Apaine

This must be nerfed before alpha finishes - seriously - it's like the announced 100% haste aura for moonkins - too good to be true. A mage with decent spell crit and this, (or just fire/ice and using shatter / ice crit talents) would make fireball / frostbolt obsolete.

Let me remind you with current BC values, warlocks with just *2 coefficient for crit, and ~45% multiplier are able to crit their shadowbolts for upwards of 10k.

And how would the frostfire behave on Curse of elements? 10% for fire, 10% for ice together for a combined 20% add imp scorch for 35% total? Cause this math seems to combine both elements already, why not that?

 

Deedre

Once again, I must emphasize we have no idea if arcane talents affect FFB. It's entirely possible they do not, and it won't get any benefit from spell power. It's an oddball spell full of sui generis effects.

 

Apaine

Been looking at Dk's skills, yeah - bloodboil is on very short cooldown high damage aoe.

And yes, DK's will be able to spread dieseases in AOE fasion. Corpse explosion damages everyone and puts a diesease that stacks (I think). Pestilence has chance to damage everyone around the target also infecting them with it. If CE's stacks are treated as separate diseases then bloodboil would hurt.. a LOT. Corpse explosion is rune power based only for damage (runepower = like rage for warriors), but even with minimal runepower, CE damage is like nothing, but diesease is still applied and lasts 12 sec. It requires a corpse though - so probably DK's will be a secondary AOE'ers - once one guy drops - they can sustain a chain reaction till everyone drops. Good old necro CE from diablo 2 worked in same way.

 

Zaldinar

I'm not certain it will be nerfed actually. From the looks of FFB and some other stuff that got put out, it looks like Blizzard has realized that crit rating is complete junk. Its possible that an Arcane heavy crit spec for FFB is something they're considering as being viable. Once beta / release hits and we can fully research it it will be interesting to see how all the numbers stack up.

I'd be surprised if it didn't get spellpower crits, honestly. If trinket procs etc pick up talents like that I'd fully expect the spells to.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...icId=109841969
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Kailhasa

I think it would be very unlikely that FFB would find itself unaffected by talents that work on "all spells". That just wouldn't make sense both mechanically and grammatically. Surely Blizzard must have the foresight to realize what kind of potential mess they could create with a primary(?) nuke that benefits from multiple trees and effects.

That said, I kind of doubt arcane would be an optimal choice for a FFB/WG-Leech build. It really depends on Spell Power vs Burnout, and if Burnout works the "good" way as a multiplier of critical damage, then it will definitely be the optimal choice IMO.

Bring on the Beta!

 

Pintofbrew

The only ones worth a damn are in bold.

The rest are almost entirely irrelevant. Arc Int was the worst buff going into BC and maintains it's status as such. I gain exactly twice as much intellect from a BoK. Even so, it's 0.5% crit at best (which is essentially nothing), pathetically low mp5 even for arcane spec and let's not even go into how few things one can do with 620 extra mana. There is not one single class that'd prefer to lose any other buff before losing AI. Even an Arcane Mage would rather have GotW or Prayer of Spirit than AI.

Amp/Damp, while a favourite spell of many, is far from crucial in any scenario. There is not any boss that mandates it in any possible way. Yes it can help, but the only place I see it being of any consequence is learning Gruul with badly under-geared healers and one-healer-down only a tree left alive in Mala'cress. The fact that it works doesn't mean it's utility; by that mention Lock Detect Invisibility is raid utility, because you can see the spirits before RoS's Depression Room. Have you never wondered why we don't get the party-buff version of Amp/Damp? It's because nobody has asked for it. Know why? Because 95% of the player base either don't know it's there, or know it's there, acknowledge that it may make a difference, but really, honestly, don't care. Healing, by and large, is not affected by healing power as much as you think.

"1 of the 2 classes with viable AoE"? Did you even notice how everyone and their mother are getting AoE? From the looks of it you'll be able to AoE perfectly fine with just a moonkin and an SP in WotLK 10-mans. And I'm happy for it, as long as we remain the premium AoE.

Food and water are irrelevant. Saving one inv. slot due to stacking both in one, and saving the cost of a third of an elixir over the whole raid is not Utility. It would be marginal, pathetically low utility if it gave 15% more mana/health over time. It'd be even better if it was one damned rank and replenished 75% over it's duration, rather than an amount that gets progressively less as gearing improves. But this doesn't detract from it not being Utility in any way.

Portals are irrelevant. How often do your players respec? Not more than once per hour? Then HS. Portals, like water, are a gimmick.

We have a moderate interrupt. it's only advantage is range. No GCD is irrelevant, largely, because it doesn't increase CS's utility, it increases personal DPS. Which contributes nothing to utility. The only place CS is superior, is that it has 30y range while a Shaman's only has 20y. For one encounter it also enjoys a longer lock-out time. The only cases where CS is of any use is the first Fireball off Kael and if a rogue balls-ups on RoS. Again, however, the RoS scenario is a failure because it's not part of the plan and even if the rogue does miss, you probably shouldn't CS unless you're on Amphetamines, because if someone with less brain-lag/lag counters you'll end up countering a Deaden and wipe anyway. That's if you're in time to realize the rogue missed his hit. In all other scenaria, having a rogue, a shaman or a warrior are all superior;

All in all, you think you have utility because you see you have plenty to do, whereas in fact if all of them were removed tomorrow morning almost no raids would care. With the exception of Poly and Decurse, any other class you chose to pick brings more utility/synergy than the mage, apart from the Rogue, who is jack of so-damned-many trades and damn-good at most of them. Even so, Poly is only critical on certain Trash pulls; it's never mandated on Bosses and as such it only facilitates your experience. There is no way Poly will become -absolutely- mandatory, because it by extension means Mages are mandatory for a certain encounter. We see Blizz (Rightly so) is trying to walk away from the "you must have n of x class and m of y class for this encounter" mentality. As well as the "Got Tank+Healer, LF3 DPS+CC" which plagued early Heroics. Fear can not replace Poly due to the wandering issue and Cyclone is shorter in range/duration and requires the great out-doors.

 

TimWischmeier

How about feral charge? It has to components (interupt and root), which can be resisted independet from each others appliance (after some fixes, finally). Even if the target is immune to root OR interupt, the other effect will be applied, when not resisted.

 

Pintofbrew

You're comparing a spell to a physical ability, one uses a two-roll one doesn't. Spells with two abilities (Frostbolt, Blastwave, etc.) are Binary and as such (1) do not get partially resisted in terms of damage, ie no 25%, 50% or 75% output and (2) can not have partial effects, ie damage goes through, but effect does not or vice-versa.

 

Nota

Feral charge has two different, independent effects which doesn't really follow with what I was talking about in the case of winter's grasp's application. Proc effects require that the ability that can proc it goes through in the first place. Feral charge is similar to slow in pve in that slow, though capable of being cast on every boss in the game, doesn't affect any boss except for 1. In most cases slow applies because the boss isn't immune to the cast speed decrease. If the boss is immune to the cast speed decrease then it most likely isn't immune to the ranged attack speed decrease. In pve all these checks are independent of each other yet in pvp if the target is immune to one aspect, the decrease in movement speed, then the target is immune to all aspects.

 

archeron

Quote from: Kalgan

PC Gamer: What else is changing?
Tom Chilton (Kalgan) : We’re also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.”

 

Deltrus

Maybe this means arcane will share gear with priests/druids

 

Rouncer

and that affects mages, how?

Seems to me to merely be an extension of the whole loot consolidation aspect of WoLK. If there is no Healing versus Damage on gear then a Shadow priest will want the same gear as a Holy/Disc priest (or at least very similar) and they would be able to fill whichever role the raid would require with nothing more then a respec.

Only people that would be affected "negatively" by that change would be melee/caster or melee/healer hybrids since attack power and spell power will still be separate stats and by "negative" I only mean that they don't get to fill 2 raid roles with only a respec since they will need 2 sets of gear to properly fill both roles.

 

Morganoth

*Battle Mages

Since we are still very early on in alpha, I thought I'd toss this idea out and see if it had any legs. A long-time wish of mages, and WoW-players in general, is to see a new class along the lines of a battle-mage. With warlocks getting a 51-point talent allowing them to transform into a demon, why not a 51-point talent for mages to allow them to become battle-mages? This could be a non-dispellable aspect the mage takes on, or a 45 second transformation ala warlock's demon form, but I prefer the former (and think it would be easier to balance that way). It would fit best in deep arcane (which as of now is only used for gimmicks or by some raiding mages).

Possible highlights of the new battle-mage:
-Increased innate armor and magic resistance for survivability
-Talent to reduce spell pushback
-Magic warding (an overall absorption bubble instead of fire- or frost-based)
-An offensive magic dispell
-High burst damage potential with PoM, AP, and Netherwind presence
-Slow actually being used regularly
-A new arcane AoE spell: Cast on a mob, it begins arcane exploding, damaging itself and nearby mobs
-Summon an arcane elemental that will protect you for x seconds

And then there are many more fun things that can make the spec fun to play and distinct from regular mage play. (Polymorph: Walrus) on a shortened cast timer for pvp. A medium cool-down mana absorption attack. A moderately strong melee attack. Reduced cooldowns on PoM and AP.

A lot of the talents and ideas listed above seem to be slanted towards pvp, but this spec could easily have pve viability. The cast rotation could even be pretty fun if it required an intermingling of arcane missiles, arcane blast, arcane barrage, and netherwind presence procs thrown in, with PoM and AP providing burst-on-demand.

Obviously there is a lot to add to this, but I think this would give the mage class something to get excited about for the expansion.

 

Gediablo

A long time ago I posted an idea that they should replace the +healing stat and +damage stat with a spellpower stat. The reason is that just because an item gives e.g. +10 damage, that is pretty much never the number it will actually boost a skill by. Also it makes no sense that you need +damage to boost e.g. the effectiveness of your shields as a mage. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% for skills and talents scaling with gear, but the logic in +damage gear boosting shield spells doesn't makes sense.

The comment from Kalgan is pretty vague, but I'm pretty sure it is related to their plan that rogues and feral-druids should wear the same gear, dps warriors, deathknights and retri-dins should wear the same gear, that shadowpriests, mages and warlocks should wear the same gear (spirit for everyone). This is actually a good thing in my eyes, since I'm against the whole concept that when a non-cloth item drops 2nd or 3rd time for a guild it most likely will be disenchanted, while cloth gear will be lootable for a long time. So far the gear distribution in WoW has been like this:
On these first 3 bosses in this instance everyone has to be able to get 1 weapon/offhand and 1 random item not counting tiers. Then they for caster dps adds 1 mail caster dps item, 1 leather caster dps item and 1 mail caster dps item - in fact adding 1 random items useable only by an elemental shaman, 1 useable for boomkins and elemental shamans, and 1 item that both mages, warlocks, shadowpriests, boomkins and elemental shamans can use. Basically all the offspecs is taking up a lot of lootspots that more often than not ends up as disenchants. If they instead of having 15 different kinds of gear can narrow it down to around half it means more frequent loot for everyone and fewer disenchants. I don't mind that. Restricting bosses to drop 30% plate items, 20% mail items, 20% leather items, 30% cloth items seems fair to me, assuming you need all classes equally and noone would(or could) ever use an item below their max armortype. But that is, however, unlikely seeing how the last 3 years have been.

I also don't mind if healing specced healers in healgear doesn't have around the same spelldamage as mages - seems wrong to me. If they want to give PvE healers the ability to grind solo too (which I'm all for) then either make them able to return their unused tierloot for another type and a small fee when they get a new tier (like when you get tier 6 healing gear, you could turn in your tier5 healing gear and get tier 5 damage gear). Alternatively make +healing cost as much as +damage (and call it spellpower) and just increase the coefficients on the healing spells that needs it or add talents that boost the +spellpower by e.g. 33% when using healspells deep in the heal tree. 1 cloth caster item for all cloth classes and specs equals fewer disenchants. Just make sure droprates match the number of users able to wear it in standard raidlineup.

 

Apaine

Druids are getting a viable CC as well FYI. Roots are a viable CC that works on ANYONE not only humanoids. Only reason they weren't used was cause they didn't work in instances. Well they will now. Of course roots should be used against melee mobs - but they usually hit hardest anyways.

With your bold points covered:

1. 2 classes can decurse - mages and druids
2. Druids getting easy spammable CC working anywhere against any melee class. Roots. Also cyclone diminishing returns in PvE are removed as well...
3. Druids getting plendora of new AOE spells making them viable for primary AOE. Moonkis getting 50% more damage to all AOE spells.
4. Moonkin druids having armor to take the aoe aggro.
5. Druids can depoison as well. Mages can't do that :P

Result: Moonkin druids are meant to be interchangeable with mages in parties. Food and water anyone can bum off a mage in AV these days :P... or buy vendor water.. not an excuse. I forgot when in T6 raid setting a mage applied amp magic It happened once or twice... but it's considered to be a minor buff... As for int buff? druids have all stats buff too. :P

Of course with roots there is always a potential for stupidity.... like healer walking within melee range of a rooted mob...
So yes, it may seem that sheep is more idiot proof.... But is it really? How many times did you get your sheep target dotted? Is it easy to CC dotted sheep? didn't think so.

 

alvinrod

The AE part is only really meaningful right now since in WotLK a lot of classes will have AE abilities. Of course we don't know what everyone's single target damage is going to look like in WotLK. Right now I'd say that ours is lacking, but we may be back on top for WotLK. Until we know for sure I don't want to draw to many comparisons because they're all hypothetical.

As you pointed out the CS isn't the best, mostly due to long cooldown, but we've used mages on RoS before if there was only one rogue that night. I have a macro that stop's casting and counter spells bound to a mouse button and just hold it down the entire fight while DPSing. If I think the rogue is taking too long or he missed it and the next one will be fast, I just need to release the button and it will go off. That's just a personal example, so your mileage may vary.

Most of it isn't utility that's used all the time, but it's helpful when it's there. Maybe I overplayed some of it, but I think most raids would notice if there weren't any mages. The major problem is that all these little things that add can largely be done by one mage. Not to gripe about warlocks, but if we look at their health stones you need three warlocks to get all ranks. Probably just as trivial as some of the mage utility I listed on the list, but just an example.

 

Deedre

Alvinrod, I know of several guilds who farmed BT/Hyjal without a single active mage in their rosters, only using a mage alt for Illidari Council. And it seems to me that mages are being deemphasized in Sunwell.

Our utility is an annoying afterthought, not a necessity, except perhaps on the occasional gimmick fight.

This is what happens when a primary DPS class is marginalized in it's fundamental role, damage. For me, and I think for most mages, it's damage we want and relative lack of same that's the real issue. That's why I'm watching these Alpha developments like a hawk. So far it's looking okay, but I'm not gonna lie: if mages in WotLK cotinue to perform as they do presently, I'm rerolling.

So I'm naturally a little impatient with this utility or synergy talk. Give me more power, Scotty.

 

Anedris

No one will know how much damage the various classes do until we see what the available gear is, what the encounters are like, how the synergies work out, and so forth. This entire discussion is largely complaining about what might happen. It's early alpha - can we hold back on the "I'm going to reroll QQ" until there are actually level 80 mages who find that they are unable to keep up with other DPSers in DPS?

 

Deedre

It's a discussion about utility versus raw power, and I'm making the case squarely in favor of raw power for this class. Mages have some reason to be disatsified with their relative standing in power as things presently stand, and calling that "qq" won't make that disatisfaction go away.

We are indeed very concerned about how our damage plays out.

 

Ozymandis

The apparent homogenization of gear (which has its good and bad points), the across-the-board improvement of Spirit come WotLK... I think Blizz is going to have their work cut out for them if they're going to really differentiate 'locks and Mages. We'll be gearing alike, bolting alike, AoEing alike (even more so than now, it seems). We may really need a push in the direction of superior DD if we're going to compete with 'lock utility.

 

Gediablo

Whether mages will be good or bad I won't comment yet, but your argument, about waiting with talking about mage concerns until people reach lvl 80 and get some gear, isn't good. After 2.0 was released but before TBC was released the mage community (and all other class communities for that matter) did the same amount of theorycrafting as they do now, and they did in fact come up with numbers matching what we saw when TBC was released. A year later after this theorycrafting proved something was seriously wrong (compared to e.g. Kalgan's post about the mage damage being jaw-dropping) Blizzard undid several of their nerfs and gave mages some much needed buffs (although still far from the jaw-dropping dps Kalgan talks about).

My point is that before last expansion what the conclusion of the theory crafting the mage community came up with turned out more accurate than Blizzard's own "test after test". Also it is a fact that from the TBC content started leaking and until people started dinging 70 practically nothing changed regarding the mage class.

Let me quote Kalgan here, because what you say reminds me of his post in so many ways:
My bet is that whatever the theorycrafting ends up proving before WotLK is released when we know how all talents work is going to give a very accurate idea of how the mage class will perform at level 80 when WotLK is released. If people consider rerolling, and you don't like the looks of the conclusion of the theory crafting here, you should reroll then or accept that your mage will stay that way for another year. Leveling to 80 and get some gear, just to see it for yourself will be a waste of time in my eyes.

 

Anedris

You don't have enough information to draw any conclusions. Consider that melee were severely handicapped for early TBC. It wasn't because they didn't do enough damage (although excessive glancing blows were a part of it), it was because practically every mob had a 359 degree cleave. This is not something that could have been theorycrafted. Similarly, the first major DPS check was a fellow named Gruul who just happened to feature silences and knock-abouts. Although warlock and shadow priest DPS was out of hand in these days (and warlock DPS arguable still is), if the first major encounter had not catered so perfectly to those classes' strength (DoTs) the disparity would not have been so huge.

Another angle: suppose they simply removed demonic sacrifice, or put it much deeper in demo. Abruptly, all these protestations about warlock superiority would fall down.

Suppose the t7 warlock set bonus is useless while the t7 mage set bonus amounts to a 5% DPS gain. All the calculations shift again.

By all means, explore the implications of the new spells, consider how they might be used, how much damage they might do, and what scaling they might produce. Note deficiencies and suggest alternatives. I enjoy reading reasoned discussion and I suspect any Blizzard employees reading these boards do take some note of it as well. But spare me the "GG Blizz, fix my class or I'm rerolling." Those little ultimatums aren't going to convince anyone of anything.

 

Pintofbrew

Apaine, I don't get why you quote me. I am aware druids are getting CC, I am also aware it is inferior. Much lower duration (6sec vs 50sec) and much shorter range (36y vs 20y). You may be over the moon for gaining 5-man viable CC but note that chain-CC will not be a truly viable option for you, as you'll have to spend 1.5sec of every 6sec re-CCing, and that's assuming you re-CC exactly as the last one runs out. Which you won't. At best, you're losing 1/4 of your DPS time. By comparison, a mage will lose either 1.5sec off the whole pull in a 5-man or 3-4.5sec off a the whole pull for a raid. The only superiority of Cyclone vs. Poly is it's immunity to being broken by mistake. But then again, I'll taker IV-Poly (1.2sec and 100% interrupt resist) and PoM-Poly as emergency oh-shit tools over that any day. Your example of Poly being DoTed is irrelevant; you can't argue your one-spell-per-6-sec is superior to Poly based on "an idiot may make your work harder". Though now that you mention it, it seems reasonable to expect a chicken to chain-Cyclone a DoTed poly while the DoTs run out.

To my knowledge, no spell ever had Diminishing Returns in PvE, I don't know what you're referring to. I'll assume you know something I don't, or perhaps you meant to say Cooldown rather than Dim Ret.

You do gain AoE. That does not necessarily mean your AoE DPS is comparable to the mage class, or that it should be interchangeable. From where I'm standing you seem to be the only other class with utility AoE. A good thing to be sure, but don't be certain you're going to be able to withstand agro because of armor. I assure you, no amount of armor will let you tank the AoE in Chicken gear. Though I'm sure it'll make a great 5-man pulling spell for a bear.

Lastly, Druids can de-poison... Yes, and? You can also heal and tank. Your point? Again we fall into the question; I make a response to a thread on "mages have utility" with "no they don't". You somehow feel "I can also de-poison" means something for a mage. It's irrelevant; You bring mages and druids when you need to decurse on the simple presumption that a Mage can stop DPS to decurse with little impact (up to now, that is) to the raid. A tree stopping to decurse may result in untimely death. That, and most guilds don't have enough trees.

Edit: I know Cycloned targets are immune to almost everything, does this mean they're immune to re-Cyclone as well? Also, if you root and then cyclone, does the root persist? If the answers are "yes" and "no" respectively, good luck chain-CCing.

 

Anedris

The answers are "yes" and I'm almost certain the second one is "no." I think the "reliable CC" he was referring to was actually roots, not cyclone though. I would question the tag "reliable" though since it has a tendency to break on its own damage. It also doesn't work on ranged mobs, and it requires that the mob be kept away from any players (not usually an issue but if something goes wrong the ability to just spam sheep the dangerous mob regardless of where it is or who is beating on it can be useful).

I am happy to see roots usable indoors, but to suggest that it can replace polymorph is quite a stretch. Mages will continue to have the best CC in the game for beasts and humanoids.

Cyclone does currently have diminishing returns in PvE I believe.

 

Deedre

Anedris, it's not an ultimatum, but a plain statement of fact. I will reroll if the TC shows a lack of relative improvement. This isn't a threat, it's a plan. I trust our mage theorycrafters, their record is excellent, and if they conclude post beta that matters haven't changed, then that's that.

I'm working on a balance druid at the moment and keeping my options open.

Surely many other mages are doing the same. (Although perhaps they lean more towards warlocks. I'm liking the nuclear chicken, myself.)