That's also very detrimental to our aoe gimmicky sutuations, such as core hounds, imps, suppression room, goblin engineers, fenkriss tunnel, naxx skitterers..... Geez, that's a pretty big hit. Is the future of aoe going to be limited to ~5 targets?

I've been trying to avoid venting my feelings on the future of the mage class on these forums, but rest assured, if this nerf goes through, I will definitely reroll a warlock.

It's like all the fun out of being a mage is being sucked out. Massive Ignite stacks, giant alpha strikes, Blizzard kiting, Flamestrike farming, all gone. But with a warlock, you get to make people hurt themselves and scatter clumps of people with your Seeds of Corruption, or let rip with your uber pets, or stun in AoEs while obtaining defensive procs from their attacks against you. All the while doing similar single target dps to mages or more. I simply don't see the point any more.

Of course, this could still be a hoax... any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

Maexxna, Anub'rekhan and Gluth alone spawn more than 10 adds to AOE at once periodically, if that change is intended then it's baffling. I'd love to see if Hellfire / Rain of Fire / Holy Nova are faring similarly.

I didn't even think about the raid implications. Baffling describes this perfectly.

ugh i hope this is a bad hoax... will test tonight

Tested some aoe right now.

It was only for a very short time, and its not very reliable, but...

At first i couldnt see a difference, then i found myself a healer gathered some mobs at Bone wastes (not sure exactly how many, around 10).
AE for around 395 each time. (the quite interesting this is, it hit for exactly 395 each time!)

Then i aoed 2 mobs from same area, 430-340 dmg. (here there was a difference in dmg each attack, as there should be).

Tried with 5 mobs too, and again i had different amoounts of dmg (430-450).

It wasnt a lot less dmg, and its probably too low a difference to say anything, but it looked a bit weird, especially that i got an exact dmg every single time i aoed the 10 mobs.

My testing shows about the same thing.
AE hit 1-8 targets about 460-480 damage, but when I got 10 targets, exactly 395 damage each time.

The HP increase across the board was more than enough to weaken suicide AoE. This really is not needed. Are they trying to remove everything that is fun about mages?

Well, I can see them reworking the code to put less burden on the server when AoE'ing past 10 targets. I'm sure when I'm doing zerg-control stuff, the server, client, and connection HAS to be burning up the cycles. The plan might have been to just get a single number when past a threshold of mobs and they goofed when they implemented it. Maybe tried to reuse code from something else (hence the unwanted behavior).

This would also explain why the reports are that Blizzard (and Hellfire) are not effected while Flamestrike is. They automatically get the same number across all ticks. Blizzard rolls once, then channels that amount. It was not effected (arguably the biggest offender next to CoC because of its kiting power when talented) because it was already doing what they wanted, so they left it alone.

That's my theory at least. All reasonable expectations point to this being a bug. After all, if they wanted to kill AoE farming, they would have nerfed Blizzard, which they didn't.

I've been playing in RFC a bit, and this is what I've found:
- Blizzard is not currently effected by this change.
- IAE up to nine mobs is not effected.
- At 10 mobs IAE does about 10-20% less damage, and it scales down to about a 66% damage reduction for large values of mobs (I'm not sure the exact number needed to hit the 33% mark, but it was about 20).
- Cone of Cold is also affected by the damage reduction.
- Frost Nova seemed to suffer very minor diminishing returns. It got about a 20-25% reduction against 16 targets.

I'll try testing flamestrike later, but I doubt I'll get to Blastwave.

You know it's bad/funny when you get all sorts other classes coming into the mage forums and posting pictures of vaseline and laughing.

Just noticing one thing about the new ignite.

http://thottbot.com/beta?sp=12848
Not dispellable..... Until they realize they made a typo.

Just trying to brigten your day :O

OK, tying this to the previous observation that low numbers get individual amounts of damage, while higher numbers all get the same damage, my money is on this being a bug related to bandwidth-saving.

It looks as though for n <= 9, each mob gets an individual damage roll. For n > 9, a single roll is made and split across all mobs. Then then forgot to make this roll scale with the number of mobs.

Thus, at 10 mobs, each is taking 9/10 as much damage as it should - a 10% reduction. For 20 mobs, each is taking 9/20 as much as it should - a 55% reduction.

If I'm right, you'll hit a 66% damage reduction at around 27 mobs - is this close enough for your "about 66%" and "about 20" to fit? It may be that the breakpoint is 8 rather than 9, which would give you 66% reduction at 24 mobs and 20% reduction at 10 mobs, which actually fits better with what you observed. Or it may be that the divisor is 8.5, or something odd like that. The point is that the numbers you post are consistent with a cutoff point in terms of mob number, after which a single damage roll is made and then divided equally between the total number of mobs.

Now, it could be that this is an intended nerf, but for now let's report it as a bug (after all, it's not in the notes), and hope that that's genuinely the case.

So I was.... guess I shouldn't post so late at night.... :(

Cyberllama posted to the mage boards an alternate theory of why the damage changes to a consistent number once you reach a larger number of targets, and it makes some sense:

bah, vampiric embrace is not a curse anymore. No more removing a shadowpriests healing capabilities ><

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=6

Kalgan responded to a thread and concerning the AoE nerf basically said its tuned for higher damage coefficent capping out at 10 targets. So your going to need X number of aoe'ers for zerg encounters or face lower damager per aoe'er.

Kalgan is brilliant. I really can't disagree with that guy, except maybe about Spellsteal. He mentions having teammates "help you out" by dispelling the target. Doesn't that remove the use of spellsteal already? It feels more like a toy to me. It won't guarantee you a useful buff and it won't be a decent dispel in anything above 2v2. It's too restricted by only allowing 1 stolen buff and only 2 minutes duration. It needs to be evaluated as it adds close to nothing in anything above 2v2.

Other than that I must say I agree with Kalgan on everything, and I was glad to see that I predicted some of his answers pretty good. I said way back that I thought invis was intentionally watered down and well... :)

Are you guessing about the new coefficients or are they actually live on beta? If they completely remove the multi target penalty then I would personally consider this a pretty big buff.

If this is so, then the aoe's are getting a substantial buff on 10 targets or less. Improved Cone of Cold becomes much more powerful (and wasn't bad already). Hell, even Frost Nova (assuming it doesn't take a penalty for rooting targets, which it might well) could be hitting in the 400 range and critting in the 800 range with 700ish damage gear.

I've chilled out a lot on mage on PVP now that ive had the opportunity to test it in the arena (PTR), I know stamina and levelling will skew the balance, but as it stands now, im simply overpowered at level 60 with the new talent points. I feel useful, and in any arena/group pvp im generally one of the most important members of the group. The damage meters in the new BGs consistantly show me as the top damage dealer by a large (i mean double hunters/rogues/warriors average) margin with both full fire and frost specs..and this is while ive got the best CC and snares in the game, BW/DB/Nova(available 4 times within a short time if needed)/sheep/cs/CoC/Poly, and generally being a pain in the ass to the enemy.

Our strength is that we can damage from anywhere on the map, basically. No other class has that, hunters come close, but have nowhere near the utlity, and have their deadzone, and compared to us in melee, they're kittens, even with 1k raptor strikes. For survival, as a fire mage, yes, pretty much any *ranged* focus fire at all is going to eat you alive, but frost mages have the best defenses of any class in the arena, period.

As 'fun factor' feedback, ill say straight out i found fire to be more fun than frost, zooming around the arena unloading DB/Blastwave and stopping to pretty much one shot people with fireballs/fireblasts. Frost is king in theorycraft terms though, simply because of its versatility, it feels too slow a playstyle for me atm, rather like playing my warlock, I may rethink when I get ice lance.

Kalgans response was very interesting, good to see some direct input from devs, and he let drop some interesting design philosophies while he was at it. Im glad they are removing combust/POM cooldown, that's going to open up fire/arcane, because frankly that build was *very* unappealing in the expansion as it stood. Invis will probably be getting improvements, and anti-caster mechanics *might* be getting improved (or locks/shadowpriests nerfed :p). Raid spots seem almost secured with aoe being changed and the single target dps info he gave. Spellsteal i never saw a problem with to be honest, i dare say it'll be extremely powerful even in it's current incarnation, and i like having a 'quirky' spell to use in instances like priests mind control->buff, but much more usable.

Only thing im still worried about is arcane blast, i just cant see a niche for it at the moment, and im hoping it doesnt fall off my castbar when i get it, we'll see though.

Yeah that's true of course, assuming that your priest/shammy has enough time to waste global cooldowns on that. Personally I think too many abilites are only successful by chance. Combustion, spellsteal and molten armor to some extent..

Not a surprise that they were conservative about Invisibilty. 5 seconds looking at the tooltip should tell you that. It really needs a buff.

DB/CoC should still be changed so using DB only trigger 10 sec cd on coc, and coc obviously only trigger 10 sec on both, then you can use DB, 10 sec after CoC, and then back to DB when its cooldown is gone. It still prevents the burst of using both in a row (which I agree would b too much), but at least you could keep CoC in the actionbar then.

Ignite should still be changed/buffed imo. Its just feels wrong that the 40% dmg isnt dealt in the 4 sec the tooltip says anymore, if you are "unlucky" and crit too much. Make it undispellable (pvp buff), make the dmg a bit higher (45%?) or something else. Dont know. 210% dmg, where 40% is a dot dosnt seem like a damn good deal currently. (but ofc, its based on what we are used to, if it had worked like this always, I bet i wouldnt care...).
Still, the ignite "fix" is what makes me most sad about mage class right now.

Counterspell on gcd. Not sure if i should care. In pve i hardly can be bothered to cast counterspell anymore. Rather keep the nuking up instead. And it can be damn hard to time it because of the gcd. In grp pvp I guess it can still be useful sometimes.
Not a change i care much about, though I cant understand the reasons about consistency. Since when should there be consistency between classes, i thought their goal was to make the classes feel different from eachother. Beside, as he say himself, gcd doesnt matter as much for all classes.

About aoe, sounds interesting, I couldnt feel any dmg boost against few targets in the testing ive done, but if he say its buffed, I guess he is right...

Also, Kalgan didnt mention anything about the frost tree (he wasnt asked either, give me access to US forums, they dont have enough spam! :/), dmg-wise it seems very lacking for raiding.
Also, with the nerf to empowered fireball, they should really let it cost 4 points instead of 5 (or let it work for scorch too?), but thats just details of course :)

Since my last view on our current situation ive got a few more lvls, and with it, arcane blast and ice lance.


Arcane blast is quite nice dmg, but tbh, i cant see where its supposed to fit in. Its too much like all the other dmg spells we have already. Just more spells in one, because of how it change.
Should probably focus on new spells that give us some usability, than more dmg spells, unless they can really come up with something thats different (Dragon Breath is nice, even if its a lot like CoC).
Cant really decide what I think about Arcane blast, both decent and useless at the sane time.
Especially useless in raiding (though you can probably theorycraft some frostbolt - arcane blast casting to maximize mana efficiency).

Ice lance. First of all its insanely useless dmg when the target isnt frozen, which isnt a surprise, but dammit i hate it when the frozen effect dissapear just before i cast it.
And even against frozen targets the dmg isnt that nice. But I can understand blizz is very afraid of scaling this spell too much. It could get pretty evil if they are not careful.
Even if the dmg isnt great, its a decent spell, and the fact its instant save it of course. Anyway, in most cases you might be better off just spending 1 sec more casting a frostbolt (then you refresh your chill effect too), if you are able to spend 2,5 sec casting ofc. If not, ice lance are great.
Not useful for anything in raiding though.

Btw, Molten Armor. Not mentioned often in here. And obviously its not useful for much at all, since Mage armor is better for raiding, frost armor for pvp (mostly for forst mages of course...). Still I kinda like it. Its cool when it proc impact, 3% crit isnt bad either, and in raids where mana doesnt matter at all it could be a decent buff). Good idea imo, even if its weak.

Oh, also Blazing speed talent. I basked it in my post some days ago, but i have to admit after spending more time with a fire build that its quite fun, and even useful sometimes in solo pve. It surely procs often in pve.
Doesnt change the fact I cant see it being insanely useful in pvp. You will hopefully not be hit as often in pvp as you can be in solo pve, since players usually hit 5x as hard or more... And thus it shouldnt proc much either.