What are your opinions on mage direction as of patch 5.2 on the PTR

[Soulstrike]

Are you sure about this level, because they have stated :

• 502 - LFR
• 522 - normal
• 528 - thunder-forged normal
• 535 - heroic
• 541 - thunder-forged heroic

blue plost - http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/2...nges-patch-52/
did they changed it since then ? I don't think.

huh they mustve bumped it higher due to vp ilvl increase

[Deleted]

They want T15 LFR to be an upgrade for T14 normal but not T4 heroic and they want T15 to be an upgrade for T14 Heroic upgrade.
The only exception could be the upgraded version of the sha-touched/Elite heroic weapon that will be equivalent to T15 normal weapon.

They only began to show gear on PTR, so wait and see

[GhostPanini]

For some reason I was completely oblivious to the change to RoP until I saw a GC tweet. Can someone explain why they would make it 75% mana regeneration to balance the talent? Is it op on live? I don't think so.

[Elegiac]

For some reason I was completely oblivious to the change to RoP until I saw a GC tweet. Can someone explain why they would make it 75% mana regeneration to balance the talent? Is it op on live? I don't think so.

"Why such a severe nerf to Rune of Power as Arcane? Seems to kill the effort vs. reward of having to stay in the same spot.
Trying to balance reward for using it correctly against penalty in those times when you can't."

I will admit, I have no idea what the fuck they're trying to say. If they're nerfing the reward, why bother taking the talent in the first place.

[GhostPanini]

I agree with you Didactic it seem incredibly stupid to nerf the reward.

[Obelisk Kai]

Our tier 90 talents are a complete mess, let's be honest. The core problem is, as dicussed before, they aren't there to enhance or add anything to our gameplay, they are there to add unnecessary gameplay elements, such as forcing us to evocate or to stand still.

We DO have an issue with Rune of Power right now. Can anyone tell me who is likey to take Rune of Power in any situation compared to the new and improved Invocation? Invocation is a three second cast that gives you a minute of mobility if required. Rune of Power forces you to stay still and requires using a targeting reticule to place it. That'sfun when you have to stack and cant see the reticule or yourself and you gotta make and educated guess where it gets dropped.

It won't have a place in pve or pvp. So what do we do about a useless tier 90 talent?

[vaccine]

It seems an over-reach in an effort to put an end to stack camping (in addition to Scorch) by nerfing the mana regen. I believe this also harms/kills haste Arc builds but not tried that much.

Yes the tier 90 talents are a mess and not fun to use. I wish they'd change Incanter's Ward to a full passive like Grimoire of Sacrifice, a mage talent for mages that didn't want to mess with mana regen, like Grimoire is for Warlocks who don't want to mess with pets, even if it means the ward wasn't the most optimal at least it gives an option (especially helpful for new mages who have trouble maintining Invo/RoP).

As for Invo I assume it's being redone because they said qutie a few weeks ago they'd be looking at it and the Mage set bonus in regards to Arcane abuse, and we've seen no changes since then so either they forgot or it's being internally reworked.

[Obelisk Kai]

It seems an over-reach in an effort to put an end to stack camping (in addition to Scorch) by nerfing the mana regen. I believe this also harms/kills haste Arc builds but not tried that much.

Yes the tier 90 talents are a mess and not fun to use. I wish they'd change Incanter's Ward to a full passive like Grimoire of Sacrifice, a mage talent for mages that didn't want to mess with mana regen, like Grimoire is for Warlocks who don't want to mess with pets, even if it means the ward wasn't the most optimal at least it gives an option (especially helpful for new mages who have trouble maintining Invo/RoP).

As for Invo I assume it's being redone because they said qutie a few weeks ago they'd be looking at it and the Mage set bonus in regards to Arcane abuse, and we've seen no changes since then so either they forgot or it's being internally reworked.

They changed the set bonus from a pure haste boost of 5100 points to 1800 points for crit, haste and mastery and I believe that was the change they were thinking about.

What is our direction?

Well what are our issues?

Each of our three specs has an individual issue. For Arcane it is that Blizzard REALLY want us to use a mana management system rather than stack camping, yet every time they come up with a new iteration of Arcane players find a way around it. People are simply going to figure out the optimum combination of Arcane Blast casts and Invocation ticks to maintain stack capping. IF they are succesful, the logical next step for Blizzard is for Invocation to get a cooldown back or for the mana to be refunded once you complete the cast.

For Fire, it's our scaling issues. Too low at the start of an expansion for a fun spec, so good at the end of an expansion no Mage is anything else.

For Frost it is that it never seems to be raid viable. Even if they got it close to working, it's crippled by the reverse problem of fire in the long run, that it's scaling sucks. Frost scales off Haste and Crit, but as soon as crit hits 28% it's value per point just collpases doens't it? Frost doesn't scale off Mastery as well as it does Haste and Crit, so once you get to that magic number of crit your potential power growth is severely curtailed. Frost also needs Water Jet to provide SOME sort of interactivity with the pet in PVE.

Overall though I like the rotations of the three specs. Arcane's rotation will work once they kill stack camping, if they ever do. Fire's works once you cross the magic level of x% crit. And Frost needs a bit more interaction with the pet, but it's not insoluable.

All specs have issues with a messy, unfocused AOE rotation that is badly in need of a rework.

We have lots of minor glyphs, but 90% of them seem to be varieties of polymorph. This is a minor issue, but surely they could give us more fun stuff here? Illusion is about the most fun glyph we have and it has a thirty minute cooldown.

And our talents. Oh boy our talents. Ghostcrawler said that he thinks there is too little variance on what talents Mages take, we all tend to take the same ones. I know people have picked apart the duffers but I want to add my own PERSONAL perspective.

Tier 1 is supposed to be the Mobility Tier. Presence of Mind and Scorch are, in my eyes, fine. Both have uses, both appeal to personal playstyles and can be used in a variety of interesting ways. Ice Floes is the problem here. When I read the official forum, I literally found only one person defending Ice Floes because it was a high skill talent that demanded a lot of them to use effectively. That simply isn't a good enough reason to leave Ice Floes as it is, a talent should not be left on the shelf for 99% of Mages because 1% of Mages enjoys the intellectual challenge of using it properly.
Ice Floes is a problem because...well it's finnicky. You press it, you get to cast two of your main nukes before settling again. The issue is that fights with such low bursts of movement aren't too common, and scorch is just handier overall. It just isn't worth the bother of speccing out of Scorch especially as Scorch is so much more forgiving (thought the time you need to move allowed for two casts, but it turns out you would have needed three...scorch would have been better).
If Ice Floes is kept, then I re-iterate an idea I posted earlier, it should be a passive option on a talent tier with 2 active talents. Let the charges stack every 20-25 seconds like a Monk's roll so that if you need to move the option will be there.

Tier 2 is our Defensive Tier. Temporal Shield is fine, it's a reactive ability that takes to time learn and is really nice when used proper. Making the effect Temporal Ripples impossible to dispel is a nice touch. Ice Barrier is Ice Barrier, enough said.
Blazing Speed I'm reserving judgement on, the new version does sound all kinds of nice but is it strong enough to warrant not taking Ice Barrier or TS? I don't think Ice Barrier should be made baseline because I actually think IB is balanced against TS and if IB were baseline, people would simply all start taking TS. It could be good on fights though where a lot of mobility is needed in quick short bursts...making Ice Floes even more pointless.

Tier 3...RoF is good despite nerfs. I love Frostjaw for being out in the world and casual battleground play butI'd probably lower the cooldown a little, maybe to 15 seconds, although maybe that is overpowered. Ice Ward...maybe it is just me but has anyone actually used Ice Ward? Seriously it looks to me like the definition of being awkward to use but I could be missing something. If I wanted to freeze a pack at range I'd drop a ROF. Frankly Dragon's Breat should have been put in this slot replacing Cone of Cold and offering a melee range cc that also packed a punch. Would have been a viable choice.

Tier 4 is mostly fine, but Greater Invis needs to remove ALL debuffs and make you invulnerable for a split second so that it doesn't break nigh on instantly. Think of it as the vanish treatment. If that were done, it would be a really good choice especially when its cooldown being lowered on the ptr.

Tier 5...well I like it to a point but it sort of feels like forcing a dot gameplay style on all specs. I would have reworked Living Bomb to be our multi-dotter, as having both it and nether tempest feels a little redundant. Maybe replaced NT with an Arcane style long cast super nuke? That way we'd have a strong single target ability, a fire based multi dot ability with some aoe potential and a delayed trigger aoe ability. But as I said, that's just idle specualtion. The tier works fine as is.

Tier 6...oh god. It's broken. A colossal Mess. That is all there is to it. Part of me thinks the changes they have made to Invocation are an admission of defeat, as Invocation is now so ridiculously strong it's going to be the talent of choice in pvp and most pve. We can all take Invocation now until 6.0 when they rip out the tier and replace it with something interesting, hopefully something to do with Mirror Images (thats a spell BEGGING to be modified by talents) Incanter's Ward is fine as a reactive ability. Rune of Power is dead.

[Deleted]

Well said, sir.

Am I the only one who thinks Arcane and Fire's aoe is crap? I mean, not in a raid for example, but for Challenge Modes it clearly sucks. Arcane's Arcane Explosion is full of crap, it's chance giving a Charge is way too low, therefor Barrage can't be used more frequently... Blizzard is also shit, and Flamestrike (my gosh this is full of crap). Multidoting gives the same result, so the only viable AoE we have is going Frost spec with Frozen Orb and Ice Lance procs... I clearly don't understand that shit, Shadow Priests, Boomkins, Warlocks, DK's, Hunters, Ele Shamans - all so bursty in a dungeon AoE, we are only viable playing frost....

[Emage]

Very nice post Rumaya , I hope they change icy-floes, however they would have to avoid making it "better" than the shaman's spiritwalk, personally I wish we had the warlocks one that's passive, but you run slower while using it, though having not used it maybe thats not a good idea. Charges for icy-floes seems as far as they would be willing to go, I think anything more will be too cheap for pvp.

About the new invocation.... I know it's too early to know for sure, but what does it seem the optimal rotation/stats will be? Will we want to try staying at full mana until it's almost time to refresh invocation buff, or will we want to do constant burn cycles, quickly burning up a evo's tick of mana and filling it back up with the new quick invocation?

[Obelisk Kai]

"About the new invocation.... I know it's too early to know for sure, but what does it seem the optimal rotation/stats will be? Will we want to try staying at full mana until it's almost time to refresh invocation buff, or will we want to do constant burn cycles, quickly burning up a evo's tick of mana and filling it back up with the new quick invocation?"

I don't care if such a playstyle (the constant burn cycle) does more damage than every other spec combined, if that ends up being the optimal way to play Arcane I'd rather take my chances as frost. Blizzard better ensure it doesn't come to pass.

[isadorr]

We had 5 in our roster and raided with 3... you know that you need more than 25 men to run a 25m guild?

Now 3 of these 5 play other classes: 1 shaman and 2 locks... because mage is horrible designed and at the moment with arcane beeing: nuku nuke evo nuke nuke evo in 5.2... the last playable spec will boring as hell as well.

Frost is not competitve in most fight because of PvP... Fire was basically killed and is subject to incredible RNG till we get ilvl 530 (?)...

So what can we do when 5.2 hits the servers: Play a boring spec with ab, ab, ab, ab, am, ab, ab... ab, evo... rinse and repeat... or reroll to Blizzards fotm class... warlock... better dps, more fun, same loot needed.

P.s. have been playing mage since release... so I even survived BC's Warlock-shadowbolt-spam...

Funny that we raided with 6 mages and still have 6 mages doing great dps as arcane. The only change has been them going from fire to arcane and they are usually the top dmg and dps at the end of the night with them also at the top or near the top of most fights. Range has always given more mobility and usefulness than melee in wow and we downed heroic sha 3 weeks ago for the first time with mages near the top with locks.

[Methusula]

This from Ghostcrawler in the PTR Class and Set Bonus Tread Pt. 2:

Mage
This is very much a PTR experiment, but we are going to try moving Blazing Speed to the top talent tier to replace Scorch. Scorch will become a baseline Fire spell. Blazing Speed’s old position on the talent tree will be replaced with a new talent.

The new talent is currently called Flameglow, and it is a “permanently on” ability that reduces all damage taken by a flat amount, based on spellpower, up to a maximum of 30% of the hit. The intent is to give mages a passive defensive option, and also one that varies with the frequency of incoming damage. Remember, mages must give up Temporal Shield or Ice Barrier to take the new talent.

We agree with the feedback that Blazing Speed makes more sense grouped with the movement talents than with the defensive talents. In addition, we have buffed Ice Floes already from live, and we have added an additional perk that spells cast within the first half a second of Ice Flows don’t consume a charge. Currently if you’re making use of spell queuing, it’s easy to waste the first charge, so this fix is intended to help with that.

That brings us to Scorch. Sorch feels really valuable to many players (above and beyond Arcane using it rotationally to avoid dropping stacks), but we’re concerned that it feels more valuable than it actually is. Yes, Elemental and Hunters can do a lot of damage while on the move, but not every spec in the game needs to do so, and mages have a lot of other advantages. Mages do have several tools to deal with movement, such as several instants and abilities such as Blink and the tier 2 talents to minimize movement time. We’d rather seem mages plan, move quickly, and plant rather than just stay moving all the time. Scorch preempts all of those tools and has the added psychological benefit of feeling like you’re always doing something, and because of that feeling of being productive, we’re concerned you have less motivation to minimize movement. Mathematically, if you’re making full use of your available tools without Scorch, Scorch isn’t much of a benefit of all, and we think the mage class would feel and play better overall without Scorch as a crutch. We debated removing Scorch completely, and we still might, but we’re sensitive to the fact that so many mages are using Scorch today and might not understand or appreciate its loss. As a compromise, we’re going to try Scorch as Fire only to preserve the gameplay for players who really like it and to help differentiate the Mage specs a bit more.

This is a big change, and the kind of thing we might revert if we and you don’t like how it plays. Try it out and let us know.


This is very exciting as it is pretty much exactly what I and other mages suggested they do. I don't care for the part where he says they may remove Scorch altogether still, but this change and the further change to Ice Flows sounds really good to me.

[Shangalar]

Ok now. So far the discussion has be quite different in our two 5.2 threads. However, as we would currently be debating one and only Ghostcrawler's post, I am going to close this thread for the purpose of a healthier and more consistent discussion.

If you disagree with this change and feel that this thread should have remained open because of some reason that escaped me, please send me a private message and if the reason makes sense I'll happily reopen it.