Coming Soon: Changes for mages

[Kevin]

(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.)

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. :)