[MAGE] We want a better answer

#0 - March 20, 2009, 10:55 p.m.

I know I'm being bold here, but the nature of GC's replies to posts that don't deserve replies in the first place has struck me to do so. It doesn't matter how hard you try GC, there is always going to be those posters who make commentary that doesn't make sense. This applies to every class' community.

p.s. the thread title is supposed to be humorous (and I'm terribly unoriginal). I don't expect a reply or want something better, this post is more or less a reply to GC's posts. <3

Q u o t e:
You are just going to make other classes angry with assertions like this. They probably aren’t true, are difficult to verify, and aren’t really relevant. Being better at theorycrafting does not make you more deserving of buffs.

I think the point here is that there are some very insightful players out there we’d like to see you interact with as opposed to the ones you replied to in the thread. Where is the affix for pve?

Q u o t e:
Can Frost mages raid? Of course. Is your dps 2000 below a Fire mage? Probably not. When you say we no longer plan on fixing you, that is an exaggeration. There isn’t a thing in the game that we think is done. We can improve *everything.* So when I say “Yeah, we would like to fix that” you can apply it to just about every feature in the game. You shouldn’t turn that into “ZOMG Blizzard ships broken games.” As harsh as you guys can be on our design, I promise you, we are harsher.

All I am going to say here is that I have personally seen a frost mage kicked from the group because their dps was so abysmal compared to mine. It was a pug but the point stands. I don’t know whether frost is 2000 dps behind fire and arcane, but it is definitely significant enough that your spot in a raid will not be justified.

Which is ironic seeing as you gave them the mandatory pve replenishment buff.

Q u o t e:
We can, but it will take time. Prot warriors and paladins, Holy priestsâ€¦ there are several specs that have traditionally not been taken seriously for Arenas. I apologize if you are impatient, but there are 30 specs in the game, and that’s only if you count each tree as a whole spec. Players also tend to be very intolerant when we bork PvP balance (and understandably so) by bringing up specs that traditionally were not competitive.

It’s one thing to say, “we are looking to do this over time throughout the future.” It is another thing to give us a preview of things that are being looked at for 3.1 and then not only nerf (as opposed to buff) fire but do nothing for frost.

If you had done that for those prot warriors or holy priests, the same thing would occur for them. I understand if things can’t be fit in, but do I genuinely feel as though there was no effort made to help fire, a problem that is far easier to fix than the frost one.

Q u o t e:
The way we set up the numbers, you should have more than 5% crit with Ulduar gear. There are mages now with “normal” Naxx gear (by which I mean they didn’t try to do anything really unusual or creative with gearing) that have more crit now with this change than they did before this change.

Those players either didn’t gear correctly in the first place or are in BIS arcane gear.

Honestly I don’t see it a big deal overall in raid settings though I just wanted to clarify that.

Q u o t e:
I’ll quote Narissaria here.

The big picture here is more than just dps. It is a matter of itemization, and if you don’t make spirit actually side by side just as good as the non spirit item of the same ilevel, you are essentially nerfing our dps by creating less and less non spirit gear and putting more spirit on our tier items.

Q u o t e:
I think though it is way too premature to say that is happening or will without a doubt happen.

Me too! And that’s why I’d prefer that when talking about our mechanics dps wasn’t constantly being brought up. Just because our dps is okay right now does not mean other mechanics aren’t worth looking at. It’s not “change for the sake of change” it is “change for a better game.”

Q u o t e:
As other players pointed out, he doesn’t do it every second though. There are very few situations where the damage is both constant and unpredictable (though to be fair, there are a few). And again, I didn't say that your Evocate concerns were out of line. I was just pointing out that anyone saying it is impossible to use in PvE is exaggerating.

No one is saying it is impossible to use. If people felt that way there would be a much larger outcry on the forums.

We are saying that

1. Evocation has a very high risk and penalty attached to it that no other class suffers, and can end up being interrupted by things out of a mages control.

2. As we approach Ulduar this concern is being compounded with longer fights and more aoe or random effects to worry about.

Ghostcrawler

#20 - March 21, 2009, 12:36 a.m.

Q u o t e:
It’s one thing to say, “we are looking to do this over time throughout the future.” It is another thing to give us a preview of things that are being looked at for 3.1 and then not only nerf (as opposed to buff) fire but do nothing for frost.

Okay, point taken. We will likely be much more conservative next time we talk about things we are working on. The preview would probably come much later, after we have had more time to evaluate what we are actually going to be able to get done. We tried to caveat all of that, but clearly it was insufficient. Somehow "here is what we would like to do" became a "promise" or close to it. We are just going to have to be more guarded when talking to the community. That may sound vindictive, but it's really not. Put yourself in our shoes.

Q u o t e:
It's like they nerfed our crit just to give it back to us through spirit, which doesn't address the poor itemization problems.

I spelled out pretty clearly that we were not going to buff mages as part of making Spirit more useful. A few sharp players even said "If you lower our base damage and then let Spirit improve it, that would be good." I acknowledged that was exactly what we were likely to do.

It is important that classes scale with gear, and cloth had a big stat investment in Spirit that was of little (but not zero) use to mages. Is Spirit now a more desirable that than it is on live? Yes.

Q u o t e:
what I am really concerned about is the math i have been able to do shows spirit scaling as horrible, we are even better off avoivding it now then ever before. unless spirit does something else for us too is is still useless you are better off going for straight +crit gear and using another armor spell then using molten armor.

Please share that math. Most of the Naxx mages we looked at would receive a small crit buff with this change. Those that manage to avoid having any Spirit on their gear at all may be slightly higher, but they are also sacrificing regen. While Spirit-based mage regen may not be very important to someone who only cares about big dps numbers, it is not trivial either.

Or put another way, mages who go out of their way to avoid any Spirit will not be rewarded with much higher dps than most mages. Spirit competes much better with those other stats on your gear.

Q u o t e:
I guess I can't really say that he doesn't talk to any other mages but I just wanted to make the point that there are a LOT of very knowledgeable mages out there that could give great input.

We talk to a lot of mages (and a lot of non-mages). Sometimes I wonder if it might be worth some kind of smaller, but publically-viewable forum where posters had to be invited to participate. The logistics of setting that up might be a nightmare, and anyone who didn’t make the cut might feel disparaged. It might have a strong signal to noise ratio, but also feels pretty elitist.

Q u o t e:
I understand your frustration. It does appear that GC is waffling around the point. His "players using our rules" against us is the classic paradime of "don't what we do, just do as we say." And in by doing so marginalizes our valid concerns. But don't be surprise this thread will be all for not, though.

I think you missed my point.

A lot of players come to these forums trying to get their class buffed. Not everyone is in that boat, but truthfully a lot of players are.

Here is one strategy they try: If I accuse the devs of not knowing what they are doing, then I will shame them into listening to use to redeem themselves.

Here is another: A ha! Down here in this Feral druid talent, you gave them a dps boost. Therefore you need to give it to us too or you will be in violation of your talent-design rules.

You don’t need to try and trick us to get buffs. If your class has shortcomings somewhere, bring them up. If you are logical and objective and if you avoid insults, ranting and QQ then we will almost certainly read it, and there is good chance the developers will discuss it.

Ghostcrawler

#101 - March 21, 2009, 6:02 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I think everyone knew these were only plans. Where your mistake is though, is that you presented them as possible plans for 3.1, which made every class very excited about everything.

Priest's Barrier was canceled.
Mage's Frost PvE / Fire PvP fixes were canceled.
Shaman's totems changes were canceled.
Hunter's ammo was canceled.
Warrior's fixes were cancled.

And so on. I'm sure you know this, but by announcing so many awesome stuff and canceling every one of them is worst than announcing anything. When plans turn into nothingness, I think this is why the players are disappointed. Just like Shamans and their totem huge thread. No, it's no promise, but it's teasing us, which is worst.

I think we are unlikely to do previews again.

Q u o t e:
If I proceeded to deliver the best idea this game has ever seen followed by 3 pages of dev bashing would you seriously ignore it? I don't think so. I never understood the point of these little blurbs in your posts.

Yes. We don't run these forums because we are desperate for ideas. We run them to give players a chance to give feedback. Players who can't make a civilized post risk chasing off the players we actually do want posting here. You will not convince us that the standard wild west Internet flame-a-thon is a perfectly fine way to communicate, and it is irrelvant anyway because these are our forums and we make the rules. If you don't like the rules, you don't have to participate. (It boggles my mind though how many players want to discuss forum rules instead of class mechanics.)

Really though, my comment in this case wasn't about rude players at all. It was saying that it isn't effective nor necessary to try to catch us in a "rules violation" (and I'm talking game rules, not forum rules).

Q u o t e:
You need to make mages have 5% crit from our BASE spirit + spirit from buffs (divine spirit, mark of the wild and blessing of kings). Every single point of spirit on gear should IMPROVE us rather than trying to catch up with what we were previously (3.09).

When you say "where we were previously" do you mean with Improved Scorch or not? You have, what, 5% crit with glyphed Molten Armor? I believe it requires ~575 Spirit to get to that point. The random Naxx mages I just looked up on the Armory had 300-400 Spirit unbuffed. You can get 100 with just Divine Spirit and Mark of the Wild. That was all off the top of my head, so forgive me if some numbers are off.

As I said in the other thread though, the exact conversion is something we can mess with. One to one (Spirit to Crit) would be too generous, but we have some room.

Q u o t e:
If you just added this Spirit scaling functionality to Mages baseline, instead of via Molten Armor, I would gain 253*.25 = 63.25 Crit rating. I would gain 1.38% crit. OMG!

1.38% crit is too much to give me???

If I understand you correctly, the answer is no, in fact 1.4% is probably so low that most mages would still complain about Spirit on their gear.

Q u o t e:
On a secondary point, using molten armor means that we have at most 30% of normal regen, due to pyromaniac. This has always been and will always continue to be inconsequential, unless the mana gain per spirit is significantly increased.

I'm guessing your mana from Spirit is probably 10-15% of your mana regen, raid buffed.

EDIT: Reizvoll later posted some numbers, above.

Q u o t e:
I need to just say one thing about all of this. If a class change is so unpopular that it requires you to spend as much time as you obviously have reading and answering complaints about it, chances are its not the best of ideas, even if its a buff far later down the road.

It's not a popularity contest. We have made far more controversial changes. I am only here to help explain our logic and to see if there is anything we missed. We use feedback to make informed decisions. The feedback does not make the decisions.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:

Mages only care about big dps numbers though...that's all our class does. /facepalm

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I thought about bringing this up as well. I'm not really sure what else we are supposed to care about.

Mana for one. Survivial for two.

Ghostcrawler

#102 - March 21, 2009, 6:02 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Why shouldn't molten armor be +3% crit in addition to spirit to crit? Making molten armor have a static crit increase in addition to a bonus to spirit would ensure that mages that are not picking up spirit are not getting a huge drop in dps, and would still benefit mages that have spirit on gear.

Many of these players are arguing that mages who avoid Spirit are not getting a huge drop in dps. It is also almost impossible to have no spirit from gear as a mage.

Q u o t e:
One appreciates the effort that has gone into ensuring this is not a buff. Issue is with theorycraft and patchwerk parses showing mages at the low end of raid damage, such care seems to have been a little misplaced.

This is a tricky thing to explain, but the two are not directly linked in our mind. Get mages not to hate Spirit is a task we wanted to do. Balance raid dps is another task. While changes in one place in the game always ripple down to other, we also don't design by trying to change one number that fixes everything (that number tends to get really overbound and a little fragile). This is not quite the same case, but the same logic comes up when players ask "Why can't our talents or coefficients be overpowered since our overall dps is low?" If mage dps is low, we'll adjust it. We don't need to and don't necessarily want to adjust it by making Spirit a huge dps buff.

Q u o t e:
To take a particular example, when the announcements were first made the frost mage discussion on EJ was basicly along the lines of 'i wish they would get over shatter combos already, but I'll hold off because it could be encouraging'''. Now of course its along the lines of 'that sucks, where is my pitchfork', but you would have got that at around this time anyway.

Perhaps, but at the time we were just seeing a lot of "Why won't they fix our problems?" and "What are your plans for my spec?" posts. We figured some news would encourage discussion, which it did. Like I said, I'm not sure we'd do it again.