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UPDATE: this first post makes some relevant philosophical comments on the Mage class, but for the meat-and-potatoes practical stuff, skip this two-parter and look for the next (long) one in the thread. Who knows, it might just work.
--ZJ
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Disclaimer 1: lengthiness follows. If text hurts your eyes, read the bold, skim or skip the rest. This shouldn't feel like work, but neither should it feel incomplete - we all love this game too much, no?
Disclaimer 2: I know it'll come up, so I'm getting it out of the way up front. I've played two mages to 60, one Alliance, one Horde. I hit Centurion - rank 9 - with my troll, and ran some end-game raid content with my gnome. Those are my qualifications; take from that what you will.
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Well, it had to happen eventually. 1.11 has a face now, and the requisite moaning and flaming has revved to full force. Ah, the delectable zest of the Warcraft boards... Anyway, I've been a silent reader of all this mayhem for quite a while, and thought it high time to toss in my two cents now that it's the collective neck of my beloved mages that's stuck out this time.
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The main complaints with the mage review seem to run like so:
- Big Blue freed up several talent points in its battle against the Cookie Cutter Syndrome, and for that, we all thank you. Really. This is a refreshing boost. Trouble is, in the Arcane tree, those talents have no place to go in the middle region of the tree. Take Arcane Resilience. It seems...well...odd, to say the least. Armor for a cloth class, but not enough to provide an effective upgrade to leather...? If not useless, it at least appears misguided, as it does little to address the problems noted pre-patch while simultaneously bringing no new "fun" factor to mask its irrelevancy.
- Pre-beta, we were (judging by now-lamentable manual description) the archetypal "glass cannons." Pre-release, we were glass F-16's, destroying everything in sight in a napalm-drenched blaststravaganza. Pre-1.11, we've been all glass, no cannon; PvP sharks go straight for delicious Mage pie, and yet several other classes can out-DPS us in PvEverything (save artificially-constructed PvE AoE encounters). Post-patch, we'll still be just as glass, and a little more cannon...but not much. In do-or-die, one-on-one run-ins on the battlefieled, what moderately WoW-literate person would bet on a mage over, say, a warlock (holding other factors, such as gear and playing ability, equal)? What about a hunter? A priest? A shaman? A druid? Where does one draw the line between two conflicting reactions: "Any class should have enemies it considers very difficult or impossible to defeat in fair matches, as this mirror relationship works both ways and balances out in the form of enemies with which that class has no trouble at all" and "If any one class knows that an encounter with a representative from well over half of the other classes distinctly favors the enemy, that rather beleaguered class needs a substantial revamp"?
- The new Arcane Subtlety is great / awful. (Flip a coin on this one: the flames, virulent as ever, seem to burn equally bright on both sides, primarily centering around aggro spikes vs. aggro from constant damage. For the moment, I plead the fifth.)
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The main counter-arguments, for their part, seem like this:
- Beloved mages, please re-examine your role; we, Two-Shot Victims Anonymous (Mage Division, not to be confused with Hunter Division), believe you simply do not understand your place on the battlefields of Azeroth. You wield tremendous area of effect power, and enjoy the finest crowd-control in the game.
- Kindly learn to play, dearest mages, for this is a tremendous buff: the only loss in an important talent came in Arcane Power - and even that was small - while everything else boosted. You got a bunch of talent points back, for crying out loud. Rejoice in the streets, and be glad, for short of the Felhound and the Death Coil, you need not fear!
- All this discussion has left us parched; might we trouble you to give unto us a spot of your heavenly water? We would be eternally grateful, and would gladly offer you some gold in recompense, to ease your slumber as you seek shut-eye up in your feathery Mage-bed.
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My take:
- A confession: I don't know enough about Arcane Subtlety to hop in on that one, really. But I've my two cents anyhow. Seems to me the new version looks like hot stuff: it makes crit builds more viable in raids, and even throws PvP folks a bone with a (to my mind) highly underrated drop in targets' resistance. "Your fireball hits Xcuttermanxguy for 391 (688 resisted)" - ah, the familiar mage melody. How I love thee. At any rate, seems like a commendable effort to me: it very modestly helps re-center the idea of the mage on crits (rather than just damage) in raids, and grants a little relief to, say, fire mages facing Tier 2-clad flame-busting paladins in Arathi Basin (to be sure, it's not so fun feeling downgraded to a glass slingshot just because lava makes for a nice theme for end-game instances and fire resistance serves as a workable game mechanic to encourage players to "gear up" for these dungeons). Thumbs up.
- To a large extent, my gut says the whining doesn't help, and usually ignores what we got. Looking back to the birth of WoW, our role is has changed - irrevocably so - and it's unfortunate that things like the game manual aren't as mutable as the site. As is, one can hardly argue that it's anything but downright misleading. That said, we're not obsolete just yet, and the changes really do have our interests in mind. Top to bottom - well, not quite bottom, as one catches a glimpse of Arcane Power - we got buffed.
- ...but we're still tough to justify in most group settings. Decursing? Check. AoE? Indeed. Sheeping? Only the best. Water? You know it. We have our niches, but check that list again: none of those is anywhere close to what Mages (if I may speak for all of us for a moment) had in mind when we rolled the class. Disagree though we may on our role now, that wasn't the intent at the start - on this much, we all seem to agree. What's worse, review that little list there for a second - how much of that is any fun? Decursing can sometimes have the frantic, do-or-die feeling of a healer class, but it's rare enough as to be a novelty and little more. Sheeping is a utility, not a centerpiece. And even AoE, while it comes in handy, doesn't by its own merit make the class worth playing. We're really only needed when the dungeon includes the obligatory "Mage room" stuck in for no good reason except to justify our existence, and while the massive DPS dropped on a tightly-bunched group on a battlefield certainly feels good, it's also generally a kamikaze maneuver, one rarely deployable to great effect simply because people spread out too much. (I'm looking at you, Warsong and Arathi, though less so at you, Alterac). In the end, why not take a hunter or a warlock?[ post edited by Zeljinn ]
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