Wow. Hardly a peep about stuff that's to come. Just a lot of restating the question and rambling about side tangents.

After the shaman series, this was the biggest let-down ever. This took weeks to prepare? Really?

Yeah, Mage has been my favorite class, but since BC they have felt so 'lost'. They don't really shine anywhere really (Especially with the homogenization with dps, cc, and aoe.) and this was just hard to read.

Well, thanks for.. 'that'.

I just want to know why I was a glass cannon, but as time passed from the beginning of BC, all classes have gotten stronger, more dps and more survivability yet were are on par with many other classes but still wear cloth, leaving us just glass.

Hope for better next time I guess. This was a bit of a disappointment.

On a side note: I can tell that they either don't play mage consistently or they just ignore the class. I feel like I'm a warlock without a pet and without the more useful utility. (Being food, drinks, and teleports are just for those not prepared, no help for actual content.)

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Q u o t e:
Community Team: The next few questions concern the number-one issue raised by mages on the forums as of late: mana efficiency.

Mana Gem and Evocation are commonly referred to as outdated mechanics. Many players feel the Mana Gem does not restore enough mana and should not be placed on the same cooldown with a warlock’s Healthstone, while Evocation has too lengthy a cooldown and is typically not a reliable means of acquiring mana during boss fights.

Q: How do you view these mechanics, and are there any intentions of updating mana recovery capabilities for mages in the future?

A: Our general philosophy, in a very broad sense, is that healers risk running out of mana if they aren’t careful or are in over their heads, but that damage-dealing specs generally have enough mana to do their jobs. That doesn’t mean that you never need to burn a gem or use Evocation, but it does mean that if you are being reasonable about what you’re doing that you should have enough mana except perhaps on very long or unusual fights. What we are more likely to do is just lower the mana costs of the main nukes: Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt, and Frostfire Bolt.

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im sorry but that is just dead wrong. arcane absolutely relies upon mana gem and evocation to have mana for any more than a 2 minute fight. you know the reason having healthstones and mana gems on the same cooldown even came up? its because we ALWAYS have to use our mana gem.

as for evocation, there's no argument about having a "reasonable" rotation that doesn't include stopping to evocate. it is required to sustain arcane DPS. you can follow the standard arcane rotation to the dot and 100% of the time you will have to stop to evocate. the issue of it not being "reliable" is the fact that our primary source of active mana regen is broken when the boss looks at you funny or sneezes in your direction. you can say "l2evocate properly" all you want that doesn't stop random aoe damage from being random. an OOM mage is a useless mage.

so in conclusion, you have answered nothing. thanks for wasting our time.

This really is a sad response....

I thought about hope for the mage class when I saw the Q and A...

This is just ridiculous... does blizzard not understand that in pvp we are major targets...
every other class knows how squishy we are... The game is NOT fun when you die constantly

Bunch of stuff thats been said before.

no discussion of scorch debuff andf glyph?

overall, very fluffy and dissappointing.

very.

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Q u o t e:

What was asked were the most common questions we found in our "Mage Questions" threads posted in all regions around the world. There were some questions that were very common but did not make it. We'll continue to address what we can, when we can. We want to release these Q&A's for each class as often as possible so we can do additional rounds for each class.

Patch 3.2 is still very much a work in progress and we'll try to share with you anything new we can. We hope you found some of the information helpful, at least in the context that we're opening a dialog with every class about their strengths and weaknesses as often as possible.

The criticism is certainly welcome. As with any information we provide, critical remarks about this Q&A are expected. With that said, let's keep it civil folks. There's no reason for a person to keep posting here if one cannot conduct oneself in a constructive and controlled manner, especially given the time we all have to process what we want to say before hitting the 'post' button.

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But he didn't say anything! He agreed with some of the problems, then went off on a tangent!

The shaman series was full of shop talk about future plans, how they plan to fix shortcomings, design philosophies on spell roles. We didn't get any of that!

It's not useful to tell us that the arcane tree is bloated. This series was supposed to tell us that you're working on a solution, or to say "We're thinking about doing ____."

This was old information, in almost every question. It gave us no new information, except that we were able to infer that the design philosophy is apparently "You guys are fine, in almost every way. Your concerns are of no consequence, or at least are not very important to us."

No mention of Ignite munching.

/thread

Good lord calm down people, nothing is perfect and when you guys are expecting the mage class to be fixed in a Q & A, you are going to get disapointed. I for one am actually pretty excited how they consider spellsteals purpose, and look forward to see how they go about changing it, such as a buff priority or the glyph. Already trying to figure out which glyph I may give up for it.

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Q u o t e:
Community Team: To expand upon the last question, Torment of the Weak is used in several of the most popular mage talent specs for both PvE and PvP, however, the Arcane talents prior to this one are of very little use to Frost mages – and Fire mages to a lesser degree -- in PvE.

Q: Are you concerned at all that Torment of the Weak is considered to be so important to mages, regardless of specialization, that a minimum of eighteen talent points must be spent in the Arcane tree to reap its full benefit?

A: We don’t think it’s must-have for Frostfire builds and it doesn’t strike us as weird that Frost or Fire would subspec into Arcane, since that is generally going to offer them more than say a Frost mage who subspecs into Fire.

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This answer doesn't sit right with me at all. In my opinion, it's not so much that a Fireball or Frostbolt build would be more useful subspeccing into the Arcane tree instead of your opposing element's tree, but the fact that Torment the Weak feels so potent that it actually takes away from choosing some of the flavor talents in your main tree to do it. Just look at the main trees of the recommended Fireball and Frostbolt specs. Likely something like this.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage=00000000000000000000000000000000550320123033300530203003510000000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9947

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000533030310233100230152201350&glyph=000000000000&version=9947

But after having to devote a solid 18 points into Arcane just to grab Torment the Weak, you're left with Fire only having 1 point (out of 9 choices that range from 1 to 3-point investments) and Frost, 3 (out of 10 choices, although Ice Barrier is probably going to be a given which leaves a frost mage with 2 remaining points out of 9 choices which also range from 1-3 point investments).

I dunno. It feels like going to the supermarket and finding the double-sided aisle of sweets while you're left with only $2 after buying all of your essential groceries, but any mage that's self-conscious with maintaining a healthy body weight isn't going to want to give up his important foods because nobody likes having the fat kid on your 25-man kickball team.

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Q u o t e:
The criticism is certainly welcome. As with any information we provide, critical remarks about this Q&A are expected. With that said, let's keep it civil folks. There's no reason for a person to keep posting here if one cannot conduct oneself in a constructive and controlled manner, especially given the time we all have to process what we want to say before hitting the 'post' button.

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You should know us by now, very defensive and absolutely no faith in the devs. Not that it's any great surprise when you look at mage history.

I was looking for something, anything to latch onto.

Hugely disappointing.