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Q u o t e:
To be honest, I read the Mage Q&A, and this is what I got out of it:

"Mages are fine, stfu and l2p"

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What it really gave me was an idea of what the best possible outcome for the Warrior Q&A is going to be like.

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Q u o t e:

What it really gave me was an idea of what the best possible outcome for the Warrior Q&A is going to be like.

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Yep, I see it now, Warriors will be the last on the list for Q&A, and we'll get "We realize you're a little low, and we're working on it", and I can see GC as he finishes typing the 3000 words it took to say that leaning back in his chair, lighting a stogie, putting a bit more crushed ice in his gin and going "there, that'll hold em till Icecrown"

I am in this thread to say that I love Luph.

Also, the Mage Q&A thread is asinine.

Blizzard things mages are in a good spot right now. Well, that's great. I have a significant portion of mages who obviously disagree with you.


(P.S. Just because we have a ridiculously narrow role in 3s, which is primarily a CC - and where you guys get off saying it's the best CC in the game is way beyond me - , does not mean we do not need love in PvP. It means you need to change RMP synergy, and fix the class. )

I was hoping for at least some plans to make mages non-extinct in arena except for a few narrow pvp comps, babysat by a rogue.

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Q u o t e:
A quick summary of the Mage Q&A:

"We think mages are fine right now"

Really a huge waste of time and nothing said that we didn't already know.

The fact that they can't make any changes to the scorch and evocation mechanics is laughable though. Giving evocation pushback resistance and making scorch a 1 stack application are hardly game breaking or difficult to change, but the theme of 3.2 is "pure laziness!" so what did you expect?

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I'm not surprised they didn't address evoc, when half the mages posting about it don't understand the problem.

Pushback resistance will do NOTHING. You can cover it with icy veins if that were an issue. The problem here is random aoe that forces you to stop casting, like ignus' pot, or that makes you move, like void zones, mimiron's rockets, or thorim's ground lightning. No matter how well you time your evocation, those can hit you at any time during the fight and stick you wanding for 2 minutes.

Reducing nuke cost will do nothing for that, and neither will pushback resist.

That Q&A was an absolute travesty. Not only did they not answer most of the actual important questions we have, but the couple that they even did ask (healthstones) THEY DIDN'T EVEN ANSWER IN THE RESPONSE!!

I'm so seriously ticked off right now.

Star Wars MMO can't come soon enough for me.

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Q u o t e:


You can reasonably time a lot of that stuff.

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You can time some of it, but not all of it.

You can avoid sarth's fire walls, but the void zones can happen at any time. You can avoid death rays on yogg, but you can get constricted or deathcoiled whenever.There are entirely too many "move now or die" mechanics that are random by nature. It's supposed to keep dps on their toes, making them move at any time. But there's no way you can time around all of it.

And exactly what probability of being rendered worthless for 2 minutes is ok with you? "Oh, well, it's one person in 25, so odds are it'll miss ya!" Big deal. No one else has a small chance to be stuck wanding. Life tap doesn't backfire and clear out all remaining mana and prohibit its own reuse. Aspect of the viper doesn't have a chance to fail. We're the only pure dps class that can't reasonably assume we'll always have the resources we need.

Telling us about your plans for the Q&A originally might have been helpful to your final goal.

GC PROMISED ME A TUNIC

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Q u o t e:
We knew that some players would approach the Q&As as a list of buffs for their class, and thus be disappointed. But that was never the intent, and we already have channels to do that. The Q&As were to address the kinds of questions we get all the time, such as "What do you guys see as the role of the mage class?" You can find a question like that about every day. I used to answer them, but then someone would ask it again the next week without looking to even see if there had been a previous answer. As such, the Q&As were designed to be more philosophical and long-term. We knew many of them wouldn't be up until after the patch notes for instance.

Given the huge numbers of questions that were asked, we knew it would be impossible to pick the set that would please everyone so we did the best we could. Just because the question wasn't of interest to you doesn't mean it wasn't of interest to someone or they wouldn't have asked it. But we would like to keep the series going long-term, so there is a chance that a question that didn't come up this time can come up again.

I'll just touch on two common themes:

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.

Some players have apparently misinterpreted my comments about mana. I was trying to say that the goal is that dps casters generally should not run out of mana, provided they aren't in over their heads and make reasonable use of their tools. We don't think those tools were adequate. However, we also didn't want to turn Evocate into Innervate, as is commonly asked. Instead, we went with the Ignite change (though I suspect the number will end up being something closer to 2% instead of 1% when all is said and done). We just thought it was a more interesting mechanic and felt mage-like. Since Arcane mages don't use Ignite, we dropped the Arcane Blast cost. Frost has some PvE damage problems, but Frostbolt is already a really efficient spell -- that isn't their big issue.

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Ghost, it really wasn't significant or in depth. It really didn't offer us anything we didn't really know, and it didn't offer us any consolation for our concerns.

We don't even want to be Buffed. We want to be more functional.

Scorch is pretty bad, glyph or no.
Evo is bad.
Combustion is bad,

We just want them fixed.

I'm sure you glanced at the 17 plus pages of ".....really?"

Come on now. You, and Blizzard, are capable of more.

Here's the only thing I can reply on (my mage is 28 :) ).

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Q u o t e:
Community Team: There are some funky cloth legging designs out there that are difficult to truly appreciate unless one wears a tunic.

Even so, will mages get robes, or at least the option of choosing robes, over tunics going forward?

Ghostcrawler: To be totally honest, this is not a huge priority for us at this time. We embrace some level of player visual customization in World of Warcraft, but it’s just not in the design vision to give players as many controls over how their character looks as some players would probably desire. One of the distinctive visual qualities of cloth is that it often looks like long, flowing robes, which is pretty consistent with the iconic fantasy wizard. No doubt some players would prefer to change the look of their weapon or weapon enchant if they could without having a game play effect, so this is just a slippery slope for us. We will keep the feedback in mind though.

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While I understand that cosmetic things aren't a huge development priority for Blizz (and shouldn't be over real content), I get the vibe from this that GC and his fellow devs think that greater cosmetic customization would be a bad thing.

I can only assume they think this due to development time. I mean, there's absolutely no other reason for being against it.


Small changes over a long period of time certainly would eat up a lot of dev time. New hairstyles and the (maybe) upcoming dance customizations probably ate up more time than they would have wanted.

So blizz, if you ever consider things like armor dyes, or hiding shoulder graphics. don't do it. Go the whole nine yards if you go at all. Do an appearance tab/lock.

I can really empathize with not wanting to give us innervate. I don't want that either. But this encounter design really prohibits reliable evocations, and any chance to fail is really too much if we're on a fixed mana supply. We can't just try again if we have to move, we're out of luck!

And what about the scorch mechanic? It feels downright punishing to have to stack it five times, and we can't spare the glyph slots to glyph it. Especially when you consider that the new and improved warlock version stacks to five in a single cast (and applies as part of their rotation, in some cases), it feels like an outdated system.

And is there any plan to give arcane mages access to the crit debuff? All the other mage specs can provide it, and we don't really have any other raid synergy instead. When you're building a 10 man, the mage doesn't get to spec arcane unless another mage is already covering it.

If you think it's fine, then please just say so. Then we can stop asking about it. But the question of the crit debuff (and its availability to arcane) was just as prevalent in that thread as many other questions, and a lot more practical than cosmetic questions about robes.

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Q u o t e:
The Q&As were to address the kinds of questions we get all the time, such as "What do you guys see as the role of the mage class?"

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What? Who the Christ asks what the role of a mage is? It's pretty obvious. And before "master of aoe" comes up, I hardly see anyone giving a crap, when they bring up AOE they just mean that ours is so outdated compared to new stuff.

I know you guys are in an impossible situation, so eh, drama ending here. But I found that Q&A 100% useless, sorry.

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Q u o t e:
I'll just touch on two common themes:

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.

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How is it remotely acceptable that mages are only capable of top dps on the two gimmick fights (Vezax and Hodir) and in the bottom 2 or 3 classes on about half the encounters, and just "average" on the rest of them? Is it really your vision that a pure DPS class should not be able to climb out of the cellar without some special caster gimmick in their favor?

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Q u o t e:
However, we also didn't want to turn Evocate into Innervate, as is commonly asked.

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It's commonly asked because we're sick and tired of having our evocates interrupted by damage, having to move to avoid void zones, etc. Why is the mage class the one that has to "use skill" in using our big-cooldown mana regen mechanic, and yet other classes don't have to deal with that at all? Hunter runs out of mana? No prob, hit Viper and keep shooting. Warlock? Just tap a couple of times, you'll get healed back up instantly. Druid? Innverate - set it and forget it. Mage runs oom - use evocate - CRAP VOID ZONE, GOTTA MOVE.

This is why mages keep asking for innervate. Because you have given us the total other extreme. I'm not saying give us innervate or anything, but come on, we're begging you to acknowledge that the current incarnation of Evocation just does work in today's raid environments where there is constant movement and damage thrown around all over the place, much of both are not predictable. And even if they were predictable, why do WE have to be "skilled" to predict it but others don't. And on top of it, we PAY mana for our crits and we take extra spell damage from our talents, the list of unnecessary drawbacks that we have to deal with goes on and on... why must we be punished like no other class is simply for doing what we're supposed to do if we aren't seeing a payoff that other classes don't get in return? If we're to be normalized with other dpsers, at least remove these silly drawbacks.

You've said before that feral druids might do some nice damage, but that's ok because of the intracies and skill required to play it well. Hunters and Warlocks and Druids have a superior mana regen mechanic, and in the case of Hunters and Warlocks it's not even on a cooldown, and yet they don't have to be skilled to use it. Where's our "reward for being skilled"? It's certainly not higher damage what with Warlocks and Rogues constantly beating us on any fight that doesn't involve a special gimmick that unnaturally inflates our damage. Add in the RNG on top of that, which often works to our detriment, and it's a problem that we are asking that you address.

The shaman QA seems like the plato's works compared to the mage one.

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Q u o t e:
How is it remotely acceptable that mages are only capable of top dps on the two gimmick fights (Vezax and Hodir) and in the bottom 2 or 3 classes on about half the encounters, and just "average" on the rest of them? Is it really your vision that a pure DPS class should not be able to climb out of the cellar without some special caster gimmick in their favor?

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Because you are above hunters whom was told the exact same thing?