The mage secret.

#0 - April 20, 2009, 3:53 a.m.

Blizz, the cat's out of the bag on what mages are doing in PvE with dual specs and buffing Focus Magic then spec'ing back to FFB.

This is a formal request to not change this. It's the only thing making FFB viable again. It is almost as an unintended fix to a broken spec.

If you do decide to call this a bug, and not an unintended fix, than please give frost/FFB a buff in the range of 6% crit in order to make up for this as it seems this is what is beginning to make FFB/Frost a bit more PvE viable. That, or make Focus Magic a trainable spell.

oh, any mage saying ..."shhh"...

It's all over EJ, Mage forums and everywhere else, people are blogging about it. Might as well make an open discussion about it and see if they were to fix it, how it would effect our class.

Maybe it's better to just put it out there and show that it's making a broken spec in terms of DPS viable again.

Oh..

DON'T NERF ME AGAIN BRO, we're already low on the meters.

Ghostcrawler

#27 - April 20, 2009, 11:33 p.m.

It's not THAT much of a secret. :) It's rare that we don't know about a tactic once more than a couple of players are using it.

I'm going to restate the problem here since this will likely get quoted a lot. The dual-spec feature can't currently wipe buffs that you have already cast on other players when you drop that spec. It is in our plans for that to happen. At first, we figured it wasn't a big deal for 3.1 because it mostly affected things like Improved Mark of the Wild (cast MotW, then change spec to a spec that didn't "waste" the points on it).

However, we do think it has gotten to be a bigger problem for a couple of talents, including Focus Magic and Hunger for Blood, so are liable to hotfix those sooner. The goal is not to so much to nerf classes taking advantage of this "tactic." We are very concerned about anything that will make dual spec feel mandatory. If we're at the point where mages feel like they can't take advantage of the feature because they have to use one spec on Focus Magic (and then have to annoyingly swap specs every 30 min or whatever), then it is time to make the change.

Competitive dps is always a concern. If we think this change will really cripple mage dps (which I think is a little hard to argue at this point), then we'd prefer to buff you in other ways rather than force you to play in a way that feels tedious.

Again: you can all assume that long-term the feature will work that if you swap specs, every buff you cast will be removed. Buff specs were not at all the point of the featue.