Mage Review (Mages Rejoice)

[Jeff Kelly]

I thought the main shaman issue they were going to address would be PVE effectiveness and the raid effectiveness

Well, that is exactly what mages had hoped for also. The shaman talent review is another slap in the face for mages. An already quite great class gets another buff, while mages had most of their concerns ignored. Hey at least we get 200 more armor points and better bread. Yeah!

[Jeff Kelly]

-one flex review / change that may go in is that they may rework arcane subltety so the aggro reduction that used to be part of the talent will be spread evenly over all 3 trees (ie, Burning soul may pick up some flat aggro reduction to go with its cast time protection)

Oh great so PvE players will have to spend additional talent points to stay effective and you will still have aggro reduction only for one spel school.

- another one they mentioned was another fluff spell added (in the form of droppable spell books in dungeons) that will let you chose different animal forms for your polymorph spell.  Turtle, Chicken, Pig, etc.  Supposedly to assist with figuring out who pollied what mob in large raid encounters like Domo / etc.

That should have been in from day one. Adding this as a fluff spell that drops sucks though. Another thing that was mentioned countless times during the review phase by mages but which was ignored.

[Paelos]

Well, the number crunchers haven't gone to work yet but.. those look like PVP buffs.

I thought the main shaman issue they were going to address would be PVE effectiveness and the raid effectiveness of totems.     Hey, this is great for me, if I ever come back it'll be on a more casual basis and that means PVP.  Now I can either make an even more kick ass melee shaman or a lightning bolt chucker with my ZHC and 6/8 tier 2 armor.

Way to open the door for more nerf shaman cries while sticking it to the raiders. Somewhere Fabricated is smiling :)

Yes, that's what I see as well. They are buffing shamans for pvp, and that's totally ridiculous. It's like buffing pallies for pvp, which I don't think they did because they were already the defender gods of the alliance. I can understand the frustration of the shamans for raiding as this is totally the wrong direction to go for that class.

[SurfD]

Offical new round of Mage talent tweaks are in:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-mage&T=918906&P=1

- Highlights of some of these changes include:

- aggro reduction has been established in each tree and should be more reliable, as it is no longer based on crits.

- Some brand new abilities

- Added functionality on previous abilities

- The prereq. for Shatter has been changed for the AoE kiters ;)

- moved some early tier talents to make things more accessible

Note: These are a quick list of what tweaks they made over the origional review list, not the complete list of new talents.

Arcane:
Tier1: Arcane Subtlety - Reduced ranks, aggro reduce effects arcane only
Tier2: Magic Absorption(New) - Ranks 5 - When you resist a spell, you regain 1/2/3/4/5% of your max. mana and increases all resistances by 2/4/6/8/10
Tier2: Wand Specialization - Ranks 2 - Requires 5 points in Arcane Talents - Increases your damage with Wands by 13/25% edit reduced to 2 ranks
Tier3: Improved Arcane Explosion - Ranks 3 - Requires 10 points in Arcane Talents - Increases the critical strike chance of your Arcane Explosion spell by an additional 2/4/6% edit reduced to 3 ranks, max crit % increased.

Fire:
Tier3: Burning Soul - Ranks 2 - Requires 10 points in Fire Talents - Gives your fire spells a 35/70% chance to not lose casting time when you take damage and reduces threat by 15/30%. edit added threat reduction
Tier4: Improved Scorch - Ranks 3 - Requires 15 points in Fire Talents - Your Scorch spells have a 33/66/100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Fire damage. This vulnerability increase the Fire damage dealt to your target by 3% and lasts 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times. edit increased vulnerability effect to 3%

Frost:
(Frost Warding[Tier1], Improved Frost Nova[Tier2], Permafrost[Tier2] have been moved around in the tree)
Tier1: Elemental Focus(new) - Ranks 3 - Increases chance to hit with Fire and Frost spells by 2/4/6%
Tier4: Frost Channeling - Ranks 3 - Requires 15 points in Frost Talents - Reduces the mana cost of your frost spells by 5/10/15% and reduces threat caused by Frost spells by 10/20/30%
Tier4: Shatter - Ranks 5 - Requires 15 points in Frost Talents and 2 points in Imp. Frost Nova - Increases the critical strike chance of all your spells against frozen targets by 10/20/30/40/50%. edit Changed prereq. from Frostbite to Imp. Frost Nova
Tier6: Winter's Chill - Ranks 5 - Requires 25 points in Frost Talents - Frost spells cause a debuff that increases chance to crit with frost effects by 2%, which stacks up to 5 times edit New functionality
Tier7: Ice Barrier - Ranks 1 - Requires 30 points in Frost Talents and 1 point in Ice Block 305 mana/instant/30 sec cooldown - Instantly shields you, absorbing 454 damage. Lasts 1 min. While the shield holds, spells will not be interrupted. Now stacks with PW: Shield and gains 10% of +Frost d-mg gear. Absorb effects now prioritized over Mana Shield. edit added functionality

Discuss.

[Teleku]

Wow, thats actually a pretty nice turn around.  Some nice new stuff in there.

[Modern Angel]

Agree. I can't really complain except for the stupid armor talent. I'm complaining about that, though, because it's stupid and a requisite for the mana regen stuff. I'll get over it.

[Typhon]

Agree, new stuff looks good, worth the effort (I'll admit to being biased because I'm hooked on frost).

[SurfD]

For those interested in mucking around with testing new builds:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent/

Just click the mage selection and tinker away.

[pxib]

My inner crazy sniffs a conspiracy.

What is now being touted as the refurbished mage review was actually the original  mage review, but Blizzard knew that mages would be disappointed and demand more... so they released a crappy set of useless talents (on a third party site even!) in order to make mages grateful for any improvement whatsoever. Yes, this is a small improvement and has some interesting possibilities... but it does little to answer the survivablity, DPS, and class purpose complaints specific to mages (but common to every class in any MMOG that ever had classes).

Bait and Switch turned backwards. Shit and Switch, perhaps.

[Teleku]

I think your quite Mad.

[Rasix]

I think your quite Mad.

His mad? 

[Zetor]

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Grammar Snake.

Anyway, the new talents look pretty nice overall. Wand Specialization at 2 points will result in a lot of angry priests though, I bet.


-- Z.

[SurfD]

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Grammar Snake.

Anyway, the new talents look pretty nice overall. Wand Specialization at 2 points will result in a lot of angry priests though, I bet.


-- Z.

I dont think the talents were ever designed to balance that way <cough> Shamans with 1 point clearcasting talent WTF <cough>

[Simond]

Oh FFS, stop complaining about shaman.
We are very good at solo/small group PvP over a short duration (aka duelling). However, complaining about dueling = "I'm rock, scissors are fine, nerf paper"
We are adequate at single group healing/buffing.
We downright suck at anything past one group content - be it PvE or PvP.

[SurfD]

Oh FFS, stop complaining about shaman.
We are very good at solo/small group PvP over a short duration (aka duelling). However, complaining about dueling = "I'm rock, scissors are fine, nerf paper"
We are adequate at single group healing/buffing.
We downright suck at anything past one group content - be it PvE or PvP.

Some of the shamen in my guild might disagree there.  Sure, they are pimped out in some quite top of the line gear, but they can hold their own for QUITE a while in a lot of situations.

[Sogrinaugh]

My inner crazy sniffs a conspiracy.

What is now being touted as the refurbished mage review was actually the original  mage review, but Blizzard knew that mages would be disappointed and demand more... so they released a crappy set of useless talents (on a third party site even!) in order to make mages grateful for any improvement whatsoever. Yes, this is a small improvement and has some interesting possibilities... but it does little to answer the survivablity, DPS, and class purpose complaints specific to mages (but common to every class in any MMOG that ever had classes).

Bait and Switch turned backwards. Shit and Switch, perhaps.

DPS Complaint (in raids) answered by:  Winter's Chill (even though they updated the update to only stack 1% per hit, up to 10 times, making it utterly fucking useless in pvp, annoying).
DPS Complaint (in pvp) answered by:  Improved Shatter that now works with your fireblast/PoM'd pyro, etc.  GREATLY improved Combustion.
Survivability Complaint answered by:  Greatly improved Ice Barrier, new Magic Absoprtion and Frost Warding talents, improved ranks of Dampen Magic, fire ward, and frost ward.

Honestly, the mage review is pretty nice now.  I wanted invis back, and more "fun" magic stuff (in the realm of feather fall, eye of kilrog, etc, stuff thats cool/fun not necessarily pertaining to combat).  But blizzards current design philosophy is very "tight", completely different group of people then what we had for diablo 2.  So expecting anything too amazing is a recipie for disappointment.

[SurfD]

The only continuing problem we have is no way to drop aggro like a hot rock if we get too much.  Hunters / rogues / priests (classes with the ability to put out large amounts of thread but not survive too well if it gets on them) all have aggro reducing abilities, Shamans / Druids dont, but they usually dont pull aggro unless deliberately trying to tank.  Warlocks cant dump aggro, but they can also take a decent beating before going squish.  Mages on the other hand generally just die (usually instantly) if we pull aggro (unless you are ice spec).

Give us a non talent required aggro dump damnit :/

[Jayce]

The only continuing problem we have is no way to drop aggro like a hot rock if we get too much.  Hunters / rogues / priests (classes with the ability to put out large amounts of thread but not survive too well if it gets on them) all have aggro reducing abilities, Shamans / Druids dont, but they usually dont pull aggro unless deliberately trying to tank.  Warlocks cant dump aggro, but they can also take a decent beating before going squish.  Mages on the other hand generally just die (usually instantly) if we pull aggro (unless you are ice spec).

Give us a non talent required aggro dump damnit :/

To nitpick this, druids do have a detaunt in cat form (cower), and warriors are another class w/o the ability to dump aggro.  We can survive it a bit better but usually with a 2h out and dps gear on, our battlefield life expectacy is drastically lower that you might think...