and it is a mistake. I'm not saying go back to the days of 360 degree cleaves, that was absurd on the other extreme. But a major advantage of mana based ranged classes to offset their limited resource was that they were safer and required fewer raid resources in terms of healing. Now you just throw enough shaman and CoH priests to cover the whole raid. Ranged dps requires nearly as much healing upkeep nowadays as melee.

Then it is okay for ranged classes to go oom and manage their mana with some care and you can design the game in such a fashion that they will do so.

Should add one more unanswered question to the list, which was just brought up on the previous page. Does the new half-duration magic debuff effect from mage armor cause DoTs with an odd number of ticks to perform less than half the ticks, or does it add a "half damage tick" at expiration of the DoT to exactly halve the overall effect?

Have you ever heard of Gruul, Magtheridon, Serpentshrine, or The Eye? You know, the content the vast majority of raiders were stuck on until the attunements to T6 were removed because less than 10% of raiders have ever managed to kill Kael according to WowJutsu (and a fair amount of those only went back to kill him after getting some T6 gear to make it easier)? Even without attunements less than one third of the people who have killed a boss in SSC or The Eye have killed anything beyond 3/9 BT and 2/5 Hyjal.

I know WowJutsu has its inaccuracies, but at least on my server I see the percentages bear out pretty well in practice. I'm on a slower progression server, and we only just had our first Illidan kill about two months ago. No one's killed Brutallus. You vastly underestimate the time people will be wearing gear below the highest tier in the game.

MOST raiders are in guilds where they'll be raiding with "crap" (read: T5 or worse) gear rather than the amazing (read: T6+) gear for more like 1.5 years of TBC's 2 year run. You're assuming everyone has access to 24 other people who aren't complete morons. Most of us don't, especially those of us on the 30% of servers or so with such slow progression most of the best players transfer away for greener grass. I myself was in a guild that fell apart when we couldn't kill Kael for 4 months of solid attempts, and then started working a night shift schedule which allows me to raid with none of the guilds I can find on any server. So I'm stuck with an Armory which, to you, says I've never stepped foot in a 25-man raid despite the fact I have no gear upgrades outside T6.

And how, exactly, does this make someone's math any worse, anyway? Someone's gear is worse than yours, so their opinions must be crap. Thanks for your armory assumptions. Take them back to the WoW forums where you said yourself they belong.

I've never as a deep frost mage in T5 content seen the ability, even with a shadowpriest, to destro pot. I haven't raided since the JoW bug with frostbolt was fixed, so perhaps a JoW would provide the extra mana needed to last 10 minutes chaincasting without pots/gems. When I raided, every cooldown was used on mana pots and gems, and in many fights even mage armor and evocation were necessary. How exactly this is "not caring about mana" as you complain, I have no idea. You can't react to a lack of mana AFTER the fact like a warlock can (evocation notwithstanding, but even that should be used at 35%, not 0%); you have to be continuously vigilent so you DON'T RUN OUT LATER in the fight. This doesn't make it less of a factor than for a rogue who purposefully runs out and then waits for energy to come back, or a warlock who runs low and then lifetaps it back, it just makes it different. Using every cooldown on mana regeneration is very much caring about our mana pool, and even if access to T6-clad shadow priests "fix" this issue and allow us to not care about mana regen anymore, that is not, as you assert, the raids and gear you'll have access to after just 1 or 2 months.

Edit: If the issue is that mage dps is seen as uncompetitive WITHOUT destro pots, then that's easy enough to fix. Bring mage dps up to the line when using every cooldown on mana, and let destro pots bring dps ABOVE the line. Then balance mana use and regeneration to where you'll never be able to use a destro pot in a long fight you don't outgear. This is a different issue than "mana doesn't matter", though.