177 replies to this topic

[Vilerose]

Simply put, Mages are a broken class right now.
Class mechanics need an overhaul in an attempt to balance Mages with both buffs and nerfs.


There are several contributing factors:

1) Novas are far too powerful and plentiful. Playing against Mages, no matter how awful the Mages are, will always be miserable and no fun so long as Mages have so many instant aoe roots at their disposal.

2) Mages are too powerful when the healer is crowd controlled, and not nearly powerful enough when not. This has to do with dispels and the momentum we're able to create through casting opportunities when novas etc aren't dispelled.

3) You are not rewarded at all for casting frostbolt. By successfully kiting and juking, you can cast frostbolt for a massive 5500 noncrit damage on players with 3500 resil. Mages are not rewarded adequately for being able to play well enough to get off Frostbolts; risk vs reward problem.

4) Extreme devaluation of polymorph on anything but the healer. The abundance and availability of dispels from healers, interrupts from dps, loss of r1 frostbolt and winter's chill, and increased cast time on polymorph make using polymorph on anything but the healer a waste of time unless the healer is cc'd by someone else. It's just almost never worthwhile; another risk vs reward problem.

5) Mages are GCD locked while being trained. Mage defenses are all activated abilities that require the use of a global cooldown (ice barrier, mana shield, cone of cold root, frost nova, mage ward); contrast this to warlocks whose defenses are far more passive in nature (damage mitigation from soul link etc).  This leaves little time to do damage of any sort besides Ice Lance on Fingers of Frost procs or on an Improved Cone of Cold target. This is also a contributing factor to Frostbolt not really being worthwhile to cast while trained.

6) The Shatter talent change from WotLK to Cataclysm forces Mages to gear for crit in order to do deal semi-reliable damage that is already insufficient in arena. This severely cuts back on haste and other stats that Mages would have been collecting instead (when Shatter was just a flat +50% crit chance).

7) Time is a Mage's enemy. Mage usefulness slowly expires with time due to cooldown dependency and the extremely long downtime between cold snaps.



Proposed Solutions: (numbers are examples; changes made with as little PvE impact as possible)

1) Completely change Shattered Barrier so that it reduces incoming damage by 20% for 8 seconds after breaking; remove nova effect. The current Shattered Barrier promotes further use of Ice Lance over Frostbolt while being trained, and the amount of instant novas available is currently absurd.

2) Change Improved Cone of Cold talent so that it roots the opponent only when the Cone of Cold slow is dispelled, change the root so that it is undispellable and 3sec instead of 4sec. This further cuts back on instant roots/peels and the promotion of Ice Lance while being trained, but it also makes it so that Mages aren't so badly punished by spam dispels. It also makes Cone of Cold more dynamic and makes Mages put more thought into the use of the ability.

3) Add a new major glyph ("Glyph of Quickening" or whatever) that reduces the base global cooldown of Ice Barrier, Cone of Cold, and Frost Nova to 1sec with a .5sec gcd cap for the abilities (meaning gcd will be affected by haste).  This essentially serves to shave off a combined 2-3 seconds every 30sec so that Mages can actually cast an additional Frostbolt here or there while being trained without actually lowering the cast time of Frostbolt.

4) Add new ability to frost talent tree choice or frost talents that functions as a modified R1 Frostbolt: .5sec cast, no cooldown, no damage or very very minimal damage; applies debuff that snares the target. When used, the ability lowers the cast time of the Mage's next Polymorph by .3sec, and when dispelled increases the damage of the Mage's frostbolts by 20% for 10sec.

The new ability's debuff wouldn't override the Frostbolt or Cone of Cold debuff, but instead both could exist simultaneously on same target.  For reference, noncrit frostbolts currently do 5.5k damage on 3500 resil targets, so a 20% frostbolt increase in damage would just be 6.6k frostbolts. This lowers Mage susceptibility to dispels, provides a minor cover debuff for Polymorph, and allows Polymorphs to actually land more often.

5) Reduce the base cooldown of Cold Snap from 8 minutes to 6 minutes. This hopefully will make it actually feel like time is less the enemy than it currently is; Rogue Preparation got the same treatment.



Net Effect of Proposed Changes:

1) Less instant novas / peels.
2) Less Ice Lance opportunities.
3) Less susceptibility to spam dispels.
4) Less awful in really long games.
5) Greater reward for casting Frostbolt.
6) Polymorph more effective.


WoW forums link: http://us.battle.net...ic/2065610125#1

Edited by Vilerose, 14 February 2011 - 03:25 AM.

[KIA Skill]

Simply not enough to fix the problems with mages.

[Waffulz]

I agree with everything, but I'm not sure why a r1 frostbolt that applies a unique debuff would be better than winter's chill. r1 frostbolt should exist (instead of early frost) and winter's chill should come back. It doesn't even need to give the passive crit % it gave before, just another magic debuff from every one of our spells (so we can apply it with ice lance).

Edit: Cold Snap change would also probably be overpowered. Maybe a smaller cooldown reduction is needed though.

Edited by Waffulz, 13 February 2011 - 11:30 PM.

[ragzdog]

+mage armor is lowered to 20% imo

[Darckli]

On the whole, I think you hit a lot of good points, but I think you really glossed over the difficulty of getting damage out as a Mage. We aren't all Vileroze, and given that everyone has an interrupt now and all of our real damage is casted, there needs to be something in place to help get casts off. Teams are not punished for training Mages both because of the lack of passive defenses and the shutdown of damage and control that comes with putting 2 interrupts on them.

The -.3 on Poly from R1 Frostbolt is a good start, but really, a system that still relies entirely on getting Frostbolts off is starting to seem outdated given the progression of the game into Cata.

Vilerose, on 13 February 2011 - 11:20 PM, said:

2) Change Improved Cone of Cold talent so that it roots the opponent only when the Cone of Cold slow expires or is dispelled, change the root so that it is undispellable and 3sec instead of 4sec. This further cuts back on instant roots/peels and the promotion of Ice Lance while being trained, but it also makes it so that Mages aren't so badly punished by spam dispels. It also makes Cone of Cold more dynamic and makes Mages put more thought into the use of the ability.

This needs to lose the "expire" condition. A snare with an 8s delay on a root seems pretty awkward. It's already a 70% snare, it'll give you space against anyone but a rogue. Rooting on dispel, with an undispellable root, seems good enough.

Waffulz, on 13 February 2011 - 11:29 PM, said:

I agree with everything, but I'm not sure why a r1 frostbolt that applies a unique debuff would be better than winter's chill. r1 frostbolt should exist (instead of early frost) and winter's chill should come back. It doesn't even need to give the passive crit % it gave before, just another magic debuff from every one of our spells (so we can apply it with ice lance).

Edit: Cold Snap change would also probably be overpowered. Maybe a smaller cooldown reduction is needed though.

Adding a trash debuff that procs off everything Mages do is absolutely the wrong way to go. R1 Frostbolt was an immense skillcap increase, and adding Winter's Chill as automatic trash is going to just make every healer occasionally get RNG'd into spending more globals dispelling.

I like the idea of having something with dispel protection, I just dunno if the suggestion above is the way to go. %dmg on Frostbolt seems like a weak deterrent compared to existing dispel protection.

Edited by Darckli, 13 February 2011 - 11:42 PM.

[inhume]

just going to say your new CoC there is dumb in the fact that either way your getting a 4 second root that cannot be dispelled. what point would there to dispel the coc?

[GLopez]

I like all of these ideas.

[Gunnermaniac]

3) You are not rewarded at all for casting frostbolt. By successfully kiting and juking, you can cast frostbolt for a massive 5500 noncrit damage on players with 3500 resil. Mages are not rewarded adequately for being able to play well enough to get off Frostbolts; risk vs reward problem.

I agree with this above all else. If we open up our tree, we should get rewarded with a substantial increase in damage. I hate our new ice lance is best mechanic, and honestly if the class stays as such for much longer I'm rerolling. Never thought I'd say that.

Edited by Gunnermaniac, 13 February 2011 - 11:47 PM.

[Belligerent]

Great post duder

[arthess]

yep

[Dverg]

I think the cone of cold idea is interesting, could maybe use some reworking though. However, this covers a large base of the mage issues and many possible solutions to the problems. Very nice write up.

[Shouri]

vileroze you sound an awfully lot like voksen

[Yes]

Give Frostbolt the benefit from benefit from Fingers of Frost.

And idk do something in pve.

[Darckli]

Yes, on 14 February 2011 - 12:14 AM, said:

Give Frostbolt the benefit from benefit from Fingers of Frost.

And idk do something in pve.

That's what originally started the Frostbolt turret issues of the past. Why cast anything else if it gets the benefit of FoF?

It should just hit for a reasonable amount in its own right, and the other spells should be situational via procs.

[nobodyseven!]

r1 frostbolt please

[Naatzors]

Good post agree with it

[Kelarm]

Don't really agree with #4, I think that proposed spell has WAY too many benefits for a single ability (kind of like necrotic strike).  Additional dispel protection would be fine to start in that vein, and if polymorph is too hard to get off in arena then I think warlock fear should receive the same treatment and both should just be lowered back to 1.5sec base cast now that bloodlust is gone, as these spells have frequently been changed together before (not to mention it also exposes shadow school but that's not exactly relevant).  And frostbolt could probably just use a large blanket buff instead of a proc like that.

Edit: if such mage issues were addressed, ice lance damage should be massively nerfed back to around where it was before as a proportion to frostbolt.  "Less ice lance opportunities" doesn't really do it for me, the spell is stupid as fuck.  Then again I'm not an expert on mage mechanics and maybe it wouldn't be so retarded with less novas going out.  But I doubt it.

Edited by Kelarm, 14 February 2011 - 12:46 AM.

[Yes]

What's wrong with the highest DPS spell being a casted, interruptible one rather than something you can cast on the move? Part of ice lance's strength is you can do it while moving. Mages should do more damage while freecasting.

[Darckli]

Yes, on 14 February 2011 - 12:40 AM, said:

What's wrong with the highest DPS spell being a casted, interruptible one rather than something you can cast on the move? Part of ice lance's strength is you can do it while moving. Mages should do more damage while freecasting.

The whole point of Cataclysm Frost is to try to get away from "if you can Frostbolt, press Frostbolt." I don't know about you but mashing that shit in season 8 got old really, really fast.

I'd prefer if Frostfire Bolt/Ice Lance did almost as much as Frostbolt, but only with the relevant proc up. Don't really want a system where the only spell worth casting is Frostbolt unless I have to cast other stuff.

[Mavolence]

Vilerose, on 13 February 2011 - 11:20 PM, said:

6) The Shatter talent change from WotLK to Cataclysm forces Mages to gear for crit in order to do deal semi-reliable damage that is already insufficient in arena. This severely cuts back on haste and other stats that Mages would have been collecting instead (when Shatter was just a flat +50% crit chance).

+1

Definitely one of the biggest issues. If this change was reverted and we could get some sort of haste it could definitely help with the problems we are facing today.