The problem with mages

[Kreskin]

This is in response to a dev on WoW boards

Tseric, as a long time mage player, I appreciate the attention you've been givng our class forum over the last few days. However, you're making the same mistake Blizzard have been making with the mage class for months now, that is you're looking past what's causing the problem entirely at something that isn't there.

At the moment, there are I think 2 main issue's all mages will agree are the major problems with our class, resist gear, and surviveability:

Fire resist: This is the issue you've been speaking about the most lately. You've made a lot of arguments as to how it isn't a huge issue for our class (and a fyi, it is a far worse problem for mages than it is warlocks. Warlocks as I'm sure you're aware, have the ability to debuff their target for 75 resist to their chosen damage type, effectively negating the issue).

Your main arguments on the FR issue, to my observation, have been:

1) Those who stack fire resists make large sacrifices in other stats in PvP, leaving them vulnerable to a quick death and unable to perform their role as well.

2) Fire resist at this point is common simply due to the fact that the current endgame instances are fire based. As the game shifts away from these instances the problem will fade significantly.

However, you're incredibly wrong on both points:

1) What you fail to realise is that the problem, for mages, is not the people who stack 300 FR in PvP. I agree with you on them, I'm quite content to be useless against these people, I'll switch to the next target and let my group deal with them. They 'do' make large sacrifices, and if they're willing to make those sacrifices to be unkillable by one spec of one class, then they're welcome to open themselves up to getting destroyed by the rest of my group.

However, it is not these people who are the issue. The issue is the way in which FR is distributed across items, and the method in which resists are calculated.

Look at any classes MC set, you'll find a small amount of resists on various pieces. Might and Nightslayer, for example, have 34 FR. Arcanist has 41. Prophecy has 34. And so forth.

Then there's items like Cloak of Shrouded Mists, Core Forged Greaves, Crimson Shocker, Crown of Destruction, Dragon Blood Cape, Finkle's Lava Dredger, and so forth.

These are all decent gear, with nice stats for PvE or PvP. The FR on these for most people is an afterthought, and not something they're really considering, yet it still adds up. By the time a person is decked out in MC loot, they'll have 50, 60, 70 Fire Resist. Not with Librams, not with Enchants, not with Flarecore or Dark Iron gear. Just using normal everyday multipurpose epic loot.

Now 50 - 100 FR, on the low end of this scale. Doesn't sound like much compared to the big bad warrior running around in 300 FR gear does it? Except consider that this person also has his stats maximised for their classes role. They don't sacrifice DPS for this FR, or HP, or AC, or Crit. It's just there as a bonus on top of their other stats.

So we've got a character decked out in epics, fine tuned for performance in their chosen role, and on top of this boasting some FR. But lets see just how far 50 or 100 FR goes.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/bas ... ances.html

Resistance Against Level 50 Direct Damage Spells

Resist Score: 50

Chance to fully resist: 0%
Chance to Resist 100%: 0%
Chance to Resist 75%: 2%
Chance to Resist 50%: 11%
Chance to Resist 25%: 33%
Chance to take full damage: 54%

Resist Score: 100

Chance to fully resist: 1%
Chance to Resist 100%: 1%
Chance to Resist 75%: 6%
Chance to Resist 50%: 124%
Chance to Resist 25%: 49%
Chance to take full damage: 20%


THIS, is the problem. With 100 FR, this character has 20% chance to take over 75% of my spells damage. Due to the random nature of this system, all it takes is a string of slightly bad luck, and you'll find you get massive mitigation. I've had a warrior with 44 FR gear do the following:

25% Resist
50% Resist
25% Resist
50% Resist
75% Resist
25% Resist

That's almost 50% damage mitigation. From 44 FR. This warrior sure as hell wasn't sacrificing any stats for that.

So there you have it. The problem is not stacking FR, it never was. It's the small bits of FR that add up as a consequance of wearing epics, and the fact that with a little luck a small bit of FR can mitigate massive amounts of damage.

Consider how easy it is to get MC loot. MC is on farm mode for pretty much any guild that's been raiding for more than a month. I'd say people in full epics are starting to outnumber those in full blues nowdays. And all of them have that tiny bit of FR required to destroy our burst damage.

We're mages. We rely on burst damage. Thats what we rolled this class for. Thats what we chose, over huge HP or pets or armour or stealth or heals. Yet all it takes is that tiny bit of FR to totally screw us up. If our burst damage fails to win us the fight, we're dead more often than not. Our surviveability is a joke (see below for more on this), is we don't drop our enemy within the first few seconds of the fight, we're the ones who're going to be making to trip to the graveyard.




As for the focus shifting away from fire instances being the solution, it isn't. As items increase in power, what we're going to see is more and more of these little insignificant bonuses on them. You think people are just going to suddenly be at 0 FR once we start raiding Emerald Dream? No, it's going to keep adding up in small ways, slowly. And the problem will get worse.

Ice mages have it even harder, or will soon. Due to their spells all being binary, they don't get partial resists. That warrior fight I mentioned earlier: had he had 44 frost resist, and I been a frost mage, it would have looked like this:

RESIST
RESIST
RESIST
RESIST
RESIST
RESIST

Frost mages aren't going to be getting 40% mitigation from that minute amount of resist gear, they'll be getting 100%, or 80%, 90%, if they're lucky to get a spell in. You think they're going to be able to compete with that?

The solution is simple. Many mages have argued for the removal of resists from PvP, but if you read my points on itemization below, you'll see why I believe this isn't an option.

Instead, resists need to be made static, in the same way damage is. My +50 fire damage doesn't somehow give me the ability to have a chance of doing an extra 50% damage, resistsshouldn't work like that either, at least not for PvP. The system works fine for PvE, but it's broken otherwise.

So, my suggestion, is to turn resists into a static damage reduction. 50 FR = -20% Fire Damage, or so forth. The actual mitigation doesn't have to be decreased significantly, if at all, simply make it so players can't get lucky and have massive mitigation from tiny amounts of resists.

You, Blizzard, are making a similar change to warlocks CoTE and CoS because you believe large spikes of damage bonuses from negative resists is a bad idea. Well it goes both ways. Neither should it be possible to mitigate huge chunks of damage. it's exactly the same thing, and both are equally bad.

Change resists to a static reduction, as you're doing to warlocks resist debuffs, not only would this solve the problem of us having large chunks of burst damage absorbed, crippling us, but it also would allow you to solve the problem of binary spells once and for all.



The second issue of surviveability is a much easier one to address. Our surviveability doesn't scale, at all. Look at this comparison:

Mage:

Stam = HP (Surviveability)

Resists = Spell mitigation (surviveability)

AC = Melee Mitigation (surviveability)

Intellect = Tiny amount of crit (100 Int = 1% crit)) (DPS)
= Mana, sustained damage

+Damage = Damage (DPS)

+crit = crit (DPS)

Now compare this to a warrior (and forgive me if I get the numbers wrong, I don't play the class)

Stamina = HP (Surviveability)

Resists = Spell Mitigation (Surviveability)

AC = Melee Mitigation (Surviveability)

Strength = Attack Power (DPS)

Agility = Crit% (40 agil = 1% crit?) (DPS)

+AP = Attack Power (DPS)

+Crit% = Crit (DPS)

Weapon DPS = Damage (DPS)



Of the mages upgrades, the following receive almost nothing in terms of upgrades once you're in UBRS blues. Even if you're decked out in the best of the best of BWL/MC loot, they'll be almost the same:

HP: Might go from 3.3k to 3.8k, or around that, but at the most you'll gain maybe 500HP.

Resists: you'll have nothing at UBRS level, 50 or so maybe at MC level, then maybe have that go up by 10 or 15 from BWL.

AC: Does not upgrade. At all. Ever. = 0 melee mitigation upgrades.

Of the upgrades listed earlier, the following are melee upgrade methods that have no equivelant for casters.

Strength = Attack Power (DPS)


Weapon DPS = Damage (DPS)

And the following scale at less than 50% of the rate melee do:


Agility = Crit% (40 agil = 1% crit?) (DPS)

Compared to:

Intellect = Tiny amount of crit (100 Int = 1% crit)) (DPS)



There, that is the issue. As a mage, we have 2 choices with our gear once we start upgrading in raids:

Intellect Loot

+Damage/+Crit%

Our stamina does not upgrade at all. We have no option of equipping a new piece of loot and having an instant 150 HP and decent AP upgrade. Intellect is pretty much useless, as consumeables can make up the difference for anything as low as a 5.5k - 6k mana pool. So of course mages will go with the +damage route.

Compare the methods melee have of scaling their character, and compare it to mages. Casters are falling behind dangerously fast, simply because we don't get nearly as much out of our gear as melee do, and all of that gear is incredibly poorly designed.

The solution:

Allow the AC on caster gear to increase as we go up in tiers of loot as melee gear does.

Increase the amount of stamina on highend gear, and make it upgrade noticeably as we go up tiers of loot.

Increase the amount of power our stats give us. Let us gain raw spell damage from Int, and give us a higher crit rate increase from it.

Give us an equivelant to a 'weapon' slot. Maybe make our staves count as this. Remove the majority of the +damage from the rest of our gear and stack it onto our staves as the equivelant to a weapons damage. We need to have one slot we can upgrade that will increase our power to the same degree a melee can by going from Heartseeker to Perditions.

HP = HP

AC = AC

Resist = Resist

Str/Agil = Int

Weapon DPS = Staff Damage

+Attack Power = +damage on other slots

+Crit% = +Crit%

You see, by this, we scale equally. We need to scale at the same rate, or balance is lost. If a warrior gets a 50% damage upgrade and 30% surviveability upgrade by going from UBRS to MC, so should we. If a warrior can upgrade his DPS by 15% or 20% by picking up a new weapon, we should do the same by picking up a new staff. Stacking large amounts of +damage onto our gear is not the answer, and the problem will exist until Blizzard realise this.


Well, my post is considerably longer than I intended it to be. Hopefully you'll respond, or at the least read it and perhaps consider some of what I've had to say. This is, after 11 months of playing the mage class, my summary of our issue's. Where you to fix all of these and give us a slight talent revamp, I'd consider our class as being up there with hunters in terms of balance and completeness. But until some of these changes are considered by the Dev's, we'll just be left in the dust as other classes pull miles ahead of us in advancement, then turn around and kick our faces in with it as soon as we try to PvP.

I know you guys are trying to solve these issue's slowly, but it's simply not possible. The problems with the mage class are problems that come from the basic core of the games mechanics, and until you address those and change them as neccessary, the mage class will continually fall behind, crippling our performance in every aspect of the game.

Yours Sincerily,

Azrayne ~ Ex-Mage of Stormreaver and Blackrock. Azrayne
Undead Mage
Stormreaver
Blackrock

[Severian]

awsesome post, makes me glad i don't play a mage

[Rikitoki]

makes me glad i don't know how to read.

[Buzzkill]

Playin a mage is like chasing a strait. Odds are by the end of the hand, you aint gonna have shit.

Poor Jafo

[Tsikura]

PRIESTS > ALL

Thats my propoganda. kthnx.

[xenmal]

damm right priest > than all

[Gekha]

Im not arguing the point here, but i found something fucking hilarious and this seemed like the best place for it.

http://www.styxelite.com/imagesz/pvp.WMV

[Kreskin]

Yea that video comes up a lot whenever people say that mages are fine/overpowered. Hes using 2 trinkets that drop from the bosses of ZG and MC and a 21 and 31 point talent to achieve that. Maybe 2% of mages have these trinkets serverwide.

heh it would be like me using that war pvp video to say wars are overpowered

[Faiten]

omg that took 0 skill to do