If you mean the regen reduction will be neutralized by the DPS increase, thus keeping the amount of mana restored the same, that would require a 150% increase in DPS, which isn't happening. If you mean that the reduction in utility will be balanced by the increase in personal DPS, yes, that's the intent. However, the DPS increase is not as great as it may appear, since Mind Flay and SW:P will apparently no longer be affected by ISB, and Shadow-based Destruction 'locks will be much less common.

Well fuck, no wonder they have such a hard time balancing if they don't theorycraft anything. That's just absurd.

Well to be fair, the quote I posted said they didn't like their _players_ theorycrafting on skills/talents/fights that they couldn't play. One could hope they were doing some theorycrafting of their own inside Blizzard's walls.

I think the implied part of the quote is that the average WoW player has absolutely no clue on how to theorycraft. In this case they are correct. The average person looks at leaked alpha talents and might say, "These talents suck! Why is it only a 5% increase? It should be 50%!!!" It only takes a Lhivera about 5 minute to show that if it were 50% that the game breaks horribly. The average suggestions are absurd.

They also worry about rumor spreading to become fact before they have a chance to tweak things. If the discussion on this thread were posted to the WoW mage forums, the "fact" that "fire mages suck in WotLK" would soon become irreversible. Blizzard could tweak 9 fire talents to make fire mages just awesome, but the momentum on the forums would continue on and on and on. That's the real reason they ban people for posting alpha info. No matter how many times you say, "This is alpha; things can and will change," every change is met with cries of "OP!" and "nerf!"

All that said, I actually don't think Blizzard does much mathematical crafting behind closed doors. Which is why my bet is the Winter's Grasp is going to make it live in a form similar that it is now. In beta, people will test leveling, and 5-mans, and BGs and arenas and a little bit of raiding. During leveling and 5-mans, the stacking problems of WG aren't there and everything will seem fine. Once WotLK goes live and the top end guilds run 6 frost mages slinging ice lance, there will be a hurried nerf patch. At least that's what I think is going to happen.

Yeah spriests are lookin' f'ed up. On a lighter note the Living Bomb thing is probably an inscription. If it's the same spell id as the non-knockback version, then we just learned something about inscription I guess.

Well, as usual, I'm not concerned as much with how class balance is going to change between now and Wrath of the Lich King. It's going to change. I'm concerned with how balance will change from some baseline gear level in Wrath to the higher end gear levels. And in that sense, they haven't done anything to shadow priests that will address the core problem of how their mana regen works.

How balance shifts or evolves across a span of gear levels can be determined (in principle--perhaps not in practical fact) by the change in dimensionless numbers or the overall trends in like-dimensioned numbers. The problem with Vampiric Touch is simple: almost every other number with the dimensions of HP/mana increases with increasing gear. Even at a simple 3% of damage done converts to mana gained (that is, 1/.03 HP/mana), keeping this number fixed doesn't solve the problem; it only gives them more time until it starts getting broken. Again.

It's no different than what Blizzard tried to do with Life Tap--one of the rare times they were actually on the right side of proportional scaling. The HP/mana ratio of Life Tap cannot remain fixed while HP/mana ratios of damage spells or healing spells are always increasing. This gives them yet another source of scaling, or at the very least, it makes the burden they exact upon healers increasingly trivial, making them less and less of a liability. Not to say they were much of one to begin with.

Actually life tap scaling is just about wrong in every way. Mana costs are fixed, they do not scale with gear, so scaling life tap just furthers multiplies the dps scaling of spell damage. The only way it would make any sense at all would be to scale with intellect, or maybe spirit. It's a bandaid from the Naxx era and definitely helps contribute to warlocks being so absurd today.

The solution is to start a revolution and abolish the concept of mana.

It might just work out perfectly all right if they do just that, while progressing in early content mages have the advantages of it, and in 25-man content it gets nerfed, but at that time instances like karazhan are much less of a "serious business" and can have the dps nerf, while the progressing end is just fine.

I've been reading over a lot of the TC for WoTLK, and it seems that Blizzard may be going with an idea of mages not speccing all the exact same builds for top dps.

My idea is that possibly they will use bosses with different immunities to make use of mages that can spec for top dps as fire or frost and use FFB as a filler that allows either a fire or frost specced mage to use FFB as needed depending on boss immunities and still at least do dps but reduced slightly.

Another possibility is to have a mage specced something along the lines of this person's post (http://elitistjerks.com/797079-post1570.html) and still offer extremely strong dps but only with other mages specced to increase their dps. This would wreak havoc with the complaints about boss immunities but still allow mages to do competitive if not top dps on certain fights making them viable options for a dps spot by allowing mages to synergize with each other and possibly synergize with another class that uses fire (warlock if a viable fire pve dps spec is available) or frost (deathknight).
This is highly dependent on what talents FFB works with but puts some real complications into min/maxing based on how many mages are in a given raid and what synergies are available in the raid.

Basically my idea is that a fire dps spec would be top against a frost immune boss, frost dps would be top against a fire immune boss, and a arc/fire/frost build would be top against a boss that switches immunities say every 60secs during a longer raid fight.
Something else that adds to my consideration of this is based on the idea that with FFB there are talents in both the fire and frost tree that could potentially increase another mages dps while they are not currently specced for that specific talent. The specific talents I'm considering are Improved Scorch, Winter's Chill, and Winter's Grasp. All of which I might add no one is 100% sure until WoTLK is live that they affect FFB.
Another reason I consider that Blizzard may be considering this is tied in with their changes to Warlock spell class damage increasing curses to all be one curse.
This is highly theoretical and I have no numbers to back it up. However I felt it was an appropriate post as any TC for WoTLK is all theoretical until release and subsequent changes. Feel free to comment if I'm incorrect or if this has been posted before. I tried to read as much of the WoTLK TC as possible but there is a ton of it .

BTW: "Synergize" apparently is not in the Firefox vocabulary so I apologize if it is incorrect English.
Edit: I'm not saying the previously linked poster's build is the best for that kind of arc/fire/frost build I just used it as an approximation as I see some things I would consider changing depending upon environment.

Personally I think a class becoming less dependent on/limited by their mana pool as gear ramps up is a great idea. Fire/frost mages really don't get much, if anything, as far as regen and efficiency going from crafted gear to t6. It is just as annoying to try to dps without an sp in kara as it is in sunwell. Elemental shamans, shadow priests, warlocks, and arcane mages all become more efficient or get more powerful regen going from terrible gear to great gear. The way things are currently, fire and frost mages simply don't. The whole idea of becoming more efficient or autonomous isn't really a bad thing. It is just something that needs to apply to all classes. Scaling is never a bad thing in my opinion.

But warlocks aren't "limited" by their mana pool, they are balanced around it. If a warlock bolts 80% of the time a mage does, 20% life tapping, and is balanced around that (e.g, 25% more scaling with damage), then when they can bolt 82% of the time due to higher spell damage, they now outscale mages. Lifetap scaling has caused spell damage to scale exponentially (i.e., to scale with itself) for warlocks. Exponential scaling is the kind of no-no that caused rolling ignites to be abolished.

I've read the vast majority of this thread, and this is definitely the "theme". The "concentrated coolness" (concept presented at last Blizzcon by lead class designer) of mages is simply lacking/absent. If the _current_ situation is "there's no good reason to invite a mage", are we seeing anything with the WotLK alpha/previews that would suggest that this will change in the expansion? So far, I haven't seen it. Sure, it's early still (beta soonish), but I am doubting we'll see it (or maybe we'll get spellsteal v2). At the least, mages could become the "caster-rogues", given our lack of synergies as suggested already, but that also remains to be seen (and to be fair, it is far too early to speculate on 80 raid dps).

Anyway, there are alot of skeptical mages in this thread and I can say I'm pretty skeptical myself. If the 80 mage is not bringing desirable abilities to the 80 raid game as seems to be the case at 70, then I'll be closely looking at the other 9 classes (well, more like 6-7, I have alts) to determine which class I'd like to change to come expansion. I'd be happy to continue on the mage if our role were more important than sheeping trash, so here's to hoping there is something to look forward to that we have not seen yet.

Warlock lifetap-damage scale is not exponential. It's superlinear around the middle, with a linear asymptote as you approach 0 lifetap. Really, it should scale with a mana-related stat like INT or SPT. Hell, if it scaled with SPT appropriately they might even be able to revert the Fel Armor change and still have warlocks like spirit, but in a different way than other classes.

The idea of a mana pool is an interesting idea, assuming it shifts from infinite to finite under different casting cycles. Static mana costs with scaling regen and mana pools introduce scaling irregularities. They provide a different avenue of damage-scaling, assuming that the finitely-sustainable cast cycle stays finite. The problem is, it tends not to. Scaling regen eventually outscale static costs, and even if it doesn't reach it, asymptotic approach leads to strange nonlinear behavior like hard diminishing returns, and fight-dependent (and raid-composition-dependent) damage bonuses. That shifts the TC heavily into the metagame instead of the normal game. And not to set off that old bomb, but shifting the TC to the metagame favors 'hardcore' players who can maintain a consistent raid roster and have more control over recruiting.
But, that's a rather doomsaying tinfoil-hat analysis of mana regen, ignoring other controling facors and only looking at the limiting cases. I'll just say, static spellcosts with scaling mana pools or regen leads to odd game-theoretic behavoir that I don't think is where they want to take this game.

Hmm... well there are actually signs that is exactly what they are trying to do to the game. If spell costs are increasing dramatically, if theres any truth in what I read about rogue energy not regenerating anywhere near as fast as it is today, and if us clothies starting to pick up more spirit, those could all be indications that the game is to become more about cooldown management. In fact having just about any mage dps cycle be unsustainable over 10 minutes would mean that our manabar becomes soemthing of a giant cooldown timer. If it has to regen its own size several times over a regular length battle then mage dps will not be about having the statpool to support mashing your best nuke while dodging boss AoE stuff.

Offcourse as you say that method runs the risk or manaregen finally catching up to our static manacosts, but it doesnt haveto be impossible to balance low tier up to high tier raiding so that mages can´t ever regen more than an effective dps cycle uses. But like Ive mentioned earlier if regen is made this powerfull and the main tool for mages to regen mana how will such a solution not make clearcasting, arcane meditation and mage armor such important tools that it would be hugely gimping mage DPS not to pick them up and minimize your regen time. And if its something like that system that gets introduced but at high tiers mages will have enoughe stats to drop arcane meditation and go burnout, molten armor and IV instead...well in that case we are just at the scenario you mentioned earlier where mages simply outscale the need to regen.

Right now the greatest conflict in our alpha talent trees sems to be that arcane has very strong regen and fire/frost does not. So, will regen be very very important and raiding mages will simply need 18 points in arcane regardless of spec or will mages just outscale the need to regen making arcane fall way behind since its strength is wasted?

First hand I offcourse hope that blizz are just gonna have smarter pants then me and do this in a way I couldnt even imagine. But if things does turn out bad for any of our talent trees Im kinda hoping arcane comes out on top. For PvE purposes that tree seems like the most fun to play around with.

I really liked that in recent times the "best" Arcane build was one that focused on dumping as much mana as possible into a high DPS spell, being able to do decent DPS while regenerating mana, make a compromise between mana regen and damage on their gear, and come out with good overall numbers. I like the idea of Aspect of the Viper and how much better it is at low mana even if hunters rarely actually use it. There was once a time that Shadow Priests could always stop using Mind Blast, Elemental Shaman could stop casting Chain lightning or shocks, and Moonkin could switch to Starfire, all in the name of saving mana. But once Shadow Priests got Vampiric Touch it sorta became a rule that you had to go all-out DPS 100% of the time - and everyone *had* to have them.

Scorch in some ways used to be a spell designed for better DPM, good solo when you didn't need a full Fireball, and has always had good synergy with Impact. Since Empowered Fireball and especially since the coefficient tax on Improved Fireball was removed the DPM difference has shrunk to the point that any 70 in Karazhan will have better DPM on Fireball. When I checked the numbers on Dr Damage the day after the coefficients changed, I could scarcely believe it. Now I had no excuse not to just burn through all my mana - but now had nothing to afterwards do but wand.

As noted above, mana using DPS characters that can't Life Tap have traditionally had some way of maintaining DPS at a lower level in order to conserve mana, and before there were Shadow Priests and berserk timers it was taken as part of the game. But once you only had a limited time to kill the boss that wasn't just based on healer mana it became a huge problem. Dreamfoil and Major Mana potions were never a terrible problem until the above mentioned boss types in AQ40 and Naxx where folks had to pop potions on cooldown and use even more Dreamfoil per attempt on elixirs.

This is not to say that having bosses with enrage timers is a bad thing, even ones with timers like Gruul. But it does mean that the developers need to give each class some sort of ability or combination of abilities that will blow through mana for massive amounts of DPS. No amount of tinkering with Mana regen will really satisfy people if their best DPS spells and abilities have solid DPM - with such a spell folks will feel entitled to use it the entire fight. And right now the only classes that have anything resembling top DPS abilities at high but not unreasonable cost are non-BM hunters (who will use shots in their rotation with very low DPM when compared to Steady Shot) and Arcane Mages - and even in their cases they can often go 100% for long periods of time.

Healers in general have to maintain their mana in one way or another - this often takes the form of down-ranking. Healers that run out of mana before similarly geared healers with the same healing assignment are clearly frowned upon yet I doubt I have ever heard any DPS player be chastised for failure to manage their mana outside things like Mark of Kaz'rogal. It's generally taken for granted that if a DPS is out of mana, they spent it doing as much damage as they could and so it can't be altogether a bad thing. Give players better ways of turning extra mana into damage and that might change. At the same time you open things up to allow all players to balance mana regen and damage in fights that now only Arcane Mages (and maybe Hunters?) do.

--

Blizzard could put effort into developing the spreadsheets that exist now for all classes and use them to not only determine current damage and potential scaling issues but also to tweak abilities without having to code them and test them in-game. However, their current testing methodology is quite obviously all about economics. If they focus their development on making the game interesting and fun to play, they'll bring in more subscribers than if they focus on making sure all classes are precisely at the desired level at every gear level. There are so few people who will quit the game or fail to start playing over small end-game imbalances that it's just not justifiable to try to correct them ahead of time. Instead, they'll watch for things that are not intended and fix them afterwards. While they may care that Mages are 2nd class DPS raid slots, they're not interested in investing to fix that: some people with Mage mains might quit but many will just reroll or live with it - management (who is paid to make these decisions) likely determined that the costs of hiring of new developers and/or reallocating them from other areas were not worth it.

You may not like that your hobby is governed by some big corporate conglomerate's economics, but there's not much any of us can do about it besides quit. And if we take things this seriously, what's the chances of that?

Assuming the Living Bomb is dispelable, have fiery bright graphics, and placed so deep in the tree with least survival I doubt Living Bomb is going to be a good Arena PvP spell. If it also knocks the mobs out of melee from the tank, the talent doesn't look that useful to me.

Games aren't meant to have a "how to have fun and discover creative use of" sheet attached. Discovery, creativity and inventive application of understanding is one of the major source of enjoyment in a game.

What can we do with an AoE Knockback? I don't give a shit what the Devs thought about. I assure you, I can find a dozen different things I want to do with it. Up to now nothing at all in the game could affect the position of anything that wasn't (1) you or (2) controlled by you (Mind Control, Pets, Summons) and now we're granted a spell with the potential to not only affect positioning but to do so to multiple targets at once. Awesomeness.

I wonder if it's going to be some kind of weird BoP inscription which mandates you be the scribe to obtain.

Tie a dev to my chair and interrogate him on how he thinks I should play? I'll leave that one up to you, thanks.

Well I partially agree with you. Finding the neat tricks of stuff is up to the players. But I really dont think its a good idea to not have thought anything about area of use for a 51 point talent. As long as a spell is good for the thing it was intended for and balanced around that Im happy, whatever extra uses there are to it is the fun stuff to discover.
Basicly its two questions I have regarding this spell:

* Will you need all of the ticks + the explosion to make it a competetive AoE spell for raiding or will keeping it ticking but recasting it before it explodes deal better damage than an arcane mage just spamming AE? Cause if you haveto have the explosion to be worth casting it kinda sucks for raiding.

* How much of an eternity will 6 secconds be for a deep firemage in pvp? Along with the questions about dispellability and such. If firemages can controll their position compared to others well enoughe not to get focused down in 6 sec but still be in range when it blows and not having to worry about dispels, then it will be a good spell. If its nigh impossible to get a LB off cause it gets dispelled in one or two ticks, or if firemages just cant stay allive well enoughe in arena matches then it wont serve much of a purpose in pvp. It will be a spell thats cool for grinding, 5-mans and BGs. In other words for casual wow.

I prefer Blizzard's way though. IMO, its better to approach things from a "Is this fun?" basis and then test it in practice. Then tweak it slightly for balance. And then let it go.

If everything is broken down into math from the very start and forced to scale based on very strict inter related numbers and ratios, we might have a much more boring game.

I don't get it. "...it's [not] a good idea to not have thought anything about area of use"? What does that mean? It's an AoE spell, it's been designed as an AoE spell. You want there to be... "thought about area of use"? Please elaborate.

"good for the thing it was intended for and balanced around that". Firstly, you, we, or anyone else outside the NDA, doesn't know what it's intended for. Hence this is redundant. It is also redundant in the technical case that "what it's meant for may not please you", for example, it may be perfectly good at doing what it intends to do (eg: Slow), but what it intends to do is fucking useless. This isn't criticism, it's factualism (is that even a word?). It's understandable to be "happy" with a spell that fulfils its intended purpose, but it's more useful when that intended purpose is what we need, rather than what we may/don't.

Your questions both are impossible to answer. One because it's specific to the application of (1) A spell we don't understand and can not test in (2) a game we do not have access to which ends in (3) 5, 10, and 25man raids we have no idea about which (4) may or may not need AoE, the nature of which we don't know. The other because it's philosphical and quite abstract. "How much of an eternity will 6 seconds be?" Well: None. It will be 6 seconds.

What happens when a mage gets focused? In the context of AoE, who cares? If you're being focused (1) an AoE will do fuck all except waste your time (2) won't save you from being focused. Unless one of the focusers is on really low health, in which case I fail to see why LB is superior to any of: CoC, DB, BW, PoM-anyhting, Fblast. Barring the possible knockback effect, which remains to be examined. If it only happens when the spell ends, it's not exactly the most intelligent form of applied CC.

Your determination of LB as "a spell thats cool for grinding, 5-mans and BGs. In other words for casual wow." is indicative either of: (1) You know more than any one else on this forum, as you have determined how useful/useless a spell is in an expansion by seeing it's Alpha text box or (2) you're talking 100% speculation, as is most of this thread.

Let's try and keep speculative doomsaying out of the thread. If days go by and no new info/ideas come up, it's tiring when everyone up-and-goes "well, basically, I decide X spell is only good for Y and thus will be shit".

Also, could you please refrain from posting without checking spelling.

I consider the balance between casters just as important as the balance between casters and melee.

I have no problem with there being certain casting cycles that are infinitely sustainable; I simply must wonder what the point would be of having more casting cycles become infinitely sustainable (or more cycles become sustainable for a long period of time). As mentioned before, it's not that this isn't fun--it's that classes are implicitly balanced around their advantages and shortcomings. For every new advantage gained, something must be lost, or the class is one step closer to overpowered.

But I think you have presented the point well, PSGarak. It certainly suffices to say that the mana problem leads to odd behavior.

I realize that there is some complexity in this game that simply relies on dis-proportionality for its very concept. These mechanics, however, are very few. Rage is a big one; mana and static spell costs another (you'll notice these are both non-damage resources--rage suffers from a fixed-size pool with increasing gain from outside effects but fixed costs while mana suffers from a scaling pool with some increasing regen and fixed costs).

Aside from those, though, I can think of few problems that, if fixed, would significantly take away from "fun." Seal Fate is a good example: as crit chances inflate, Rogues have access to more combo points. Seal Fate is not broken, though. What's broken is that crit chances inflate. If you think it's not fun for crit chance to be mitigated, what do you think of resilience? Though resilience is poorly conceived in terms of how it affects crit chances, it is also necessary to counter the inflation of crit, which is a dimensionless number, a dimensionless proportion (hence proportional scaling).

This game is based around the illusion of progress. You raid, you get loot, you improve, but then you move on to a new level of content, where everything hits harder and has more health to compensate. Or, you PvP, you get loot, but then you rise to a new bracket, where everyone else hits harder and has more health to compensate. All I am advocating is that illusion be just that--illusion--instead of uncontrolled drift from one state of balance to another.

Im not trying to set a doomsday tune. Im trying to discuss one version of the LB spell that has been forwarded here. If all debate about how the up till now aplpha spells will be put to use and what strengths and weaknesses they will have is useless then this entire thread is more or less redundant. The previous post was written along the thought "if LB has knockback I think these will be the effects." Thats a line of thought thats well inside the topic in the thread and I kinda like tossing ideas about the spells to come around even if things may change, I am however not going to force you to do the same if you thinks its completely pointless.

As for the intended use for spells any spell that hits more than one target isnt automatically a well balaned AoE spell. With that line of thought you could argue that fireball would be an awesome AoE spell if blizz changed it to also deal 1 firedamage to all targets within 10yd of the impact target. It deals AoE damage, voila and AoE spell. Its just not that simple. When judging it for raiding I took into acount that mobs that get AoEd in raids are mobs that are to many to be efficently cut down one by one. Groups like that haveto be clustered up, tanked and AoEd. Offocurse you [u]can]/u] deal with them in other manners, but most of the time its pretty obvious when a pack is an AoE pack and not. And for bossfights in paricular you cannot deal with AoE elements in any other way than AoE unless you heavily outgear the fight. Lets try applying LB to a few fights we allready know. SSC, morgrim summons his murlocks, boomkins start the weather forecast, warlocks plant their seeds and then comes the firemage who goes wiee and scatters all the murlocks out of range from hurricane and SoC explosions. Moving on to Kaelthas weapons... wieee boom there goes the weapons flying. Hyjal and Gloria Gaynor sings its raining ghouls. Are you starting to see why Im saying knockback would be crap for raiding?

And pvp then, why is focused firemages of importance for this spell? Well it´s not if AoE is good while being focused or not thats the point. The point is however deep firemages can survive being focus fired, because if they cant it matters little if the top talent of their tree has good uses in pvp when the rest of the tree makes for a bad arena spec. If ( <--please not that word) LB is introduced as a knockback spell you need a talent tree that makes for a competetive arena spec unless you want it to be DB all over. we´ve allready seen it in TBC, DB was great for pvp but deep fire was not so great.

These are the two main points I hope the talk of LB knockback isnt true.