The mage Q&A responses.

#0 - June 19, 2009, 3:32 a.m.

While I can understand--since you've already said it--that you don't want to give anyone "promises" to cling to ala the previews from the last major patch (aka Mage Fire PvP working, cookies and candies that never got handed out, etc.)

Isn't that what people really want to see out of these Q&As? Dare I say, what they expect to see from a Questions and Answers list?

I'm afraid that the two so far are vague and frustrating. They're skirting some of the issues at best, and avoiding them by restating the question as an answer at worst.

I won't say I drew nothing from it. Many of the questions were spot on! We just didn't get any real answers to many questions. But at least we know you've heard the questions.

If you can't say the answer to a question because you're not sure it will ever be acted upon--and don't want to make "promises", please remember a more valid answer is: We know the issue exits and acknowledge it. And we're working on something to improve it.

At the current rate, I'm afraid every Q&A will be responded to with nothing but groans and disappointment.

Good luck gentlemen.

#50 - June 19, 2009, 7:24 a.m.

We knew that some players would approach the Q&As as a list of buffs for their class, and thus be disappointed. But that was never the intent, and we already have channels to do that. The Q&As were to address the kinds of questions we get all the time, such as "What do you guys see as the role of the mage class?" You can find a question like that about every day. I used to answer them, but then someone would ask it again the next week without looking to even see if there had been a previous answer. As such, the Q&As were designed to be more philosophical and long-term. We knew many of them wouldn't be up until after the patch notes for instance.

Given the huge numbers of questions that were asked, we knew it would be impossible to pick the set that would please everyone so we did the best we could. Just because the question wasn't of interest to you doesn't mean it wasn't of interest to someone or they wouldn't have asked it. But we would like to keep the series going long-term, so there is a chance that a question that didn't come up this time can come up again.

I'll just touch on two common themes:

We think mage PvE damage is fine. If you are routinely getting trounced by bad players in your raid, you might consider trying to figure out how some mages are getting really good numbers.

Some players have apparently misinterpreted my comments about mana. I was trying to say that the goal is that dps casters generally should not run out of mana, provided they aren't in over their heads and make reasonable use of their tools. We don't think those tools were adequate. However, we also didn't want to turn Evocate into Innervate, as is commonly asked. Instead, we went with the Ignite change (though I suspect the number will end up being something closer to 2% instead of 1% when all is said and done). We just thought it was a more interesting mechanic and felt mage-like. Since Arcane mages don't use Ignite, we dropped the Arcane Blast cost. Frost has some PvE damage problems, but Frostbolt is already a really efficient spell -- that isn't their big issue.