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
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(Mage: Neze)