Mage against WarlockFollow

Mages do not utterly suck at PvP. Fire mages don't have a great amount of control in PvP situations (e.g. why talk about dragon's breath unless you're deep fire), frost mages have much greater control. With abundant roots and snares, ice block, and a pet, the frost mage is the PvP spec.

I do agree that mages are currently on the shorter end of the stick in Arenas, but their time will come. It is like every other class in WoW... it gets buffed & nerfed in cycles. Oh... and people don't have access to just 1 character, but you can have multiple characters on a realm. If you don't like the way mages are being treated now, roll a hunter and play with that for a while. Ultimately the choice is yours, and you sound rather angry.

As a 70 warlock, I get passed by in favor of mages for lots of instances (especially heroic) because the mage CC is the best in the game (takes targets out of combat for extended periods of time, and is recastable on a given target). I believe that mages are *highly* sought after in PvE environments. That, to me, is more where WoW excels, rather than in arena or dueling.

My 2 cents.

Blizzard is a company that makes good games. Mages, being one of their creation, comes along with weak points that other classes can exploit.

Basically, Mages are powerful when they have sufficient time (though only a few seconds) to complete the casting of their high-damage spells. Any class that can disrupt this casting time have an easy time against mages.

Mages are weak against direct hits and anything that can disrupt their casting. Pets, Hunter's shots, and warlock's damage-over-time spells are all aimed at keeping their opponents busy and distracted.

The relationship between rogue and mages is a carbon copy of that between asassin and soceress in Diablo 2

As a sidenote, if we look at the history of Warcraft, warlocks are once mages who diverge into practicing shadow magicks. Almost as naturally as mages who perfect their combat skills against normal people (kiting and freezing warriors, soldiers, sharp weapons etc), warlocks naturally perfect their spells against their nearest kin (mages). Nevertheless, they have the same weakness as their mage brethen: low health and weak against direct hits.

Simply get the two set bonus from T4 gear.

if you dont have the raid dps then go arcane, not frost as many of the mages go now...silly mages

news flash. arcane isn't the best raid build anymore. even with T5.



yes, pve gear performs so well in pvp...

i'll ignore that and ask you why you think a class should be considered balanced if they absolutely depend on a few specific items to even function?

My Feral Druid in crappy healing gear (+600 healing) kept an AP Mage alive through several Horde attempts to take over the Goldmine in Arathi Basin.

Instead of wearing my super S1 Feral gear, I switched to the crappy healer gear and kept him alive. He took out everything. Nothing lived. Everything died.

Including me.

Though that wasn't the Mage's fault. Mortal Strike apparently has a new damage scaling factor based on "percentage of enemy's remaining health" built into it. It now deals damage equal to 120% of my remaining health, regardless of which form I'm in.

2k Mortal Strike crit on 200+ resilience and 16k armor rating is hurtful.

Edited, Apr 1st 2008 2:49am by Mazra

i'm not trying to be offensive, i'm not an angry, raving zealot: i'm stating things quite calmly and very reasonably. it's not rude to point out facts and try to explain your own ideas.

i have to think long and hard in order to not be any more brutally frank than is absolutely necessary.

as for my personal opinion about the way blizzard balances pvp... at first, they claimed that each class was balanced against each other class (that is, 1v1!) in a circular "rock, paper, scissors" manner. then they claimed that people who weren't doing well in pvp were simply not geared or spec'd for it -- a ludicrous idea and a bald faced lie since it was entire classes that were not showing up on the stat boards, and the armory could confirm that gear distribution was relatively equal considering blizzard's itemization. now they're trying to say that it's natural for some classes to do poorly 1v1 because they're trying to balance the game around 5v5 and larger-scale BG combat.

this last idea is a cleverly devised pile of *********

if it were true, then blizzard would have been balancing pvp around content that didn't exist until arenas went live. but i suppose it's also possible that their standard of balance has changed according to content, so i leave this as the weakest plausible argument.

logically, it's absurd to balance an individual class around group content because group make-up is extremely varied and not even blizzard can know who will make teams with who. in other words, it restricts the viable combinations of party make-up -- and arbitrary restrictions to players' otherwise perfectly legal capabilities is nothing less than ****** design. when a DM forbids the player wizard to cast any divination spells just because it would ruin the plot, the DM is a moron and the players need to find someone who can cook up a real campaign.

in practice, the work of a group is never performed equally. anyone who's ever heard of a damage/healing meter knows. in 5v5, the weakest classes' slack gets picked up by everyone else -- and therefor the weakest class needs to be cut by the team for the team's benefit. which means that individual classes can still be imbalanced and that it's just as bad as class imbalance is in 1v1. it just might be harder to detect because the group's performance is averaging over the crapadelic performance of their mage.

you don't see the warrior getting focus fired down. it's the mage. they aren't worth the CC. you sit on the healer so he can't do much and just three-shot the mage as soon his ice block drops.

how telling.

I'm going to look past the standard mage QQ for just a minute here. Pre-TBC the classes were extremely unbalanced, but the paper-rock-scissors scheme was very obvious. The imbalance was due to the fact that things like warlock could defeat a large number of classes while paladin could only beat 1 or 2. However, winning against those classes was a virtual assurance.


With the rise of arena a great many things have been changes to balance PvP less around 1v1 and more into group combat. A major change was the duration of CCs. 20 seconds of sheep is bad, but 20 seconds of fear is unstoppable. Literally, some classes could not win against a pair of well played warlocks because there simply weren't enough ways to avoid their CCs. The introduction or resilience seriously hurt ret pallies as well as destro locks and most mages. Higher resil totals have removed certain specs from the arena as just being too crit dependent and forced others to shift tactics to adapt.




Only an idiot would balance classes individually when they all have to interact. Especially in a PvP setting, certain abilities have to be limited and restricted to maintain balance. Classes will always have certain counters. Even in table topping, casters will defeat fighters, rogues will defeat casters, and so on and so forth. Games with group content are SUPPOSED to be balanced around the group. Yes, this does create situations where your group is just completely inviable. Why have you never encountered this in your scrubby little D&D games? Because first off, many campaigns are made FOR YOU, which would allow your unorthodox composition to thrive. (I also find it comical that your appeal to better balance happened to be one of the most poorly designed RPGs of all time. D&D was the prototype for modern gaming and it shows. D&D blazed a trail but the road was paved by systems like L5R, Shadowrun and V:TM.)

It is even more likely, however, that only a group of idiots would manage to put together a group without a single spell caster, healer, or negotiator, even in the care-bear table top realm that is D&D. This carries over directly to MMOs. Mages play a very simple role in 3s+ and BG play. Locking out healers, harassing melee and providing essential offensive support are all "mage jobs" that can be performed even under duress.



In a 5 man or 5v5 the weakest performance should still be stronger than whatever you're up against. There are certain classes mages play very well with and others that they don't work as well with. A mage's main problem is going to be his mana pool, and while it may be quicker to focus fire it down in a standard 3s situation, I've found that a mage backed by a disc priest can be exceptionally hard to take down and if you put a ret pally onto that same 3s team what you have is a mage who will be far more powerful than you would initially anticipate. Given IB, PS, BoP and PW:S that mage will take far more punishment than you want it to. The key? Building groups that mages can work with, rather than being a nub, dropping your mage into any old team and wondering why you aren't getting anywhere.




Protip: If you want to survive focus fire, try arenaing with classes that can help you with that. Druids and Disc Priests make very good healers for you because they can set you up before you get attacked as well as use their CC to buy you some breathing room. Pallies are a bit easier to control but also provide very good benefits. If you're getting focused down, though, I have to wonder what the rest of your team is doing.

A well geared mage can technically just blow the problem up. Locks without high resil aren't much tougher to hurt than a mage, especially at low level. The key is just hitting him hard enough that he's dead before he fears you.

And about knowing what the other classes can and most likely will do i don't mean you have to research them for hours and hours roll a class to 70 to know their moves i'm saying the simple stuff that you see everytime you go against them such as
locks=fear dots drains
shamans=windfury crits frost and earth shocks with silence
rogues= stunlock vanish Cloak of shadows
warriors= intercept spell reflect and hamstring
druids=cyclone fast melee hits and changing forms to avoid snares
priests= aoe fear Dots and quick heals to themselves
hunters= basically depeding on their spec is how you handle them
BM take out their pet fast
MM forget their pet take THEM down fast
just simple stuff that you know each class is going to do EVERY time can make pvp so much easier
you know it's going to happen so just be ready for it
most classes you can out range and other classes you just have to be right up in their face to get the job done
but if you still just aren't doing what you want in pvp maybe you just aren't meant for it

i've never played a game of D&D in my life. so your personalized insults are really rather wasted. also, your fanboy is showing and i'd rather not have to see that little thing. i alluded to the game to make a point which you simply didn't understand. the scenario is that players' abilities are being restricted arbitrarily and unexpectedly to ease the task of the game developer. players feel cheated and rightfully so.

second, if you actually knew the facts of the matter, you would know that melee classes and hunters dominate WoW pvp. this is a problem of itemization and game mechanics (spell pushback for instace). items could be tweaked, but various game mechanics are permanent and crippling.



it's selfish and unrealistic to demand that the entire team be created to help the mage kill things. why should anyone choose a mage who requires another or two players to support him in order to do his job? there are other classes who the job better and don't absolutely require a certain other class to protect him. we aren't talking about how awesome any TWO classes *can* be, we're discussing the problems of the mage class compared to any other.

so far you haven't presented any arguments, you've merely complained that i have good points and you don't have any compelling evidence that i'm wrong. go take current census data. compile armory reports. go look at the publicly posted pvp stats. what do the facts say? why do you suppose things are the way they are? not how you think they should be, or how you like to pretend things are in your magical universe.

basically, you're too lazy to do your homework and then you show up here trying to drag your balls around and give pep-talks to make everyone feel better for playing a weak class. no, loki, you're wrong. and you don't understand why.

If you're POM, I'm assuming you have Imp Counterspell. What you have to do is force them to use a big heal, so you could do AM spam/AB spam to take chunks of health down and then CS their heal, then POM Pyro -> AM (with AP).

The problem with druids is all those instant heals, and God help you if they actually try to attack you back. ;-) Resto shammies can be a royal pain as well (but for all the totems).