Shadout

Hey Vhad. Met you in wsg just before :P Got to feel the power of mages on one of my alts...

Anyway, arcane still feels like 3 min mage to me tbh. Sure, you can do quite good most of the time, but everything is still about waiting for the next "bomb" from AP and/or PoM.
Arcane is very strong though, no doubt about it, maybe even too strong. But the playstyle is centered on the cooldowns.

My point? Got none. Arcane is great for what it does. Personally im a bit sad to see the 3 min bomb back again. Imagine the "Nerf mages" whine it will start :)
I havent tried arcane since the patch, but tested a few different arcane builds in beta. As one could guess from what ive just written, I was not impressed at all. Sure, high crits, 3 min mage, but it felt wrong, for me. Cant complain if we get more specs to chose from, and more playstyles though.


Also, water elemental, it is freaking nice, maybe the best new ability we get (ice lance is quite nice too though). A shame it still got some weird bugs. Im normally FireForLife (tm), but going deep frost in bc (and was deep frost in beta), and the power is amazing. Sure, it got low health, but anything else would have been overpowered. Maybe it will start to have too low health at lvl 70, with new raid gear (it doesnt scale very fast from what I could see). But kinda hard to say yet.

 

Darkchani

After doing some arena i must say it... full discipline priest + full fire mage is insane in arenas... combustion + PI + DB + DBZ every fight... on top of a mini shield wall on the priest... pretty crazy :D


Has any deep-fire (horde) mage done 4H yet ? we've often had aggro pulls in the past from warlocks and mages... and now with warlock dot dps up and mage aggro reduction went down while dmg going up...
Anyone have experiences to share on that ?

 

Raiste

i went from 17/31/3 to 0/48/3 and I must say I am absolutely loving it in pvp. It is an order of magnitude higher as far as pvp viability goes than 17/31/3 (hunters and locks are still over the top, gg silencing shot).

For PvE, we cleared AQ40 thru the twins on friday and i must say raid dps seemed very noticably higher. Things just died in a blink of an eye. SWS i think was still a bit buggy so no solid hardcore numbers but as a measure huhuran died in little over one shield wall I think when generally we take 2+. One thing to note is WE's will pull Veklor agro fron tanks >.< and 30 sec blastwave + 20 sec DB are absolutely amazing in AoE situations. Also blizzard has gotten a nice buff to it as well ticking for 210 or so a wave now instead of the 175ish range pre patch for me.

Real test will be naxx next week where decursing and mana may become issues. We'll see. So far it definitely feels like a dps upgrade over prepatch. (moonkin aura = 5% and the 5% misery debuff from shadow priests is also very awesome to have if you happen to have one in your raid ).

 

flyinfungi

I agree, Arcane feels alot stronger then it did before. I no longer feel as if i must hide behind the lines for 3 minutes so i can kill the flag carrier in WSG or be truly effective in any pvp situation. Arcane has been handled very well by blizzard. Fire tree I also think is very well done. Frost On the other hand needs work on end talents although a very strong tree otherwise.

Fungi cause the great majority, an estimated two-thirds, of infectious plant diseases. They include all white and true rusts, smuts, needle casts, leaf curls, mildew, sooty molds, and anthracnoses; most leaf, fruit, and flower spots; cankers; blights; scabs, root, stem, fruit, and wood rots; wilts; leaf, shoot, and bud galls; and many others. -Encyclopedia Britannica

 

Northerner

Frost is actually (in my opinion of course) not only a very powerful tree but perhaps a little too strong for the later levels. I do not *at all* mean that it is too strong in a class-by-class comparison, only that it is relatively potent in terms of PvE/PvP for the options that Mages have. Arc/Frost, Arc/Fire, Deep-Fire and Deep-Frost are all actually pretty well balanced for mages at 70 now I think, it's just that they are not perhaps balanced in the ways I would like them to be. Specifically, Shatter is too important for PvP and too unimportant (and defintely gimps) a PvE spec [EDIT: PvE raiding, it is a dream PvE levelling/questing] , including a PvE 'trash'/generalist spec even.

I could QQ for hours about a lot of the changes to our class but frankly, I don't think it is productive. I think I finally see where they want us to be (and damned if that didn't take a while!) yet I strangely think we might get there when the gear comes and we adapt a bit more. I am completely unsold that this is the class I want to play in WoW2.0 but it will be a solid and useful class I believe.

Only time will tell of course and the odds of me continuing with my present main are slimmer than they once were. That too is all fine of course.

EDIT: misconstrued PvE levelling and PvE raiding

 

Viator

Could you extrapolate a bit more on that? I'm sort of feeling the same way but I'm having a hard time finding the words for what the class is becoming. I feel the same levelling up on beta and I feel the same at 70... except I completely don't. That's completely useless but there's something subtle going on that I can't quite grasp in a tangible way.

Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork

 

Maledict

Hmm, I wish I could find the quote where Tigole said that rogues were meant to be the twitch class for raiding, with warriors short behind them, and that mages were the "simple" class to play for dealing damage - paraphrasing, some people just like to sit at the back and see big numbers.

That's my one concern with the mage class at the moment and into the future. It's looking quite powerful, but it's also looking very easy to play compared to other classes, with a lot less room for skill to play a part, and a lot less room for the "fun" factor, unless seeing huge numbers is the fun you're looking for.

 

Vhad

The Pre 2.0 arcane mage was very gimped the other 2 mins 45 seconds waiting for spell cooldowns, mostly because it lacked specialization - Your fireballs would hit for very weak amounts unless you were powered up and frostbolt even more so. Now, with my full arcane I can pick and chose, I don't get ice shards or ignite, but fireball and frostbolt hits very hard on their own. The bomb that is pom and ap just makes it for a very very dangerous build for nearly anyone you meet in pvp, and even though alot of people claim AM to be useless in pvp I beg to differ, it chases through walls and if you launch your barrage and they go out of range and come back in they still chain.
I just come to love the playstyle, you can launch one wave of AM get clearcast stop AM to not get counterspelled and then do a fireblast with 50+% crit, that's alot of burst.
I'd better stop talking about my new found love for arcane now, else I'll get nerfed.

What!?

 

• Snowy

I love AM in PvP for the same reasons, due to the fact that it'll continue to finish its cast even on people who duck behind walls or go around a corner. Plus it's uninterruptable with the talent, which is useful in AV when you have random things plinking at you sometimes.

Personally I love water elemental. I haven't even begun to scrape the surface with it, but with cold snap you have potentially 4 frost novas at your disposal in a very short time. Ice blocking with it still up is incredibly useful in many situations. It's a very harsh counter to prep rogues too, you have an extra snare to burn one of their vanishes with.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Tweaknutz

I just spec'd 51 arcane, working pretty good for pvp, AM def aren't to shabby now. Slow is great in 1v1 situations.

Does anyone know if the current slow is the same on beta? I thought i head read somewhere that they nerfed it to 20% redux in attack speeds instead of 50%.

 

Northerner

I'll be honest here, I don't really think I can articulate it properly yet. I am getting the feeling that they want us to spec for a role and the desired raid role is one of mixed utility with decent sustained damage, AE synergy with warlocks and strong short-term burst damage situationally. We also seem to get thrown some utility in terms of encounter-specific perks through spelll-stealable crutch abilities and/or polymorph. I'm still just not seeing the "jaw-dropping" damage relative to other classes though and the new statistics paradigm doesn't seem like it lends itself to Mages particularly well.

I'm still playing around with options though and frankly, Beta simply isn't done yet. When considering where one class lies in terms of balance it is pretty silly to do so when I don't really know where the other classes will end up of course but it is more than that. Until we can really see what the larger raids will demand from a dps class and more importantly, until I can actually parse some important content, I'm just speculating and doing so without enough information to make it meaningful. So, I'm going to cop out for now and rather than throwing out a lot of drivel that is half-formed in my head, I'm going to wait a little while still and see if it becomes clearer. I do get the inkling that it is at least starting to make some sense and as frustratingly vague as that comes off, that's all I have for now.

 

Mandilo

This is from 5 minutes ago:



They changed the way the ignite damage is carrying over didn't they? On beta it was completely falling off by the last tick, now it's split between the the ticks.

http://ctprofiles.net/1391975

 

duostrike

This is exactly the way it worked on ptr. I don't know exactly how it is working on beta to compare. This is the take the last ignite divide by 2 method that hasn't changed at all afaik.

 

Evalara

When our mostly-alt MC run got to Rag on sunday I swapped my mage in for my warrior, as did a couple of warlocks, just to see how fast we could burn him down. As a stupid 5/0/46 pvp spec (0/3 EP!) I topped the meters, 20k ahead of second place (another deep frost mage), who was herself 20k ahead of 3rd, 3-5 was a shadow priest and two rogues. With ToEP up my frostbolts were hitting for 1500+ and the WE's waterbolts ocassionally topped 1k non-crit. It was pretty sweet. I did run out of mana at 2% though, sadly I didn't have that shadow priest in my group!

 

Jantteri

I just wrote a post about it in the other thread: http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...262815#p262815

Basically it's a very thin line to walk with fireballs. 1 crit, or even hit with high +dmg gear and after 20% mark could pull agro.

 

Cagalli

Tailoring BoP gear, ilevel 105 so on par with Karazhan gear I think.

http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=16945
http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=16947

Frost = PvP, Fire = PvE, thanks Blizz!

Geez if you ignore that socket bonuses on the frost set and stack them with +dmg gems you're looking at +256 dmg along with 860 health. Also about gems... shouldn't we be getting some single school +dmg gems?

http://ctprofiles.net/37645

 

Tweaknutz

When comparing T5 sets: Warlock > Mage

They get better Stam, Int. We get better Spr. Dmg, Crit, Hit are roughly the same.

Mage Lock
sta 99 137
int 120 130
spi 85 0
str 0 0
agi 0 0
damheal 188 192
crit 84 91
hit 27 27
pen 18 15

 

flyinfungi

I'll say it once and i will say it again, spirit is going to be a defining part of our class in the future.

Whats your thoughts?

Fungi cause the great majority, an estimated two-thirds, of infectious plant diseases. They include all white and true rusts, smuts, needle casts, leaf curls, mildew, sooty molds, and anthracnoses; most leaf, fruit, and flower spots; cankers; blights; scabs, root, stem, fruit, and wood rots; wilts; leaf, shoot, and bud galls; and many others. -Encyclopedia Britannica

 

Nurru

For PVE it always is going to remain a good stat. I wouldn't claim it's defining though.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

• frmorrison

Spirit is great for raiding or grinding, but I would not say it is a class defining stat. Spell Crit and Damage are the Mage class defining stats.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Phanuel

Grats Stamina having a double use for them while a marginalized use for us. Spirit just doesn't compare for mana regen to having a giant HP pool and healers hitting you with a HoT for massive mana efficiency.

 

Tempestra

On the plus side, I prefer our T5 set bonuses to warlocks'. Still, I wouldn't mind the having a stat be greater on our gear aside from spell penetration (yuck?) and spirit (good for raiding but *not* class defining by any stretch of the imagination).

 

duostrike

Spirit is nice but it should be a part of our armor. Baseline spirit level shouldn't cost anything in the budget or perhaps a tiny amount. While I like spirit on my gear it's almost never worth giving up other stats to have it. Consider HP for warlocks. It serves as health and extra mana. I really don't know why perhaps int for mages could perhaps serve as mana pool and regen.

Another suggestion, something like:
Mage Armor: % of int translates into mana regen
Evocation: X amount of int translates into X mana gained per sec

Then shelve all the spirit on mage gear for int/damage/crit

Mage set should be considerably higher in crit than warlock set and perhaps the same or a little bit less +damage. Mages have no real defining stat besides perhaps int now that the arcane tree has the int->damage.

 

Alcyon

For spirit to be a defining part of the class it would have to do something more than adjust the speed of your mana regen. Until it does, it's worthless for PVP and mediocre for anything other than single encounters where you would run out of mana (i.e. raid bosses).

As long as warlocks require only two stats and mages require three for the same (essential) effect, itemisation won't really be equal -- we've seen this on all mage specific sets which are in general worse than the warlock equivalents (especially things like the AQ20 ring).

Even if int becomes our defining stat, it's still worse than stamina. You always want a big buffer of health, and you only want enough mana to be able to kill what you want. Having an excess of health that can be turned into mana is the ideal situation -- even were mages given a "mana tap" that converted mana into life it would not help against burst damage, and we would not be able to derive greater efficiency from heals as warlocks do, only Innervate and Evocation (which both rely on spirit).

The trouble is, not only are some stats better for a particular class (agility is better for a rogue than for a warrior) some stats are just plain better (stam vs spirit). The classes whose "defining" stat is one of these good stats lucks out, and the ones that don't don't.

The decreased budget of stamina items only intensifies this disparity -- warlock resources to cast spells goes up, mage resources stay the same or in fact get worse since everyone has more stamina now. Longer lasting fights also favours warlocks with their DOTs, as opposed to the burst damage of a mage.

The only way this can be solved is to give mages inherent class advantages over warlocks, or to improve what int and spirit does. The arcane talent that converts int to dmg is fantastic, but only available to arcane mages (and requires a slightly awkward spec at 60).

At the end of the day -- they're raiding sets, designed for raiding. The warlock set will clearly be superior for pvp, but at the end of the day might make mages and warlocks equivalent in raids. The problem is more that warlock pvp gear is extremely similar to warlock pve gear, whereas for mages it's quite different. Which is the problem healers have always had =P

 

Zephro

Is Pyroblast worth using in raids now, with the better scaling?

Presumably your scorch/pyro rotation is more dps than pure scorch, but less dpm, while being less dps than fireball spam but more dpm. Is that right?