The New Real Top Mage Questions

Those are good questions and sadly I don't have time right now to answer them all. I will try and address the infamous "pace yourself" comment.

First, I'm talking about PvE here, and that means I'm going to skip over Frost for the moment. Sorry. We know how Frost should work in PvE and we need to get it there without making it too good in PvP. With the Arcane changes in 3.2.2 mages should now have two viable raiding specs again, which is an improvement. I ask that you not derail this thread into a Frost discussion.

To be brief to the point of simplicity, we see the Fire playstyle as being more about lining up your cooldowns to maximize your damage (and that improves trinkets as well as spells). Mana is a consideration the way it is for most mana users, but shouldn't be at the fore front of every decision you make and you do have ways of restoring mana if you get into trouble.

Arcane is a little different. We want Arcane to care about mana more. Sorry if that offends casters who think their output should be unlimited, but if it really bugs you, I suggest you try Fire. A lot of Arcane mages like the way mana works for their spec, and Arcane Blast is pretty obviously designed with that gameplay in mind.

What we're trying to do is give Arcane two rotations: the low mana, lower dps version and the higher mana, higher dps version. The first rotation would mean doing things like keeping Blast at 3 stacks, and the second would mean going into 4 stacks. Your trade-off for going to the expensive rotation would be that you could do higher dps than Fire if and when you had enough mana to keep that cycle going. This then becomes where the player skill of Arcane comes in -- knowing when you can afford to step it up for max dps and when you need to pace yourself.

I say all that because we're still tweaking the Arcane numbers for 3.2.2 and that might include increasing the mana cost of stack 4, since the free Missile Barrage procs are already a pretty generous mana break as it is. I know some players will try and keep the 4 stack Arcane Blast up all the time and will then call it a class design problem when they run OOM. That's what those short cooldown Innervates are for. We also might lower the duration of the Arcane Blast buff / debuff to make sure Arcane Barrage is the clear choice for when you are time constrained (like say you have to move or do something else).

This means we are asking a little more out of Arcane mages. To be honest, some of them responded negatively to the Arcane buff in 3.2.2 because they felt like they had to sacrifice too much of what they enjoyed about the playstyle (which includes mana as a potentially limiting resource). We are trying to nail that sweet spot while still boosting sustained Arcane dps.

The goal is NOT to push every mage into Arcane next patch because it's the new flavor of the month for highest theoretical dps. We don't want you to have to regem and everything whenever we come out with a new patch and a new spec is on top. We want you to have a choice between Fire and Arcane (and maybe someday Frost). Arcane will "beat" Fire sometimes, but not all the time.

I know that's a lot of philosophy dumped quickly, and doubtless it will spawn a lot of other questions, but that's the idea in a nutshell. Try and take it at the high-level spirit in which it is offered instead of trying to read too much into every word I chose. :)

EDIT: I should have put the smiley face after Innervate. The intent of Arcane is that you have to watch your mana, but also have solutions for dealing it, principally Evocation.

Q u o t e:

That's how I read it. And assuming that is the case, I personally very much appreciate the fact that GC took the time to share some information about Blizz's goals and outlook for mages, especially since we have been asking for it for so long. I admit that I can be pretty naiive, but I'm really surprised by the number of people attacking Blizz for daring to have ideas about their own freaking game.

Heh.

Indeed, I write most of my posts from the point of view of designer intent, not a description of what is going on in the game. I assume most of you know what is going on in the game, and any direct discussions therein tend to lead to arguments about how numbers are measured or who is or is not out of touch. (Case in point when I say we are happy with Fire mage damage). My point was that we don’t want Fire / Frostfire to have to worry about mana to the extent that Arcane does. Arcane is more about pacing. Fire is more about responding to what is going on in the fight. That is not to say that Arcane should run OOM constantly or that Fire has an unalienable right to infinite mana. Try not to take my comments to illogical extremes. :)

When I say we want Fire to be about cooldowns, I meant that lining up your spells at the right time is the hallmark of a great Fire mage. I know a lot of players will say either LOL mages just spam one button, or else LOL mage dps is entirely RNG. I don’t believe either to be true, and the evidence supporting this conclusion is that there are mages who can do much higher damage than other mages, consistently and with similar gear. This suggests there is a much higher skill component to mage dps than even some mages want to acknowledge. A lot of that skill component for Fire / Frostfire comes in doing things at the right time (which we hope to contrast with Arcane and ultimately Frost).

What those things are you are supposed to manage come in several tiers: first are Scorch, Living Bomb and Hot Streak. Yes Hot Streak has an RNG component, but not entirely so. Players still have some control over it.

Second are things like Icy Veins, Combustion, Molten Fury, trinkets and even things like Flame Caps. Yes, I know that both Fire and Frostfire mages don’t always take all of those talents. A note on Combustion in a minute.

Third are more external cooldowns like say Bloodlust and Power Infusion. Yes, other classes benefit from these too. But mages can inflate their damage dramatically when they line these up with their other cooldowns. In the BC days, a mage who really focused on that last 20% of a fight could see their dps nearly double. (I acknowledge this was a bigger factor when Combustion was a bigger contributor.)

Fourth are factors that have less of an effect overall. I’m talking about things like PoM and Firestarter (not included in most raiding builds), and Focus Magic and Torment the Weak (not trivial, but generally up nearly all the time too).

Combustion isn’t good enough right now. We get that. Fire used to be more about cooldown stacking when Combustion meant more. The problem is that we’re happy with Fire damage. We don’t generally like to nerf a spec in order to buff a talent unless things are really, really off. We’ll eventually (3.3?) fix Combustion, because it’s a fun talent. But we aren’t going to do it in such a way that just grants some “free dps” unless of course mages need it at that time. If you disagree that Fire is performing well, then I can understand how you’d disagree with our course of action here.

Q u o t e:
1. On what basis you stated that "The problem is that we’re happy with Fire damage."
is 10% less single target dps compared to other pures fine?

GC: I'm really here to talk about the design direction for the mage specs. We think Fire damage is fine.
Player: Do you think Fire damage is fine?
GC: ...

Q u o t e:
2. What percentage of mages does receive "power infusion" in their raid? Alliance does not even have bloodlust.

Still playing vanilla? :)

Q u o t e:
It's not the damage or the rotation. It's the fact that our dps can fluctuate substantially because of RNG between fights. It all depends on the lucky crit rate for the duration of the fight. For Example, A mage could have 50% chance to crit. However, the actual crit rate for the duration for a fight could be as low as 40% or even as high as 70%. The mage could have easily seen a 1500 dps difference between fights because of that terrible RNG. We understand your view on the good mage/bad mage thing. It's Consistency Consistency Consistency.

The Fire tree tries to advertise itself pretty well as being all about crit. Crit is a random number. If consistency is very important to you, I can see how Fire might be a frustrating spec.

But again, if RNG was all that mattered then there would not be mages out there with such consistently high dps.

Q u o t e:
You're being disingenuous here.

Players are not complaining about crit. They're complaining about the distribution of events when you require two specific outcomes (crit twice in a row) in order to produce another event.

I'm not trying to be disingenuous. I understand that from a player perspective maximizing your dps is a goal and one way to do that is by maximizing your consistency. I'm saying we added that RNG element with Hot Streak knowing what it would do and we're happy with the way it works.

Q u o t e:
Stacking drums/iv/skull/hero/pot/combustion during our 20% heroism on brut was one of the funnest things ive done in this game. I would love to see fire get back into using cooldowns instead of the same thing over and over.

Yes, we agree it was fun and that is more in line with our vision for Fire.

Q u o t e:

So, this is why you gave mages *A LOT* of mana reductions on spells in the last patch?

Yes, that's exactly why we did it. We thought mana was becoming too limiting for mages. That doesn't mean you are supposed to ignore it.

I can't count the number of threads I've seen today alone that basically argue "I shouldn't have to worry about my resources." That's not the vision for WoW.

Q u o t e:
The "timing" is irrelevant. You repeatedly say that you see good mages putting out good DPS consistently and bad mages QQing on the forums. I think you're pointing a lot of fingers though at good mages who are bringing up valid concerns and it makes everyone feel like they aren't good enough. In fact, every time I read one of your comments, I think to myself, "Who are these good mages that he is talking about?"

I can't name names, Enthorn, but they post on a lot of the same forums you do. There is a big discrepancy between good mages and bad mages, and the main delta is skill. I use that argument to try and counter the persistent memes that mages just spam one button or that Fire dps is entirely RNG dependent.

If you think you should be doing more damage than rogues or locks or whatever, that's a different issue. But I suspect you can look at high vs. low mage dps and know what someone is doing wrong.

Q u o t e:
The changes look good. We can't just sit there spamming AB 4 ever.

We'll see. Mages have always been big theorycrafters so there are a lot of discussions going on and it's fun to try and keep up with it all. At the very least I see mages in good guilds saying "Hmmm, I might have to try Arcane" which is something I didn't see much a couple of months ago, so that's nice.

It is non-trivial to try and get pure dps classes to use more than one spec in PvE. Not impossible, not not easy.

Q u o t e:

This translate to the following:

Blizzard does not care what players think and Blizzard does whatever Blizzard wants.

To the cynical-minded perhaps. I'd say we do care very much about what you think (or I wouldn't spend so much time trying to understand it) but that doesn't mean we implement changes just because a few or even a lot* of players say "Hey, I think this thing should work like this instead." People buy Blizzard products, in part, because they like the way they are designed. It's irresponsible for us to turn that task over to the community, no matter how clever, passionate or dedicated that community might be. But don't take that (as the community often does) to the opposite extreme of thinking your feedback is irrelevant.

* - And you can't pretend for a moment that any of you speak for the majority. Sorry.

Q u o t e:
I hope you are still browsing this thread GC, can we get a blue post at some point to validate our utility with Amplify / Dampen. I believe it is great but 95% of raid-leaders and healers would disagree. Most look at the "frequency of incoming magical damage" but the part that is glossed over is what actually is amplified / dampened in a raid encounter.

I think some of the confusion / concern is justified. Using those spells felt like it used to be a big deal -- not critical perhaps, but helpful. It does seem like they have fallen off the radar a little.

Q u o t e:
I'd rather see some GC responses regarding imp scorch debuff since its been relatively avoided by devs so far.

It's going to be hard to word this in a way that won't get misinterpreted, but I'll give it a shot. Overall we have no problem with someone having to do something that is a personal dps loss for the good of the group. It works out okay overall. The Scorch debuff is probably too extreme though.