But ... but ... but we haven't killed Illidan yet. I would be very upset if we got locked out of BC content in preparation for LK content. Blizz won't be retooling the BC fights to fit the new game mechanics. Yes, some mechanics get more powerful, but some will change completely in ways not consistent with BC fights.

I'm sure those issues are not a problem for raids that have overpowered most of the BC content. It just feels crappy not being able to finish up before the LK arrives.

My mage on live could get something approaching 400 spellpower from the new fel armor, with appropriate raid buffs and consumables. To be sure, no level 70 warlock could approach this figure given current itemization, but by level 80 they could be in the neighborhood of 600ish spellpower in raid conditions, particularly human warlocks. (I am leveling a human warlock right now with this in mind.)

We really aren't the only class getting new abilities and talents that will drastically increase dps. If anything PvE will just be a joke through and through after 3.0. Coordination fights will still be roughly the same but fights like brutallus will sort of melt. Really don't see anything terribly wrong with this. Really who cares about balance for the few weeks or months during 3.0 before WotLK? It's no different that it was at level 60 during 2.0.

full arcane while we still have mad shadow priest regen?

1) If some bosses suddenly go unkillable due to unforeseen consequences it sucks for those who havent cleared whole SW
2) If they instead get much easier it sucks anyway, since you arent really killing those same old bosses anymore

Not really complaining though, it was expected. It only sucks if they release 3.0 a very long time before Wotlk. Shouldnt be more than a month or so.

1 most classes do mad dps in beta, and healers heal for more.

2 hello scrubs with high warlord weapons and blue gear pre tbc (you have 1-2 months to clear all bosses and we had plenty of time to work on them already, in my mind tbc ended when illidan died )

Probably still bad since it has the worst rating to percent conversion rate.

On arcane in 3.0, I see a couple problems:
1. Spell power got moved up the tree, so 40/0/21 is somewhat worse off.
2. The hit from Arcane Focus went down to 3% from 10%, so you'll have to re-gear (assuming the spell hit cap stays at 17%, which it sounds like it is).
3. The 3 second debuff duration on Arcane Blast means no rotations.

I thought it was confirmed that the spell hit cap was reduced to 9%

I read this two, people confirmed this a few build ago.
But there was some weird things with resists on +X monsters (lack of hit now produces misses not resist), I wonder if there is a change of mechanic or if it was a bug.

It was always a miss it just was labeled as a resist. I could have sworn there was a differentiation in the color that indicated miss or resists in wow classic but it has been too long and I could be remembering things that never actually happened.

Anyway it wasn't a mechanic change or bug it was a display change. The only thing that was borderline buggy was the absurd amount of partial resists on higher level mobs but I believe testers stated they dropped to a more reasonable rate in one of the past patches.

Most recent tests I've seen, http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...p6/#post861956 indicate miss vs. +3 is still 17%. However, it appears you can reduce that to 0% (vs. the current 1%).

I believe it was just a rumor started by speculation that if hit ratings were being merged, then surely miss rates have to be merged also, or else hybrids would always be undercapped for spells or overcapped for (one-handed/yellow) melee.

This thought crossed my mind.

Since fire spec started to care about dpm, how does this affect the relative standing of dam, crit and haste?

Currently, you have too much mana, thus haste rules over all, followed by dam, followed by crit.

In WotLK, firemages get their own way to convert mana into damage, and suddenly haste stops looking as attractive. Why spend mana faster if you can already spend it all?
At the same time, crit rating - while being inferior for straight dps increase - seems to provide a higher increase in dpm than +dam.

Do these changes challenge the current firemage gearing status quo of haste=>dam>crit, transforming it into dam=>crit>haste?

Regarding Blizzard's history of respecs, I think it is important to place those in the context of what those costs actually were. You *could* respec, and the cost wasn't very high. Even before BC, there were lots of PVE tanks who switched to Arms on weekends, and holy priests who went shadow for BGs.

When BC came out, respec costs didn't scale as fast as income did. Was this an accident or a choice? It seems like a choice to me, given how popular it was and how little comment we have received from Blizzard that people are respeccing too much. They have also kept a hard cap of 50g.

My point is just that given that track record, I can't see Blizzard penalizing respeccing much more than they currently are, without some specific comments of Blizzard's to the contrary. Scaling it so that it costs the same in terms of gold farming time (15 minutes of farming gets you enough gold for respeccing in LK, just as it does today) would make sense, however.

Lhivera said:

Except that anyone who tries to glyph for pve and pvp is going to be badly glyphed.

A pvp frost mage giving up the frostbolt snare or wanting more mana regen on mage armor? never. A PVE raiding mage wanting 20% more damage on his nova, nova reset after iceblock, fireblast crits during a stun, 5 yards more on ice lance or snare removal on icy veins? No way.

Just look at the glyphs. Pick your top 3 for frost pve - probably frostbolt, water elemental, one of the armors. For pvp frost, it is probably water elemental, icy veins, and frost nova or ice block. The only overlap is the elemental. Even if you decide frostbolt glyph gimps you too much for non-raiding, you still won't choose the pvp glyphs. It would be improved scorch (for 0/18/53) or mana gem or something.

Fire admittedly has a bit more pve/pvp synergy (fireball, scorch, molten armor would probably add value for both), but for other classes and specs similar problems occur, where pve glyphs suck for pvp.

Frankly, if they are indeed allowing the ability to toggle between two specs, its pretty easy to imagine allowing the ability to toggle between two glyph sets. Not sure how Blizzard will actually solve this problem, but making it hard or prohibitively expensive (say 1000g to respec today) to use different glyphs for pvp and pve is something that they won't do. Won't be able to join you in Seattle for the beer, but will post a virtual one here if I am wrong.

Think about what you just wrote. If we get WotLK talents in SW, so does shadowpriests.

Anyway, less discussion about non-mage-wotlk-stuff would be nice. This thread got a bit too off topic with 3.0, respec costs and glyphs discussions to my liking.

I have trouble believing that Eyonix used the phrase "weeks" lightly, given Blizzard's fear of timelines. For good or ill, I strongly suspect Blizzard wants to release the new talents and some new content to compete with Warhammer, even if the rest of the XP won't be ready for prime time for months.

Its gonna throw S4 arena and PVE raid composition completely up in the air. I agree that it is unwise. Making the game unbalanced for months while waiting for LK is far more likely to drive affected players to Warhammer. "Nothing I do for the next three months matters anyway, as my class is now gimped in arena, and all we get is laughed at for making progression kills after all classes have been buffed - might as well play a different game until the XP comes out."

Good. Mages could hardly do any worse in pve raid comps. We've nowhere to go but up, and ought to be cheering this.

[quote=Ivorthemage;868204]Except that anyone who tries to glyph for pve and pvp is going to be badly glyphed.

(And other stuff about glyphing problems in the system I described.)

This'll be my last words on the subject until we see what they actually come up with. I'll just say that my predictive record on this stuff is pretty good, though. That whole "Raid Stacking" post from a few days ago essentially duplicates the design philosophy I've been arguing for on the official forums for the past two years, and I had a lot of people telling me that my ideas were crazy.

First, Lord Beef: I think you're misinterpreting Blizzard's statements. I read no implication into them that they intend for gaps to be filled by forcing your hybrid to respec to fill the missing role. To me, what they intend is for gaps to be filled by making the abilities of classes that can fill those roles more homogenous. You no longer need a Mage for DPS+CC+AOE because now a hunter pet can reasonably off-tank an elite, or a shaman can hex it, or a rogue can sap it, or a succubus can seduce it, and more classes have AOE. You no longer need a specific combination of tanking classes; if you need two tanks, then any two tanks will do. And so forth. Now, if absolutely necessary, yes, a hybrid can respec -- but the changes they've explicitly described in posts about tanking in WotLK allow for a lot more group flexibility, so there's no need to try to find other implicit changes to allow for it.

Ivor: First, if you correct the problem of the Frostbolt glyph sucking (no other primary nuke's glyph renders it worthless for a whole aspect of the game), your overlap on major glyphs is now 2, not 1. I expect that will happen. Second, the penalty for a compromise set of glyphs is nowhere near as severe as the penalty for a compromise spec; I doubt Blizzard will have a problem with it. Finally, some people have suggested, and this sounds somewhat plausible to me, what you say here:

That would be a fairly elegant solution that would fit what I said in my previous post, allowing for the ease of optimization while still remaining true to Blizzard's philosophy of spec investment.

Pretty sure if they include new talents, that would also include the dps rebalancing at the same time. I fully expect it would include 2% mana regen from SP, as well as raid-wide 'group' buffs such as totems. I'm not sure exactly how mana will look out at 70 using lvl 80 talents (but no lvl 80 spells) given that we don't know what will stack (mana wise) and what is group-wide and what is raid-wide. That means so far the uber-JOW, 2% from SP, mana tide (raid wide?), hunter regen (raid wide?) and imp WE.

I would expect the new mana costs to go live too. But thats just my guess. If I were to make a guess, that will mostly affect healers that will have to adapt. Keep in mind you won't be getting spells above lvl 70, that means no FFB.

As was said before, I am pretty sure this is more about 'changing things up'. I am fairly sure major patches attract a lot more players than they lose to pissed off players. If anything, I'm all for it, although I am somewhat very much not looking forward to have to enforce a frost mage in every raid due to WC (seriously, make it not stack with coe or something).

Except that PvP in 2.0 was one of the worst things ever seen and showed the glaring problems in PvP when all warriors, hunters and rogues were running around with grand marshal weapons insta-gibbing everyone and loads of people decided to take a break over christmas until tBC came out. It's fortunate that we won't be seeing PvP problems on that level in 3.0, but I fear a lot of people will decide to stop raiding making it hard to get groups together.

With numerous things that have been hinted at in blue posts and interviews (such as the insane mage DPS that beta hasn't seen) I personally think it points to the possibility that a lot of the bugs have been fixed, the raiding content is close to finished and they've already started the number crunching. Say a month and we get a release date, a couple of weeks later 3.0 is released, then another month before it's shipped? Around mid-November doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility, although that's probably wishful thinking on my part. If their team totally focused on getting the new spells and abilities ready in time and focus on the raid content later then I don't think it would be too hard to iron out the bugs and get things working properly.

I also don't buy the whole "they wouldn't rush the release just because of Warhammer" line because I do think out of all the MMOs released Warhammer is the biggest threat to them solely because it's PvP focused and PvP is WoW's greatest problem (and they know it).

Err, sorry for the huge off-topicness.

Back on to mages, I'm interested in the mage armor glyph. People keep comparing the mage armors to warlock ones, which is fair, so it seems like a glyph to convert spirit to spelldamage or crit rating would be a feasible way of solving that problem and make it useful in both PvP and PvE. The problem is, arcane spec can already convert intellect to spelldamage and giving that spec another rotue could make it potentially really hard to balance. Crit on the other hand seems to work better because arcane gets the least from crit, but that balances slightly cause it likes the regen better. It'd give frost and fire something to be excited about and mage armor is already great for AOE due to mana and with extra crit on AOE it would bypass the AOE cap thing.

It would kind of conflict with the molten armor glyph, but that could always be changed to offer a further reduction in crit damage, or make up the other 50% of ranged attacks and spells being hit with it's damage (that seems to have disappeared from the talent tree and not returned).

In my mind, the solution to mage spirit itemization is exceedingly simple.

1. Move the magic resistance from Mage Armor to Ice Armor. Add a damage increasing benefit to Mage Armor based on spirit. You don't want spell damage because that is Fel Armor; you don't want spell crit because that is Molten Armor. Easy, add X% of your spirit as spell haste. The armor increases DPS through spell haste while simultaneously giving the regen necessary to accomodate the increased mana consumption. Ice Armor becomes the perfect battleground armor and Mage Armor becomes a perfect PvE armor.

OR

2. Move Arcane Meditation to be a much shallower arcane talent. Something akin to how Elemental Precision is now so that any spec can easily pick up the talent without a significant sacrifice in their primary tree.

This is in fact the direction I hope they go. This allows for a couple common behavior patterns that cause most respeccing today that I've seen.

1. One spec, but "raid emphasis" and "pvp emphasis" . This is in fact what I do with a fire spec build, only about 9 talent points change between what I take to raids and what I take to arena, but they have a 13% DPS decrease on boss mobs if I'm in pvp spec, and a vast decrease in my ability to defeat a player focused on me in PVP when I'm in raid spec.

2. Two specs, usually people who don't care about PVP or one which is ok in PVP (eg, a raid healing spec with proper resilience gear). This lets you switch raiding roles (prot/fury warrior or maintainkadin/healadin or whatever) to match what a group needs. In BT, we have people on the raid speccing healing for some fights and teleporting back to the trainer to spec DPS for other fights, on the same night.

To some extent the death knight mechanics are an acknowledgement of the #2 scenario. In the context of a mage, which isn't a hybrid spec, it is possible that the water elemental mana battery stuff is something a raiding mage might want as an alternative to whatever his favoriet "boss DPS" spec is. Maybe he stands in a healer group when the raid needs more healers and powers their mana batteries or something while DPSing. There are some other possibilities too...a "mobile fight' DPS spec rather than a "static fight" DPS spec. Or an AOE spec. I'm likely to go down the road of PVP vs PVE, but mages not interested in PVP do have good uses for alternate specs.

As for PVP, I already gear differently for arena vs world/battleground. I could see speccing differently too, if PVP was my main focus or if hybrid, being able to fill two comps by taking on two different roles (assuming I had gear for each role too)