I hope that, they cannot say "(similar to Shadow priests)" without considering that they have only 1 tree for dps and the replenish talent is a consequence of that

We have 3 talent tree aviable for dps, and frost should get buffed, so if they want to "give replenishment to mages" they should add it to all 3 trees, something like

Ignite: usual crit damage dot plus replenishment to the raid

It's obvious that they've done the least amount of work on the mage class since almost every point is just a vague idea of what they want to do.
And unless they forgot to mention it, scorch/wc isn't getting nerfed to 5% after all.

Is it just me that are wondering whether the new clearcasting buff will overwrite itself or stack?

The references in the blue post did not look like they were referring to mage Clearcasting. From the implied tone it looked like they meant the interaction between Clearcasting and OO5SR for Priests. What with Clearcasting proccing, the priest casting a GH, then Inner-Focus GH, then something else with a long cast time, resulting in <too much> OO5SR regen. Or some weird combo to that effect, at any rate.

There was little implication that any change to CC was because mages were generating any mana from it worth nerfing, in fact you'll notice the point where he states (in essence) "DPS casters will see practically no difference".

I don't expect either mage or E-shaman Clearcasting to change.

Even if they do, two clearcastings in series will hapen to a maximum of 1% of your spells, and even that's assuming you can always use your spells, which you can't, because each time you delay for 10sec you'll inject a possible two-in-a-row CC that won't happen because the buff will expire.

They havent really mentioned any nerfs for any classes. This is just buffs for the masses.
'Nerfs', if you would call the scorch buff balancing that, will be hidden somewhere in the patchnotes I'm sure.


Lots of classes suddenly bring replenish now.
Had hoped mages would get another underrepresented raid buff, in exchange for the spellcrit buff, but who knows, it might not be too late.

Personally I would love to see some raid buff synergy between physical dps and caster dps. Right now casters 'mostly' (obvioiusly some exceptions around) buff casters and melee buff melee, which means a good 10man setup will be either very melee or very caster heavy.

Its a bit ridiculous to discuss frost dps already. From the Blizz post it seems clear that stuff is going to change in the frost tree, or with the mechanics, so we got no foundation to discuss frost dps on at all.

That wasn't in the context of clearcasting though.

Oh I'm pretty sure they'll change if not for something else, consistency.

You're right though, it's not really significant but I guess it caught my eye as it's the only statement with direct impact on mages that have no more than two possible truths instead of endless guesses.

The replenishment mechanic is something we could have expected after seeing posts about how replenishment is considered a "mandatory" raid buff and the earlier-announced warlock changes giving warlocks replenishment in the destro tree .... left mages as the only mana-using class lacking a tree with a replenishment mechanic.

Everything else is so vague it's almost not even worth discussing.
1) Spirit...interesting? Then why constant "de-interesting" student of the mind in wotlk beta? *sigh*
2) Fire pvp "yeah, so fiery payback actually is bad and it's not helping fire mages stay alive"
3) Frost - "so we did read Lhivera's comments, and frost is boring in pve, and we're working on it, just like we said 3 months ago"

I was sort of hoping to see a hint towards either of the following
1) 10% crit debuff? added to arcane? reduced?
2) "fixing" the pvp burst of arcane without gutting the pve spec.

Guess we'll need to keep waiting - though I am not especially surprised at the vague changes listed. Aside from warrior stances, all of these are "buffs for the masses" not adjustments/balancing/nerfing - we'll have to wait for the PTR to see what becomes of the frost tree, arcane tree, and spirit?? for fire mages.

You forgot about Shamans. Also it remains to be seen if Mages are Warlocks are really getting raid viable replenishment talents, as neither Frost nor Destro is all that great at the moment. Have to wait for the PTR to see that too tho. Also hopefully the Survival tree will end up in a state such that Hunters put enough points into it. The change from 5 points to 3 is good, but I believe they are typically only putting 1-2 points into it now (or maybe the Hunters in my guild just suck).

Well - two points means that they have a 40% chance on Arcane, Explosive, or Steady Shot crits, to trigger a 15 second Replenishment.

The reason they'll only be using a couple of points is because they can reliably count on enough crits within a 15 second timespan to be able to reliably refresh the replenishment.

On the topic of non-replenishing mana users, unless I missed something Druids don't have one either? (Yes, they have innervate, but that's only single-target and on a six minute cooldown).

Edit: Unlike me, you obviously weren't forgetting their 'Revitalize' as it will be named - interesting (given that it's being renamed to differentiate it) that it will remain separate, and presumably able to stack, like our current water elemental...

Shaman don't have one either -- but they have lust. And druids have brez. Which may have been the logic.

But Hunters have one of their stronger two trees (assuming GC still intends to keep BM low on dps) providing replenishment, whereas for mages it's the tree GC explicitly posted would be weaker on DPS because otherwise who would play a harder tree. I don't know about locks.

And I don't understand why it's not just something the DPS classs provide, rather than something in one of their specific trees, unless they're trying to avoid giving it to pvp -- in which case, why is it in frost? Talking about "non-ret paladins" and "non-shadow priests" is silly, it's clearly a buff that DPS classes bring, those classes don't have other dps trees.

The spirit change won't be game-changing in any way, it won't address threat, armor, mana, scorch, arcane's lack of scorch, or anything else. They'll give us crit (bleh, as arcane) or +dmg off of it, there really isn't amazing design that can come from "use spirit in some way." It just means we are no longer avoiding the bulk of the WotLK gear -- a change that should've happened before launch, given their itemization. The mage class was an afterthought in the 3.10 notes, which makes me unhappy.

It is grounds, especially when a third of your DPS is tied to a transient, fragile, disobedient pet.

I don't have a hunter or warlock main because I don't like pet management.

I find the lack of scorch interesting.

Could be that warlocks are getting an inferior version, which is better than not having a mage, but not as good as a mage. That's kinda weird. I'd actually prefer an across-the-board reduction to 5% and giving a selfish advantage to having scorch or winter chill, similar to IFF.

I think one reason the mage changes may be fairly minor is the mana recovery changes that affect arcane and fire mages (and frost mages if you think of replenishment). They may not want to muck with much on the dps side, especially as arc, fire and frostfire are all raid-viable at the moment.

Also they've said nothing about dual-spec being in 3.1 yet, so I'll hold off on speculating about that.

Excuse me but Mages are what every other class strives to be. The reason there aren't any huge changes to the mage class is because we are the dominant class in PvE & PvP.

They gave us so much attention after BC and rightfully so, and they made us a great class. They intend to bring frost dps a little closer to the other tress in PvE and fire a little closer to the other tress in PvP. What more can you ask for?

Arcane and Fire are fantastic in PvE, and Arcane and Frost are fantastic in PvP.

Mages being an afterthought in 3.10 makes me so happy. When they don't have to do anything to us (and rightfully so) it means that we are balanced.

I find it much more likely that the preview was designed to only include buffs, not nerfs (although this still doesn't explain why they didn't mention scorch if it's being changed), OR that they just haven't decided what to do about mages yet, as we're generally pretty well off in both PvP and PvE at the moment. It seems somewhat odd that Blizzard felt they had to hotfix nerf Explosive Shot and Deep Wounds, but hasn't done anything further to mages when we're clearly above their dps mark of MM Hunters. *Insert Blizzard conspiracy theories here*

Unless they're lying about how they're doing the mana regen changes, it should only affect you if you spend time out of the 5 second rule, which rarely happens for mages. Depending on how high the standard in combat percentage goes they might have to add an additional spirit or regen multiplier to Mage Armor or the glyph to keep us at the same rate we were at before though. Even if they don't do that it shouldn't matter for PvE since we use Molten Armor all the time anyways.

Virtually every shared buff/debuff has identical power when fully talented. As far as I know, the only exceptions are the Felhunter's Int/Spi buff, which is weaker than AI and DS (but provides both stats), and the spell power buffs, which use such wildly different mechanics that they really can't match up to each other.

With this in mind, I will once again stake a beer -- not a proverbial beer, an actual real pint of fine craft beer -- on both IS and WC being nerfed to 5% with personal effects added on to keep the talents attractive.

No, they aren't buffing us -- that doesn't mean they aren't making changes, it just means we aren't getting buffs. Why in the world does everyone assume that this is the one wow patch without any nerfs?

It's a political choice -- optimize for optics, as my old employer used to say. They put out a bunch of positive stuff (for most classes -- almost nothing for mage and a paladin nerf, but outside of that everyone else is happy), generate good buzz, keep the conversation on the forums focused on the impacts of those changes, and then slip in the nerfs over time via smaller announcements and eventually patches on the PTR.

And I personally feel that mage mana issues are still a problem (especially after we drop 2pc T7), as are threat issues (threat management between the classes is wildly different -- what's the point of carefully balancing DPS when lock and mage threat management talents and tools are so out of whack relative to the rest of the pure classs, not to mention the hybrids?)


This is going to turn into a rant if I continue so I'll just end with: no, I don't think mages are so perfect that they don't have anything that could be improved upon, and no I don't think the issues are all so minor (looking ahead to other content, *not* looking at Naxx) that they're irrelevent.

(1) There's more to a class than DPS

(2) Iceblock and MI don't drop threat in any way at all, they just delay it.


Every class has inherent 29% threat reduction or better other than mages/locks and hunters. Rogues get an instant 100% threat drop and tricks on top of that. Hunters get an instant 100% threat drop every 30 seconds.

Mages/locks have 1/3rd of the next-worst inherent threat reduction talents in the game, and both have clumsy, long-cooldown threat management tools: invis takes more than the 3 seconds the cast is due to having to cancel and retarget (extra-annoying when there's other mobs around e.g. 3D sarth; why it doesn't drop aggro instantly and then have the invis effect fade in I do not know), warlocks get -50% on an even longer cooldown and nothing else.

I know threat doesn't matter *now*, but it's been posted to the tanks that threat management will get harder in Ulduar, and that's also the same time that your tanks will be back in their mitigation gear and specs, rather than their high TPS stuff they're doing now.

It doesn't make sense to me to do so much effort to balance dps when threat is the other half of the coin and the threat abilities are so incredibly disparate between the classes (hybrids don't get a dump, the dumps have wildly different costs/cooldowns, the inherent talents/abilities vary wildly.) I'm not saying threat management should be irrelevent -- I'm saying it should be more consistent as far as the tools go.

(e.g. adding a -threat component to MI would work on the mage side to mitigate the fact that we don't get things like -30% from shadow form and then another 3 optional talent points totaling -25% on top of that.)

So examining the list:

1) Frost Changes - I'm just going to lump the Replen and Shatter Combo changes into one section because my point is the same for both. Blizzard has freely admitted Frost will always be lower DPS than Fire/Arcane. So the net effect here is "we're going to spend our time this patch working on a tree that the (vast) majority of PvE mages will never care about." And I'm not opposed to working on the Frost tree, but devoting a major content patch to a tree that's never going to be popular for PvE seems like an inefficient use of time. As for Replenishment, it's already a fairly easy buff to come by, and adding warlocks to the list of Replen-providing classes is going make it pretty uncommon to be in a raid where a mage needs to be Frost for Replen.

2) Fire PvP is a pipedream. The only way it's ever going to be remotely competitive with Frost/Arcane is to make Fire PvP so ridiculously imbalanced that it dwarfs the other specs. And that isn't going to happen, so essentially fixing Fire PvP is buffing PvP for raiding mages who are too cheap/lazy to respec when they want to run BGs. Color me excited.

3) Spirit - Never mind the fact that Blizzard has been talking about making Spirit interesting to us since Wrath beta (and note: the sole change from those statements thus far is Pyromaniac), but either way it's not going to be some class-altering change (i.e. not "interesting"). Mages have been grappling with spirit issues since Molten Core and adding a tangible benefit to spirit after four years of it being worthless is not some great revelation for mages; it's a change that should have been implemented a long, long time ago. Even in my wildest expectations of what gain we might get from spirit, it still won't be enough to address the fundamental mana issues that have been plaguing the class since vanilla. That's not something I'm going to get excited about.


Warlocks are frequently competitive with (occasionally better than) mages, but they don't "beat us silly" by any stretch of the imagination.

Then why do you assume that we are going to be nerfed? This entire thread blows goats. They need to change the title to: Mage Change Speculation in 3.1

I'm not. I haven't commented on any nerfs, speculated about any nerfs, predicted any nerfs, or in fact done anything other than just commented to people who say "LOL AT LEAST WE'RE NOT GETTING NERFED" that I think they're unduly optimistic, and the nerfs are yet to come. For everyone.

Maybe I'm wrong and this is the first time in Blizzard history when there's one nerf in an entire major content patch (DP for paladins)! Maybe =).

Mage and Warlock threat isn't really as bad as a lot of Mages and Warlocks like to make it out to be. Threat reduction can be expressed as: 1 - (threat per point of damage dealt)

Now for a Fire Mage, it doesn't look pretty:
1 - 0.9 = 10% threat reduction.

But for an Arcane Mage, it looks pretty sweet:
1 - 0.6 = 40% threat reduction.

With the Water Elemental accounting for 10% damage, it's not all that bad for Frost:
1 - 0.9 * 0.9 = 19% threat reduction.

Warlocks complain about their threat talents not affecting all their damage, but if a Destruction warlock gets 15% of his damage from the Imp, and 80% of the remaining 85% of his damage (68% of his total damage) from Destruction spells:
1 - (0.9 * 0.68 + 0.17) = 21.8% threat reduction.

...and so forth. And of course one thing all pure classes have that the hybrids don't is at least one active threat dump, which is a very potent tool when used properly.

Personally, I think it's a boring game when we don't have to worry about threat, and I prefer to have less passive reduction combined with some active reduction to make the game more interesting. But on top of that, I think it helps keep things interesting to use threat as one of the differentiating characteristics of specs.


Well, first, that's of course a matter of perspective. A lot of folks argue that Mages are in great shape for PvE, but for Frost Mages, that's really not true; the viability of other specs isn't really any comfort. So from our perspective, it's a terrific use of their time.

Second, I think (and hope) that they've reconsidered the DPS balance issue. You'll note that they're trying to get all three Hunter trees to very similar DPS despite variations in both survivability and utility, and they've been working on getting Demonology up there with the other Warlock specs as well. And while they may not want to close the gap, their statement that they are concerned about Frost's poor raid performance does indicate that they want to greatly narrow the gap.

Yes I was on the same thread on the WoW forums you were Lhivera and arguing the same points. In particular, warlocks miss the inherent threat management that their pet gives them.

What you're missing is my point: Either threat matters or it doesn't.

If threat matters, then he with the worst threat management loses regardless of what his dps is. If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter how many tools we're given.

I don't know how you keep dps consistent between a lock who ends up with somewhere around -45% effective threat reduction (talents + soulshatter used around 65%) and a spriest who has -55% from talents in a world where threat matters.

Or hunters with 100% drops every 30 seconds.


(edited for math)

Also should've added, I'm unconvinced arcane's hybrid-levels of threat reduction will last. It sticks out amongst the other mage/lock specs, and I actually have been expecting it to be nerfed in 3.1. That's sheer speculation though, at this point just note that arcane is quite the anomaly amongst the caster dps.