#0 - July 12, 2007, 4:57 p.m.
This is my work, but not necessarily my beliefs.
As I don’t currently see any post concerning this, I’ll try to summarize the current mage class concerns. I’ll try to explain each of them as much as possible without being excessively exensive and try to have it influenced the least possible by my own opinion, so do feel free to correct me on something or add up to the list or to a specific concern. I’ll include everything that has a place here, weather I agree with it or not, and try to include suggestions for them. In no particular order:
1. Miscellaneous
a) Mana gems – FIXED* - Mages believe that our BoP, conjurable mana gems are too weak as it stands. They don’t restore enough mana and their scaling when TBC was implemented was very low, even though mages are now 10 levels higher. Mages also tend to use the warlock Healthstone and potions as a term of comparison: Healing potions restore a lower health value than the value of mana restored by mana potions of the same item level, while Healthstones restore a noticeably higher amount of mana than mana gems. Some do believe mana gems aren’t so bad, because a mage is able to create several, lower level gems that restore a lower amount of mana but can be used every 2 minutes. However, the second you use will restore less mana and so on and in situational one on one PVP, a player doesn’t get the chance to use 2 gems, in which case mages feel it is unfair that our Mana Emerald restores such a low amount of mana compared to the warlock’s highest rank Healthstone. Also, some think our gems should not be soulbound, mostly to increase our raid utility.
Suggestions:
- Increasing the value restored by the mana gems.
- Making the mana restores by mana gems scale with a stat (spell damage, intellect, crit rating).
- Make our gems not bind on pickup, making them tradable. It’s been suggested something similar to warlock SoulWell, to make gems in a large scale.
- Give us a way to improve mana gems through a talent in the arcane tree (this is a good thing to take into count when considering the need to improve our low tier arcane talents).
b) Evocation – FIXED* - Some days ago, a blizzard poster informed that evocation is working as intended, and the reason it doesn’t restore a very high amount of mana is because mages don’t stack on spirit. Does this mean they should? Mages don’t seem satisfied with this answer as they feel it’s hard and not beneficial to stack spirit overall. The level 60 spirit enchants don’t have level 70 versions and the number of spirit gems is limited. Mages feel mana/5 is much more worth stacking for long fights and that we can’t afford to stack spirit due to the need of damage in raids. PVP mages have no way to stack spirit, nor is it viable at all. Some mages still feel it restores too low an amount of mana for such a long cooldown.
Suggestions:
- Increasing the scaling it gets through spirit.
- Changing the stat it scales through to intellect, damage, crit or mana/5.
- Making it not scale and restore a % of your mana
- Make it scale through level and not through spirit but resulting in a higher amount of mana restored at level 70.
c) Scaling reduction to Improved Frostbolt/Fireball (10% damage tax) – FIXED* - Being our sole role in raids ‘main damage dealer’, we feel this is extremely unfair. Mages were the only class that got their improved <insert main nuke here> talents nerfed through scaling, by 2% per point spent: warlock Bane and Improved Corruption; druid Starlight Wrath; shaman Lightning Mastery; and to a further extent, healing spell cast time reductions.
Mages don’t understand the need for this, as being a main DPS class in raids, other classes seem to deal more damage than we can achieve. PVP wise it’s also visible that shaman, druid and warlock direct damage spells scale better than the mage ones.
Suggestions:
- There’s not much into this: Either apply it to other classes in the same way it was applied to mages or remove the mage tax.
d) Invisibility – This spell often tends to be held as too situational and not as powerful as it should be. In PVP a 5 second time frame where a single point of damage or crowd control will interrupt the effect and where the mage can’t use any ability seems to render invisibility close to useless. It’s only use can be at the start of arenas to try and surprise opponents or as a very situational escape skill. In PVE, some mages feel they should be able to drink when facing raid bosses, but the invisibility detection of these bosses makes this impossible, rendering it as a simple aggro reset. Many feel this isn’t a problem in PVE, but mostly in PVP.
Suggestions:
- Reduce the invisibility time frame.
- Allow the mage to take actions during the time frame.
- Make invisibility break only on direct damage.
- Make invisibility improvable in some way through arcane talents.
e) Low tier Arcane talents – P. FIXED* - Most mages believe these talents are too weak, and are mostly “fillers”. We feel these talents need an improvement to make it more worth spending talents in the arcane tree, mostly PVP wise. In PVE, abilities like arcane subtletly, clearcast and arcane meditation are useful, but a mage will still have to place talents in rather useless abilities to go higher in the tree. PVP mages tend to go for improved counterspell, as it’s a strong and solid talent, but they feel the rest of the arcane talents they spend to reach it are too weak.
Suggestions:
- Remove or change talents like: Arcane Absorption or Wand Specialization.
- Give PVP mages useful talents: Tier 1 and tier 3 arcane talents are simply fillers for arcane mages. There have been some suggested talents to replace or improve these (listing these as the following suggestions).
- Increased range or anti-damage interruption on polymorph.
- Make improved blink have a 25% chance per talent point spent to remove snares from the mage (this increases the survivability of arcane and fire/arcane mages).
- Mana cost reduction on Arcane spells.
- Improve mana gems.
- Improve spellsteal/invisibility.
- This post by Zarc has some good suggestions: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=303220722&sid=1
f) Slow – P. FIXED This ability is close to useless in PVE, and hardly any mage ever picks it over blast wave/ice block in PVP. In fact hardly any mage even gets that far in the arcane tree.
Suggestions:
- Change the position of Arcane Power and Slow in the arcane tree, because Arcane Power is a more powerful ability and it would give mages a better reason to put points into arcane, would make them sacrifice something to get that much burst and would put Slow in a more realistic position in the tree.
- Improve slow: Give it undispelable properties to make it much more powerful and useful in the arena.
- Reduce the mana cost by a visible amount to, again, make it useful in the arena and not completely useless against dispellers.
- Give it some sort of PVE use.
g) Bug fixes – This has been discussed and replied by the blues, but being this a concerns thread I have to include it here. This applied mostly to PVP situations, but bugs are still general so I included them in the Miscellaneous section. Blink is still bugged, often resulting in a 2 yard blink when there is a melee opponent on the mage, resulting in a death. Counterspell still has the bug causing it to “interrupt a spell on the combat log” but not actually interrupting it in fact. Cold snap still happens to fail at resetting frost abilities sometimes (happens with any ability, it has happened to me with Frost Nova, Cone of Cold and Ice Block). Some mages also believe Dragon’s Breath is not working as intended, and that it misses too often in situations it clearly shouldn’t (graphic bug?).
h) Water/Food Conjuring - FIXED* This has always been a bothersome task, I think we can all agree here. Mages often get asked for water and food and have to keep conjuring those to trade those who ask or, in raids, the mage has to conjure and conjure and conjure, to trade, trade and trade. It's boring and repetitive, and from my view, how would be it be overpowered or unbalanced to have meanings of mass conjuring?
Some also feel our water and food doesn't restore enough mana/health. In raids, warriors can have 18k HP and casters 14k mana, and water/food clearly don't get close to restoring those values.
Suggestions:
- Conjure 20 (a full stack) instead of half a stack of food/water at a time.
- Give us a Waterwell and Foodwell ability. While this sounds like your own personal McDonals, it does save a lot of trouble with the conjuring-trading routine. Give it a 15 minute cooldown or similar and a big mana cost.
