[Mage] 5.2 Patch notes discussion

[kif]

The problem is that many, many players are not at very high gear levels and might not see the gear levels required to get to the part where it scales well...when it is relevant.

[Shangalar]

And how is that pathetic ?

It's pathetic because most of the community goes completely quiet and forgets about illogical rotations or lack of utility the second they start topping the dps charts. Then when their personal e-peen isn't important anymore they come back to moan about utility and "how they never stopped thinking about it".

I'm tired of it. I want people to be honest and say "I want to top charts by 20k and don't care about anything else" instead of "We need a revamp" every time a mage spec gets nerfed as a hidden message saying "I don't really think we need a revamp, I just wanna get buffed but I don't wanna seem petty."

[Kiry]

I'm tired of it. I want people to be honest and say "I want to top charts by 20k and don't care about anything else" instead of "We need a revamp" every time a mage spec gets nerfed as a hidden message saying "I don't really think we need a revamp, I just wanna get buffed but I don't wanna seem petty."

Not everyone thinks like that. Maybe most do, but I cannot speak for them. I raided progressive for two xpacs as a shadowpriest. During that time, I thought of my class in terms of utility and dps. Coming back to my mage for this xpac, I've found that it's hard to remove the "utility" thought process, but have so little.
Now that mage dps is lower than other pure dps, and we dont bring much else - what is the average person supposed to think? "We're supposed to do more dps because we dont bring anything else." I agree it's a sad thought, but that is currently how mages (appear) to be designed. So we're bummed (to put mildly).

[kif]

I would prefer that if i play well, I am rewarded by being near the top. Not always at the top, sometimes it is not possible, it happens. As I have said a few times, I am lucky, I am in a small casual raid team, and even with these nerfs, adjustments, etc...my spot is safe. As a player, and a person that is competitive though...I hate feeling like I am holding my group back. Hammering a spec/class into the ground because when the Full Heroic are OP...is poor design. They need to figure out how to manage specs so that scaling with gear doesn't completely unbalance the class.

The biggest problem I see is that the game has evolved so much. I'll use an example from the OTHER portion of my competitive life. I race sailboats. The most important, or rather longest continuously run event is the America's Cup. In the beginning the differences between winning and losing were massive, but is was still new. I think in the first race the difference between first and second was a matter of HOURS, over a 100 mile course. In the last race with similar boats in 2007...the difference, was a matter of SECONDS. Basically the sport had become refined to the point that differences of 1% or less, were game changing.

This same thing has happened here. The other problem is directly related to the SIZE of the numbers. a 3% difference is kind of meaningless at 2k dps...but when your looking at 200k, it's very noticeable. That item squish is looking like it could have quelled much of the QQ over numbers.

[Deleted]

It's pathetic because most of the community goes completely quiet and forgets about illogical rotations or lack of utility the second they start topping the dps charts. Then when their personal e-peen isn't important anymore they come back to moan about utility and "how they never stopped thinking about it".

It's not helpful to throw out vitriol about "most of the community" like you've done in this and your previous post. I'm sure you're already aware (god knows I've seen plenty of people saying it in the past few days) that it makes perfect sense that the time people would worry about lack of utility is when they're bringing subpar dps to a raid. I assume that many people, like myself, feel like they're simply holding their guild back by taking up a spot that could be easily filled by somebody with more dps and/or more utility. Obviously, if mages easily hit the top 3 in DPS, lack of utility becomes a smaller issue for them because they feel like they have brought something to the raid.

[Shangalar]

My opinions came from seeing how these forums have been working for the last year. When MoP launched, Fire mages were talking about their rotation and cooldown usage while Arcane mages talked about everything that was wrong with the spec. Then arcane got buffed and most of people (with exceptions) fell silent about the core issues and focused on topping meters. We rarely talk about spec quality while it's on top.

It's just infuriating on occasion. I meant no harm.

[Dyart]

My opinions came from seeing how these forums have been working for the last year. When MoP launched, Fire mages were talking about their rotation and cooldown usage while Arcane mages talked about everything that was wrong with the spec. Then arcane got buffed and most of people (with exceptions) fell silent about the core issues and focused on topping meters. We rarely talk about spec quality while it's on top.

It's just infuriating on occasion. I meant no harm.

But the flaws in mechanism has been there for years:

I don't even remember how many times arcane has been changed: first missiles consumes charges, then not, then again consumes it, then not then consumes it again etc etc etc. A big mess that was introduced in 80s is the super failed mastery. Now another big mess is introduced, that is the tier 90 talent. It is hopeless in my opinion to fix all these issues, I just hope they don't introduce a third big mess, oh wait, now that invocation consumes charges as well??

I don't remember for how many years fire are highly RNG based, and it is a spec scales so well that it can not survive in this world of inflation. And guess what? They dare to design something like Critical Mass in this world of inflation!

Frost? I have faith in that frost will one day be PvE balanced, but wait..it just can not be done as there is a world of PvP.

So, seriously, I don't know how do you get a feeling that there is hope to fix the mechanism of these specs. We just hope to live in such a chaotic and anarchy society, simple story.

[Deleted]

But the flaws in mechanism has been there for years:

I don't even remember how many times arcane has been changed: first missiles consumes charges, then not, then again consumes it, then not then consumes it again etc etc etc. A big mess that was introduced in 80s is the super failed mastery. Now another big mess is introduced, that is the tier 90 talent. It is hopeless in my opinion to fix all these issues, I just hope they don't introduce a third big mess, oh wait, now that invocation consumes charges as well??

I don't remember for how many years fire are highly RNG based, and it is a spec scales so well that it can not survive in this world of inflation. And guess what? They dare to design something like Critical Mass in this world of inflation!

Frost? I have faith in that frost will one day be PvE balanced, but wait..it just can not be done as there is a world of PvP.

So, seriously, I don't know how do you get a feeling that there is hope to fix the mechanism of these specs. We just hope to live in such a chaotic and anarchy society, simple story.

And this among other things (got benched on our second 5.2 raid, yay, thanks Blizzard) is why I'm considering changing classes more and more seriously. The Mage just isn't fun anymore and seeing how GC says they are happy with the Mage right now that won't change. Anytime soon or possibly ever.

I hated the RNG in Fire for years and years. It has never changed and probably never will. It got better with 5.0 and Inferno Blast but *bam* they nerfed it and it's again frustrating to play *and* unrewarding to boot with lower crit rates and lower damage and now even worse AOE thanks for the LB nerf.

I wasn't too enthusiastic about Arcane as a whole, in whatever incarnation at any point, for years. In the end all their talk about mana management always come down to stacking the buff/debuff and burning. Also because it's more fun. The mana-conservative playstyle just isn't as fun.

I wanted to raid Frost for a long time but that got less and less interesting and I've come to strongly believe that Frost will *never* be a truly competitive - or dare I say it, TOP dps spec - as long as their PvP and PvE systems are linked. By its very nature, how it deals damage, how it offers CC etc. I don't think it can ever be truly balanced in a way that works both in PvE and PvP.

Portals are nice and all but they're just convenience, I can learn to live without them. Same for Mage food etc. So for me there is actually not a lot if anything that the Mage really offers anymore that is more, or at least as, interesting as other classes.

At this point I only play the Mage because I'm used to it, have done so for years and it's my best developed character. If I had another character that was as well equipped that I played as well and that could replace my Mage in my raid I would switch. Right now. I'm actually done with Mage. I'm just lacking any viable replacement options right now.

[Bopcommander]

Silly side note... We don't really provide a raid with much, nothing unique. We have always been able to provide the raid with great DPS, so I'm okay with not having "something special". Of course going from the best DPS class to now dead last in all 3 specs hurts. I'm the 2nd best geared DPS in my raid, And I'm having trouble beating our monk Tank on single target DPS on some attempts. That shouldn't happen.

[Dralektus]

My opinions came from seeing how these forums have been working for the last year. When MoP launched, Fire mages were talking about their rotation and cooldown usage while Arcane mages talked about everything that was wrong with the spec. Then arcane got buffed and most of people (with exceptions) fell silent about the core issues and focused on topping meters. We rarely talk about spec quality while it's on top.

It's just infuriating on occasion. I meant no harm.

You're right, it sure can be infuriating. But I think most of what happens isn't nefarious. I see a couple things happen when we're doing well in dps and someone complains about mage quality of life:

1) From other classes, you're met with, "Stop asking for buffs. Mages are fine." no matter how many times you say it isn't a dps issue and things need to be rebalanced accordingly.
2) From mages you get "Shut up. If they make changes, they'll nerf us."

And because quality of life is hard to quantify except when it results in dps losses, it's rare that you can make any headway with devs unless you're discussing recently tested changes in a beta or on PTR. You see wish lists for redesigns pop up all the time, but there's rarely much point as Blizzard generally doesn't seem to be listening unless there's a balance problem or we're in an expansion beta. Because, when it comes to it, the design is their design.

[DeLos]

It's pathetic because most of the community goes completely quiet and forgets about illogical rotations or lack of utility the second they start topping the dps charts. Then when their personal e-peen isn't important anymore they come back to moan about utility and "how they never stopped thinking about it".

I'm tired of it. I want people to be honest and say "I want to top charts by 20k and don't care about anything else" instead of "We need a revamp" every time a mage spec gets nerfed as a hidden message saying "I don't really think we need a revamp, I just wanna get buffed but I don't wanna seem petty."

I think you have it wrong. I do believe most of us want more utility. Yes, most also want killer dps. It is kind of the nature of things.

However, the core issue stems from wanting to feel crucial to the raid. We want to feel like we are a key part of the raid. So, if we have little to now utility we want big numbers. If we don't have big numbers, we want the utility.

Think of every dps class as having a formula:

(DPS done) + (Extra utility*) = (Importance)

So, the more dps you do, the less utility you need to feel important. The less dps though, the more you want to bring something extra to make the raid succeed. So, as an example: (Warlock dps) > (Mage dps) AND (Warlock Utility) > (Mage utility) then it falls that Warlocks are more important to the raid success then mages are. You can continue this across the classes. Right now mages are feeling like we have less dps and less utility then every other class. So, we are feeling less important then every other class. That is not a good place to be.

That is why I have always said that the extra utility that a class brings has to count against the damage they do. The less extras a class can do, the more dps they should do. Right now mages have among the lowest amount of extras, so by that reason they should be among the highest dps. If you want mages to be middle of the pack dps, that is fine if you add more utility.

*When I say extra utility I mean more then the raid buffs, which are by design shared by other classes. It would be things like health stones, gateways, raid walls, clutch healing (both self taking pressure of healers and off healing at high damage points, etc, etc.

[orph]

I am not looking forward to the frost nerf "due to PvP." You know it's coming... Every time frost does anywhere near good we get slapped due to pvp issues. Make it all a non-issue... Do something that makes it change on "player targets." Difficult? I don't think so.

[kif]

In one of his last interviews, GC mentioned that was definitely not off the table. He did however say that it does add a fair bit of complexity across the board for newer players.

[Akraen]

My opinions came from seeing how these forums have been working for the last year. When MoP launched, Fire mages were talking about their rotation and cooldown usage while Arcane mages talked about everything that was wrong with the spec. Then arcane got buffed and most of people (with exceptions) fell silent about the core issues and focused on topping meters. We rarely talk about spec quality while it's on top.

It's just infuriating on occasion. I meant no harm.

I'm going to have to completely agree with you here.

I got burnt out on these forums recently in one of those 5.2 discussion threads. I keep trying to explain the numbers don't matter, it's the gameplay, utility, and how much skill dictates your DPS. Even when frost numbers supposedly became "viable" - I still want to point out that the mage community doesn't yet support the spec in PvE and the number of parses really shows it.

I do often battle within the class, rather than versus other classes. zomgDPS wrote this huge thing about how frost is the spec to play in 5.2, but if you look it is still very underrepresented by top and mid-level raiding guilds in ToT. Frost is and always has been the underdog.

I stuck to druid for 8 long years of nonsense changes and class revamps. I'm a mage now for only one reason-- if I had to tank another day as a druid I was going to uninstall WoW, 6 years of tanking was too much for me, it had nothing to do with the class, but whenever I'd go another spec, I'd be forced back into that role because we couldn't ever find competent tanks to take the role from me.

So anyway, I hate to give up on a class, and the DPS numbers don't matter to me. Thematics and enjoyment matter, but I also am a bit hardcore, which means I want my cake and I'd like to also eat it. If you just talk about DPS, I'd like to just be worth a raid spot as frost. But if you talk about other mage issues, I want to be on the forefront of figuring out ways to add to our thematics and gameplay, without adding things that hurt our quality of life.

When I say we're pretty broken, I mean it. Has very little to do with numbers. Look at frost as an entire spec-- our stats don't scale right, we get to the point where we don't even want any of the green stats anymore, and we don't get excited about trinkets because they either are useless because we have shatter or pigeon hole us into a bomb because it only procs off DoT damage. Our elemental is buggy and provides no flavor or interactivity. We don't use have our tool kit in PvE and feel under constant threat by PvP balancing. It's just not ideal right now, and I don't think any dev should say we're "fine" - they should say what the truth is "Mages, particularly frost, will see a warlock-style revamp in 6.0" - that at least would give us something about which we can get excited.

[DeLos]

they should say what the truth is "Mages, particularly frost, will see a warlock-style revamp in 6.0" - that at least would give us something about which we can get excited.

I don't agree. I don't think we need that level of a rework. Oh, we do need some changes, but not that drastic. I think the seeds for each spec's unique swing is there. I just needs to be expanded a bit. The picture cleared up, not redrawn.

[Akraen]

Frost plays great but it is broken stat-wise. Mastery revamp would be very significant and I don't see that or L90 talents happening until 6.0.

[jacce]

Looks like GC finally got enough data and now agrees that mage DPS is too low.

Greg Street ‏@Ghostcrawler

After a few more days, we now think mage DPS is low. We want to keep parity among mage specs so the buffs will likely be fairly passive.

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/sta...78474507714563

[Firebert]

After a few more days, we now think mage DPS is low. We want to keep parity among mage specs so the buffs will likely be fairly passive.

---Source

How do you think they're going to go about it? AB, Frostbolt and Fireball damage up?

[Soulstrike]

How do you think they're going to go about it? AB, Frostbolt and Fireball damage up?

http://www.thedailyblink.com/2013/03...-mage-in-need/

fireball 300%damage
frostbolt 350%
arcane blast 800% damage XD

any buff RIGHT NOW (progression) is good news

[Firebert]

http://www.thedailyblink.com/2013/03...-mage-in-need/

That'll do it I suppose.

I mean, there's other things they can tweak, what would you want and what would the other specs get?

So long as any of AB/AM/ABarr/FB/FFB get buffed I'm happy :3