#0 - Nov. 18, 2006, 4:58 a.m.
I've played the beta for some time now, althoug not as much as I've wanted to but I still feel I can give my view about things that has occured while playing beta. First of all this is not a QQ thread (well maybe a little) but I mainly try to give some pointers to the dev teams and as I said, my personal views on what should be changed before TBC goes retail.
The first thing mages have been crying nerf over has been the massive increase in hitpoints while our damage didnt scale up properly. "We rely on our burst damage to beat classes x and y" Now to some extent this is true I admit it. Bursting down that shaman before he can groundening totem heal himself, or bursting that priest down out of sheep before he PW:shield and renews himself for 400 a tick. In TBC it isnt as much about damage as to the art of actually staying alive. Now if your going in a 2on2 arena without a healer your pretty much screwed unless you specc deep deep frost. I play 45 frost atm and with double water elemental and double iceblocks aswell as ice barrier giving you that extra edge in survivability (not bad talking frostbite thoug it saved me alot of times against warriors and rogues even hunters sometime) youll do quite well in arenas if it wasnt for the very poorly scaled mana capacity of your mage. Now arguably the players on beta doesnt have acces to those wtf bbq roflcopter atack damage in your face weapons so this might be subject to change so dont hold me to it!
The intellect/mana issue:
Your intellect and mana pool will suffer severly from the newly introduced stamina gear. You might have the skills to survive fights but you just cant use them because if you do you might not have enough mana to actually burn your enemy down when you finally get that range / nova / sheep in depending on what class you face. Aswell as the complete lack of spirit on the gear in TBC rendering evocation almost useless. In live I evocate for around 5k with my spirit staff on while I in TBC evocate for about 2,5-3k. This is one of the biggest issues for mages right now --> mana vs survivability. And putting blink slow and spellsteal on such ridiculus amounts of base mana costs doesnt make life any easier let me tell you that.
Arcane intellect:
Secondly is the poor poor pooooooor scaling of some of our already implemented skills. Arcane intellect increased by 9 ? I mean come on it already costs a boat load of mana to actually cast aswell as the fact that it's the weakest in form of actual stat buff / utility. I consider the priest stamina buff and the druids motw to be far superior arcane intellect in both raid pve and pvp UNLESS your solo farming frost specced and you wont get hit at all. Now that extra piece of intelligence isnt useless at all with the low amount of mana we already have but it still feels like this should get an increase of maybe 15-20 points instead of just 9 at lvl 70.
The mages armor utility and the evocation issue:
Think molten armor looks pretty neat eh? well think again. The only usage for molten armor is if you have impact and even then it's still far far less viable in pvp then ice armor is. And if you actually play a mage you know that if you stand around getting hit all the time you get bonkered anyway. -5% crit on your opponent? well that takes away the warriors berserker stance I guess so now he only has a 30% chance to crit me and rogues crit almost all the time anyway and that 75 damage/hit sure isnt going to save you when he runs around with 8-9k hp.
When you solo you'll be using what? Mage armor. When your pve raiding youll be using what? Mage armor (unless your kiting at gluth maybe O_o) All in all, mage armor is our most utilized spell I think we have. That 30% mana regeneration is vital for every mage at all times EXCEPT in pvp (unless your fighting only casters) Now what does mage armor get on the new rank spells? +3 resistance. Thats right warlocks gain +100 spelldamage from their armor which is frecking huge but what do we get for our most used armor? Thats right +3 RESISTANCE. I mean COME ON! What is wrong with you? You level 10 levels only to see one of your most used skills get so badly scaling it makes you want to cry. Same with frost armor It doesnt get any more slowing movement wise or atacking wise It only gets around 100 more armor and guess what? another +3 resist to frost spells. Wich just "#%& balls in my opinion. Why would you give one class an armor that gives +100 spell damage while the other class gets complete "%&& upgrades like this? And yes I'm quite aware that the effects of the mages armors are very good anyway they still dont compare to warlocks +100 spelldamage armor.
They have life tap so they dont need the 30% mana regen while casting althoug it would be nice since they wouldnt loose dps, their dots more then make up for the lost time it takes them to get their mana back up. I guess you could say warlocks has infinite mana as long as a healer still has mana for them. But with the massive hit points in TBC ive seen warlocks with almost 10k health (priest buffed) and 10k health = alot of mana take into effect that they also have siphon life (if specced for it) / drain life / bandages at their disposal to regain their health/mana quantitys.
Mages dont have any of this, we have our evocate wich is severly under its old function in its current form. We have our mage armor, our clearcast (if specced for it) some more mana regen while casting (if specced for it) and our mana gems. Oh and guess what the new mana gem rank looks like? it gets boosted by around 150 mana.............. Now you do however get an additional boost from the mana citrine -> mana ruby after the 2 minute cooldown is out but in pvp its over way before 2 minutes any way so it is somewhat fine in pve i guess while its a very very minor upgrade pvp wise.
Invisibility:
Now about invisibility, I really really hope they reduce the fade time to maybe 5 seconds instead of 8 aswell as now this is a BIG ONE so get ready for it and grab some popcorn.
It takes away dot effects when you use it. Now this might seem very very powerful and to be quite honest, it is very very powerful. But think of it this way. How many times have you seen warlocks saying "omg use iceblock you nuuub stop qqing and learn2specc" Now it would work somewhat as a rogues vanish I guess (vanish removing snares/immobilizing/huntersmark etc) while it still has a fade time so you can get redotted/atacked etc while not actually entering your invisible state seems like a fair deal to me now this however might not be balanced with a 5 second fade timer so you could keep it at 8 seconds but make it do this instead. And to be quite frank with you, ive never really understood why mages "the masters of magics" can only remove curses and not magic? Warlocks corruptions and SoA eating you away for looooooooads of damage upwards to 450 a tick isnt going to cut it IMO. Not to mention shadow specced priests Shadow word pain eating you for 400+ a tick and healing them while theres nothing you can do about it. This would give mages an ability on a 5 minute cooldown to do almost what iceblock does with the big difference that it doesnt make you immune to atacks aswell as it is on a 5 minute cooldown. I think blizzard didnt want to add iceblock as a core ability solely because of the fact that you get invurnerable. This would really give us a lot more survivability aswell as one of the functions we so direly need. You killed that warlock or priest? To bad for you he dotted you before and your still going to have to corpserun from dying of their dots.
Spellsteal:
Spellsteal stealing random spells isnt mana efficient it isnt reliable and a 2 minute function for a boatload of your mana cost you've got to be kidding me. I'f i saw a mage popping arcane power I would tear my hair off because I would have no idea if I were to get amplify magic or arcane power for like 100 frostbolts cost (yes abit spicy but you get my point). You say you want consistency in spells right? I would gladly give up spellsteal for purge any day. Knowing I could actually purge something useful of my opponent for a negligable amount of mana cost without me gaining anything other then the sheer joy of seeing that power word shield or ice barrier dissapear before my eyes. In my eyes purge wich is a level 12 trainable skill without noticable mana cost severly outranks a lvl 70 trainable spell in both function and utility. Also while im typing this, polymorph is actually a magic effect so if I polymorph say a priest with power word shield that I woudld like to take from him and instead of stealing that 1k hp from the priest I steal my own polymorph and get wtf bbqed myself? That would be so tremendously stupid I cant express myself in words about how stupid that would be.
