Mage PTR 6.2 Discussion

[Torian kel]

Mage spell changes :

General
Amplify Magic has been removed.
Arcane
Mastery: Mana Adept has reduced in effectiveness by 6%.
Arcane Missles now deals 10% more damage.
Frost
Mastery: Icicles is now 13% more effective.
Brain Freeze now has a 15% increased chance to trigger on each multistrike (down from 25%).


Mage T18 set bonuses :

Item - Mage T18 Arcane 2P Bonus (New) Your Arcane Blast has a 20,000% chance to reduce the cooldown of your Presence of Mind by 20 sec.
Item - Mage T18 Arcane 4P Bonus (New) Presence of Mind opens up a Time Anomaly, summoning a random ally to assist you in battle.
Item - Mage T18 Fire 2P Bonus (New) Pyroblast has a 25% chance when dealing damage to conjure a Firey Pheonix, dealing [ 200% of Spell Power ] Fire damage to the target.
Item - Mage T18 Fire 4P Bonus (New) While the Pheonix is active, you gain Ph
Item - Mage T18 Frost 2P Bonus (New) Water Jet generates Brain Freeze when used.
Item - Mage T18 Frost 4P Bonus (New) Increases the duration of Water Jet by 4 sec, and increases the total Fingers of Frost stacks by 2.


Mage related miscellaneous :

Legendary ring
http://ptr.wowdb.com/items/124635-ni...s-the-all-seer

Class specific trinket on Archimonde
Arcane http://imgur.com/a/kXVLo#10
Fire http://imgur.com/a/kXVLo#11
Frost http://imgur.com/a/kXVLo#12

[Summer]

Always wanted a phoenix for fire mages! <3

But why is it spelled like that.

[Justin-Sane]

I don't know about those phoenixes.. They make you pretty acidic.

[LocNess]

Just as a reminder as I was looking at other people freaking out about things in other forums, this is a Day 1 look. There are going to be TONS of changes coming, tons of nerfs/buffs, and we still have months left to go of testing and such. Please don't spell doom and gloom towards anything, be constructive.

With that out of the way, the Phoenix is cool, and really excited about that. The Legendary Ring seems pretty bad, but they tweeted to not look too much into it. Our class trinket is interesting as well, be fun to follow how that develops. Interested to see if they will just have the trinkets to help tune specs/classes.

[Zulandia]

Just as a reminder as I was looking at other people freaking out about things in other forums, this is a Day 1 look. There are going to be TONS of changes coming, tons of nerfs/buffs, and we still have months left to go of testing and such. Please don't spell doom and gloom towards anything, be constructive.

Not to mention a numerical decrease/increase means very little between tiers since the new gear skews the current balance as is!

On topic however probably worth linking our Archimonde class specific trinket in the opener (though only Arcane has anything thus far):

http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=124516/b...rinket&bonus=0

(linking wowhead since the mmo-champ version doesn't seem to allow choosing a spec).

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Fire is 60% to Flamestrike under the target you IB, and Frost is increase the damage of any Ice Lance that directly follows a Frostbolt by 60%. Both on normal.

[Zulandia]

Fire is 60% to Flamestrike under the target you IB, and Frost is increase the damage of any Ice Lance that directly follows a Frostbolt by 60%. Both on normal.

Pretty solid. For curiosity where did you find them? Would love to look up some of the other classes that I could not find every spec for.


edit* nvm found them in the journal.

[Torian kel]

My opinion so far :

AM wasn't the best raid CD ever, but it worked well with tranquility, as far as mages go, it's a good thing our dps is high because our usefulness is pretty low, and will be lower still. I can't think of another class that isn't as useless (outside of dps) when the next Tier will come out. Compare us to the mutiwonders that are hunters or warlock, and if our dps isn't top, they'll be no reason to bring us anymore.
My early opinion on the slight nerfs, if they stay as such, are warranted, Arcane is very strong, and Fire is starting to brake out of control (granted, it's mostly due to 2p exploit than anything). Frost ffb nerf is to compensate the probable explosion in multistrike we'll be getting at at mythic levels, and the mastery up is to probably make us want another stat beside ms and versatility.

My early opinion on Tier sets is even worse than T17, not in dps gained or fun, but in RNG. For people pushing ranks or just trying to be in the top dps in raid, RNG is already terribly bad, and Fire/Arcane bonuses seem to rely heavily on RNG, wich is seriously screwing us around.
Losing our Fire2P makes me incredibly sad as well, and I wonder if losing the 2P exploit is going to be worth it switching to at least Heroic T18.
Frost though is interesting, it makes PC worthwhile again, more than TV, and can be used to be a seriously nice setup. I wish they'd raise the FFB cap as well because even with 4 seconds more on WJ, if you don't want to lose out on proc you'll be doing something along the lines as WJ > FrB > FFB > FrB > FFB > FB > FFB and probably nothing more, witch amounts to about 1 more use out of WJ despite having 4 seconds more.


My main concern atm is the ring; if it stays that way class stacking will come back as caster stacking, force your healers to get the caster ring, bring only moonkin, mages, warlock and sp to your raid, and you got a proc on a member of your raid going up as high as +150% damage, promotting even more RNG.
Moreover, this legendary is garbage compared to the free one they gave in MOP, and doesn't feel the slightest unique. Nothing changes except a bit more stats overall, now I don't know if we'll get a visual effect but this seem so shitty to me so far. The least they could do would be to add a third stat, and something more visaul than a random proc.

Edit : And removing fox makes me so sad, and IF that much more precious.

Edit 2 : The class specific trinkets on Archimonde is Insane for Arcane, the burst will be threw the roof, and I doubt SN will be the way to go on PC anyway, maybe making UM stronger? It's good for frost, making it even more a good sustain spec. As for fire, I highly doubt it's going to be a bis. FS is shite, and even a free one everytime uour IB a target (For single target at least) is not going to be better than a random intellect trinket droping in Hellfire Citadel. I even doubt it's going to be good on multitarget, though numbers need to be run on that one

[Slykz]

The set bonuses are meh, and nerfs were expected considering the insane scaling arcane and fire has. The real interesting thing here is the ring.

Random jump? i have a 20% chance to get it in my opener if we have a total of 5 spellcasters?
Ditching 5 agi/str users and brining a total of 10 int casters, we'll have a 100% buff rotating? Wtf?

If the ring procced for everyone in opener, and THEN rotated, it would make more sense. And it also promotes insane class stacking, what the hell?

[Deleted]

AM was the only raid cooldown we had... ok except Time Warp, but AM was such a usefull spell, tho my raid leaders always forget about it :P

And the removal of fox would also be kinda crap... Good thing this is the PTR. I really dont want these changes to go through. Just as I started getting into Arcane.

[NPI]

Blizzard's patchnotes states that AM gets a buff, but the MMO-champion's datamine says it will be nerfed. We will see.
The legendary ring will be a mess. It links all same-type rings together and buff is shared and rotated every 12 seconds. It gives 10% per ring, which means you get a permanent 10% buff if you are questing, and if there is 5 casters then you get 50% for 12 seconds in each minute. This bonus is so huge that most likely will affect our rotation, definitely worth to delay CDs. There can different rotation if you are alone, with an other caster (e.g. dungeon), and there can be different scenarios in raid.
At first thought i think those classes, who can stack "resource" (like demo or destro warlocks) and spend freely will benefit most. Arcane mage has mana as resource, which means that probably we should try to align burn phase to ring proc, but its cooldown is way shorter.

[Araitik]

AM was the only raid cooldown we had... ok except Time Warp, but AM was such a usefull spell, tho my raid leaders always forget about it :P

And the removal of fox would also be kinda crap... Good thing this is the PTR. I really dont want these changes to go through. Just as I started getting into Arcane.

Pretty much anybody can apply Bloodlust with Drums, Shamans and Hunters have access to it too ... AM was the only truly unique raid cooldown we had, and it only lived 6 months ?!

What exactly has Mages done to Blizzard for them to always make us the useless raid class ? And it's not like +10% healing was completely insane (for that matter, Fox was much more OP, as it benefits the entire raid while AM only benefits healers)

So yeah, I expected nerfs / buffs but not that one. Hope we get it back, or something else.

[Deleted]

Hope we get it back, or something else.

Mages should do at least 10% more dps than any other class to make up for it. Arcane should do 15% more, due to its stationary nature.

[Araitik]

Mages should do at least 10% more dps than any other class to make up for it. Arcane should do 15% more, due to its stationary nature.

Don't know if serious or not. I'm going to assume the former, and say that the sheer idea of having a class designed to always top the DPS charts is absurd.
However, a version of AM that does +10% DPS for the whole raid for 10s would be a very good idea.

[Cracked]

Mages should do at least 10% more dps than any other class to make up for it. Arcane should do 15% more, due to its stationary nature.

I fail to see how is arcane any more stationary than elemental shaman or shadow priest.. or moonkin for that matter. If anything, while playing mage I feel like I can move almost freely compared to my other casters.

[Deleted]

Mages should do at least 10% more dps than any other class to make up for it. Arcane should do 15% more, due to its stationary nature.

I see mage privilege is still going strong. *lol*

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Mages should do at least 10% more dps than any other class to make up for it. Arcane should do 15% more, due to its stationary nature.

However, a version of AM that does +10% DPS for the whole raid for 10s would be a very good idea.

No. There's no fun in winning charts without a fight, and there's a reason they got rid of Stormlash/Banner.

[Deleted]

I don't care to be on the bottom chart of dps IF we provide something to the raid. I DO NOT care about my dps, I DO care about my raid group beating bosses. Really, really sad AM going away, worst nerf ever.

[Imnick]

All pure DPS are losing their raid utility so there's not really much reason to panic over that one. AM was nice to have but never swung an encounter, it's not going to be a huge loss.

I like the Fire and Frost bonuses but PrM has never excited me as Arcane. Not likely any of these will go live in their current incarnations though, so I can still hope they change it to something else. I don't mind RNG, I just think "your next cast is instant" is a boring spell :P
The Ring I especially doubt is going to go live as it is, twitter's as much as confirmed that isn't what they are actually going for.

The class-specific trinkets are really cool, only a shame they drop off the last boss in the expansion so the most powerful version isn't going to be very useful for anything.

I'm not sure yet how sold I am on the visuals of our tier because the MMOC version seems incomplete, whereas WoWheads model viewer is a piece of crap. I might just have to wait and look at it in game.

[Araitik]

All pure DPS are losing their raid utility so there's not really much reason to panic over that one. AM was nice to have but never swung an encounter, it's not going to be a huge loss.

Rogues still have their Smoke bomb, Warlocks still have their gate, Warriors still have Rallying Cry ... are they not pure DPS class or am I missing something ?