http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...968115908&sid=1



I'm not too up on mage mechanics, but is the gem change enough to make mages less dependent on shadow priests? Combined with what looks like Frost raid viability I think it's possible that this is enough.

Does this drive the nail that the Mystical Skyfire Diamond cooldown put into the raiding arcane build's coffin even deeper?

Am I the only one that is getting sick of watching them throw all kinds of talents to Mages for free while doing very little for the other classes, ie, what was a long time talent was turned into a class skill? There are tons of talents that should just be made outright class skills for all the classes, but Mages continue to be the one class where they turn long running talents into class skills.

...

They've turned one talent into a spell for mages so far -- Evocation. They've done so for other classes as well (druids, warriors, just to name a few).

You're going way overboard here. I'm not exactly a fan of the Ice Block change either, but saying that they "throw all kinds of talents to Mages for free" is just not true.

Conc, the gem change sounds pretty awesome. Rank 5 restores 1136-1364 mana, so on average it's doubled up. The gems are unique, so currently you have to use different ranks to have more gems, so it's a VERY significant change -- on average, ~100% extra mana on the first gem, ~120% on the second, and a whopping ~180% on the third. Very nice.

Ok, name one class, besides shaman and paladin, that has had *one* talent fully turned into a class skill? You can't cause Blizzard hasn't done so, yet there are a number of talents through out the various classes that are almost must have or should be class skills. Numerous players of various classes have pointed out why certain talents should be changed to class skills, but the Mages on the WoW forums say that they need X talent turned into a class skill or Y cooldown decreased and Blizzard jumps and gives it to them while Blizzard generall ignores everyone else even though a lot of people have made very good thought out arguements why certain talents should become class skills and Blizzard does nothing about it. To me I'm getting sick of watching Blizzard coddle certain classes while never taking in any of the other construtive thoughts presented by players to make certain aspects of other classes play better.

And as Tal mentions, changing untalented Arcane Explosion from being a 1.5 s cast to instant (another change from talent to full class skill). There's more than just Evocation that the Mages have gotten for free.

Didn't they change Arcane Explosion from talented instant to instant for all? There are others that are tickling the back of my memory but having not played my mage for quite some time its not something I've tracked.

Cloak of shadows - Rogue. Stance Mastery - warrior.

I will admit, I had to actually think about Shaman for a minute there and then I finally remembered the two-handers, now that they're basically useless if you are serious about any kind of melee DPS.

Edit: Forgot about innervate for all druids. Holy fire for priests (although if you choose to not count that one, that's understandable). Fear ward for all priests now (even nerfed to all hell).

Technically, Cloak of Shadows got changed before it was introduced live. Also, Tactical Mastery is halfish with all warriors maintaining only 10 rage with potential of keeping 25 rage if they take TM fully so I consider that only a half change talent. Innervate I had forgetten about, same with Holy Fire, but Fear Ward was a racial, not a talent. Thing is, there hasn't been any talents converted to class skills for Rogues, Warlocks, Hunters, or Warriors (technically for Warriors). I have seen numerous suggestions from all of the classes listed about various talents converted to class skills with very good backing as to why they should be changed and Blizzard has ignored them.

So now Mages will have had atleast 3 Talents (that I can think of) converted to class skills while there are several classes that haven't even seen one talent converted to a class skill and several classes that got a talent converted to a class skill while Mages get a talent converted to a class skill frivalously (Ice Block).

Hmm. Now what is it about that list that pops out to me? Oh yes, they're all very powerful classes.

If development of WoW were handled "we gave this class something so we have to give all the other classes something like it" the game would be unplayably bad.

1) Mana has always been a very significant issue for mages in both PvE and PvP. Mages were extremely dependent on shadow priests in the raiding game.

2) Iceblock from talent --> trained ability isn't going to change much. The good PvP mages will still be frost. The other builds will be a little less glass cannon, but will still lack PvP utility. Overall little to no impact on the PvE aspect of the game.

It's hard to be too negative about the changes, they really do fill significant holes. Unless, of course, you just like to whine for the sake of whining.

The point is, it's a frivalous change to give Ice Block to all mages. You yourself said it, it doesn't help mages in any serious way. As such, it should be left alone, it doesn't fill an adequate change. I won't argue the issue involving the mana gems because I can see the issue, but I will say that Mages get their way far more often than any other class in WoW. IMO, frivalous changes like Ice Block should not be made and it seems that the whining and crying that non-frost mages made on the WoW forums is where you should really direct your whining charge.

And Klaus, Mages are among that list of powerful classes, yet Blizzard continues to cater to them while doing nothing for those other powerful classes. And if you look at the DPS charts, you'll see that Mages are right up there at the top on DPS. If they were not doing so well, I could see boosts being handed out, but in the case of Ice Block, you have a talent that is being given as a class skill frivalously.

Oh, screw you Blizzard!! Geez! Lochnar has always been a frost mage, long the red headed step child of the mage class. I could do certain things because I chose that tree but now something looks cool to the other trees so you hand it over to coddle the whiners? Explain the logic to me. How does this fire mage suddenly gain the knowledge to deal with that magic? "I throw these massive fireballs and rain down pillars of fire but all that heat requires a cooling system so I can do this one other trick - poof, instant drink cooler!" Also, the mana gem. While I will use it, I don't understand it. Part of playing the class is managing your main resource, mana. "Oh, that's just too hard - let's just buff up that mana pool for them so they have to think even less!" I started to type "ezmode is going to kill WoW" but I think they are counting on just the opposite. The more they dumb it down, and do things like the Tacoma truck ads, the more of the masses they will probably draw in. Cool will kill WoW. Did I tell you about how I discovered gummi bears on my trip to germany 30+ years ago several years before they became cool candy here in the states. Yeah, yeah, just like the rest of you WoW addicts and techno geeks, I'm a man before my time, leading edge on the wave of what's cool!

I'm honestly not sure what Blizzard is trying to accomplish with this change. Sure, it's a nice buff for arcane and fire mages, but I doubt that frost will be knocked off its PvP pedestal. Depending on the way the new talent works and how much the cooldown on Cold Snap is reduced, it's entirely possible that frost will become more powerful.

I have to agree with Lissa, the iceblock change seems rather frivolous.

Ah, you're right. I forgot about that one. Mea culpa.


Let's see here. What talents have, more or less, been turned into class skills?

Mages - Evocation and Improved Arcane Explosion.
Paladins - Consecration and Improved Seal of the Crusader.
Shamans - 2-hand weapons.
Warriors - 2/5ths of Tactical Mastery.
Priests - Holy Fire.
Druids - Innervate.
Rogues - Shadowstep.


Yes, I forgot that one. I'll add a note in my defense that Improved Arcane Missiles wasn't a spell, though.

While I agree that there are several talents that could easily be turned into class skills instead, Blizzard most likely has a good reason to avoid doing it.

And quite frankly, Blizzard does not "coddle" ANY class. All classes have seen buffs and nerfs. Blizzard has one of the best balanced MMOs on the market.


They've stated that the change is so they can balance PvE encounters around mages having Ice Block. Quite understandable.
(EDIT: Source.)


Seriously, cut it out. Blizzard has nerfed mages in the past. Counterspell on the GCD was a hefty nerf, as was the coefficiency tax. They were reversed because they were way too much.

I'll also add that mages are currently not among the top damage dealing classes. Rogues and warlocks beat them out of the water with relative ease.

Stance Mastery is not Tactical Mastery. They threw us a bone to make us stop whining, but it's not a real talent-to-skill changeover.

Also, everyone's forgetting that Priests got the old version of Improved Power Word: Shield for free (remember, Weakened Soul used to be 30 seconds with the talent reducing it to 15 seconds), and that's what really set Warriors off; literally less than a week after a Blizzard representative told us (the "Warrior community") that Tactical Mastery would never become a class skill because it went against Blizzard's code of never, ever turning talents into skills, they did exactly that with Priests. I don't recall if the Innervate, Improved Arcane Explosion, and other class changes happened before or after this incident.

Regardless, after seeing the stupid number of buffs Hunters received, I no longer really care about the other classes; this is going to make Arcane and Fire Mages' life expectancy ten seconds longer in PvP, and make Frost Mages even more overpowered than they currently are. But it's nothing compared to Hunters getting both dispel and a 41-yard Mortal Strike.

You forgot Hurricane for druids... once the 31-point balance talent.

(And improved pounce as the 31 feral, lol...)

Oh, trust me, I was peeved to hear about this change. Fire mages are a pain in the ass in the arena as it is, and this will make them a pain in the ass and make them hard to kill. I truly, truly hate dotting up a mage, only to have them wiped by ice block.

And if you look at a lot of encounters, at least in the Terenas lurkers, the mages are not the #1 damage dealers. Rogues and warlocks are up there, and before he left the game, our elemental shaman was way up there. I frequently beat most of the mages as a shadow priest, and that's with the mages in my group getting the mana return. So, I truly understand the mana gem change.

I'd not mind seeing the hunter damage tax undone, now that everyone's 70, and the clothies can't whine about being 2-3 shot anymore.

Eh. The MSD nerf and the nerf to the Lightning Capacitor already firmly nailed down the coffin when 2.3 came out. After a certain point, it's just...dead, and you can't really get deader than dead.

I could go on with a long spiel about Arcane, but they either need to junk the tree and start over or do something better with Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast. About the only thing Arcane is any good for is AE, and mostly that works well untalented.

What is very true is that this ends raiding mages' investment of more than about 2 points into the Arcane tree. Arcane Concentration's value dropped like a stone the moment shadow priests received Vampiric Touch, but raiding builds kept picking it up mostly because there was nowhere else to put the points. Past 47 in fire, everything is a PvP talent or just bad. Same with Frost, really, although if you wanted frostbite/shatter tricks you could easily, easily discard clearcasting (and many did).

Since we never really needed the mana anyway, any build that doesn't dip 11 into frost to grab Icy Veins is now pretty weak. There's still some people pushing 33/28/0, but its damage was just barely competitive with x/47/x. Take those 47 points and add something that combos with activatable trinkets and flamecap and destruction pots and it simply won't even be comparable.

In current content - yeah. There's nothing that Ice Block really does aside from help out on Archimonde a little bit. Most high-end raiding mages know that, in current content, trainable ice block changes nothing.

We'll see what Sunwell is like. After all, they made Innervate trainable specifically because they finally introduced mana limited fights (and the first truly mana-limited fights were introduced in Naxxramas). It may very well be that a Sunwell fight has something that every class needs to be able to answer, and that mages didn't have it. Hard to say. But if Blizzard says (which they basically have) that they're tuning at least one Sunwell encounter around the assumption that all mages have ice block, they'd better make sure all mages have ice block. You might say, well then, change that fight, but we all know it's not that easy. Viscidus never got changed, and he certainly was one of the top five fights that desperately needed adjustment in their time.

The PvP explanation isn't really believable, though. Adding Ice Block to a fire mage isn't going to make them any more competitive in high-level arena than they are now. You still need Water Elemental and Cold Snap.




The experience of numerous guilds suggests that this statement simply isn't accurate. Before the broken MSD/TLC/AToI AM build of 2.2, extensive statistical analysis of WWS parses was done (on the official WoW boards, it was true, but it was no less statistically rigorous for that). The only time mages actually do competitive DPS are at the Karazhan to early SSC/TK levels, when they outgear other people via tailoring. At these foundational stages of raiding, you'll see the DPS meters look like a mix of mages and locks, as well as rogues with epic weapons. But by mid tier 5 content the scales begin to shift, and by T6, mages are solidly behind rogues, destruction warlocks, beast mastery hunters, and DPS warriors. The majority of complaints on the official boards are whining, to be sure, but thoughtful, skilled mage players as well as mage and non-mage high-end raid leaders throughout WoW are coming to the same conclusion regarding mage viability.

Briefly, it goes something like this: at the high end, mages don't do enough damage to be taken for DPS, don't survive long enough to be taken for survivability, and don't have enough utility to be taken for utility. It's not that mages are useless; far from, and every high-end guild has a number of mages. The problem is that mages are about 1-2% behind DPS warriors and consequently up to about eight or so percent behind the class which directly competes with them for raid slots, destruction warlocks. Obviously, a gap of 1-8% isn't going to stop any good guild from progressing. On the other hand, in terms of game design, there's clearly a flaw if a class exists for which, in terms of PvE 25-man boss encounters, they are the best at nothing. And I want to make it clear: I'm certainly not saying that mages are awful or that they aren't sufficiently good to be in the raid for any encounter in the game. But it is a design flaw when a class is strictly inferior to another, and, as it happens to be, multiple others.

Trainable Ice Block and Icy Veins are in the direction of potentially addressing this flaw. It's actually a baby step, but Blizzard tends to take baby steps on class balance, and at least it's heading in the right direction, in my view, which is to accept that mages don't functionally have PvE utility (PvP is quite a different matter, of course; Polymorph is fantastic in arena), and to re-emphasize the damage aspects of the class and to provide a little survivability help. Most importantly, making iceblock trainable is a way to improve mage PvE survivability (since the PvE tree is clearly intended to be Fire) without making already-survivable Frost mages more durable in Arenas.

Kalgan made a post a long time ago where he talked about balancing for Arena. He got a lot of flak for it, because he was asked "So you're just balancing Arenas around the very top brackets?" and he responded "Would you rather we balanced classes around people who are not good in Arena?" The questioner took umbrage, because Kalgan implied that the majority of people are not good at Arena. Of course, the majority of people are, in fact, not good at Arena, but my point in bringing up this example is to illustrate how Blizzard frequently has its eye on the high end when it comes to balance. In this case, I can see these mage changes in the context of repairing faults in the mage class that only become visible at the high end.

It's about balance. I'm not really interested in comparing lists of who got the most talents turned into skills. What's important is reaching, as close as possible, a decently balanced state, and Blizzard feels (and I agree) that they'll turn as many talents into skills as is necessary to achieve balance. Arguably, all that turning fewer talents into skills for a class signifies is that the class' talent tree was better designed in the first place, instead of including things that should have been skills. There's certainly more than one perspective on it.

All this crap makes me sad. I get so sick of all the changes to classes - all classes always, not just the current mage change squabble. They should have been set in stone long ago. Learned skills should have been those that didn't rely on specialized knowledge and trees should have each stuck to their themed knowledge instead of blurring the trees where a talent in one tree affects another tree. Encounters and arenas and instances and whatever should then have been designed with those classes in mind. Each class would have their strong points and weak but everyone would have learned what they were and could have planned strategies as such. Instead, we get bickering over how Johnny can do this so I should be able to do that and then, if my class whines enough, we finally get that. Now xyz encounter is borked because that makes it trivial so it gets changed. A battleground gets added and some aspect makes it difficult for a certain build so the class gets adjusted instead of the battleground being adjusted to level the playing field. Etc. etc. The whole thing reminds me of the cliche cartoon where you see the character running across an endless brick bridge with the bricks falling out behind them. The classes should be the solid stone base that the rest of the WoW bridge is built out from.

See, I disagree with this. This game will *always* be a work in progress. The day it stops changing is the day they shut it down. There will always be new content to re-balance things for, and there will always be new ways that people will use talents that Blizzard hadn't thought of, and they'll have to tweak things for.

As far as class changes, I've seen every class have its day in the sun, and I have also seen them get hit hard by the nerfbat. It's just the cycle, IMO.

I have a feeling Skan is on the right track on the Ice Block change. They may need that down the road in something Blizzard is planning. Maybe not. Regardless, Blizz giveth and Blizz taketh away. Our choice is to play, or not to play.

I didn't say they should stop changing. They should continue to add content. They should raise caps. They should expand trees with raised caps. The way they do it now, everything changes. They keep changing the target but they are also changing the gun we are shooting with. There will never be a bullseye.

I keep coming back for the content but all the class changing and resulting bickering and whining makes me want to puke. I love the game but hate the rules makers and the player population en masse.

Oh, I hate the whining about every change, too. That's why I'm pretty much the last to know about anything on the official forums. Too much whining. I read here, I read EJ some, and that's about it. If it's not in those places, and I don't hear about it in-game, I won't see it.

They have invisibiity for this reason. If they can't maintain their aggro, that's their own fault. Warlocks have to deal with threat far more than Mages do and they get a half aggro wipe that can be resisted where as Invisibility cannot. I'll stick by my earlier comment of it being a frivalous change, it's not needed at all.



And other classes haven't been nerfed as bad? Please, other classes have seen far more numerous nerfs than Mages and yet Blizzard hasn't reversed any of their nerfs. If you look at it from that stand point, yes, it certainly does look like coddling to me, especially when they throw out frivalous changes like the IB change.

I'm pretty sure "balancing around mages having ice block" != "balancing around mages having an aggro wipe". Just off the top of my head, you could have a fight where you need someone to go push a button, but during some sort of blast-wave-o'-doom that does 100k damage. Mage blinks over, pushes button, ice blocks. Tada. Balancing around mages not pulling aggro? I really don't think blizzard is fond of making aggro sensitive fights anymore, because Omen turns it into a "who can watch little coloured bars best" fight. You said it yourself; if they made threatcap so low that mages are pulling aggro... well then, warlocks, shadowpriests and DPS warriors would scream bloody murder because they'd basically be able to do white damage

Which brings me to another allusion you're making; that mages top charts. That's just... simply not true at all. I forget who said it, but basically it boils down to this: mages compete directly with destruction warlocks for raid spots. They're called shadow mages for a reason. Besides having one for AI and water, and possibly improved blizzard but not really, there's no reason to take a mage over a destro lock at the moment because the lock just does way more damage. It frustrated me enough to reroll warlock, to be completely honest.

No, instead they now whine about you dispelling Earth Shield and Power Word: Shield and hitting them with Mortal Strike from 41 yards away

And how is it that IB could actually be used that all mages would need it an other classes wouldn't need a similar skill? Are they going to make it so that all mages get a buff that makes them detonate equal to their mana bar if they don't have IB up? If so, that's an extremely power reason to add something to the game so that they can do something like this. IB gives you a temporary aggro dump and protects you from taking damage (although there are some encounters out there right now where IB doesn't stop the damage you take). I honestly still do not see a good reason, even in future content, to figure something around a talent being turned into a class skill when the talent's scope is protecting from damage (which every class could us) and temporarily dropping aggro (which Mages already have on a more permanent situation with Invisibility).

Kalgon's reasoning, as it stands right now, is that this is a completely frivalous maneuver and it's silly to tune encounter specifically around one talent that has no benefit to any other character but the person using it (atleast Innervate, PW:S, and others benefited more than just the class that had access to it).

... This doesn't even make sense. Ice Block isn't an aggro wipe. Invisibility doesn't remove debuffs.

There's no comparison.



Name me one class that has seen worse nerfs and not had them reversed to an acceptable level.

It is still a frivalous change. As Skan pointed out, if they're trying to make fights based around IB, then they are going to need to add similar skills to all classes, not just Mages because I can gaurentee they will screw up what their implementing and break it so that it affects more than just Mages necessitating an IB type skill for whoever gets affected. Think about what all IB does, then look at other classes, does it make sense for IB to be a class power, no, it doesn't, as such it's frivalous.



I would hardly call the things they did to Imp Fireball and Imp Frost Bolt the worst nerfs ever. There was a clear reason that they did it, but didn't completely think it through. During tBC beta, they realized that the Tier 5+ powers that were new made Fireball and Frost Bolt deal way more damage then they wanted, so instead of toning down the Tier 5+ talents and the synergy within, they instead choose to nerf the coefficients on Fireball and Frost Bolt if you took Imp Fireball and Imp Frost Bolt respectively. I know Quark did some looks at their math and he was one of the first to point out that Blizzard was dealing with it wrong and instead should have toned down the Tier 5+ talents by a few percent then hitting the coefficents on Fireball and Frost Bolt when improved. Given a few weeks, you will see the same thing happen again that Blizzard was trying to guard against, maybe this time they might realize where the problem lies, but I will bet you see Mages at the top or near the top of the DPS meters again with the reversing of the coefficient issues.

Oi, and how. Funny thing is though, whenever I chance over to the official WoW fora, I am constantly amazed by the amount 41/41/41 hunters folks encounter. You'd think that Blizz would catch all these hacking hunters.

- "Silencing Shot" now does only 50% of weapon damage instead of 75%.
- The base damage for "Arcane Shot" has been reduced by about 9% and the bonus damage from ranged attack power reduced from 20% to 15%.
- Traps can be set while in combat, but require a 2 second arming time.
- 1 Agility will now grant 1 Ranged Attack Power.
- "Auto shot" is now reset when casting Aimed Shot.
- "The Beast Within's" Bonus damage caused has been reduced to 10%, but now also reduces the mana cost of all spells by 20%.
- Arcane Shot: Casting lower ranks of Arcane Shot than your maximum rank will now reduce the bonus you receive from attack power.

My point isn't that it's a frivolous change. My point is that we don't know. So far all the information we have is that Blizzard is balancing new PvE encounters around the assumption that every mage has ice block. That sounds to me like a good reason to give every mage ice block.

It's not about mages v. other classes. In terms of PvE design, if you assume that every mage has ice block and you do not make it a trained skill, you're forcing raid groups to bring all frost mages, in direct contrast with the way they've built talent trees to this point in TBC. Again, this is why they made Innervate a trained skill, because bringing a resto druid versus bringing a non-resto druid was such a wide gulf in capability.

As to exactly what they're doing that'll make ice block mandatory? I can't say. Just because we can't think of it doesn't make it impossible to do. At this juncture I think we should all take Blizzard's word when they say "Here's Ice Block. You'll need it." Better, I think, than automatically disbelieving them.



Part of the reason Icy Veins is being introduced is because Blizzard is checking out mage DPS with the coefficient tax reverses and finding out that, in fact, mages are still not sufficiently competitive. The fact is, the coefficient taxes were a reaction to the strength of tailoring and the apparent imbalance of mages in t5/t6 equivalent loot versus other classes in dungeon blues and Karazhan loot. Now that the gear playing field is level, mages are finding themselves behind, and I personally suspect that we need far more DPS help than just Icy Veins. But I'll take that for now. Baby steps.

I would say that a class' history of buffs or nerfs is irrelevant. The question that matters is "Are classes balanced?" Beastmaster hunters are some of the most fearsome ranged DPS classes in the game, at this moment. That suggests to me that despite these nerfs, there's much less wrong with the hunter class than with some others.

OK this has been bothering me for a while... the word is frivolous.



It seems like when blizzard hears the moans of a DPS class saying there's no reason to bring them because they don't do enough damage, they often toss the class a "gimmick" fight where they're required. Think rogues and supression room - they were being outdamaged by DPS warriors, so the rhetoric was "why bother bringing rogues?". Instead of buffing their damage or fixing itemization (that came later, granted), they gave them disarming traps in raids. Nowadays there's alot of mage QQ about "why bring us when we can't outDPS hunters/warlocks/XX and have no utility, either!" so I'm sensing a gimmick using IB. Perhaps like I outlined above, involving a big red button, and some sort of nasty effect when you push it that would require IB, but couldn't be done with a pally + bubble. *shrug* Was just a thought!



Again... mages beyond SSC-ish aren't at the top of the DPS meters, even after reversing the coefficient crap. They won't be after they give ice block as trainable, either. Maybe closer with icy veins, but we'll see

And you were given Disarm, Mortal Strike, and Dispel Magic as compensation. You can't have both damage AND utility, unless you're a Warrior.

Double post nukage...

We weren't given Disarm. And buffing PvP doesn't help PvE nerfs. though, since the nerfs came about due to PvP in the first place, maybe it does make sense to Blizz.

Knowing what I do of your playing, I'm interested in some expansion on this point. From everything I've heard and the WWS' I've seen, while hunters are no longer simple MDBots in a raid, they are still pretty close, being topped by just about everything (other than mages) on end game 25man raids...but you are saying that they are tops in the ranged dps category. Does this imply that all ranged dps needs some help, or that what I've been seeing is atypical?

No, it wasn't that anyone was out DPSing Rogues, it was because Rogues were screaming to have more utility so Blizzard said here you go and gave them the suppression room. After that, you didn't hear as much from Rogues on utility because they were afraid of what Blizzard may throw their way next (another something that Blizzard did to be cutesy with Rogues after they asked for something is the putting of small hearts on the T3 armor).

I don't honestly see how they can introduce something and say that Mages have a need for Ice Block unless they're going to institued Nef part 2 (Nef Mage call to remove mage call effects). This is the only thing I can see them doing given what IB does, and to do that is really old and tiring. Of all the fights that they have rehashed so far, they've always added a twist to it (Lurker being C'Thun phase 1, but without the jumping death lightning and insta-kill beam for example). If they need to make it so all mages have IB, they're basically rehasing the Nef fight's class calls which would be fairly boring now matter what you try to do. If that's their reasoning to make it so all mages have IB, I say to them, go rethink your fight and come up with a better mechanism than to have a one trick solution of turning a talent into a class skill. All the other talents they shifted to class skills prior to this were necessary, but to design fights around the Nef class call aspect to justify giving a talent as a class skill is silly and wasteful time spent (and probably boring for every raider that has seen that type of fight).

Well, let's throw out a couple WWS parses. Check quick because they expire today.

Teron Gorefiend
Essence of Suffering

These are two Black Temple encounters. Teron is commonly considered the fourth boss of the instance. Essence of Suffering is the first phase of the Reliquary of Souls encounter. Both of these encounters are simply "stand still and nuke away" encounters with DPS essentially standing still and performing max-DPS cycles until the boss falls over. Teron has a "ghost" mechanic that causes randomly selected players to have to run to the back of the room and die, but of the top DPSers in that parse, only Fayne received the debuff and died from it prior to the boss death. Essence of Suffering has no such mechanic at all; the special attribute of that phase is that aggro is not a concern, so DPS classes can go all out. Rakuten and Voomer are BM hunters in this parse; Twistedone is Survival.

The numbers more or less speak for themselves. I wouldn't say what you've been seeing is "atypical" because the typical case for players of any class is that they're not very good at it, and hunter class mechanics are far more punishing of mistakes than the mechanics of any other class. Weak hunter parses are, for the most part, quite typical - but they are also not what Blizzard is balancing around. Beastmaster hunters are 100% viable and powerful when properly played.

The problem is pretty specific to mages. While there wasn't any mage on Teron, you can see me down at eighth place on the EoS parse, in a dead heat with our enhancement shaman - and, as you can see, using the broken 2.2 MSD/TLC/AM build. While 2.3 undid the coefficient nerfs, they also applied heavy nerfs to a spec that was...competing for eighth. Unnerfed fire is about the same, perhaps a little higher than that 2.2 build.

As long as you're looking at the parses, you can take note of Noxt, a destruction warlock. You'll note that he beats me in the EoS parse and comes in fourth in the Teron parse. He does not have his 4-piece Tier 6 bonus (+6% to shadow bolt and incinerate damage). I do have my 4-piece Tier 6 (+5% to fireball, frostbolt and arcane missiles damage). Despite the fact that I substantially outgear him and that I am using a talent and equipment setup deemed abusive and nerfed by Blizzard in 2.3, he still has an edge of about 150 DPS on me. Now, the 1528 DPS I'm doing is fine; you can beat Essence of Suffering with all of your DPS classes doing 1528 DPS. On the other hand, why, exactly, when he has so much more utility than I do and is so much more survivable than I am, does he need to also dominate me in DPS?

Ah, I see why the results are 'atypical'. I tend to look at overall reports, and very rarely do I look at encounter specific ones. Stand and nuke fights are (as I understand it, though my experience is limited to early SSC only) very rare now. Take the report as a whole, as I tend to, and the hunters all the sudden drop from first-ish to 9, 10, and 11. I wonder why they topped a rogue and warlock, and figure that both those those two had many deaths, or, as their dps time is low (60%-ish) they weren't there for fights that the hunters were. All the sudden the fearsome ranged DPS class (who, overall, are even under your mage) are now at the bottom of the dps pile, instead of the top.

Looking further through the parses you provide, it seems to me that your hunters are either at the top, or at the bottom of a fight. This is interesting to me, though they seem far more 'at the bottom' than at the top.

So, the solution to "buffing" hunters? Making all fights 'stand and deliver' style. =D

Overall reports are terribly misleading. For one thing, the inclusion of trash damage, which nobody cares about, skews the meters remarkably. Typically, hunters need to trap things on trash, which is a more time-consuming process than other forms of crowd control. Also, Black Temple has a number of AoE-trash packs (and a few packs which are not AoE but which we do that way anyway), which hugely skew the meter in favour of classes that can hit more than one thing at a time.



Well, of the other fights contained in that parse, only Naj'entus and Bloodboil are anything close to fair. Supremus is a fight where the amount of damage done by any ranged class is completely random and not particularly correlated with anything, Akama is a fight that lasts approximately thirty seconds long, which gives classes equipped with burst trinkets and DPS cooldowns to have near-maximum uptime. And those are the only two parses where hunters are clearly low.

Go ahead and look at Naj'entus, and Bloodboil tries 1 and 2. They exhibit more or less the same pattern, even though a hunter isn't in the #1 slot. (Obviously, the Bloodboil death parse isn't a good indicator because the BM hunters both wind up dead fairly early on.) Unless the hunter simply can't attack their target, they will do great damage.

In terms of the pure "stand and deliver" fights, 3/5 Hyjal encounters and 4/9 Black Temple encounters fit that category, so it's a solid half of them. That's certainly nothing to scoff at.

Hm, I need to get me into these places, and have a look around, then.

It may be all of those things, but if they're doing it, they're doing it. Nef is a great example, but instead of saying that they might copy it, I prefer to take it as an example of how they can make creative encounters that challenge every class in different ways, and that they certainly can do it again in Sunwell.

Even if it doesn't specifically require Ice Block, one thing to keep in mind is that any form of environmental damage that inflicts a roughly equal amount of damage to anyone it hits automatically hits mages proportionately harder. Because Blizzard is so attached to including Spirit on mage gear, mages have among the least stamina of any class, and lack the priest's ability to shield and heal to counteract low hit points. (As an aside, redesigning Evocation to be a percentage of maximum mana and gutting Arcane spec has made all the Spirit completely worthless, causing ~15-20% of itemization points on even Tier 6 gear to go to waste.) Proper employment of Ice Block can at least negate one or two attacks. Obviously it's not the same as having more stamina, but "different but equivalent" is part of the goal of balance.

And this is exactly why I don't expect too much in the way of further talent and skill tweaking for mages. As mentioned the tweaks are aimed at the high end. New content hits and the mage gear no longer has spirit on it and that buffs mages some more because they have better itemized gear.


This happened with hunters, and is part of why as I played my hunter deeper into content I laughed even more at the people who didn't understand hunters and still thought they weren't powerful enough. Hunter CC is used all the time when dealing with at level/gearing content. It was used a lot when first learning and early farming of Kara (less and less as gearing got better but that is true for all CC). It's very handy on Mags when learning to back up warlocks (we only had 2 locks on our first kill). It's used all the time on SSC trash. With our 2 nights a week of raiding we've been focusing mostly on SSC [Lurker, Hydross, Morogrim all on farm] so I haven't seen TK first hand but it's used there too from what I've read) And hunters are consistently fighting for the top spots on damage in all those instances assuming most of the raid is in the same gearing level (this isn't always the case for cloth wearers. Mages and locks are often ahead of the gearing curve due the power of tailoring but when the hunters get the drops to close that gap the move back up the charts). And as you've shown this continues in BT and Hyjal. So hunters bring tons of utility for trash, good utility for bosses and tons of damage. Gearing had some issues for hunters but they fixed a fair bit of that too (giving pretty hefty buffs to hunters with the bow change that came along with the change to agi and RAP but too many hunters didn't understand that impact either and thought they got nerfed when in fact they got buffed and made it a lot easier for Blizzard to do future itemization for hunters). Many people can't always look past the gearing issues to see what the class is actually like and I'm just glad to see someone else that understands that hunters aren't broken and very rarely have been if you understand how to play one.

Because you are that from which the sacred conjured water flows, and without such a bountiful resource, his DPS would falter!

No it wouldn't - he's a warlock. Warlocks don't need to drink, you silly person!

I can see why Noxt is ahead of you. He has the backing of two shadow priests giving him Shadow Weaving. You have only yourself to put up the Scorch debuff. Since you have to drop Scorch into your rotation, this is costing you DPS. He on the other hand is only needing to Life Tap on occasion to keep his mana up. If you had a couple more Mages there with rolling Scorches, I'm sure you'd be ahead of Noxt in overall damage as you would have to add Scorch into your rotation less often.

The parses are from 2.2 when I was using the "broken" Arcane spec which has no need to put up Scorch.