[Mage] Legion: General Information and Discussion

[spychalski]

if you take shimmer and blink twice in a row do the heals stack or does it extend it or does one get wasted?

buff gets refreshed.

[Eppzy]

I've been reading over some these posts for a while and I'm looking to get my hands on a beta account to test things myself, but everything is changing fast enough I can't get a solid grasp on which to try first or decide for my main spec for legion. What is your opinion of being the go to spec for serious progression on launch?

[AngelovV]

I've been reading over some these posts for a while and I'm looking to get my hands on a beta account to test things myself, but everything is changing fast enough I can't get a solid grasp on which to try first or decide for my main spec for legion. What is your opinion of being the go to spec for serious progression on launch?

Arcane. It requires a lot of play to reach its maximum output, unlike fire and frost. Also has a much better burst than the other two.

[Deleted]

What's our soloing capabilities in this expansion? As I've understood it, a lot of quests will be in instanced zones where you do stuff for your order hall/profession/weapon etc. Are we able to efficiently complete those quests with any spec, or is there a spec that outshines others? Or are we just trash? ^^

[Champagne Supernova]

Reading the talent blue post about how they wanted to make each talent meaningful, useful or rotation altering in some way, but that doesn't seem to be the case for all Mage specs talents from my point of view. The majority are boring or recycled skills we've had before that doesn't really impact rotation all that much, it's mostly fire and forget talents.

[Deleted]

Reading the talent blue post about how they wanted to make each talent meaningful, useful or rotation altering in some way, but that doesn't seem to be the case for all Mage specs talents from my point of view. The majority are boring or recycled skills we've had before that doesn't really impact rotation all that much, it's mostly fire and forget talents.

Yup. From all the specs I have tried in Beta, Fire Mage especially had the most boring and uninteresting (sometimes outright bad) talents out there.

[whisperingsage]

The recent build swapped Words of Power and Resonance for Arcane, making each tier more bland and less flexible.
Tier 15 is now for single target, and tier 60 is aoe, though Charged Up is at least more flexible.

Even worse, the earlier tiers really should be talents that somewhat help with leveling, and while Resonance helps with aoe pulls and dungeons, Words of Power isn't really that great, since arcane can afford to waste mana in earlier levels.

[Seneca]

Even worse, the earlier tiers really should be talents that somewhat help with leveling, and while Resonance helps with aoe pulls and dungeons, Words of Power isn't really that great, since arcane can afford to waste mana in earlier levels.

Blizzard caring for the leveling experience in 2016? Drag me in that dream of yours sir.

[whisperingsage]

Well, some specs still do have talents that reset themselves or something else on kill in tier 15, though for some reason hunters still don't have Murder of Crows there. There's also talents that give stronger effects to mobs at higher health, which works best while leveling, because after the initial hit, they don't live too much longer anyway.

I mean, I suppose Presence of Mind is pretty good for leveling, to start the charges stacking faster, and making it easier to maybe pull with a slow and then PoM two blasts. The other two are pretty lackluster for leveling (or at least very bland), and PoM is useless for aoe, though I suppose they don't want new players thinking they can actually aoe on arcane. Might break something.

For frost I guess Lonely Winter at least lets people who don't want to play with a pet do so early on which is a plus, but right now numbers balancing makes it a bit ridiculous to choose anything else, since a stacking talent and a minute cooldown are not as good for leveling as having flat increased damage.

Fire has Pyromaniac which can help with keeping up HS as you move from mob to mob, but even though the talent is terrible in general Firestarter probably will end up giving crits more consistently while leveling.

Our early tiers are still pretty bad for leveling, even with giving a lot of slack.

[Deleted]

The recent build swapped Words of Power and Resonance for Arcane, making each tier more bland and less flexible.
Tier 15 is now for single target, and tier 60 is aoe, though Charged Up is at least more flexible.

Even worse, the earlier tiers really should be talents that somewhat help with leveling, and while Resonance helps with aoe pulls and dungeons, Words of Power isn't really that great, since arcane can afford to waste mana in earlier levels.

In case you don't know there is a thread for this. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...eta-Megathread This has been discussed there if I recall correctly.

[The Archmage]

What's our soloing capabilities in this expansion? As I've understood it, a lot of quests will be in instanced zones where you do stuff for your order hall/profession/weapon etc. Are we able to efficiently complete those quests with any spec, or is there a spec that outshines others? Or are we just trash? ^^

I would like to know this too... This game has been constantly shifting more and more to single player mode. Mages always had the short end of the stick in that department, with the almost complete inability to pull more than a few mobs at the same time, and with the utterly frustrating total inability to properly solo ANY "élite" content whatsoever.

I think the discrepancy between classes that can solo-faceroll pretty much any content and others that struggle should be properly addressed, since instanced-solo content is the way this game has been constantly going for quite some time now.

[Lady Atia]

I would like to know this too... This game has been constantly shifting more and more to single player mode. Mages always had the short end of the stick in that department, with the almost complete inability to pull more than a few mobs at the same time, and with the utterly frustrating total inability to properly solo ANY "élite" content whatsoever.

Tbh this isn't true. I did fine with my mage solo against the big Zandalari rare's in MoP, had 0 issues with Tanaan rare's, and fire is atm pretty good in killing multible mobs in beta ^.^

[Deleted]

Tbh this isn't true. I did fine with my mage solo against the big Zandalari rare's in MoP, had 0 issues with Tanaan rare's, and fire is atm pretty good in killing multible mobs in beta ^.^

And we're still the single worst class for soloing old raid content.

Just because we can at the sweat of our brows solo some of the hard content doesn't mean that it's fair. Especially seeing as basically every other class can do it with way less effort.

[qtBlackGandolf]

Will blizzard ever make MH+OH = staff in terms of stats? Based on the fire artifact, it seems to have slightly less stats than the arcane and frost one (not to mention fire's weird spread of secondaries).

I am mostly just whining because I feel like it may impact min-maxing but not realistically be observable.

[Keiyra]

Will blizzard ever make MH+OH = staff in terms of stats? Based on the fire artifact, it seems to have slightly less stats than the arcane and frost one (not to mention fire's weird spread of secondaries).

I am mostly just whining because I feel like it may impact min-maxing but not realistically be observable.

Probably not - buts a really minor difference in the grand scheme. As long as ilvl is equal, you'll have the same int and same spellpower and those are the 2 that matter most.

MH+OH can have a greater variety of stats (since its 4 secondaries instead of 2) so even though the total is slightly less - it can potentially come in handy (when a staff has secondaries you don't want for example.) It's likely a legacy hold over from when off hands had the int enchant. Since back then you would choose "more 2ndry stats vs more int"

TL/DR: It's such a small difference as to not be noticeable really.

[Rothex]

Tbh this isn't true. I did fine with my mage solo against the big Zandalari rare's in MoP, had 0 issues with Tanaan rare's, and fire is atm pretty good in killing multible mobs in beta ^.^

My Mage was mostly SoO Mythic geared at the end of MoP and couldn't really solo the Zandalari Warbringers without some epic kiting skills; still got like 3 shot and couldn't really deal with the fear that well either. We definitely weren't tanks nor Warlocks/Hunters who would literally AFK on the Warbringers and not die; Mages had to try pretty hard to solo them.

Although access to leech has definitely helped our survivability where we wouldn't have been able to solo something before.

[Deleted]

Will blizzard ever make MH+OH = staff in terms of stats? Based on the fire artifact, it seems to have slightly less stats than the arcane and frost one (not to mention fire's weird spread of secondaries).

I am mostly just whining because I feel like it may impact min-maxing but not realistically be observable.

There is no issue with this during Legion. They will tune the specs with the artifacts in mind obviously. Staves could be 50% weaker or 50% stronger and they would still balance the specs correctly to compensate.

[Deleted]

My Mage was mostly SoO Mythic geared at the end of MoP and couldn't really solo the Zandalari Warbringers without some epic kiting skills; still got like 3 shot and couldn't really deal with the fear that well either. We definitely weren't tanks nor Warlocks/Hunters who would literally AFK on the Warbringers and not die; Mages had to try pretty hard to solo them.

Although access to leech has definitely helped our survivability where we wouldn't have been able to solo something before.

It was doable, but not without effort. Unlike basically any other class. Tanks and melees just face tanked them, we had to do epic kiting and have backup plans for certain abilities (like the fear as you say)

[Araitik]

My Mage was mostly SoO Mythic geared at the end of MoP and couldn't really solo the Zandalari Warbringers without some epic kiting skills; still got like 3 shot and couldn't really deal with the fear that well either. We definitely weren't tanks nor Warlocks/Hunters who would literally AFK on the Warbringers and not die; Mages had to try pretty hard to solo them.

Although access to leech has definitely helped our survivability where we wouldn't have been able to solo something before.

It was doable, but not without effort. Unlike basically any other class. Tanks and melees just face tanked them, we had to do epic kiting and have backup plans for certain abilities (like the fear as you say)

Not really :



Done during MoP, in full SoO mythic gear. Required all cooldowns but they definitely could be facetanked

Nostalgy ...

[Deleted]

-snip-

A fully buffed, flasked, fully last-raid-of-the-expansion-mythic geared mage blowing all their cooldowns being able to do somewhat well at something that a heroic dungeons geared death knight can do while alt tabbing for porn.

And that is somehow proof that mages are balanced in terms of soloing capabilityedit: Just noticed the guy who first brought it up allegedly was also fully mythic geared ... still not a good proof that we are a good soloing class.