A Conclusive Mage Rage

[Nezek]

Originally taken from apathy-guild.eu/?p=108

Mage

Students gifted with a keen intellect and unwavering discipline may walk the path of the mage. The arcane magic available to magi is both great and dangerous, and thus is revealed only to the most devoted practitioners. To avoid interference with their spell casting, magi wear only cloth armor but arcane shields and enchantments give them additional protection. To keep enemies at bay, magi can summon bursts of fire to incinerate distant targets and cause entire areas to erupt, setting groups of foes ablaze.

Extracted from: eu.battle.net/wow/en/game/class/mage



Blizzard Fail (initial view)

So what you have done Blizzard Entertainment is effectively allow the world’s best guilds the opportunity to utilise a huge damaging class throughout X amount of weeks of raiding, in order to gain massive progress. You have waited until they are done with current content, completed the game so to speak and have topped World of Logs ranks on all viable encounters, you are effectively saying to us: “now they're done with the game we can nerf all of lesser geared, still progressing, ‘shitter’ guilds”, might I remind you, the guilds that are the majority. You can butter this up any way you like but the bottom line is you have broken a class specialization for raiders and hindered guild performance part way through current content, after ALL our gear itemising, re-forging, re-gemming and gear prioritising and don’t forget all that gear we have passed with haste or mastery on, and you have done this in order to "SCALE DAMAGE", if it was so important, why were there no PTR tests conducted? How have you come to the conclusion that this is best for the game right now? There are hundreds of progressing guilds out there who have had a large portion of damage removed from their raids in order to facilitate what is more than likely due to a 16 year old Warlock that was raped a new arse hole by a Mage on Elegon, the Warlock's father was probably working as a Board Director, Chairman or Stakeholder for Blizzard Entertainment, the kid then proceeded to complain to daddy, daddy then made a baffling complaint about the whole ordeal and went straight to the top (owners and operators of the game), final result: An overnight "Hotfix”. We were not that broken. :-( Trivial.



The Nerf

So you like pulling agro? You like bouncing around for no apparent reason whilst launching 350K burning chunks of molten rock at anyone or anything that stands between you and the World of Logs? You like sending 6 instantaneous giant balls of fire one after the other at your already burning helplessly victims? You love rank 1? :-)

Blizzard have now applied the following "hotfix":

Mage - Fire

• The periodic damage from Combustion has been reduced by 50%.
• The critical strike chance multiplier from Critical Mass has been reduced to 1.25 (was 1.5)

If you are wondering what this means for us and how it will affect us, let me give you a quick breakdown of the “damage” that it has done to the Fire class specialization.


1. Periodic damage from Combustion has been reduced by 50%

Not so bad, our combustion has effectively lost 50% of its ticking damage over time effect, we can live with that, at certain times it was pretty over powered anyway, I myself as a fire mage can admit that some of my combustions (if done properly and crit after crit occurs) can tick for around 80,000 and crit for double that on normal non damage boosting raid encounters! So yea, a nerf was justified, and as it happens, necessary. I'm not sure if I agree with the scale of this nerf but nethertheless it was somewhat warranted.


2. The critical strike chance multiplier from Critical Mass has been reduced to 1.25 (was1.5):

A quick example of some typical statistics pre-nerf, Critical Mass multiplied your critical strike chance of Pyroblast, Fireball and Scorch by 1.5, for example: my critical strike chance self buffed was 30%, so 30 * 1.5 = 45, thus giving a 45% chance to score critical strikes on those fire spells. So what is so bad you are asking? Well... I'll tell you, having that multiplier brought down to 1.25 has reduced our crit chances of those spell by a crippling 7.5% (using my example), and as any mage will know, crit is our most valued statistic sometimes on par with or greater than intellect depending on our stat weights at times, we thrive on criticals, we reforge into crit and we say out loud “crit!!, 1 more crit! please please come on crit!!!!”, we hope for the next spell to BOOM onto our screens with huge energizing oversized yellow digits!



Performance Verdict

Unfortunately, after these mind numbing changes you will find yourself at the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to big damage, we have been stripped of reliable nuke, huge crits and the fun factor or simply blowing up everything, and going from bottom on our DPS meters to top in 4 seconds. These nerfs have hurt the Fire Mage, you can now launch 4 to 6 Pyroblasts at an enemy target, and crit nothing, not really justifying the use of combustion, but making you nervous enough to use it anyway because you have just wasted cool downs on those "potential big crits", instantly regretting your actions and shouting out, “why the f*ck did I use combustion then!! argghhh!”

I am estimating a damage loss of around 15 to 30% of your damage on patchwerk style encounters with an average item level of 489.

Players who are in end game raiding environments and among some of the worlds best will also notice a dip in DPS, however this will be effecting them in a less negative manner, for it is the progressing group of general raiders, the majority of subscribers and semi-hardcore or even hardcore less progressing non-sponsored guildies and fellow gamers that are really going to suffer, the guys still trying to clear current content. It's more a scaling nerf, scaling down the guys at the top in order to give other DPS classes a chance to catch up. In my opinion it’s wrong, Blizzard have made a bad call, a nerf is a nerf, but an outright destruction of a class specialization with no hint or preview, no warning or courtesy is just plain arrogance.



Arcane Viability

Arcane is now a viable spec, the slight buffs from patch 5.1 make it a now go to class specialization following the nerfs of Fire, I have tried Arcane and will be playing it in our raids, I can put out around 75 to 90k single target damage per second on patchwerk style encounters with an average (non itemised as all my gear was originally for fire) 487 item level. While not as great, as big or as bold as Fire, I do see viability here, although movement mechanics during Heroic progression may douse our flame.

The rotation is extremely unforgiving and the slightest movement, miss-calculation of cool downs, or just plain "oh sh*t I f*cked up" can be catastrophic to your DPS output. I was sceptical at first but the spec has grown on me over the last few days and I am enjoying it more and more as I tweak my performance and figure out new ways to keep my play style to its maximum capability. I've been logging LFR on a regular basis with a couple of Mage friends of mine and getting some nice ranks there, it's more for testing purposes to compare my damage percentages spell by spell against other high ranking Arcane Mages, but I'll post the logs for the public anyway.

Update: Icey Floes & Blazing Speed are great in conjunction with each other whilst in need of a burst of movement and ranged reapplication of Rune of Power, or even just using up a damaging spell giving you maximum uptime on DPS....... but at a loss of my religious Ice Barrier!! >_<

WORLD OF LOGS

worldoflogs.com/reports/df91jotrq61hsn9a/
worldoflogs.com/reports/ub88a4kx5nscenwa/
worldoflogs.com/reports/66xjoh7uu24smbgb/
worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-j2lstbs3r20zwn4k/
worldoflogs.com/reports/skzukk37hmbrx5os/


Nezek
Apathy
apathy-guild.eu - Top weekend raiding guild

(Mage: Neze)

[Xarganthos]

yeah i know what you mean^^ yesterday i realized just how bad we have become. i have 31,18% critchance raidbuffed (490 ilvl) and crittet for like 16-25%. and as you said, to not waste combustion usage, i've used it even if i only got 5k ticks from it.. i had tries where in 3 minute fights my fireball didnt crit even once.. its frustrating

pardon my english

[Akraen]

Why do you disregard frost?

[Menphis]

Its not just about Blizzard making the fire spec boring as hell (mainly spamming fireball because of lack of crits).


I think players who decided to go with fire spec did dailies/dungeons etc to cap valor points everyweek for that hit/crit gear sold by various factions.
We've been grinding/dedicating 2months and they suddenly nerf fire to the ground.
Crit gear isn't useful for the other 2specs, which means our 2months of grinding went down the drain, they made us waste our time.
Some raiders might have even passed on mastery gear for over the passed 2 months.

Yes you can still reforge, but think for a moment.
Those VP vendors also sell hit/mastery bracers and cloaks.
We could of bought that with our VP.
I would definitely prefer, Hit/Mastery gear over a Hit/Crit gear reforged to mastery for Arcane.

[Babylonia]

Why do you disregard frost?

Yes, it appears that frost would be the better choice based on Fire gear. Frost: Haste - crit - mastery. Arcane: Haste - mastery. Although the difference is probably not that much. Either spec will be limited due to lack of correct gear.

I too tried arcane and was disappointed (ilvl 485 - 75k dps avg). Quite frankly I think fire is still competitive (if you have fire gear) with arcane and frost until you obtain spec specific gear.

As you indicate both spec's will require practice if you haven't played them in awhile. I was mostly fire in Cata; arcane in Wolk...I lvl'd as frost and still use frost for pvp so I am familiar with frost. Arcane seemed a bit overwhelming at first but became manageable after a little practice. The ForteXorcist add-on was a big help (Thanks Voltaa for recommending this).

[Magpai]

First of all, 15-30% overall dps nerf? Lol.

Second of all the fact that you disregard frost kinda ties into you sounding like you think fire mages are entitled to be top dps on anything, but that's a minor and shaky nitpick.

My main point is: get over it and switch specs. You may be right about nerfs being overkill, but all this crap about "now all guilds relying on fire mages will have their progression halted" - just switch specs. I think that people who like fire deserve to have it be playable and all, so if you were complaining along those lines I'd agree, but progression is not halted. Those mages have other specs they can choose from. And if those specs do significantly less damage than fire did before these hotfixes, that's proof-in-the-pudding of imbalance that needed fixing.

The whole juvenile warlock's daddy being on the board is just stupid by the way.

---------- Post added 2012-12-04 at 08:39 AM ----------

Its not just about Blizzard making the fire spec boring as hell (mainly spamming fireball because of lack of crits).

I'm curious, what is your post-buff crit chance? I don't play a crit class but let's be what I think is generous and say 30%. So your effective crit rate is now 37.5% instead of 45%.

That's a difference of 7.5%. That means ROUGHLY out of every 13 spells cast:

- 5 would crit pre-nerf and post-nerf

- 7 would not crit both pre-nerf and post-nerf

- 1 will now not crit that would have crit before

So compared to a week ago, you're missing out on one crit every 13 casts.

The "lack of crits" in comparison to previous is something you can look at a log and see for sure, but it's not something that's going to make your rotation "boring" beyond "hmm, those last 60 seconds feel like they were about 3 crits short."

[mnzahra]

Magpai, the CM nerf alone made fire unplayable. Fire is all about chaining crits. If you can't chain crits you can't stack ignites which makes your nerfed combustion even more nerfed. If you played fire at all for the last few patches, you would get what I'm talking about. They made the spec 100000x more RNG than it was already. In my raid, during burst (start of fights) I would be competing with our lock and hunter at 220k....now as Fire I'm below our rogue and at the end of fights I'm usually top 3 worst in the raid. Also I'm finding that I'm sitting there just spamming Fireball for like 30 seconds+ without a single crit. It will still parse high on world of logs because 200 out of the 6 million mages in the world are going to get extremely lucky and get lucky crits with big ignites and do a fuck ton of damage while the other 5.9 million fire mages are doing crap.

[Shmeh]

First of all, 15-30% overall dps nerf? Lol.

Second of all the fact that you disregard frost kinda ties into you sounding like you think fire mages are entitled to be top dps on anything, but that's a minor and shaky nitpick.

My main point is: get over it and switch specs. You may be right about nerfs being overkill, but all this crap about "now all guilds relying on fire mages will have their progression halted" - just switch specs. I think that people who like fire deserve to have it be playable and all, so if you were complaining along those lines I'd agree, but progression is not halted. Those mages have other specs they can choose from. And if those specs do significantly less damage than fire did before these hotfixes, that's proof-in-the-pudding of imbalance that needed fixing.

The whole juvenile warlock's daddy being on the board is just stupid by the way.

---------- Post added 2012-12-04 at 08:39 AM ----------



I'm curious, what is your post-buff crit chance? I don't play a crit class but let's be what I think is generous and say 30%. So your effective crit rate is now 37.5% instead of 45%.

That's a difference of 7.5%. That means ROUGHLY out of every 13 spells cast:

- 5 would crit pre-nerf and post-nerf

- 7 would not crit both pre-nerf and post-nerf

- 1 will now not crit that would have crit before

So compared to a week ago, you're missing out on one crit every 13 casts.

The "lack of crits" in comparison to previous is something you can look at a log and see for sure, but it's not something that's going to make your rotation "boring" beyond "hmm, those last 60 seconds feel like they were about 3 crits short."

In the last few days I've posted something similar to what I'm about to post multiple times, I think one of them was actually directed at you in another thread. Fire was absolutely murdered. I'm going to walk you through the math as simple as possible.

Combustion is 25% of my total damage, it was nerfed by 50%. That's -12.5% damage.

The CM nerf was ~7.5% crit. On Empress this week I crit 24/48 pyroblasts and 40/95 fireballs. After the nerf I'll crit 7.5% less. Every lost fireball crit is a lost pyroblast. It extends much further than that, but I'm not going to explain it to you.

The 7.5% crit nerf reduces the chance of getting a double pyroblast crit before a combustion by 33%. Double and triple pyroblast crits are the only way to get big combustions. A lower chance of getting a big combustion is a further nerf to combustion and makes the spec more rng.

If you include all the side effects of losing 7.5% crit with the combustion nerf, you're looking at well over a 12.5% damage nerf. It's closer to 20%, and I would not be surprised if it was 25% in some cases.

As you stated in your post, you're not a fire mage. Less crits does make the spec boring. Pyroblast is the fun part of playing fire, it's fun to set up combustions and fire off pyroblasts. Less crit = less pyroblasts.

Why don't I just play another spec? I will, but it's not ideal in any way. All but three pieces of my gear have crit on them, crit isn't the main stat for arcane or frost. Frosts stat priority is hit > haste > crit, arcane is hit > haste > mastery. Arcane is unplayable for me due to all the crit on my gear. Frost is playble, but not optimal. Why should I have to switch to a spec with opposite stat priorities on less than one days notice? I shouldn't.

If you don't understand the class, why don't you stay the fuck out of the forum?

[Menphis]

Magpai, the CM nerf alone made fire unplayable. Fire is all about chaining crits. If you can't chain crits you can't stack ignites which makes your nerfed combustion even more nerfed. If you played fire at all for the last few patches, you would get what I'm talking about. They made the spec 100000x more RNG than it was already. In my raid, during burst (start of fights) I would be competing with our lock and hunter at 220k....now as Fire I'm below our rogue and at the end of fights I'm usually top 3 worst in the raid. Also I'm finding that I'm sitting there just spamming Fireball for like 30 seconds+ without a single crit. It will still parse high on world of logs because 200 out of the 6 million mages in the world are going to get extremely lucky and get lucky crits with big ignites and do a fuck ton of damage while the other 5.9 million fire mages are doing crap.

Very well explained.
Especially the, "fire being unplayable anymore", explanation about CM nerfing combustion even more and
"just spamming fireball for 30sec without a single crit".

I've been in the exact same situation so many times since the nerf.

[mnzahra]

Yeah smeh, it's pretty damn retarded. I've passed on so much gear to our lock just to try and get hit crit peices. Then this happens. And people that don't play Fire will just play it off that we're just crying about it. It's really stupid that I have to regear and do crap damage until then. Frost is fun I love it a lot but Arcane is really boring and Fire is worse than Arcane now. I can't believe I only did 110k dps on Heroic Elegon tonight when I'm usually pulling 140k+. I was below our hunter for god sakes all because they made an RNG spec even more RNG. Fire needed nerfs but not like this. Combustion needed nerfs. Nerfing our crit to make our spec pretty much one button. Spam fireball until you crit one every minute or so then Inferno Blast and Pyro, Combust on a terrible ignite. FUN TIMES

[Crackleslap]

Mage complaining? Funny. Move along, re-roll or stop complaining. Every other class gets nerfed all the time. This time Mage. Suddenly the world ends.

User was infracted for this post.

[Shmeh]

Yeah smeh, it's pretty damn retarded. I've passed on so much gear to our lock just to try and get hit crit peices. Then this happens. And people that don't play Fire will just play it off that we're just crying about it. It's really stupid that I have to regear and do crap damage until then. Frost is fun I love it a lot but Arcane is really boring and Fire is worse than Arcane now. I can't believe I only did 110k dps on Heroic Elegon tonight when I'm usually pulling 140k+. I was below our hunter for god sakes all because they made an RNG spec even more RNG. Fire needed nerfs but not like this. Combustion needed nerfs. Nerfing our crit to make our spec pretty much one button. Spam fireball until you crit one every minute or so then Inferno Blast and Pyro, Combust on a terrible ignite. FUN TIMES

Yeah, pretty much. Our lock has all of our haste gear too.

[mnzahra]

Mage complaining? Funny. Move along, re-roll or stop complaining. Every other class gets nerfed all the time. This time Mage. Suddenly the world ends.

You're beyond stupid. From top 2 to bottom 2 with 1 hotfix. Making a spec unplayable? Is this Burning Crusade?

Infracted.

[Crackleslap]

You're beyond stupid. From top 2 to bottom 2 with 1 hotfix. Making a spec unplayable? Is this Burning Crusade?

Shit happens. This is why i don't fotm.

[Shmeh]

Shit happens. This is why i don't fotm.

Every fucking mage in the world rerolled fotm right? Nobody was a mage before. Are you fucking kidding me?

[Deleted]

I'm a raiding mage in a 25man guild with 4hc bosses down currently.
I don't think the nerf on fire hit the class that hard. I like the new arcane, it's different and easy to play.
Sure fire is still the best 3cleave in the game and thus will be better on amber-shaper for example, but arcane don't do that bad.
I currently have 494ilvl(higher ilvl in arcane specc cuse of haste/mastery back from elite boss), reforged and geared my mage for arcane(hitcap, hastecap at 21% rest into mastery). Simulated my gear and I'm supposed to have 111k on single target patchwerk, which I'm getting closer to. I topped the dps as fire and now I top it as arcane, only thing I feel that arcane is weak at is AOE but lets be honest it wasn't fire either since we were only good at cleaving. Arcane weak during movement? don't think so, sure it gimps the dps but I still use scorch on movement and if I can't keep arcane charge up I use arcane barrage on cd. Works like a charm on lei shi.
ps. I use rune of power at all times cuse of the mana regen.

[Shmeh]

I'm a raiding mage in a 25man guild with 4hc bosses down currently.
I don't think the nerf on fire hit the class that hard. I like the new arcane, it's different and easy to play.
Sure fire is still the best 3cleave in the game and thus will be better on amber-shaper for example, but arcane don't do that bad.
I currently have 494ilvl(higher ilvl in arcane specc cuse of haste/mastery back from elite boss), reforged and geared my mage for arcane(hitcap, hastecap at 21% rest into mastery). Simulated my gear and I'm supposed to have 111k on single target patchwerk, which I'm getting closer to. I topped the dps as fire and now I top it as arcane, only thing I feel that arcane is weak at is AOE but lets be honest it wasn't fire either since we were only good at cleaving. Arcane weak during movement? don't think so, sure it gimps the dps but I still use scorch on movement and if I can't keep arcane charge up I use arcane barrage on cd. Works like a charm on lei shi.
ps. I use rune of power at all times cuse of the mana regen.

I'm assuming because you're in a 25 man guild that you have haste/mastery gear already, correct? Most mages in 10 man guilds don't. We have one set, and it's a crit set. We're still a long way away from arcane being playable to its potential for us, because we had no reason to collect the gear over our warlocks.

[Magemaer]

So much text. Damm kid, shouldn't you be studying or something? I feel like you like and want to write, you're wasting it on this subject, dressed to this company.

[Deleted]

Shit happens. This is why i don't fotm.

Well I have been playing a mage since late BC. This is a rather silly & inane argument. Please at least try to add something to the thread rather than bitter ramblings from someone who has a chip on their shoulder about mages.

[Shangalar]

Every time you flame someone, a moderator cries s little. Please spare our tears from falling. This is a thread warning.