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removing wards make me sad... I used that spell to reduce the damage I took tanking the mage boss in TBC.

The other things are really interesting.

Arcane Missile will change to a full proc spell which may mean other mages will want to cast it.

The fire changes are really tasty and ignite's change mean no more lost damage. The rolling factor will also be gone too but I still think it is cool.

I do worry that Arcane's mastery will be a ***** to balance. Especially with potions being 1 per battle. Because, frankly, playing a class that gets weaker over time would be kinda lame. But, we'll see. I wouldn't mind Fire/Frost becoming FotM.

I really like the new abilities though. Interesting and totally unexpected. Would be really fun if you can have more than 1 orb at a time. Just fill a boss's room with them. XD I don't care if it is way lower DpS, it would be AWESOME.

I thought ghosting went dead when FoF got changed, Jay. Did I miss something?

I remember Blizz saying that hit caps were going to be way higher, and not really feasible for any class to reach. I think the reasoning was that they just don't really want caps, because they'd prefer all stats always be helpful, even if they have a declining benefit.

For instance, atm, when you are at or near hit cap, a piece of gear with hit on it could be a huge ilvl upgrade for you but be a DpS loss. They want that piece to still be an upgrade, even if not a huge one.

I like the Mage changes, but won't stay just for them. The Shaman/Druid changes sound interesting enough that I may try it out though. By that I mean I'll level one or both in WotLK and decide based on current style (because neither are getting a massive overhaul, just getting their rotations cleaned up).

That is kind of dumb to make the hit caps unreachable (I guess similar to a 2H-derp DW (meant melee that use 2 1handers lol) melee where it isn't feasable to go for it), but the problem is wasting a 3 second cast on something that misses is a bigger deal than a single GCD of rage/energy that you get back in 2 seconds.

Edited, Apr 10th 2010 11:39pm by Anobix

If the hit-cap theory is correct, it just feels a little bit more... dangerous? Assuming it works this way for every class, Blizz will have to scale boss health pools with in the back of their minds that, say, 1 out of every 4 attacks will miss. Which means health on bosses has to be a bit lower than they're currently scaled. Which means that if you get a lucky roll of non-misses in a fight the boss is **** easy while next time you draw the fight out one minute because of a surplus of misses. Maybe I'm just panicking without a reason and this is barely an issue, but it is something that comes to mind and serves as food for thought...

Assuming they keep the standard 83% chance to hit a boss, then there will be a standard 17% chance to miss. Most likely it will not have dimininshing returns until cap, so grabbing a piece of gear with hit on it will pretty much always be an upgrade as long as the hit 'damage points equivalent' is better than what you are getting from haste/crit/spellpower/etc.



Oh, and additional comments/blue posts were done:


Flame Orb
Flame Orb is not channeled. It may have a cast time, but after that is fire and forget. We want to try the line idea because there aren’t any spells that work that way currently. Giving it a target to follow makes it feel more like a fancy dot – useful perhaps, but nothing that feels really new. It will be balanced for single-target damage, but if you can launch it in such a way that it will hit multiple targets, then you’re just being awesome. (Source)

Wall of Fog
Wall of Fog is not channeled. We don’t know yet how wide it will be, but wide enough so that it feels more like a trip-wire than an area like Frost Trap. (Source)

Hot Streak
We like the basic gameplay of Hot Streak. With lower crit rates all around, we hope that it will feel more like a bonus when it’s up rather than a penalty when it refuses to stay up. We may lower the magnitude overall for the same reason. (Source)

Arcane Missiles
On Arcane Missiles, the basic spell is pretty cool. The problem is the way the spell works makes the current design hard to balance. It’s either too expensive and low damage or the opposite problem. This is particularly true at low level, and meanwhile we think the mage experience at low level is also a little too repetitive. The change is that you can’t hit Arcane Missiles whenever you want. The icon is just grayed out. However, when you deal damage, you have a chance to get Arcane Missiles to light up and then you definitely want to hit it. At higher levels Fire and Frost may eventually phase it out in preference for other spells, or if we like the mechanic, it may be something even Fire and Frost do, just less often than Arcane. (Source)

Mastery Bonuses
On the topic of mastery bonuses, understand that this is a new design for us and very few people have seen them in action yet. We run the risk of specific masteries being so generic that the mastery stat isn’t interesting or so complex that what players really like about playing a certain spec gets turned on its head. This is the kind of thing that will require a lot of iteration and the reason we’re trying to cover the whole gamut of relatively complex to relatively simple to see what feels right. (Source)

Deathfrost
The reason behind Deathfrost (Frost mastery) isn’t to get Frost to spam Frostbolt more. It’s to get mages to spam Frostbolt less. If you hit nothing but Frostbolt, you’re wasting the Deathfrost bonus. (Source)

Food and Water
We’re shifting food and water to higher level because we don’t want players to have so much down time at lower level. We’re not trying to make it harder to level; we’re reducing the need to drink or eat so we’re bumping the actual food and water (though it’s really foodwater in the case of mages) higher. (Source)

Mana Adept
The intent behind Mana Adept (Arcane mastery) is that Arcane currently has a pretty fun mana management game going, at least at relatively high level. We thought it would be fun to extend that concept even further to where Arcane mages that use the mechanics to keep their mana high would do higher dps. I find many of the predictions that Arcane is doomed in PvE based on the very limited information you have at the moment to be quite premature. (Source)

Time Warp vs Bloodlust
On Time Warp vs. Bloodlust, we are really trying to give groups flexibility in who they bring to 10 player raids to an even greater extent than we did in Lich King. We heard over and over that shaman still felt like the one mandatory class in any raid. The more we hear “now there will be no reason to take me over X class / spec” the happier we will be. The reason should be that you’re a good player, not that your mere presence makes everyone else perform better. It’s fun to feel more powerful in a group – we get that, and we aren’t going to completely marginalize group synergy. But it needs to come secondary to the skill of the players involved. (Source)

Fire Ward / Dampen Magic
I understand some mages really like Fire Ward or Dampen Magic. Perhaps “no clear role” wasn’t the best choice of words, but we are trying to remove mechanics from the game that we think aren’t really cutting it. When asking players to put more buttons on their action bars from these new spells, we only think it’s fair to try and get some bar space back from the least interesting spells. Don’t worry so much about balance at this stage. Many things will need to be tweaked. Worry more about whether it ever felt like a fun decision to use these spells. (Source)

Rogue/Mage/Priest Arena Comp
For everyone focusing on the RMP Arena comp, I really think you’re going to see a shift to more PvP concerns in Cataclysm being about Battleground balance. There will still be players playing Arenas for sure, but a lot of the players currently doing Arenas are going to shift to rated BGs instead. (Source)

Healing reduction effects in Cataclysm
"All equivalent debuffs" means if you have the debuff today, you will have it in Cataclysm, but at 20% healing received. To avoid further confusion, we are talking about Mortal Strike, Furious Strikes, Wound Poison, Aimed Shot, Permafrost and Improved Mind Blast.

We are also strongly considering having all of these effect cause the same debuff, called Mortal Wounds, which is a physical effect and therefore undispellable. This allows the behavior to be more consistent regardless of who is applying it and lets us consider things like how easy it should be to dispel poisons (since Mortal Wounds would not be affected).

Heals will be smaller and health pools will be larger in Cataclysm, so we don't expect Mortal Wounds to feel as mandatory as it does today, but this is clearly the kind of thing that will require a lot of playtesting and feedback.

I don't know about that. In PvP, having it be unpredictable would be useful. In PvE, knowing exactly where it's going to go is better, IMO.

I assume it will be the normal range of scorch/etc. If you mean if the person you target continues to run away, I'd guess that it would go for another second or two then fizzle/splode.

Oh man, druids and priests are going to hate us. I think they're confused on the arcane thing. For me, I don't doubt arcane will be able to put out the damage and be useful in a raid, it's that it really doesn't sound like fun to worry that much about mana. I can handle "using a limited resource." I don't want to be the guy bugging the druids for innervates every fight.

I'm imagining that they will either buff ABarr or give us a new spell. Because:

A. The spec needs to stay at top mana as long as possible. AB Spam will NOT allow us to do this. I imagine the spell will be changed some, but not a lot.

B. The rotation right now is just too worrisome. Assuming that AM has a high proc chance, but below what MB had, we just can't do it. And our only option would be to unload AB on Mbarr, which would be a huge DpS loss at the moment unless AM is getting a *massive* buff to accomodate for those fewer casts.

I'm imagining this:

1. AB does more damage at the base, but gets a lower +% when fully charged.

2. Some unknown spell (or Abarr) will have a decent spell damage, but low mana cost. However, like Abarr, you can't spam it. It could maybe have a DoT or buff attached when you cast it with enough AB procs.

3. AM will *not* benefit from AB, which will last longer (instead of 3 seconds, maybe 6 or 9). If it is going to be strong enough that Blizz is considering letting it be a part of Fire and/or Frost rotations at end game, as well as Arcane, then it buffed by AB would be ludicrous. But they can't just lower AB's power when AM is such an RNG dependent skill--that makes the DpS of an Arcane Mage extremely erratic. So, I imagine we will weave in our AMs while using AB and this other skill.

What I am picturing for the spell is something like this:

ABx1- +A% damage
ABx2- +B% damage
Abx3- +C% damage and a haste buff.
ABx4- +D% damage and a DoT

The buffs from 3 and 4 will not stack with themselves, so you'll need to stack your ABs high enough to try and keep their uptime as high as possible, without wasting the Mana to go to 3 or 4 if you don't need to reapply the de/buff.

What this means, in my vision, is that you'll need to know when to use AM and when not to. It (hopefully) won't play like you should just hit AM whenever it is up, regardless. I think it should be a significant DpS boost to hit it at some times, and a loss at others. Knowing when is part of it.

So you're priority system would be something like:

Apply Haste buff via ABx3+spell (maybe Abarr)
Apply DoT via ABx4+spell
AM if available
AB x2+spell

If this ends up being fun, they could add effects to ABx1 or something, so you'd need to keep up 3 de/buffs and ABx2 would be your damage rotation for when none of those are needed. It doesn't have to be true that the percent buffs from AB need to be liner, either, or even that 4 is more powerful than 3 (and so on). Maybe ABx1 is significantly weaker than ABx2, which is significantly stronger than ABx3.

Would make the mage class much more dynamic, imo.

My thoughts regarding the Arcane mastery;

A) They haven't worked out the details themselves yet. Blizz doesn't know yet whether they'll give us an additional ability or in other ways change the way arcane plays (save from things like the Arcane Missiles change)

B) People are looking at it the wrong way. Possibly, you shouldn't go "omg it's a DPS loss whenever I'm not at 100%" but instead say "I gain a ******** of extra DPS when I'm above 50% mana". I don't see it as an unlikely option that Arcane mages will spend most parts of the fight actually on low-medium amounts of mana because they deal up to two times as much DPS as other classes with a full pool. It might be balanced so that the point where the mage deals 'average' DPS (compared to all other DPS classes) is at 50% or 60% of his mana pool, not 100%. The only problem with this scale of balance is the one pointed out earlier where arcane mages will have aggro problems at the start of every fight.

C) Rather than changing the rotation, Blizz might just make it easier to keep your mana up as arcane, with all spells costing ********* of mana but also some spells providing mana and possibly ways to speed up the cast time on the next Evocation in that rotation.

These might all be true or all false - just thinking out loud here as I don't feel we should be jumping at extremes. Especially with healer mana becoming more valuable in Cataclysm, I sincerely doubt they'll change the class in such a way that druids will want to innervate their mages.

As a reply to Anobix; you're assuming the Fire Orb actually has a target. Fair enough. I was imagining it as a non-targeted spell that just travelled away from you in a line. I guess the sentence saying it might "explode upon reaching it's target" would insinuate it did have a target, but I'm not entirely sure yet - if it did would just be a boring AOE-kind of Fireball.

What I'm saying is that being at 100% mana would give such a huge boost it balances out for the 'most of the time' you spend at 50%. Tbh, I don't see people's problems with it - if it indeed works like that, it's completely similar to a cooldown? "A +% buff that you don't always get"? Which is also why mages wouldn't be getting a lot of innervates - being at 100% mana is nice for DPS, but if it means your healers will run out you'll wipe anyway. And you aren't 'supposed' to be at full mana all the time anyway, because it would provide you with constant sick DPS. Similar to a cooldown that wouldn't have any CD.

That said, I'll wait for more info on it before judging. I feel it could work, but I'm not sure what way Blizzard wants to go with this.