[Mage] Spirit "more useful" - still planned?

It is still in the plan. The goal is to make it so that a mage who avoids all the gear with spirit does not have significantly higher dps than the mage with the (more common) gear with spirit.

Regeneration itself is just something we're going to have to test more, especially on the PTR. We've made it clear that we think it is too easy to ignore mana as a resource currently on live. While this may be fun (in the sense that running around in a video game on god mode might be fun), we don't think it's ultimately good for the game. We don't want to go to the opposite extreme however where you use 3 spells and run dry.

My "god mode" comment was refering to being able to play (any class) with unlimited resources. When I have said before that we wanted to make the risk of running out of mana less trivial, there have often been responses of "Why? Worrying about mana isn't fun. Make the game challenging while still leaving us unlimited mana!" I was trying to ward off those comments this time.

We don't intend to balance mages as a class that can do decent damage but then quickly runs OOM.

Q u o t e:
I hope I don't get the ban-hammer for quoting here, but there is a fundamental problem with how mana, as a resource, is being treated with these regen changes.

You only get the ban hammer for cursing, insulting people, or otherwise making inappropriate posts. Disagreeing with us is not inappropriate or we would have long ago banned the lot of you. :)

Rogues and warriors are balanced around their resources as well. They are infinite over the course of a long fight (but few fights are really that long) but they can be limited in any given second. Mana classes generally have the luxury of not having to worry about mana at all early in a fight, unless you are just trying to pace yourself. You don’t often hit a button and have it not go off due to lack of resources, which rogues and warriors do all the time. The various resource models all have their inherent advantages and disadvantages. Being in a perpetual state of infinite mana lets you avoid one of your disadvantages.

I am sorry to those players who perennially run out of mana now. I’m not sure what you are doing differently, but we are often dealing with the opposite extreme.

Q u o t e:
It does sound like Blizzard is still focused on the only use spirit has for mages is as a regen stat.

That isn’t in fact what I said though. However, I also didn't say that we are going to give you 200 additional spellpower for free.

Q u o t e:
Our spells right now are balanced around not having that spellpower. If you did something like that, it would be assumed by us that you'd rebalance our spells to counteract the difference.

Net result is we scale with better white stats on gear. Just like every physical damage class and every other caster class.

What's so bad about that?

Nothing at all. That would be ideal. My suspicion was some players were naively anticipating a talent that says "You now get spellpower from your Spirit" and salivating over the thought of having 200 more spellpower. The goal, as you say, is to make Spirit more useful, not to buff mages.

Q u o t e:
If the goal is to have the mage who doesn't take spirit not have significantly higher dps than the ones that do, it won't solve the problem. As long as it is higher at all, mages will avoid spirit.

Spirit does provide mana regeneration compared to non Spirit. It may be low compared to other classes, but if you have say Pyromaniac, you do gain some benefit. Spirit can't provide both more damage and more regen for the same stat (relative to similar stats) or it goes from neglected to godly. Since most mages end up with some Spirit, unless they have been farming for a long time and managed to build an amazing dps set that lacks Spirit altogether, we don't think it will be a problem.

Q u o t e:
Basically what all this QQ boils down to is that Spirit has to be useful. The disconnect seems to be between the devs and the playerbase on what the definition of "useful" is.

The devs think regen is useful. And to healers it is. To mages it is negligable.

The players think dps stats are useful. And to mages it is.

If spirit does not give a dps boost of some sort then it is not useful in the minds of the mage players. That's pretty much the basis for the issue at hand.

I agree with that and think all of the discussion about whether mana should equal energy is a distraction.

I said that a proper benefit of Spirit to mages would be for it to affect dps. But I cautioned that you should not expect your dps to go up overnight because of this change. Perhaps I was being too cautious, but I know that at least some players are hoping to get free dps out of the deal. The problem we are trying to fix here is not "mage dps is too low." The problem we are trying to fix is "mage gear has spirit, which doesn't do much for them except for a small bit of in-combat mana regen."

If you think mage dps is too low, that is a separate topic, but we would still be unlikely to fix that by suddenly giving you 10 dps for every point of spirit on your gear.

Q u o t e:
GC, I don't think that's as much of a concern as you think it is. The Mage community has said repeatedly that we expect Spirit to give a dps boost, but that we also expect our other damage spells or talents to receive some kind of balancing nerf to make up for it. We not only expect this, but we're fine with it as well. Of course, the numbers have to be worked so that Spirit at "average" levels combined with gear and talent at "average" levels does not increase or decrease dps. In the long run, at higher and better gear levels through Ulduar and into Icecrown Citadel, and in the hands of better players, the Spirit will allow us to scale as well as our caster counterparts, which is a big reason why Sunwell happened to us.

That's cool. I figure most of you would "get it" but I've been doing this long enough to know that even if we made a patch note that said "Mage spells no longer cost resources" there would still be post in all caps immediately that said THAT'S IT?! THAT'S NOT WHAT WE ASKED FOR!

We won't "Sunwell" mages. I don't make many promises, but I will as-close-to-a-promise-as-I-can-get that we will fix it if it looks like we are heading that way.

Q u o t e:
I don't think anyone here understands your argument or what you mean by "free DPS." Spirit costs us DPS, not provides it. It only improves longevity, which is a binary number (enough||not enough). They request a conversion talent (like healers get) because that off-sets the cost. Not because they want a free bonus. If you just offset the cost of Spirit, it would become a lot more attractive. The question is, how do you offset the cost but not provide free DPS?

I said mage A (little to no Spirit on gear) and mage B (Spirit on gear) would have similar dps. Currently A has higher dps because she has no "wasted stats."

I probably ended up confusing some people because I was trying to be too cautious in saying do not expect mage B >>>>> mage A.

Q u o t e:
1. You just took 5% crit away from mage's (and everybody else) due to scorch debuff being too much Rdps
2. Mages DPS is deemed "ON PAR" with everybody else, so with 5% less crit we are no longer there
3. Make SPIRIT -> CRIT like you were planning to during Wrath beta, where current levels of spirit ~= 5% crit
4. ...
5. PROFIT!

All of that logic makes sense, and we might in fact convert Spirit to crit, except for your point 2. All casters lost 5% of crit with this change. So then you would only risk falling behind melee, but we have nerfed the melee damage of many specs.

Again, this thread is long enough already that if you want to discuss mage dps, we should do that in another thread.

Q u o t e:
Hey GC :D

My thoughts:

Spirit to X conversions are kinda silly.

The conversion is just a work-around. You pay the budget for spirit, and get the budget back via talents, only inefficiently.

Most specs of mages are rarely OOM.

My spec of Arcane is the exception, and we ride the fine line of pushing our best potential dps .. managing CDs ... and if we mess up, we are wanding. Sounds like working as intended.

Pretty hard pressed to go OOM as Frost / FFB / and even TtW Fb has Clearcasting and 30% crit return. (and I think Hot streaks are free, unlike Mbarr)

Spirit needs to be used by some, and it is more "valuable" to me that most other mages. I think a wholesale revamp of spirit is wrong. There are a lot of specs abusing OOFSR, and some who spend almost zero time outside the FSR.

Spirit should allow me to maintain a higher DPS cycle, but that is arcane, there is no "mana-dump" for many, therefore spirit is meaningless.

I say blow the FSR and have spirit make spells cheaper. Talent the mana starved trees, and not on the healers, FFB, Frost, etc (your targets for regen nerf)

I do think it is a little odd that Spirit isn't value in and of itself (at least by some classes) but by what your talents can turn it into. It becomes this wild card stat. Similarly, either Spirit or mp5 always seems to win the race for best regen stat. I imagine before too long we'll take a hard look at the system overall.