I posted this on the WoW forums earlier today, but reposting it here for posterity:
Here’s some more mage myths for you, GC, that I have seen you and other Blizzard posters make over the years.
All are provably false. Please feel free to ask for supporting data if you wish, but I’ve posted on all of them so many times that I don’t want to waste my time re-writing that which may again be ignored:
(1) You can ‘manage’ things without tools
This applies to both threat and mana. We have two limited, poorly-design active tools (invisibility and evocation) and all the rest is passive (yes mana gems are passive — if I hit it on every cooldown, it’s not a choice or a ‘use in emergencies’, it’s a passive mp5 expectation)
Posting “mages need to manage threat” ad nauseum doesn’t change the fact that without the tools to manage there is no manage — just ’stop doing everything until the problem goes away or you die.
-10% from talents and a single threat drop on a long cooldown aren’t tools and don’t cut it anywhere threat matters. If we’re going to need invisibility we’ll have to hold back at the start anyways because -10% is so paltry, and on any multi-mob fight a single threat drop on a long cooldown is a joke: we use it once and then we hold back on the other mobs.
Mana-wise, why do we have gems with a limited number of charges — not just that, but with too few charges for the encounters?
Here’s how to decide how many charges gems need: Take the length of the longest encounter you will design, divide it by two, add one.
You add one because we don’t wait two minutes to use a mana gem, we use one as soon as we can because otherwise we will go hard OOM mid-encounter even sooner.
The mana changes in the 3.2 patch notes are actually a mana nerf to mages. Even if you double the return to 2% it’s at most a 10-20mp5 gain. This is because ignite is a dot that gets reset every time you crit, so dots get “skipped” — go look at any combat log parse and you’ll see it.
If you want to fix mage mana, why does Burnout still increase spell costs? Why aren’t pyroblasts mana-free like the Brain Freeze procs are for fire?
(2) Mage DPS isn’t RNG
I’m actually going to make a supporting post on this one later. Suffice it to say, it’s correct, it *is* very RNG, so you pointing at top parses as proof that mage DPS is fine isn’t useful.
It may still be fine, but top parses are not what can be used to show that.
(3) Giving fire mages more mana results in more dps)
If you removed fire’s mana bar, they would do the same DPS now as they do for the first 5 minutes of the fight. If we aren’t already overpowered on “most” of the fights in the zone, then how is it bad to fix our mana efficiency?
You could make evocate have a 0-second cooldown and it’s actually a dps loss to cast evocation no matter how short the cooldown is.
Add five million mp5 and fire will do the same dps for the majority of the fights in the game as it does now.
The only difference is, with five million more mp5, we wouldn’t go hard OOM when rng killed an evocation, and we wouldn’t have the mana crisis that occurs as fights approach 9+ minutes or have any mana drain or AE component.
Am I proposing 5 million more mp5? No. I’m arguing against this design that seems to insist mages need to run OOM at 9+ minute fights despite there being plenty of those in the game, and mana drain and AoE fights existing.
AoE should be time off the main target, not “ok well, mages just wand the boss in between waves” (anyone remember Morogrim?)
Mana drain should be “mana users are at decreased efficiency since they have to spend more time regaining mana” rather than “Let’s sit the mages.”
(4) Giving arcane mages more mana results in substantially more dps
Unfortunately this is tragically a fallacy. While arcane handles low mana situations better than other specs, its upside in high mana situations is extremely low.
With the absolute highest dps rotation for an arcane mage, doing nothing but spamming AB, my dps is 5495. The mps is 388.
With the next highest rotation, a normal raiding rotation, my dps is 5132, at an mps of 190.
So I more than double my mana consumption to gain 7% more DPS. And there is no higher mana rotation — that is spamming the highest dps spells with no regard to mana use whatsoever.
Arcane is mana-sensitive to a small degree, but even with infinite mana, arcane cannot increase its dps by more than 7%.
(5) Mages should “pull out all the stops” on short fights and “pace yourselves” on long fights.
Mages have two speeds: full and off. Outside of arcane, which is not a viable raiding spec (no scorch debuff, cannot beat fire on fights designed for it, 4pc T8 is weak for it) there’s no “I’ll do less dps and more mps” option.
You can, in fact, show that a mage is better off doing *no* dps than trying to use a lesser dps spell because [they all cost more mana than fireball.
The only tradeoff you can possibly make is to drop living bomb and pyroblast, but now we’re come to the question:
If mages aren’t owning the meters on shorter fights when we’re using our full dps rotation, what then is their role on longer fights when the design is for us to drop 1500+ dps worth of spells from our rotation just to ‘pace’ ourselves?
(6)TTW is an interesting and engaging mechanic, and the mage trees are well-suited to support our builds
A ranged magic class relying on a melee physical class to apply a debuff that accounts for 18% of their damage isn’t design it’s laziness. And it doesn’t work a significant amount of time, making mages tied at the hip to DK’s who are the only class who can apply their TTW-triggering slow from range (this is how you can do Mimiron and Yogg as a mage.)
Furthermore, it’s puzzling why so many trees in the game have received attention and mages keep hearing “the mage class is fine.” Why then do I spend 5 points in arcane to get absolutely nothing that benefits our spells as a fire or frost mage? Why does this occur no matter what build I make, that I end up throwing away multiple talent points?
Why do I not take my 21, 31, or 41-point talents in the fire tree?
Why do I make tradeoffs like: “I can spec into Magic Absorption and get the only damage reduction talent available to the raiding mage, or I can get mana efficiency”, forcing me to respec multiple times just in between the fire builds, not to mention the fights I must be frostfire, frost, or arcane on.
(7) Mage AE is fine
We shouldn’t be the only class who avoids AE’ing at all costs beacuse it means a decent chance we won’t have the mana to finish the encounter. We’re deeply mana-bound and have no mobile AE (SoC and Mind Sear are mobile AE’s).
Having to spec into the frost tree to bring Blizzard up to par as an AE spell doesn’t mean that Blizzard is fine.
Flamestrike’s mechanics are incredibly clumsy and well-documented — if you do read every post on the DD forums, you would’ve read that multiple times and not thought people meant its DPS when they said it needed fixing.
(8) Scorch is fine
The mechanics on scorch/winter’s chill/ISB are clumsy and need to be fixed: all should just apply a single 5% crit debuff that is the same across all of them so there are none of these silly stacking issues.
Not only that, but its artificially short range (and fireblasts) mean that mages don’t get to enjoy their 41′ range like they should: they always have to remain closer, meaning that the points they put in adding range to their fire spells are useless outside of scorch. It doesn’t matter how far away I can cast my fireball and living bomb if I must be in range for scorch.
Finally, it should be given to another class. I would suggest spriests, as they really could use some more utility.
(9) Mage PvP survivability is the problem, not PvE
Mages have no +hp talents,
We have one damage reduction talent and it’s +resists, making it RNG-based. We actually *take* 3% more damage from fire, in an archaic and outmoded “glass cannon” model.
We cannot reduce AE damage done to us.
We cannot use healthstones (note: finally fixed in 3.2 after 4 years). We cannot use health potions because our mana mechanics mean we need mana pots much of the time.
We have exactly one ability to save ourselves if we’re about to die (iceblock) and it’s on a 5-minute timer.
Our self shields are element-limited and we only have fire and frost. Ice Barrier as trainable would solve many, many pvp and pve problems and not over buff the class in PvE (it’s not a dps boost, it’s a dps loss.)
Adding some more self-preservation to the fire tree and reducing the bloat so these talents would be available reasonably to a pve build would go a long way to helping fire mage pvp and pve both.
(10) Mage spells are in a good place
Combustion: complained about for ages, ignored in the Q&A. One of the hallmark fire-tree talents it now provides, to quote the forums, “less than one tenth of one percent of DPS for a talent point.” We don’t even bother to pick it up now, and instead use that point to get desperately-needed survivability and mana talents in the arcane tree.
Mage Armor Glyph: Invalidated with the regen changes, you guys still haven’t addressed it or even talked to mages about it. Our armors are in a crazy spot where their bonuses make little sense, and the changes to spirit now mean we don’t ever even have a choice: pve is *always* molten armor. Fixing the mage armor glyph might be able to make some strides in the direction of again having a choice (since the resists could be nice given our poor PvE survivability.)
Arcane Barrage: nerfed in a spate of supposedly PvP-only nerfs, the 51-point arcane talent doesn’t even show up in any arcane rotation anymore. Should the 51-point talent, introduced with Wrath, really be that irrelevant to the tree it serves?
Mirror Image: Now costing a GCD, it adds a whopping 15k damage if all the images live and doesn’t affect our threat like it always feels like it should. Is this what was envisioned for the spell, one of the hallmark spells for mages in Wrath?
Tags: mage
I like what you write. Could you post the URL for the thread at WoW-forums with this post ?
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by “mobile AE”?
AE that moves with the mobs. AE that doesn’t require that tanks keep the mobs within a 10′ diameter circle (which is what Flamestrike does.)
SoC and living bomb are “mobile AE” since they are on an add.
Mind Sear is “mobile AE” since you target an add and it spreads out to mobs around it from there.
I can’t find it on the blizzard forums. Please post a link to it so that we can comment it on on the forums and get it some attention.
I play a mage, I was FFB for a long time and recently switched to arcane to try it out, and i must say that i disagree with your “attitude”. First of all, I really don’t know what all the QQ about invis and evoc being hard to use is. 90% of the time both of them are successful, the key is to just wait till AFTER the boss uses his aoe or w/e. Granted, some fights theres nothing you can do about it, but hey, its not like mages are the only class like that. Priests hymn of hope can be randomly interrupted, ruining an awesome cooldown. I never hear them QQing about it.
Second, you complain about mages mana and then complain about how more mana doesn’t = more dps. If mages only purpose is to dps, then why do you even care about having more mana, using that logic? Also, maybe I just don’t use Blizzard enough
, but it really doesn’t drain your mana that fast, because it has an EIGHT second channel. Especially if you are FFB and have 2 Spriests in your raid 
.
I totally agree that combustion needs to be buffed. When i first got it at level 45, it was teh super awesome, but since then its slowly gotten worse. I think it should become a 50% crit chance buff for 15 seconds or something. (BTW, when you make QQ posts like this, i think its a good idea to suggest actual changes you would make as a developer, instead of just QQing.)
I also agree that arcane barrage is a little pointless. I thought i would be using it all the time, but now i’m wondering when to actually use the spell (except to get rid of AB charges when you want to conserve mana). Just a funny fact, i notice that noobs that do horrible dps always use this spell alot.
***I do not raid hardmodes!!!! So maybe some of my comments may seem a bit off, perhaps. But keep in mind 95% of mages don’t raid hardmodes.
Until you do hardmodes, while I appreciate your comments, you are indeed off on what is hard or isn’t.
For example, with invis: the only two fights you ever need to invis on are Hodir and Vezax. On Vezax, the only time you need to do it is during the Animus — which has a 1-second tick which makes invis impossible. On Hodir, yes, you can sit and wait until Frozen blows has finished (20 seconds), but not DPS’ing for 20 seconds during a 3-minute fight is not the route to winning.
Also you pretty clearly misunderstood the point of the piece: this isn’t a series of problems with mages, it’s a series of myths. e.g. that giving mages more mana will give them more dps. I don’t think it’s a problem at all. But when that myth is used to justify keeping mage mana regen low…. we have a problem.
And I am very tempted to ban anyone who refers to essays I write as “QQ”. Just for the record. I find it childish and offensive. If you can’t think of a better way to express yourself than dismissing a lengthy opinion piece as “QQ” then you may be better off on the WoW forums than here.
Many of us, myself included, find that “offering solutions” (especially if the point of the piece wasn’t listing problems but was listing *myths*) is presumptuous and leads to more bickering over whether they’re good solutions rather than people actually discussing whether or not they are problems.
Do you have a link to where you posted this so we could watch for possible (but not probable) responses from GC ?
GhostCrawler has limited future sight on the mage class. Hell I’d say none TBH. Much like we all saw prior to 3.1 this big long crap post he made about increasing frost mage’s PVE dps. It fell thru like any/all crap he says.
Personally I’ve over the years stopped any/all posting on changes that could be made to help the mage class. As a person who has played a mage since Closed Beta. Saddly, we (I’d have to say) say the most persay on the blink issues, etc. to change/fix our class and it get’s overlooked/ignored.
But anyways.. Great post, but honestly you could tie GC to a chair.. cut off his finger’s one at a time.. and he’d never change or want to look at a different aspect. For instance the change to empowered fire gives alittle mana back, yet at the same time.. the burnout is counter productive against the new change.. Honestly sometimes alot of the shit GC says makes no sense.
Agree with all those points, and would add another
11. Mage DPS is fine
Personally I disagree and recently evidence is growing to support this, although it’s doubtful it will ever be addressed since the current thinking is dps is encounter specific. Enthorn posted on the DD forums a comprehensive spreadsheet showing where each class came in on during fastest kills from wowmeter’s
ref: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17730083638&sid=1&pageNo=1#0.
It shows to me that only on encounters with significantly altered game mechanics can a mage be top dps which is in my opinion not quite where a pure dps class should sit.
I never really noticed that as a raiding mage I skip the 21, 31, and 41pt talents – which on reflection is actually quite an astounding thing for a class to do in the tree their main spec is in.
A suggestion for flamestike AoE would be to have the spell operate like meteor in that is it cast on a mob and then lands on that target – then debuff the target so that the ground dot, now performs a tick which is like a living bomb explosion. It’s just a thought and I’m sure there are plenty of other ideas out there.
Nice post overall, but I disagree with you on our mana issues and always wonder why you seem to consistently make a big deal out of it. My opinion is that we are in the correct place in terms of mana (although I agree that gems should be unlimited) and it is the other classes that need to be changed. If mana is our resource system, and we don’t start to run out at 9 minutes, then spells may as well just be free. Personally I think that they should bring other mana using dps classes closer to us, than the other way around. Mana management should be part of good play, which it is for us at the moment but not alot of the other classes. I do get your point about when an evocate gets interrupted though, something needs to be done about that.
Playing a mage since WoW came out, I totally agree.
This post makes me not want to play my mage =(
Real issues with the class not being looked at seriously, while the developers keep on denying us desperately needed PVE buffs.
So true what Ezmoad says. Every time I start browsing through wow related websites and read stuff about mages it just makes me annoyed. Usually my DPS is fine, but sometimes it’s so frustrating to get crit-hit-crit-hit-crit-hit and see the DPS dropping without being able to do a thing.
Well, it’s no use repeating the same stuff that has been written here / wow-forums but couldn’t we compile a bunch of WWS logs that show massive differences in DPS even if the raid buffs / gear and everything is roughly the same? I haven’t remembered to log my raids but for example last week I had really good luck with Hot Streaks and got a bit over 6000 DPS on Patchwerk, and the week before I was struggling to break 5000. It would be so great to have a bit more consistent DPS: it makes playing frustrating to see that your dps can drop like 1-2k if you simply get unlucky and that has nothing to do with skills or anything. Just pure luck which is dumb.
Ghostcrawler stated the following: We think mage PvE damage is fine. If you are routinely getting trounced by bad players in your raid, you might consider trying to figure out how some mages are getting really good numbers.
Well, there are no magic tricks to mage dps I’m aware of, the really good numbers are just good luck with Hot Streak procs.. Does Ghostcrawler not understand how Hot Streak works or what.
I just wanted to point out that healthstone wasn’t always tied to mana gem, so it isn’t exactly four years, pretty sure this was done around naxx time in classic. Regardless, you make some very gewd points, I especially like the suggestion on scorch, possibly sharing the same debuff so all possible classes capable of keeping the debuff up could work together. The mentioning of RNG while using evocation is a big pet pev of mine, ei getting mana denotated then needing mana shortly after and getting a void zone while evocating… you would think this wouldn’t happen much or at all, but it does. Getting some improvements on combustion would be great, but I don’t see anyone mentioning the living bomb glyph and how terrible it can be with our hotstreak procs. Am I ignorant about this?
Yeah I forgot it was during the Great Consumable Cooldown Fix.
But it’s close enough :p.
It’s also pretty annoying how blizz is constantly chipping away at mage mana regen like they are. When you nerf mana regen to all healers, you are also nerfing mana regen more so than other dps casters.
Could you at the very least post the supporting data you speak of? Or perhaps links to your previous posts where that data may be found?
Well as for the Hotstreak RNG they could just make it more like Maelstrom Weapon, eg. You get a stacking buff on you when you crit which reduces the casttime of your pyroblast by 33/66/100% or something that would atleast take some of the rng away though i guess it needs to be played with abit to get the right numbers.
I dont know but it seems like a decent change to me. Less RNG
I stopped reading about halfway thru. seems to me someone is focusing on the negative and wishing/hoping bliz will fix things for their playstyle instead of making a class work.
God damn those people who want to improve their class.
They should just go play another game unless they’re 100% happy with what Blizzard gives them!
Hey there… I was brought here by a link I followed and read Kyth’s post.. Having been away from consistent raiding since classic and from the game in general since tbc I’ve kinda lost touch with what’s going on in wow, but recently got a friend’s account to see how things are going(I liked what I saw
) and played his mage for a bit…
Anyway, I’ve tried some stuff recently both on 3.1 live and on the 3.2 PTR and some things don’t really fit well with me…
I tried a few classes in DPSing the dummies, including: Retri Pala, Boomkin, Elemental Shaman, Affliction Lock(I always liked that spec, though I read afterwards that destro ones got the upper hand in PvE) and of course Mage, being the class I’ve played since release… My knowledge on Shaman and Lock and Pala was next to 0, considering that I had no shaman alt, a lvl 30 lock that I hadn’t played for like 5 years and a lvl 40 or something pala((I haven’t played my main for 2, but whatever
) and regarding Druids, I had a one which I played on tbc togeather with my roommate, though he played my druid more than I did while I played his warrior when we were doing arenas…
I saw that I could sustain roughly 3.5k DPS with all those classes but the mage on the target dummy… With the mage I could sustain ~3.1-.3.2k and would go out of mana easier… On the other hand the other classes could never run completely oom… The lock could of course tap and then slowly regen his life enough for the next tap… He also had Dark Pact, the druid had innervate which has 3 min CD which was about how much it took me to drain his mana completely. The Pala had that instant regen thingie that had like 1 min cooldown(divine plea, was the name?) in addition to the replenishment. Finally the elemental shaman had both his mana spring totem, a fine regen and I didn’t even need to use the 51 point talent often enough…
I do understand that the arcane mage works better in 25man situations than other classes as both the mana is easier to come by and any possible damage bonus scales well with both the talents and the arcane blast buff, but still something doesn’t seem right…
As for the other builds, Frost didn’t really seem viable to me(too low dps), Frostfire and Fireball seemed kinda boring to play, but well, they had good overall dps that had no mana issues…
I was chatting with a friend who’s raiding with a mage, but had the last 3 months or so away from raiding, and got a bit outgeared by his guild… He told me that his DPS is roughly the same as the top damage dealers but his position is lower than them… What I told him was that he was probably running low on mana easily and would be fine with some more regen, but then I tested arcane on the dummy and realised what you pointed out: that the damage gained compared to the mana loss is neglectible…
I also don’t understand what’s going on in pvp either… I read that in wotlk pvp became more bursty again, and tbh I was happy cause well, it would seem to me more similar to the pre-tbc times… Still, the mage doesn’t really seem to have that much benefit from that… I got crit for 7 and 8k from deathknights and paladins in a row, resulting to my death(well, apparently a badly geared mage vs a well geared dk/pala would die fast), while as arcane I had to stack AB to get such results, which was virtually impossible, and as fire (FFB or FB) i needed to get a little lucky in addition to casting for 2.5-3seconds…
When comparing pre-tbc to wotlk pvp (I had pvped hardcore there, while in tbc I was playing less than casually in both pvp and pve) I got a feeling that mages didn’t really get much more tools to use for survivability, kiting, disabling etc, while on the other hand other classes got some more for both surviving and disabling… For example: Against a warrior pre-tbc: He only had intercept to reach us, and 1 trinket use to break sheep while we had nova to root and blink to go away (And frostbolt to kite)… Now warriors got charge in combat, intercept, spell reflect, bladestorm while mages lost the low rank frostbolt for a quick kite and only got slow or db for kite/disable(one excludes the other), trainable iceblock and well, that’s it… I do think that warriors for example are piece of cake to kill as arcane or frost, but I’m just comparing tools…
Rogues got cos, cheat death, silence on garrote, and kept the good damage they had, which can be done while on the move(dunno what else they got, didn’t really check the wotlk rogue)… Etc…
I don’t know if it’s me, but the mage class does seem like it’s lacking many improvements… I was thinking of getting a new account soon and starting a new mage(cause I play mage in all kinds of RPG games), and I’m not really worried about it as I’m not aiming on going hardcore again either in pvp or pve, as I only intend of spending a little hours a week to just have some fun with a game I like…
Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post, I just liked the original essay and decided to share some thoughts(though I’m kinda absent-minded and it turned out a little long and messy)… I’ve only played wotlk for 20days or so now, and don’t really know what’s going on in most areas, but you posted some stuff that were really true and made me reply…
Btw, could anyone post your opinions of the PvP mage in wotlk? I’ve only done 2 days of pvp and no arena at all and don’t know what to expect when I level…