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Q u o t e:
Q: In particular, a lot of the newer PvE and PvP mage or caster items seem to favor Fire spec and, to a lesser extent, Arcane. Do you feel as though mages are being forced to focus too much on critical strike rating (crit) over stacking more haste, spell power, and intellect, stats that are much more beneficial to the Frost mage?

A: It isn’t in our best interest as designers to have Frost want very different stats than Fire. In a world where we already must add so many new items to the game with every new raid tier / Arena season, we just don’t want to dabble too much with “this piece is attractive to the Fire mage, but not the Frost mage.” We think the value of different stats has just crept too far apart for different specs of the same class. It’s just never going to feel right when one stat is worth double or more of the value of another stat. We’re making a big pass at all of the talent trees and item stats to try and get this a little closer for everyone. Ideally you might be comparing two pieces of cloth and have to decide whether the haste or crit is more valuable to you, and not just write off everything without crit as junk. So to answer the question succinctly, yes mages are being asked to focus too much on some stats.

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(quoting just for a possibility of brief review)

Ok cool but that doesn't answer the bigger question here.

Are you going to do something about it?

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Q u o t e:


(quoting just for a possibility of brief review)

Ok cool but that doesn't answer the bigger question here.

Are you going to do something about it?

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what do you think? :p

Also

The comunity team says that the items are better for Fire/Arcane than for Frost which needs, quoting:
haste, spell power, and intellect.

First off spellpower cannot be used i such argument cuz t's just best for every spec there is.
Secondly, and most importantly, they use ARCANE as an example of spec that the crit gear is good for instead of HASTE and INTELLECT, while Arcane is the spec scaling worst with crit and best with haste and int out of all mage specs??

Who makes these questions? Why do they handle mage Q&A if they have no idea about the class? Yes I'm raging, join me won't you?

Point is: Arcane is in the insufficient haste gear even more than Frost and I would love to actually have an answer that would tell us what we can count on.

Is it really a problem? I don't quite see the issue here. It's not like there is a stat we don't value. We use all of the caster stats today. While we favor spellpower and spellcrit we wouldn't ignore hit and haste if we could, there is still a undenyable synergy effect.

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Q u o t e:
Well from what I can see, the sentance "We’re making a big pass at all of the talent trees and item stats to try and get this a little closer for everyone." does seem to suggest that we are.

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Thanks man. I'm not english and I took some words for something they weren't:P
Still, the question stated there is just showing lack of understanding of mage mechanics. Just as GC's alreade infamous comment on Mirror Images

However, there's no "when", so don't take that as a promise that it will happen for 3.2.

The errors in the Q&A (for example as pointed above, frost mages don't care much about intellect) make me very worried about how well the mage class is understood by the developers.

If you really want to help out mages, please contact some of the more respected theorycrafters/players, have them sign an NDA and discuss some ideas with them. A little bit of dialogue will save you days or weeks of internal testing and PTR time.

In general, I think most of the ideas behind mage design are good, but there are flaws here and there in the talent trees that need just a bit of tweaking.

The tier item sets are mostly OK, but the PvP sets need a complete revision. I have deadly gear sitting in the bank and I have skipped buying some furious items simply because I don't think they are any good.

In terms of stat scaling, PvE frost scaling with crit and spirit are very much on the low side. Frost also scales badly with spell power, which then makes all the other factors scale badly too. Reduce the base damage of frostbolt slightly and remove the 5% snare penalty that frostbolt has and that frostfire bolt doesn't have.

Arcane scaling with crit is a bit low (but arcane mostly has a problem with evocation being unreliable). Arcane suffers greatly because its DPS output is balanced around 6% hit rating from talents - points which could be dropped, but then couldn't be placed anywhere else where they would make sense.

The lack of hit from talents for fire is actually a strength, because fire DPS is currently in balance with 0 hit from talents and hit is very inexpensive on gear. I'm tempted to say "give fire mages access to a hit talent to see how they like it", but I think that would be cruel, because in the end, it would be a nerf.

One possible solution would be to make the hit cap a bit softer for arcane and frost. One way to do this would be to offer alternative talents (not just flavor, but of some DPS value) and another way is to make hit rating beyond the cap beneficial in some way.

There is no way TTW in the arcane tree is OK. GC always says that what makes the game interesting are hard choices, but most mage specs have no choice but to put at least 18 points into arcane. Some of the points before TTW are useless, some of them lack flavor and a lot of them lack DPS value. 5 points into arcane concentration so that you can have a mage that goes "ping"? Ouch.

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Q u o t e:
Well from what I can see, the sentance "We’re making a big pass at all of the talent trees and item stats to try and get this a little closer for everyone." does seem to suggest that we are.

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i love how GMs answer the few questions they actually can come up with an answer to..

this just shows us that ur here and reading our posts, but u chose not to reply to the 90% of our questions/threads.

why? obv because u have no acceptable answer.

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Q u o t e:


i love how GMs answer the few questions they actually can come up with an answer to..

this just shows us that ur here and reading our posts, but u chose not to reply to the 90% of our questions/threads.

why? obv because u have no acceptable answer.

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Shut up.

These aren't the US forums, our CMs (yes, they're CMs not GMs) aren't exactly 'in the loop' and afaik we don't really have any devs on these forums either.

Go read the US boards if you want answers to questions.

Well im pretty disapointed with the mage Q&A. I mean whats the point in makin a mage Q&A, when pretty much all you are going to say is "mage is fine, no need to change anything" ?

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Q u o t e:
Well im pretty disapointed with the mage Q&A. I mean whats the point in makin a mage Q&A, when pretty much all you are going to say is "mage is fine, no need to change anything" ?

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How's that a part of this topic?