Arazan

To be frank, I don't think they care enough about the testing to do this. If you spent a whole day testing a fight like brutallus which is PURELY dps (hell, realistically you could just be doing Dr. Boom type tests on a mob with a ridiculous amount of hp), you could do so with no gear and see how classes stack, entry-level gear, high-level gear, end-level gear, and then do another test with some insanely high never-will-be-in-game level of gear to see how classes fare among all gear levels.

Basically what I mean would be for TBC-development this would have been testing all dps casters with no gear at all, then one with ~700 spelldamage, then another test with ~900 spelldamage, another with ~1300 spelldamage, and another test with ~10,000 spelldamage. Then you can go "oh hell fire mages really fall behind after 700 spelldamage" or "hmm affliction warlocks fall way behind destruction warlocks". To be frank, the common statement was that they didn't test 0/21/40, which makes absolutely no sense to me. I like tinkering with different talent builds, and when you look at hypothetical talent builds you look at relevant 11, 21, 31, and 41 point talents and see what's worth getting. It's not hard to see that Shadowfury is pretty useless for a pve warlock, and SL (the 21 point affliction talent) is underwhelming as well, but DS is absolutely amazing. +15% dps for ONE talent point... so I really don't understand how 0/21/40 could have been overlooked in testing.

They shouldn't test with one level of gear, regardless of what level that gear is. Proper testing should be done across all levels of gear at specific benchpoints. Entry/t4/t5/t6 are easy and obvious set benchmarks for TBC, and had they done testing across those approximate levels of gear it wouldn't be hard to see how things would fare.

Frankly, they need class masters for good balance. Back when they were doing class-based revisions it was an okay system because it guaranteed that every class would get attention in turn, but it wasn't great because certain classes in need didn't receive attention quickly enough. If they had a developer objectively "in charge" of each class, it wouldn't be hard to make sure things went completely unattented like how mages stayed mediocre for about a year... as well as how druids and warlocks were completely mediocre for the first year or two of WoW.

So for WoLK, they really need to do testing at entry, t7, t8, AND t9 levels of gear. Then they can see "oh holy hell balance druids are insane as soon as they get t8" or "wow warlocks suck after t7" or however the testing ends up. They also need to do this testing on completely vanilla targets, and then they can balance classes but favor certain classes or playstyles depending on the raid encounter.

This could be the biggest downfall of TBC balance. There were no encounters that specifically favored mages. I'm gonna go ahead and say that again because it's really one of the issues at heart of mages who want balance. THERE WERE NO ENCOUNTERS THAT SPECIFICALLY FAVORED MAGES. Mages were completely outshined in aoe fights by seed-spamming warlocks, outshined by rogues, warlocks, and hunters at tank n spank fights, and consistently burned by immunity and high resistance. Meanwhile, where's the boss that's immune to shadow? Where's the boss who takes extra damage from arcane, frost, or fire? Where's the boss that takes triple damage from crits? Etc etc etc. That's probably the biggest issue with mage balance... it's not that we don't do what we want to do, it's that we're constantly outshined by other classes.


EDIT:

Sorry if that sounded whiny, I think my point got a little lost in there. Basically I think what they do with testing is they take the most popular spec, or the most archtype spec of that class, and do their testing at some random entry level of gear and just call that good. I don't think they really do heavy testing, because they're more preoccupied with thinking of what would be interesting or fun and not what would be powerful.

 

Skallewag

Yes, part of the TCs who now act out in the open would get cut off and placed under NDA rules, the gain however would be that they get far more accurate numbers to juggle and those numbers would be regarded by the otherwise not so math interested devs. The concept of blizz assembling means tp produce lots of numbers within its own walls by people who are fed their actual plans and the actual current shape of WotLK would give them a way better chanse of learning potential scaling imbalances rather than trying to read what we manage to manufacture on forums like these without blizzards support.

The way I see it you would be building a greenhouse. There it lots of theorycrafting interest out there. But instead of testing a few gear scenarios and possibly glancing out into the vast djungle of the web for any interesting plants or seeds of ideas managing to bloom in a mathematically unforgiving climate they could isntead cultivate just the kind of math they want in a concentrated area. My basic point is that I think its a lot easier to find a good seed and try to nourish it with proper numbers rather than trying to deduct anythng from everything that non initiated people are guessing about Northrend.

Like I said I seriously doubt that will happen, but for the initial balance of WotLK blizz would have been far better off trying to emply Lhivera than the oposite. But who knows, maby they will get it right anyway, its just that having a company of my own I cant help thinking about what a waste it is to ignore eager free staff when there is such an abundance of it available.

Edit: : Arazan you have a very good point here. This is the exact reason they should also try to handpick a couple of Nihilum-minded raiding guilds and pvp groups. Let them play around inside the intended dungeons. Offer them access to a testserver, slap some decent beginners raid gear on them, grant free respecs and give them some magic GM item to conjure all the consumables and materials needed to start raiding. Just basicly give them everything that grinding would have acomplished for them since a real raiding guild would have covered that. After that they will happily raid away, discover the intended tactics for bosses and experiment what happens with talents and gear. Not only would blizz get data on what happens in strict t7, t8, t9 gear, but also what happens in between. Especially if they gradually give them acess to higher dungeons so they cap out their gear a bit before moving on to a new level. The point it so very simple and really the same as the one about TCing, theres tons of eager raiders out there who love to chew new content. Reqruit 10 guilds that would be worthy of calling themselves serious elitist jerks and let them do what they always do, but before the expansion is released and fix the balance from the start and not several patches down the road.

As for destro "slipping" though its always a serious mistake not to compare 21 pt talents with the top tree talent and look wich one would help each trees intended role out the best. 21 pointers have always been powerfull stuff but good design should aim to make 41/51 pointers better.

 

• Actovision

All of this is assuming that the people on EJ can do this better than the people who've been working on the game for 7 years. Just because they "haven't" and "probably won't" go into hardcore TC to balance things doesn't mean they "can't" do it themselves. Obviously they arent a bunch of monkeys hooked up to computers who need us to tell them what works and what doesnt. I mean really, TC'ing about how TC'ers would TC better than Blizzard?

 

Sancus

Of course people on EJ can do it better. It's practically an axiom of game design that the players of your game will always know it better than you will. That's because there's an infinite number of players with an infinite amount of time, compared to a sharply limited number of designers with very limited time. Blizzard designers have many responsibilities, there is no one designer whose job it is to just spend hours per week figuring out Mage Raid DPS pve balance. It's unrealistic to expect that there is. But there are, in fact, dozens of people - some of whom are as smart, and smarter, and just as good, or better programmers than anyone at Blizzard who do exactly that. And they do it without getting paid, because they enjoy the game and care that much about it.

Blizzard simply doesn't have enough dedicated designers to cover every possibility in the world at the same level of detail as a playerbase of ten million can. Why do you think the ChatHandler exploit existed in Asia for months(years?) without it being discovered and patched by Blizzard. Someone in the wild discovered something that the people who wrote the UI code didn't even know existed. This kind of thing is not uncommon. Blizzard isn't god, and their programmers are often not even close to the best available in the industry.

They're going to miss things, and they're going to miss them a lot. That's why it's important to listen to the community, because the sheer number of us means that we examine things in much greater detail than they have the man-hours available to do.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

◊ manly

What? Mages are highly favored on felmyst over seed spamming warlocks and for like every part of felmyst.
M'uru 'favors' mages as long as you include either spellsteal, or if you put the focus on the 1:20 burst.
Brutallus tends on average to give really good showing for mages.
If that weren't enough, you could even argue that mages are awesome for kalecgos if you put the focus on the burst dps capabilities when in the other room.

But thats not the problem. The problem isn't that the fights are good for mages are not, the problem is that there isn't a good reason to invite mages to raids. If I do the same dps as a warlock, but don't provide cos/coe/cor, then theres no good reason to invite a mage. The fights are very very fine, the problem is that we don't have any synergies at all, and/or don't have high dps to make up for lack of synergy.

Let me word it another way; a mage is like a rogue, but without the dps. I think the encounters are very fine and I do believe its unrelated.

self reminder: put signature here.

 

• Actovision

What you are claiming as the main function of the player community is different than what the others were saying above. They were specifically talking about number crunching, and I find it difficult to believe that no one at Blizzard is capable of doing it. You simply don't hire an entire team of designers and have none of them know how to make a spreadsheet, write a spell cycle script, etc. If they needed players to do it for them, they would already have had them do it (not to say that they haven't or won't). As I said they probably just don't consider it as high a priority as we do. We want certain things for our class, and those things don't always necessarily mesh with Blizzard's design intentions. Does anyone honestly see them going "Oh no, we have no idea how to balance warlocks against mages. Get Vontre in here, NOW!" (no offense)? Despite the fact that many, including myself, are unsatisfied with our lack of passive synergy within raids, raid makeup is mostly player-chosen, and, I'm guessing, not something they stress about unless it gets ridiculous (totem and VT changes, for example?).


On a side note does anyone feel that, assuming the talents as they are now go into Beta and live, the only raid synergy changes we are seeing are coming from the Elementalist camp and that any increase in our usefulness hinges on Winter's Grasp being necessary for DK tanking? By that I mean 1 mage will be useful for Imp. Scorch, but anything past that will be just as useless as now without WG uptime becoming VERY important? Or they could always let us have rogue DPS or make every fight require 3 sheeps...

 

Anedris

We don't know how mage DPS will shake out against other casters at the moment. Spell costs are being changed, everyone gets new talents, new synergies are being introduced, etc., and we've already found a couple possibilities of mages being overpowered in the "broken" category (see discussion of frost mage stacking and speculation of what would happen if every fire or frost talent affects FfB). Given these, it's quite possible mages may stand on their own based on their DPS. It's also possible they won't.

Stackable utility isn't enormously common, and most classes stop at about 2 (warlocks will have two curses, the warrior buffs and debuffs can be efficiently applied by two warriors, most of the hybrids have one major non-stacking utility per spec, etc.). It looks like mages will also have about two - imp. scorch for the fire 'locks and elemental shaman (who can be expected to make regular use of lava burst, unless Blizz completely mucks that one up) and winter's chill/grasp (frost death knights). The latter is of course fairly narrow as it benefits one class/spec only.

More utility than a rogue though. There's no real way to know if it'll be enough until we find out where DPS will be at (which is highly dependent on how they fix WG and FfB and whether they buff burnout to be something actually worth taking).

On the note of testing, though it's mildly depressing from a player PoV, I have to agree that Blizzard probably isn't nearly as worried about class balance (especially end game class balance) as we are. They probably regret that mages were weak compared to warlocks in TBC, but mages still raided and very very few guilds min-max to the point of actually excluding them, so from their Blizzard's perspective it's a pretty small issue. The fact that mages were 5-10% weaker than their peers in gear that 1-2% of the player base will ever acquire is a pretty small point when set against the whole of their game.

 

Skallewag

Heh, no Im not actually suggesting that blizzard turn their development over to the players and I dont think we know every aspect of this game better than they do. What I do believe however is that when it comes to spotting op spec/gear combos, figuring out optimal raid composition and noticing the fine fluctuations in scaling through all the raiding content that hardcore raiders who pay blizz to spend 20+ hours per week exploring experimenting and learning about this can actually spot ceratin stuff better. Its basicly people who are doing their job vs people with a very passionate hobby. I think the main point is that hardcore players care a lot more about balance since it affects their gameplay personallly, while a blizz programmer only cares because its his job to make a good game. Most blizz devs probably like their jobs, but in general I simply think that the most dedicated players care mor about their hobby than the general blizz employee cares about how perfectly they balance their game. Also players dont haveto think about things like making each class unique, spells having cool visuals and so on because thats not whats key to raid progress.

My point was that blizz could really benifit by more actively using the feedback they could have by their most dedicated players while creating new content simply because players will always be testing the game in ways that blizz cant/wont.
Blizz devs are probably very capable of making spreadsheets and calculating scaling on any spell. Its jsut that they dont do it while people in here always do it for every spell, item, talent, ability sooner or later. THe EJ forums are hungry to calculate any aspec of this game. Arcane missiles is a good example. Pre TBC it was anounced that this spell was going to be our heaviest hitting nuke but at a steep manacost, this was a very good aim to go over the viability of arcane. Problem is it just didnt happen. Whatever the real reason may be blizzard didnt notice this but the hardcore raiders of the game did. People at EJ could have pointed out to them that the first mages reaching BT did great damage with this spell but that the reason wasnt the spell design but rather what ahppened when they combined certain items. That is exactly the kind of detail I think blizzard could find great help in playtesting and anticipating entierly for free. People would love to be helping blizzard develop new content. I would gladly spend twice the time I do reading/writing here for no payment at all knowing that at the end of the day a dev would be reading what I figure out or notice while playing/experimenting with talents and spells.

 

Jarlyn

You should really invest in a browser with spell-check features.

Either way, even among people who do actually know their math and understand the game mechanics (already a very limited subset, even on these boards), even fewer will actually be able to see the forest for the trees. No one is ever satisfied with their class and if the power was given to the players, WoW would never made it out of the original beta because it would have been unimaginably crappy.

To sum it up with a stupid example, imagine for a second a Blizzard CM came into this thread and said "ok, we want to fix mages, you guys come to a consensus on the best change we can make to fix things and we'll do it." I would estimate that 15 minutes after that comment was posted, my head would explode from the overwhelmingly stupidity that would ensue.

[e] grammars

 

Arazan

In all honesty I'm not very familiar with SWP for the most part. I understand the mechanics on the fights, but don't have personal experience with SWP. My point was that mage burst is pretty iffy at best. As you pointed out, you're doing less damage than a warlock, and I've gotta figure that a destro warlock would provide equal or better burst dps than a fire mage, simply because the warlock does better damage overall. Arcane mages could outburst a lock, but requires a lot of group support that I don't think you get while you're portaled in the kalecgos encounter.

I think you're agreeing with my point but don't quite realize it. I was basically saying that there are no encounters where mages specifically have an advantage. I wasn't thinking of AE on adds in the felmyst fight, so I'll definitely give you that... but unless you're in the mobile add-control phase of the felmyst encounter, mages slip back into mediocrity. M'uru is another one that I'll definitely take your word on, because it's probably the only encounter that I don't know at least the basic mechanics of.

My point was basically that people who say "oh mages are great for burst" don't realize that warlocks and hunters generally have so much better damage that their trinketed damage will match or exceed the burst dps of a mage... and of course a BM hunter probably has the best burst in the game, as long as the hunter is a good one.

Basically, there's nothing mages are good enough at to really showcase mages. That's what I was trying to say when I said that no encounters specifically favor mages. Even in fights like lurker or brutallus that are pure balls-out threatless dps type fights, which is where a mage should always #1 in my opinion, mages are third or fourth best.

Mages only do damage. They have polymorph, but it's damn near never useful in a raid boss encounter, and the same goes for amp/damp magic. So really that means the only value a mage has in the truly important part of the fight is damage, and when they're doing less damage than classes that bring more utility, exactly as you said... there's no reason to bring mages anymore.

 

Skallewag

And thus the words "Im not actually suggesting that blizzard turn their development over to the players". A blizz dev turning up in here asking how to develop the mage class is not what I had in mind. My point was that they could gain a lot from letting people who constantly do spreadsheets all the time with whatever numbers they have available do so but with accurate numbers instead.

Heck they could even have a panel of TCs that were being fed 90% blind tests. They could tell the people who want to help that for NDA reasons they cant tell htem what content is real and not. Just feed them nameless spells that are plain numbers. Cast time, coeffs, base damage, and possible gear/statpools to combine them with.
Then they could discard all TC on the blind tests and look at what the private TCs thought about the real stuff and then compare if it matches their own ideas about the spell.

Its really not hard to think up scenarios of how to let players do a bit of good with their math rather than just randomly guessing.

 

Vayl

So musing some on Potent Spirit and Student of the Mind.

At 70, you need 22 points of crit rating per 1%. Crit rating to crit % maps linearly up until 60 to 70, presumably to outdate level 60 gear faster. If it follows that same 60 to 70 curve, it'll take about 58 points of rating per crit % at 80, or 25 points if it resumes the linear progression from 1-60 starting at 70. Certainly they could add a new formula for 70 to 80, but I doubt it would fall outside these (admittedly wide) bounds.

Looking at the level 70 values, in order to get 1% crit per talent point out of Potent Spirit (an "okay" talent), you need 295 spirit. Ironically exactly the amount I have right now; I've neither made an effort to avoid spirit or to stack it; most of mine comes from T6 pieces. To take it to 2% crit per talent point (a "good" talent) you need 590 spirit which I find unrealistic for a mage to get without severely compromising everything else.

Now, to get the 1% per point at 80 with the curve value, you'd need 775 spirit; with the linear one, you'd need about 335. For the 2% per point, you'd need 1550 spirit or 770.

Now, I know we're most likely going to get spirit on much more of our gear, but reaching even 770 just seems unrealistic to me. You'd be needing 50 some spirit average on every piece of gear besides the weapon and trinket slots, rings included. So if they go linear with the crit rating, Potent Spirit will probably be better than 1% crit per talent point but worse than 2%, so a kind of hum-drum but not awful talent. If crit continues to curve up like it did 60-70 (not an unreasonable thought if they want to encourage you off 70 purples onto 80 purples), then it will be a very measily talent.

Now, Student of the Mind. This one seems less ambiguous to me; weak no matter how you slice it. At current spirit levels, it'll be providing around +30-+40 spirit even in spirit-geared mages, kinda weak for 3 talent points, and that +30 to +40 spirit is gonna add only another 0.2% crit. Even at higher levels of spirit it seems rather weak, I think in part because it's moderately expensive per talent point compared to many +stat talents, and focuses on spirit. That deep in arcane, the /only/ thing that will give you mana problems is AB spam, and since start-to-finish AB spam seems like it won't be viable in the expansion, it seems unimpressive to me. The main thing is, if you want to have 20 (or 21) points in fire or frost and get Netherwing Presence, you can only really pick 1 of Student of the Mind and Incanter's Absorption and IA just seems the better choice even if it is likely to be terribly unpredictable.

 

Maglors

Mages are good for the first 3 boss's of SWP but this is due to having IB more than a damage or utility issue. Getting rid of the arcane debuff during Kalecgos, not having to move when burned by Brut, and blocking out of encapsilate are all very useful. The final three bosses of SWP is where our flaw's really show in comparison to other classes especially locks. My guild used 3 mages and 2 locks in a raid for all TBC until we got to Twins and now we only bring 2 for the second half due to our shortcomings in favor of a lock. I still don't understand how blizz admits that majes like myself are being "sidelined" and yet make zero effort to fix it. The coe fix was so obviously needed that I cannot consider that a maje fix. As for synergy purposes I thing we need some sort of stacking dot or a "refined" form of rolling ignite. Something that would enable a raid to want to bring 3 majes, that's the magic number for us to achieve equality with the other class's.

Maru fight-
Are you including locks ability to enslave an add and use it against Entropis for the burn phase? Even with coe being fixed with the upcoming patch; bringing majes in favor of locks isn't gonna happen due to seed's vast superiority over flamestrike.

 

Densor

700+ spirit values may be more common than you think.

Well geared priests who stack spirit (as opposed to mana/5) are probably better to look at for spirit values. If Blizzard plans to homogenize gear, then we are likely to be geared more like a current priest than a current mage. For example, The World of Warcraft Armory is a priest with 525 unbuffed int and 562 unbuffed spirit (had to remove a +5% spirit talent from 590 shown on the character sheet). The gear itself will probably change, but if priests are going to wear the gear, the relative spirit on the gear will have to stay close to what it is now. Adding haste and crit to more of the pieces will cut a bit into the spirit values, but it shouldn't be too much. I'm guessing that hit will have to be dealt with by sockets, trinkets, rings, cloaks, and amulets, since there will be more people capable of using a ring with hit on it than a piece of leather with hit on it.

 

PSGarak

More to the point, if mana regen models get revised sufficiently, mages (and warlocks!) may actually want more spirit on their gear than the incidental hundred they happen to pick up from best-in-slot pieces. Priests get that much because they go out of their way to gear for it. Mages could start doing the same. If any mage would do it, it's definitely a deep-arcane mage.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Densor

The mana regen formulas already got revised. That priest I linked to has around 950 mana regen per 5 seconds from spirit and intellect when fully buffed. A mage with that kind of regen would no longer need a shadow priest to function in most cases. And when gear gets changed to gives mages those stats, I imagine we won't have to give up the 15-20% spell crit and 10-20% haste that we currently would to get it, not to mention the 400-600 spell damage.

 

Muphrid

Think about the consequences of such massive regen, though. Shadow priests are in a very awkward position; if they can be relegated from necessity for classes to function to purely optional, then they must gain something in return to keep their viability in line. This is exactly the kind of viability shuffling, though, that makes it difficult to balance the classes in the first place.

Mana regeneration is poorly conceived, not only in the form of Vampiric Touch but spirit regeneration itself. The inflation of mana forces the devs to (a) make fights longer and longer to be as straining or (b) require more constant casting, with less opportunities to circumvent the five-second rule or (c) speed up casting, so mana per second usage rises.

Needless to say, there is only so long 25 people can be expected to focus on a single fight, so (a) is naturally limited. (b) is also limited, as once constant casting is achieved, there is nothing else that can be done (for DPS this is already moot, as we will cast whenever possible; for healers, I don't see how this is possible without making the margin for error in the fight razor-thin).

Which leaves (c), but faster casting is only achieved by haste at the moment, and haste is an ineffective counter to mana regeneration. Mana regen is so powerful that equal quantities of haste and regen allow a caster to maintain a faster casting speed for the same amount of time. This flies in the face of proportionality (though I will admit it's desirable for raiding).

At any rate, the inflation of available mana has to be kept in check by increasing consumption rates, or else additional mana becomes devalued as unnecessary.

 

◊ manly

As I said before, I totally disagree that the problem is the 'low dps' of mages and whatnot. Its mostly fine. So are the fights really. The problem is that we provide essentially about as much raid synergies as rogues, but yet, don't have the dps that goes with it�*. We're like 3-4% behind what I'd call 'fair'. Basically if mages had something similar to ferocious inspiration, but only for 2% more group dps, I think we would be perfectly in line. Its as-if were paying an invisible tax for a raid synergy we just don't have.

The point isn't really about getting better dps. The point is that theres no good reason to invite mages to raids because we don't have jaw-dropping dps, and neither have any group/raid synergies. I consider imp scorch roughly the exact same thing as winter's chill as far as raid synergy goes, which is to say not much else than a personal upcost to do my own damage. Either increase mage damage by 3-4% (bad solution) or give a reason to invite mages to raids (ie: every time a mage crits, the group gains 2% more damage for 5-10s ?).

self reminder: put signature here.

 

Arazan

I dunno, I'm tired of boring, uninventive stuff like ferocious inspiration. I don't mind getting effects like FI, but just saying "oh we need to up their dps and group utility, give them a carbon copy of FI" is getting kinda old. The only group dps buff I'd support for mages would be a proc on crits that has a chance to greatly increase damage. Something like:

Classes really are different in theory, but the implementation of homogenized buffs like that makes everything boring and blended.


But realistically, mages are unhappy that their damage is poor for their low utility, as you said. Most people say that rogues don't really have any utility, so they deserve unrivaled dps. Well really, on boss fights mages have what, improved scorch? It's an almost strictly personal buff that mages keep up as a sort of maintenence upkeep, like you said.

So when mages say they want improvements, all the other classes who enjoy out-dps'ing mages just say "oh then give you generic group utility. You don't need dps buffs." That's not what I rolled a mage for, damnit. When I want to buff my group I'll play on my shaman. When I want to weaken mobs to make them more vulnerable I'll play my warlock. When I play my mag