Mage mana regen is unreliable at best. Fights with a lot of movement and disruption (Yogg comes to mind) make Arcane incredibly difficult to play. Evocation is dated and pretty janky in that regard. What plans are there to make mana regen more reliable to keep us from wanding until the next cooldown?

Arcane is falling behind. It also is more difficult to play well versus other specs as mana is very sensitive. As mentioned previously, as fights get more difficult, it's going to continue losing representation versus other specs due to not only lackluster DPS, but also an inability to get evocation off reliably.

The only niche' FFB is filling right now is that of the super-efficient spec. It's DPS is poor and it doesn't offer any advantages over say, arcane or Fireball. Will this change or are the developers happy with this niche'?

Frost, and casters in general, are losing serious ground to Melee in competitive PvP. While melee is getting more and more ways to get away, our novas are getting put on a shared DR and we are losing our ways to get away. Talents like Juggernaut are making casters obsolete. What changes do we except to see to keep us from getting jibbed by a retadin in 3 GCDs?

Mana gems are once again showing age. It feels like a poor design where I have to drop another 2k mana to get another gem in a long fight. The charge system deserves another look I think.

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Q u o t e:
Thank you for the questions so far. Please keep them coming. :)

Just a couple of things to keep in mind...

While we'd love to take everyone's questions, we intend to keep a rapid pace with these reviews so we can get to all classes in a timely manner. Keep your questions constructive and concise. If the question requires a lot of back story of personal play experiences, chances are it's not going to work for our Question & Answer series. We can only arm ourselves with a small portion of the questions being asked, so the more direct and plainly laid out your concern is, the more likely it'll suit this review nicely.

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Zarhym, it's somewhat unclear from the topic of this post if we should reserve this thread for just asking questions or if we should also post our opinions about other people's questions ("GC already said they weren't doing that" or "I actually think that mechanic is fine"). Could you clarify this for us?

Will we be getting an increase in mana and health regeneration from our conjured food and water?

Love this Q&A idea. Shows you're wanting to gathering everything in one place. :)

Here are my queries:

1.) Any further plans to modify/tinker/refine Mage spells and abilities? This is mostly to further differentiate Mages from Warlocks.

Admittedly, I'd like to see the spell repetoire of Mirror Image increased a little. ...okay, the thought of a Mirror Image casting Living Bomb is kinda amusing, albeit OP, but eh, just curious. I'm also curious about possible tinkering with Frostbolt's coefficient....


2.) Kinda ties in with all the classes...but any more glyphs in the near future? (And technically, this is profession related as well, but are Inscription-specific glyphs a possibility? Kind of like how Dragon Eye's are Jewelcrafting specific?)

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Q u o t e:
Zarhym, it's somewhat unclear from the topic of this post if we should reserve this thread for just asking questions or if we should also post our opinions about other people's questions ("GC already said they weren't doing that" or "I actually think that mechanic is fine"). Could you clarify this for us?

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Nethaera posted in the shaman thread that they want to keep it just to questions and not discussing the validity of other's questions. ;o

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Q u o t e:
I just wanted to post quickly and let everyone know not to worry if someone else asked a question before you or not. Repeat questions mean it's something many people are interested in. Also, if you all could avoid discussing things with each other in this thread (giving feedback on other people's viewpoints or questions).

Thanks for contributing!

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1) On what grounds was it thought a good idea to give the class (mages) that while mobile (blink) suffers the most damage dealing loss during mobility fights (certain raid bosses, all PVP) ANOTHER LONG NUKE AS A TRAINABLE SPELL. IN FACT THE LONGEST OF ALL OUR NUKES. I'm looking at you, Frostfire Bolt. Why? What was the thought process? From beta til now, I still don't understand. It was a golden opportunity to give mages of all specs, since its a trainable spell, something new and different and NOT MARRIED TO A PATENTLY RIDICULOUS 3.0 SECOND CAST TIME. Any fight that is designed around moving, at all, and this spell is as obsolete as fireball and frostbolt. Why was this thought a good idea? It could have been 1.5 seconds with a long cooldown or something and still get all the dual-frost-fire-crit buff action. I would really like an answer to this.


2) Whassup with Arcane Barrage? The 51 pt answer to "mobility" problems, has, since WOTLK launch, been "nerfed into the ground." I'm not sure its even part of an Arcane optimal rotation. On the surface it looks like the talent was given to give another mage spec besides frost some powerful mobile damage, but with resilience, direct nerfs to the spell itself, and the mechanics of certain raid boss encounters, has this spell met its goals? Are you proud of it?


3) Mana "Management." Is a myth. Manly, Lhivera, and many others have posted about this time and time again. We in no way manage our mana during a fight, what we do is pay a tax for being a mage. Its preposterous. Spec is chosen before a fight. Gear is chosen before a fight. Thats the most mana "management" we get. Deciding when to use a mana gem or when to Evocate is more like deciding whether or not we want to continue playing or go AFK. Its not an in-game decision, its a "do I want to do anything, at all, or not." Its completely binary. There's absoluely no depth or "management" or choice of any kind. We use these feeble tools to prolong the life of the blue bar. Why is this still the case?


4) The Hit Point tax. Can we get rid of this please? Its absurd to have less HP than every other class in the game. In this brave new WoW we have moved beyond the description of "glass cannon" but retain all the archaic weaknesses. Por que?


5) RNG. No other class is as RNG dependant as the mage. Frost PVE, is frostbolt spam and hope for crits for more Frostbolt spam. Fire/Frostfire aside from being the same exact rotation (replacing FFB with FB, of course) is also chuck and hope for crits. No crits? No Hotstreak Pyro's. Arcane? Yet more "Chuck and hope." Yes, Arcane Blast offers the interesting dynamic of possible dmg buff vs mana cost, that's really cool, but it is poorly implemented. We have figured out how to "game" it and thus its "Chuck and hope" for Missile Barrage. Why? Why, in a class that can only do damage, at range, are the 3 specs so similar in playstyle? All so dependant on the RNG? Is it "flavor?" The mage's "niche?" No other class can attribute so much performance gain or loss on RNG as the mage. Is this intended? Are there any plans to make our DPS more skill based? We are often told that if our dps is too low perhaps we should be playing better. I would like to hear how a Frost Mage spamming Frostbolt could improve his/her DPS via "skill." Buy a better keyboard? How about Arcane? Or Fire/Frostfire? Is "skill" a moniker for "RNG?"


6) Combustion is a terrible, terrrible talent. Why is this still in the fire tree/game?


7) There is literally no use for Pyroblast save for a Hot Streak proc. The current Arcane Tree has so many "needed" points that there are none left to go deep enough in Fire to get it and combine with Presence of Mind. ARC POM PYRO is dead and gone. So, why does Pyroblast even exist on its own anymore? Why could a player, out of ignorance or blind with alcohol put 3 points into Hotstreak, but forget Pyroblast? That player would then have an utterly useless deep tree 3 point talent. Awesome. Bake Pyroblast into Hotstreak, please. Give fire some needed protection talents or something new and cool. As is it is the worst of the 3 trees at anything but raiding. And even then, on non-patchwerk type interesting fights, the requirement to stand utterly still and hope for Procs amidst a sea of chaos is not compelling in May 2009. As mages we are supposed to be unpredicable, enigmatic, and slightly erratic, yet in raids all we do is look for places where we can stand still. Explain.


8) Brainfreeze. Please address this, it is very very lackluster. Why haven't we gotten an improvement on this talent? We told you in beta that is was terrible.


9) Help vs melee. Do something. For all of us who wear bathrobes. Non-collision and "run throughs" make long casts a suicide decision. Melee simply aren't frost nova'd in place for more than one cast, if even one. Worse is DK's, like the one I'm posting on, who can negate all damage types (IBF) or magic specifically (AMS) WHILE MOVING. Thank you. I love it while tanking, but shooting one is an utter waste of my time. Its also fun to be charged/spell reflected/intervened. feels good. We would like to know what the future of the Mage class is. If you give all the other ranged damage dealers all of the tools that Frost has, what is the point of being a Mage? Can you ackknowledge this problem and what are your plans for the future of the class? Why are we always given weird spells that do not address our immediate and pressing concerns (Invisibility, Mirror Image, Frostfire Bolt, Spell Steal) and left with baffling talents like Arcane Fortitude and Fiery Payback? Is there any "direction" at all? Because it doesn't feel like there is, at all. It feels like we are limping around with out dated game mechanics, using talent points to patch up our issues.

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Q u o t e:
Thank you for the questions so far. Please keep them coming. :)

Just a couple of things to keep in mind...

While we'd love to take everyone's questions, we intend to keep a rapid pace with these reviews so we can get to all classes in a timely manner. Keep your questions constructive and concise. If the question requires a lot of back story of personal play experiences, chances are it's not going to work for our Question & Answer series. We can only arm ourselves with a small portion of the questions being asked, so the more direct and plainly laid out your concern is, the more likely it'll suit this review nicely.

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One of my main Fire-PVE concerns is the Living Bomb glyph and how it interacts with combustion. Living bomb crits eat a charge of combustion, but do no good towards causing a Hot Streak (half the point of combustion AFAIK was to be able to force the burst. Well timed/used combustions could be used to force multiple Hot Streaks. This is now even more up to RNG as the living bomb crits can eat the combustion buff before you get a single hot streak.

- Will the arcane tree be de-bloated? It's at 81 possible talent points now, and 5 talents require 5 points to max out. I understand many talents are designed to be PvP or PvE oriented, but overall the tree is bloated, particularly at the top 2 tiers.

- Will combustion be looked at? It affords little DPS increase, and gets worse as you get better gear.

- Will arcane explosion make a comeback? Even at 3k spellpower (trinkets proc'd) it does laughable damage and eats mana.

Evocation should resemble the druid's Innervate. Throw it on ourselves and it gives us our mana back without sitting there looking silly. I do however, enjoy standing in a blue tornado. We can keep the graphic but let us move and cast in the meantime!

Flame strike is a useless spell. Long cast time, tiny radius and a smaller damage tick, it doesn't have a use. I only ever use it to make the ground glow when I dance.

Blizzard is a pain, having to hope the tank doesn't wander off his with his collection of mobs, or they start taking off in all sorts of directions, wasting my mana and killing the DPS is could bring.

Can we address the shared CD of mana gems and healthcandy?

Can we get the options of showing our clothing as a tunic/robe? I look hot in a dress! I don't like looking at my ugly boots in T8 :(

1) In general, playing a mage in pve is ridiculously boring and generally unsatisfying. Frost Mages in pve have 2 spells: Frostbolt and Water Elemental (which barely counts). Arcane Mages have 2-3 (Arcane Blast, Arcane Missiles, and Arcane Barrage), and Fire Mages also only have 3 (Fireball/Frostfire Bolt, Pyroblast and Living Bomb - four if you want to count Scorch which is such a horrible pve spell that we only cast it because we are forced to). In comparison, Death Knights and many other classes get such a large percentage of their damage from 10-15 sources routinely. And you wonder why Death Knights are so fun to play - they have lots of different things to manage and a bunch of cool things they can do.

This also speaks to why mages have been so hard to balance for you guys - with only 2-3 spells, any change made to any of them has a much larger effect on the total amount of damage that we do compared to other classes. A small buff even to Fireball would be multiplied greatly because it's all we cast. A nerf to Arcane Barrage, a core Arcane spell, resulted in it being dropped from pve rotations entirely.

Because of this, the mage class is boring, clunky and not interactive at all. Also because of this, mages tend to be on the receiving end of the nerf stick very often because you're afraid to buff us - even a small buff gets magnified since we use the spell so much. This results in mages being underpowered often and Sunwell become more of a way of life than an aberration or a mistake.

2) Will you please consider reworking the Mage/Molten/Ice armors into two armors rather than three? All we need is an "Offense" armor and a "Defense" armor and the ability to switch seamlessly on the fly between them, like hunters can. Take the qualities from the three "tree" armors and split them into offensive and defensive abilities and put them on their respective new armors. You might have to reduce the numbers slightly to compensate. Then remove the mana cost entirely and let us switch between them at will, making them a much more interactive part of how we play. Right now it's silly that we have to choose between the offensive bonuses of Molten and Mage Armor, and the defensive bonuses of Molten, Mage and Ice Armor. It's clunky and not fun.

3) Why is Intellect such a useless dps stat for mages? The benefit of being a mage should be something to do with intellect - something more than having more mana. Mind Mastery should be a baseline mage core ability. And along those lines, why is it that the white stats on melee gear like Strength and Agility directly benefit the wearer's dps, but the white stats on mage (and all caster gear, actually) - Intellect and Spirit - do not? And more generally, Melee has always scaled better than mages because of this - a piece of gear with better green stats and better white stats always makes their damage go up more than a caster's since we only get benefit from the green stats, not the white.

4) Will mana gems ever scale with better gear? Will they ever get more than 3 charges, which isn't enough for long fights? Will they ever be removed from a shared cooldown with healthstones?

5) What potential changes are being looked at for Evocation? It's completely outdated and for a class that is so reliant on mana and so screwed when we're oom, to have Evocation be as unreliable as it is isn't fun. Rogues regenerate energy at will, Hunters can regenerate mana any time they want just by switching Aspects, Warlocks can regenerate mana anytime they want for free just by hitting life tap. Why are mages the only pure class with no on-demand and reliable mana regen mechanic? Mana gems are pitiful, plus them being on the same cooldown as healthstones is silly, especially when mages are the most likely class to die in the first place since we can't self-heal and have low health and armor.

What would you think about changing evocation to something like Ignite, where for 15 or 20 seconds, all the mage's crits return 40% of the crit's damage as mana to the mage? This would also help arcane get a little more out of crit, normally not an optimal stat for them. It would be a great time to work on a fix for ignite munching - the proposed "each crit generates its own debuff" would work great here as a test run.

6) Speaking of ignite munching, any progress on fixing this? It kinda sucks knowing a good portion of our damage is constantly being pissed away due to this bug.

7) Raiding Fire Mages do not take their 21 point, 31 point or 41 point talents. Does this seem like a problem to you? Blast Wave and Dragon's Breath are useless in raids, and Combustion has become useless due to high crit levels and living bomb tick crits using up charges. It makes us feel like we're missing out on something special and fun when we can't take these flagship talents for raiding.

8) Speaking of Combustion, do you have any plans to address how useless its become? This talent really needs to be redesigned.

9) In PvP I can spam frostbolts at a healer and use all my burst damage like shatter combos and deep freeze, and still not even come close to bringing down a healer before I go out of mana and get killed due to something completely stupid like shadow word pain or moonfire. How is this acceptable that a pure dps class can't out dps a healer's healing? Do you even consider mages as a dps class anymore? Feels like we're a support class and that's it. We sheep, we freeze, but we don't actually kill things, which is why we rolled mages in the first place. We want to make things go boom. Mages only success in arenas are with rogues and priests, who basically carry us, and our representation is always low. Mages in battlegrounds are always focus fired first because we're the easiest and most harmless kills. We can't do any damage of note on the run and cannot out-kite melee anymore. Just like melee says it's not fun to get kited around by us, it's also not fun for us to not be able to get away from melee. Mages have it bad, and yet we still have it better than all the other casters in this regard. I can't imagine how much it must suck for them.

10) We don't want to cast Scorch. Ever. It is horrible. Get the improved Scorch debuff off this spell and get rid of the Glyph. Put the debuff as a 5% one-time stack on Living Bomb. Please. Other classes get to apply their debuffs from their main nuke. We don't. It's a dps loss and a pain in the ass. Why are mages different?

11) What are you doing to address mage threat/aggro? It's way too high right now.

Needs more good questions guys! Our arch nemesis eyonix and the warlocks have challenged us!

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Q u o t e:
Keep up the good work, guys/gals! So far, only one post removed. Let's show up the other classes by having the best questions, and LEAST amount of moderation necessary!

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As champions of Zarhym, we can't let this happen. :P

1) IGNITE: Fix this 2 year old bug, im tired of losing 200+ dps every fight every encounter, and being balanced around it.

2) Student of the Mind (3% Spirit/15 dps increase) is worth my dps than our main 31 point fire talent.

3) Arcane Bloat, early on and later

4) Invisibility- Breaking early and randomly on many boss fights

1. Why can't blink cool down be reduced to 10 seconds from 15 ?

Arcane problems:

talent tree bloated
evocate risky ability
doesnt scale as well as fire

Fire problems:

low threat ceiling
combustion is worthless (30-50 dps increase at best and gets worse as gear gets better)
flamestrike is garbage (radius too small, targeting system sucks)
shouldnt have to waste a glyph on scorch

Frost problems:

just doesnt scale at all
frostbolt glyph is dumb
3/3 enduring winter makes replenishment less efficient
no passive pushback protection