Mage 5.4 Discussion

[Polarthief]

What Power?! Power to change something in this game? He definately does not. Everybody who is willing to prove something to a developer, lead designer or someone else at blizzard has the same chance to do so.

I reallly respect theorycrafters but in the END it comes down to the game! INGAME. You can theorycraft all you want if you dont have the reactions to play this game efficiantly it means jack.

Lets be honoust here: The Mage class is not "fun" to play anymore in many parts ( I still think "blink" is the best skill in the game after 7 years and its the only reason i keep playing a mage) There is no "great" raid utilety...

Alright, you want some cold hard facts? Here ya go:

- Fire is out of control with Scaling. It sucks horribly at the beginning and is too good at the end due to Crit scaling way too high. SINCE LICH KING (that was two expansions ago), it's been reported that it needs fixing. Blizzard has done nothing but made us too good at the start of 5.0 and decided to continuously nerf us, still leaving the core issues of RNG and retarded scaling.

- Arcane is too immobile and has nothing to do with mana (either stay above 90% mana or drain it and get it back) as much as they say it does. It's a proc-fishing spec that's super mindless. Arcane has always been very immobile, but this is the first expansion where mechanics are really pushing fights, so it's more of a fatal flaw than ever. The Mastery needs a serious rework as it doesn't really interact with anything but rather force us into two mindless rotations that we get to pick from.

- Frost has the opposite as Fire when it comes to scaling: It scales too poorly. In addition, two of its stats, Haste and Crit, cap waaaaaay too easily. Frost also has a huge issue with multi-target fights where they have to constantly swap because of the annoying Frostbolt Debuff for maximum damage, plus a retarded pet UI that makes you want to kill something. Frost's Mastery is also too good in PvP and too weak in PvE. A nice killing-of-~three-birds-with-one-stone would be to make it really good in PvE and fairly mediocre in PvP. This would solve: Haste/Crit capping issues as Mastery is now the best stat for PvE, Frost PvP Burst, and Weak PvE Mastery.

- The class as a whole works horribly with the L75 and L90 talents. The Bombs feel forced into Fire and Frost by how they (now) interact with them. Arcane they're pretty strong due to the mastery, but also feel phoned in. Besides Fire, Mages were NEVER known for using DoTs until this expansion. L90 talents, just... no. They need to be destroyed in a fire.

With the exception of my views on "the class as a whole" the spec-specific problems are FACTS, not OPINIONS. No one can deny the scaling issues of Fire and Frost. No one can deny the immobility and mana-pointlessness of Arcane. Some of these issues have come as late as 5.0, while some as early as 3.0. All I know is we continue to go ignored and remain to be a broken, outdated, class, that only has competitive DPS because they make our spells strong enough to be viable. Yeah, our DPS is fine, but how we do the DPS is NOT fine.

BUT! in the END the Mage class does deliver Top End DMG in almost every encounter there is. We are highly mobile in most situations and can substain extreme amounts of incoming damage wihtout dieing.

No we don't.

High mobile? Sustain extreme amounts of damage? Have you even PLAYED a Mage? We're good at immobile fights and as far as taking damage, we're good at taking ONE, SINGLE, large hit. We're TERRIBLE at taking a large amount of small hits (even with Flameglow, which is what it's meant for, we still take too much damage).

Please, just stop.

[Milamber]

- Change Shatter to: "If your critical strike chance exceeds 100% after taking Shatter into account, the damage is increased proportionally to the bonus".
(e.g., if you have 30% Crit: -3% Boss Suppression = (27% * 2) + 50% = 54% + 50% = 104%. Your frozen spells, FoF'd ILs, and BF'd FFBs will deal 4% additional damage against bosses)

I'd like this change

[mrgreenthump]

So.. haven't really been posting lately due there actually not being any changes to mages on the ptr yet. But some posts here are starting to grind me a bit.. This is freaking 5.4 not the next expansion. It's a raiding tier, it brings raids and adjustments for progression so there wont be class stacking or op classes during the progression, given they have failed in the balancing the past tier. They will try to make it better this tier, or that's at least what I hope to be the case. But we do not know it yet, as there is absolutely no change for any classes when considering dps balance.

Now every frost mage here seems to call out a nerf for fire next patch, when they have been posting all this patch that frost is right there next to fire on dps. This really makes no real sense to me.. Sure fire scales a lot from gear, but every single piece in tier 16 either had crit on them or could be reforged to massive ammount of crit. This can be avoided by different itemization all together.. Hell don't give us any secondary stats on trinkets, and that's already 3-4.5% crit gone from our budged. It would be the clever way and wouldn't need a nerf to something that has been kicked around for the whole expansion. And for a spec that still has no real aoe, when comparing to all the other specs in the game. And fire multidotting is still way too weak if they decide to nerf fire in some way.


Now what comes to the problems mages were facing in ToT progression. They are directly adressing the worst 1, every other ranged class has some sort of passive reduction and the encounters were designed in such a way for the most part, that those classes were just simply better than a mage for almost all of the progression fights. Now they are removing all of the passive reduction from ranged. So it brings mages to a much better place in the overall picture.


And what comes to the level 90 talents ofc they want change them or remove them now. They might adjust them, but they have shown that they want to stick with these talents if possible till at least 6.0. Now what comes after is a totally different story, what GC has been saying is that they feel they failed on delivering on the t6 mage talents aside from arcane. Now that kinda has me scared, as the t6 talents are a lot more annoying when playing arcane than when you play fire or frost.


Finally. They won't revamp us for 6.0, no way. Mages are still 1 of the highest played classes in game. And while I kinda suffer a bit inside when playing my mage in raiding, it's the class that I want to play with, and I ain't abt to quit raiding any time soon. And I think most people are thinking the same. It's still fun playing a mage, given its somewhat boring and annoying due to the rng nature of all of our specs.

/end rant

Now discussion abt mages is always nice, but for me personally we are kinda talking the same points over and over again.

[Deleted]

@Greenthumbs & polar :
I'm pretty thing that they will revamps mage a lot more than we trough in 6.0. Part of this come from the fact that we only have small change since 5.2. It's true that rogue (the least played class) will receive most of the attention in 6.0. For me, revamp is not always tied to popularity, not always.
Some class are change more regularly than having a big change, like Hunter or Paladin.

But on popularity, there's an interesting data :
The number of Warlock did increase but not by much. At the same time, the number of mage reduce only a little globally but it's due to the mage popularity in PvP. It drop more visibly in PVE.

[Deleted]

Yep, the fire set bonus gets worse as gear gets better, if they don't adjust CM then it's absolute crap.

And by "adjust" CM I assume you mean nerf it... In which case the 4pc just "balances" our dmg rather than increasing it.

[mrgreenthump]

But on popularity, there's an interesting data :
The number of Warlock did increase but not by much. At the same time, the number of mage reduce only a little globally but it's due to the mage popularity in PvP. It drop more visibly in PVE.

The drop was due top guilds(and lesser ones followed) not taking mages like they did before, this was due us having nothing special to bring to the raid and having the most damage taken of any class. It was simply not a good choice to bring a mage when he might die from any raid aoe. It got far better in the end when we had enough gear and hp to survive the mechanics. But they are adressing that very thing. Now I don't think it will make a huge impact to mage community as blizz kinda burned those mages who got left out.

[Pandacally]

Now discussion abt mages is always nice, but for me personally we are kinda talking the same points over and over again.

What other points are there to discuss?
4th mage specc? Using another source of magic? Or combining all 3 elements (fire, frost arcane) into elemental specc?

We know this is not going to happen anyways, so we might as well suggest improvements of gameplay/lvl 90 revamps etc ^^

[mrgreenthump]

And by "adjust" CM I assume you mean nerf it... In which case the 4pc just "balances" our dmg rather than increasing it.

Even if they would nerf it.. Our crit rates are so high due to the ammount crit rating being just nuts atm, that top mages would simply still just ignore the 4 set. And given that am quite sure there will be 2 parts of t16 again without any crit on them. I would much rather have 1-2% more crit than this 4-set bonus.

---------- Post added 2013-06-14 at 10:24 AM ----------

What other points are there to discuss?

That's kinda my point. We are creating this huge conversation from speculating and attacking each others opinnions. And in a week or two, Blizz comes out with a ptr patch that will most likely destroy everything and then we will have another 20-30-40 page topics of how wrong they are and what they should do. But it's just my PoV atm. I might just be too annoyed abt everything today xD

[Deleted]

Finally. They won't revamp us for 6.0, no way. Mages are still 1 of the highest played classes in game.

Just a quick note on popularity : mages are definitely not one of the highest played classes in the game. According to Realmpop data, mages are the 7th played classe at 90, above Shaman, Warlock, Rogue and Monk. They are the second class less likely to reach lvl 90 in fact (just beaten by rogues) : there's not that much 90 mages compared to their overall population, and in particular compared to their previous 85 population. There's been a huge drop in mage popularity which can be seen by looking at the actual 85 population : mages are the second most "played" class at 85, which seems to show that people choose not to level their mage.

[Summer]

High mobile? Sustain extreme amounts of damage? Have you even PLAYED a Mage? We're good at immobile fights and as far as taking damage, we're good at taking ONE, SINGLE, large hit. We're TERRIBLE at taking a large amount of small hits (even with Flameglow, which is what it's meant for, we still take too much damage).

Please, just stop.

I don't think this is quite fair of you, or true either. Playing fire with Evo I at least I feel pretty damn mobile with pyro procs and imo mage survivability is pretty good. Arcane would be another thing but who's forcing anyone to it :P

Example? We just managed to kill Lei Shen HM and after al that wiping I've come to love my class once again for the perks. Thunderstruck? Blink away and laugh, or pop invis and laugh even more. Transitions? I can solo soak two static shocks - talk about being able to live through incoming damage, we're awesome! Last phase with constant AoE damage? Maybe not our strength but I was the only ranged dps alive when the boss died and this despite getting diffusion chain on me twice. I haven't felt like a burden to our raid on any boss since tortos and horridon really, after you get past those fights mages start to be all kinds of awesome.

I pretty much love our toolkit

[Deleted]

Just a quick note on popularity : mages are definitely not one of the highest played classes in the game. According to Realmpop data, mages are the 7th played classe at 90, above Shaman, Warlock, Rogue and Monk.

I'm not sure how mages stand in PvP, but I think that a Frost mage is a very common sight there.

In PvE we can use Raidbot's data. Selecting 10N and the last two months gave a DPS sample size of 1,130,503. This is how they are divided to different classes:

8.7% Hunter
8.3% Warlock
7.8% Mage
6.5% Shaman
5.2% Rogue
4.8% Shadow Priest
3.9% DK
3.7% Druid
3.4% Warrior
2.3% Paladin
1.5% Monk

[Deleted]

I think you forgot a bunch of specs here. I was talking about class popularity, not dps spec popularity. Do you really think rogues are more popular than paladins and druids ? ^^

Something interesting to note is that Warlock are now more common than Mage, at least in 10N.

[Deleted]

No, I didn't forget healers and tanks. I just think that comparing mages with other classes only makes sense when you compare to other pure DPS classes.

And yes, it will be interesting to see how many Warlocks there are in 5.4

[Deleted]

But you're not comparing to other pure DPS classes, you're comparing to other classes from which you arbitrarily remove some specs, how does it makes sense ? So a warrior tank is no longer a warrior ? Why wouldn't he count as a warrior too ?

I'm not sure if the numbers will change that much with 5.4. With the legendary questline and all, I don't see people switching main unless there's some really impacting changes in the patch notes. Fingers crossed for a T75/T90 change to surprise us all ^^

[Deleted]

Better analysis than mine, with all class, a lot of graph, source, etc : http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2013/06...for-patch-5-3/
(you can also jump directly to the last par of the article).

[Deleted]

No we don't.

High mobile? Sustain extreme amounts of damage? Have you even PLAYED a Mage? We're good at immobile fights and as far as taking damage, we're good at taking ONE, SINGLE, large hit. We're TERRIBLE at taking a large amount of small hits (even with Flameglow, which is what it's meant for, we still take too much damage).

Please, just stop.

Ehm.. Yes we do. I don't know in which world you are living sunshine but in my WoW-World Fire Mages are dominating the meters. It not even about luckl anymore to do good DPS with a Fire mage with a critlvl of 50+%, there is just: Good DPS -- or GODLY DPS

We can take two!!! large hits directly in a row. I don't know what spell you take but Greater Invisebilety works wonders in taking Big DMG income and it even does it for a couple of seconds.

Ehm in what encounter does a player who does not stand completely wrong an extreme amount of low amounts of dmg that kills you ? That stuff is supposed to be healed...

Immobile ?? With the current critlevel I can run around spamming scorch and pyros all day and still keep up a decent DPS. Where is that immobile? Just because I cant run around and do everything like a warlock or huntard doesn't mean a mage is a immobile class.

Yes, I DO know that I am talking about only ONE Spec of the whole class, but arkane is doing absolutely fine dps in many encouters aswell and frost kan keep up at a couple of encounters too. Actualy I played Frost till an ilvl of 526 and was doing good enough to justify a raid spot.

For god sake... just stop whining about this class... if you don't like it, there are plenty of other classes that can be played in this game.

I don't like the lvl90 talents either, I dont think the bombs tier needs to be there. We have told Blizzard more then enough that most people don't like em.

They have told us several times that they cant change such big things in the middle of an X-Pac.. Lets wait till 6.0 and than we will see what they did to our beloved class.

Till than stop the b****ing and show a little bit of endurance.

[ternglim]

We'll find out soon enough once raid testing starts. I still think locks will reign supreme and heroic guilds will continue stacking 4-6 in 25-mans as they did in previous tiers.

[Polarthief]

Finally. They won't revamp us for 6.0, no way. Mages are still 1 of the highest played classes in game. And while I kinda suffer a bit inside when playing my mage in raiding, it's the class that I want to play with, and I ain't abt to quit raiding any time soon. And I think most people are thinking the same. It's still fun playing a mage, given its somewhat boring and annoying due to the rng nature of all of our specs.

We're actually not THAT high tbh. I think overall at 90, we were 5th or so, and raiding wise, only Fire has a super-large number of players; Frost a fair amount, and barely any Arcane.

I'm pretty thing that they will revamps mage a lot more than we trough in 6.0. Part of this come from the fact that we only have small change since 5.2. It's true that rogue (the least played class) will receive most of the attention in 6.0. For me, revamp is not always tied to popularity, not always.
Some class are change more regularly than having a big change, like Hunter or Paladin.

Signs point to not having a revamp. Also, if you look at the raiding census, Mage players have dropped significantly since MoP started.

I don't think this is quite fair of you, or true either. Playing fire with Evo I at least I feel pretty damn mobile with pyro procs and imo mage survivability is pretty good. Arcane would be another thing but who's forcing anyone to it :P

Example? We just managed to kill Lei Shen HM and after al that wiping I've come to love my class once again for the perks. Thunderstruck? Blink away and laugh, or pop invis and laugh even more. Transitions? I can solo soak two static shocks - talk about being able to live through incoming damage, we're awesome! Last phase with constant AoE damage? Maybe not our strength but I was the only ranged dps alive when the boss died and this despite getting diffusion chain on me twice. I haven't felt like a burden to our raid on any boss since tortos and horridon really, after you get past those fights mages start to be all kinds of awesome.

I pretty much love our toolkit

To be fair, yes. Fire is mobile. Frost w/o procs and Arcane? Not mobile.

If you read what I said, I said we're good at taking one single hit of large damage. We are 100% frail at taking a bunch of tiny hits. Now with the reduction on the % passives of other classes, we'll be just as frail as them (maybe a bit more due to us having the lowest Stamina/Armor [for Physical AoE, if not Fire] as well, but still, it's a nice 'boost' to us because encounters will be based around the % Passives being gone).

Still though, other than that, our rotations and how we do our damage is begging to be fixed. Doing the same thing as Fire for 2 fights and dealing both 80k and 170k is super aggravating.

I'm not sure how mages stand in PvP, but I think that a Frost mage is a very common sight there.

In PvE we can use Raidbot's data. Selecting 10N and the last two months gave a DPS sample size of 1,130,503. This is how they are divided to different classes:

8.7% Hunter
8.3% Warlock
7.8% Mage
6.5% Shaman
5.2% Rogue
4.8% Shadow Priest
3.9% DK
3.7% Druid
3.4% Warrior
2.3% Paladin
1.5% Monk

This is a highly inaccurate way to get a census for the classes. Only people who parse 10N isn't going to get close to a fair number.

Ehm.. Yes we do. I don't know in which world you are living sunshine but in my WoW-World Fire Mages are dominating the meters. It not even about luckl anymore to do good DPS with a Fire mage with a critlvl of 50+%, there is just: Good DPS -- or GODLY DPS

I've done the same thing with 50% crit. Ended up with 80k. Did another with 160k. I'd rather stay Frost where I always do 160k.

Immobile ?? With the current critlevel I can run around spamming scorch and pyros all day and still keep up a decent DPS. Where is that immobile? Just because I cant run around and do everything like a warlock or huntard doesn't mean a mage is a immobile class.

Oh, so I guess we should just completely force everyone into Fire.

Yes, I DO know that I am talking about only ONE Spec of the whole class, but arkane is doing absolutely fine dps in many encouters aswell and frost kan keep up at a couple of encounters too. Actualy I played Frost till an ilvl of 526 and was doing good enough to justify a raid spot.

While that's fine and dandy, 5.4 is only going to be harder with mechanics to move out of.

For god sake... just stop whining about this class... if you don't like it, there are plenty of other classes that can be played in this game.

I don't like the lvl90 talents either, I dont think the bombs tier needs to be there. We have told Blizzard more then enough that most people don't like em.

They have told us several times that they cant change such big things in the middle of an X-Pac.. Lets wait till 6.0 and than we will see what they did to our beloved class.

Till than stop the b****ing and show a little bit of endurance.

This isn't bitching, this isn't whining, it's saying that I'm fed up with the fucking developers not listening to us. If you want to brown-nose Blizzard and agree with literally everything they say, then you go right ahead. If no one speaks, nothing ever gets changed.

Yes, we've told them about the L90 talents. SINCE BEFORE MOP EVEN WENT LIVE. Guess what? They kept them and didn't listen to us.

Guess what they added in 5.2? Green Fire for Warlocks. Why? Enough people told them "Hey, we want green fire".

Guess what they were going to add in 5.2 AND 5.3? Stronger Frostbolts and removing the annoying Frostbolt debuff stacking. Guess what happened? Too many bitches complained about it in PvP and so it got removed. (And it was going to make us stop instant casting, too).

It's shown time and time again that Blizzard will listen to whoever talks/whines/complains more.

As far as endurance goes, I've been playing Mage since 2.4.3. LK we were fine. Cata, no. We were forced to go Arcane for 2/3rds of the expansion and it was boring as hell. Now, all 3 specs suffer because of our talents, continuous problems among the specs (Fire being nerfed every tier, Frost having poor scaling issues, tons of mobility problems with Arcane), and they aren't going to fix anything! All I'm trying to do is speak up and get others to realize "Hey, we have some problems. If we keep telling Blizzard, they're going to fix them."

---------- Post added 2013-06-14 at 12:12 PM ----------

We'll find out soon enough once raid testing starts. I still think locks will reign supreme and heroic guilds will continue stacking 4-6 in 25-mans as they did in previous tiers.

Even without KJC, non-affliction warlocks will dominate. They'll probably cave and give Malefic Grasp mobile casting, too, (already did it for Haunt) meaning the only Aff spell to get "nerfed" would be hard-casting Unstable Affliction, but most locks will just SB+SS to get all 3 DoTs rolling simultaneously with trinket procs.

[jcdommo]

For god sake... just stop whining about this class... if you don't like it, there are plenty of other classes that can be played in this game.

Sorry but you lose credibility here, please don't confuse being passionate about your class with whining. There are serious problems with mage that will never be solved if everyone just sits back and accepts that it sucks and that's the way it's gotta be. If you're happy with your mage then I'm glad for you, but many of your fellow mages are not and we deserve to have our opinions heard as much as you do.

[Deleted]

It's been said before: It's the warlock expansion. And thats great, we all love warlocks, don't we? ;-)

But the mage class has issues. They adressed one by bringing down caster-survivability across the board, bringing the pack closer together, which is good. The other issues require more thought, and Blizzard hasn't invested that.

It has been stated that they are more willing to make balance-changes from patch to patch, and they have shown it this expansion time and again. I'm generally in favor of that. But I also feel that they could have avoided the more unfortunate situations mages have faced (the silly fire-nerf, the bandaid-change to Invocation) if they had adopted some of the suggestions made in many parts of the mage community. It's not a divine law that Fire needs to overscale with crit, and it's not that hard to find meaningful, fun talent choices for Level 90.

Now, I agree that we won't see big changes with 5.4. Thats actually ok. Nobody is expecting them to redesign our Level 90s, or get rid of the bomb-tier etc. We just need some bandaids to keep going. Small things. Change CM now so Fire doesn't scale completely out of control and gets overnerfed overnight again. Change Frost so I don't have to try capping expertise next because I've already covered all the other stats. And so on. That would be ok for 5.4, and I suppose we will be seeing some of that in the next days and weeks.

But THEN we need to get reworked. The mage has accumulated a lot of baggage since WotLK, which was the last time we felt reasonably designed. Blizzard keeps pushing this further and further behind, because the mage is still a fun class, and it still has a lot of advantages, which is why we all keep playing it.
But it can't keep going on like this forever. We need to mention those issues, because by now, we are in the second expansion that is following basically the same exact pattern of mage progression, interwoven with random nerfs and buffs here and there. The second expansion where our stat balances, gearsets, playstyles etc. are thrown overboard more times then I care to count. Hell, I used to be pretty informed about most of the inner workings of the mage, and now I probably couldn't even tell you what most of our spells actually do anymore. The death of mage theorycrafting isn't just a coincidence, it's a sign of surrender by those to fed up with a class that feels inconsistent, badly lopsided and stale. Now, a big overhaul is probably not in the books for 6.0. We need to get it there.