Euro Mage Thread

There's a thread here on the Euro class boards that hasn't gotten much attention here in the States concerning how one would improve the class without significantly changing class balance with three small wishes. It's not really a particularly interesting read but has gotten a few Blue responses and historically threads like these haven't been awful predictors of future changes to the class.

Here is a summary of the requests:

1) Removal of the -10% dmg Tax................|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| (88)
2) Better Mana Gems....................................||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| (67)
3) Evocation Restores more Mana............|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| (57)
4) Various Bug Fixes(CS, Blink)..................||||||||||||||||||| (19)
5) Trainable Ice Block...................................||||||||||||||||||| (19)
6) Restore old Ignite......................................||||||||||||||||||| (19)
7) Improve Invisibility....................................|||||||||||||| (14)
8) New Mana Fountain Spell........................||||||||||||| (13)
9) More Intellect on Mage Gear..................|||||||||| (10)
10) Remove AoE Cap....................................|||||||| (8)
11) Lower Mana Cost of Arcane Spells...|||||||| (8)
12) Remove Hypothermia............................|||||| (6)
13) Tradable Mana Gems............................||||| (5)
14) Frost Nova should hold longer............|||| (4)

I don't think the list is really going to surprise anybody, but the two topics receiving slight Blue coverage were -10% dmg Tax and Mana Gem scaling issues. I'm probably a fan of #1,#2, and #5 (LOL, okay #13) over the other choices, but more explicitly I like:

1. Increase the mana return on mana gems by 33%. Mana gems no longer share a cooldown with the Warlock Healthstone ability.
   
2. Evocation now returns 100% of caster's Mana over 8 seconds. Cooldown is now 10 minutes.
   
3. Players can no longer consume non-conjured items in the Arena once again. (nerf non mage water)
   

Basically, restore the dependence on mages in the drinking/stalling game. The inclusion of water for every setup was a huge mistake as it really lets teams you'd normally be able to wear down drag games out near indefinitely. I do think a change to the mechanics of Evocation is needed as the scaling is far too different between PvE and PvP gear, and the spell should still be useful in PvP as it is a core class ability that has a heavy cost to use. That's it. ^^

That said, I suppose the following would also work:

1. Make Dragon's Breath trainable.
   
2. Make Ice Block trainable.
3. Make Slow trainable.

More Mage Arena Thoughts

On Castbars:

I use Quartz for my castbar as well as focus and target bars; I do this mainly because I use it with macros for /stopcasting + frostbolt and /stopcasting + ice lance. This takes a LOT of getting used to in arena play, but is huge when you get used to it. I know this sounds like PvE nonsense, but it will dramatically improve your play once you get used to the clumsiness.

I also use a /stopcasting and CS my focus macro; for both this and for normal stopcasting + CS, I find Quartz great as you can sometimes squeeze in a cast you normally coudln't if you stop it during the latency and still snag the spell lock.

/focus target and /stopcasting/cast[target=focus] Counterspell are the two main focus macros I use

On Specs:

I do believe 17/0/44 is the strongest overall spec, and I don't feel that what you get in deep frost makes up for Imp CS. I believe in taking Perma and Winds but passing on Empowered Bolt; I don't see much benefit in investing further in frost unless you want talents like Frost Channeling or Improved Blizzard -- both are talents that I feel are overrated. Silence can win games a lot, spell locking isn't what it used to be, and clearcasting makes up for any efficiency gains of deep frost. Improved Missiles is actually quite useful too especially with the focus gem as you can still cast missiles when you get the proc and then recast missiles right as the buff fades to get 8-9 missiles in about 4 seconds, which is quite a lot of damage that can't be LoS'd or frost resisted.

Advanced WE Control:

You NEED a macro that does /stopcasting /petpassive. You should use it for your fakecasts instead of trying to move or (please don't do this) jumping. It is a much safer way of baiting interrupts as it is much faster, can bug the interruption display (the spell will appear as interrupted on their side, but you will not have your school locked) and using one key to do both these actions allow you a quick way of turning your pet's autoattack off in case of it being midcast on a target being CC'd. The best part of this is that your pet will return to your side when you return him to passive. This lets you move your pet toward you quickly away from danger. Say you have a rogue snared and he is heading toward your pet, simply passive your pet and run so as to path the pet far from the rogue's direction. As you play with this, you can also get much better at pinning players behind pillars as you can get your pet to go one direction as you go the other.

This isn't going to always protect your pet from aggressors in arena and a lot of healer heavy, melee matrices are going to gun for your pet especially if you're on a traditional type matrix. There isn't necessarily a lot you can do, but avoid summoning your pet and attacking with him in the middle of the fray. On a DPS heavy team, you should definitely be doing enough offense to make going after your pet simply infeasible in the face of the damage and CC you are putting out.

Decision Making:

Every class lives and dies in the arena by decision making; you cannot plan everything out and execution is only part of the game. Should I Ice Block this fear after just trinketing poly? Is this HoJ worth blinking or should I eat the stun and not risk getting intercepted after Blinking?

Every game I try to think about not what happened, but what choices I made; I find that on days when I feel I'm playing well I can remember the choices be they mediocre or solid, but on days where I'm sucking, I can't even really recall what I was deciding between during the game. I'm very much the type to go against my planned strategies with on the fly improvisation, it's very alluring to play the flashy game and you tend to remember the games where your fancy play paid off better than the ones where it risked games that your conventional strategies would have locked in.

Status Update:

An interesting night of arena where we played some pretty good teams, lost a ton of points, got pissed off and emo about it, then recovered it all back with our best play of the season. Magdain's healing heavy team is going to be a perpetual nuisance, but the surprise has been that we play much better against 4DPS and 2.5healer teams than the classic matrices as of late. I wonder a bit if perhaps the classic teams have been sold a bit short in how viable they can be.

Ten Random Little 4DPS Mage Stuff

Pretty obvious to some but:

1. Shadow reflector is a decent way of defending your frostbolt casts to guarantee shatter combos especially when you know that the opposing lock likes to defend you. A lot of people would say to never waste a trinket slot on something like this, but it is actually pretty good especially against lock heavy 4DPS opponents. (like the double lock/priest/rogue style)
   
2. Generally, a target below 75% should be shattered if its up, otherwise hard cast and save nova for next cast. You certainly won't do 75% even with a double crit and a fireblast, but your goal is not always to kill targets but to force defensive play and healing.
3. This is going to sound a bit scrubby, but LOOK AROUND while hard casting. Even with heroism or lust, you're not kiting, so you should be surveying and planning your next few moves. Generally, casting is the best time to think about your next move as you can't really plan ahead anywhere near as well in 5s.
4. Consider using Imp CS as a silence only when casting on targets below 60% when you're about to shatter. Factor a global on bubbling and another 2 seconds on that Holy Light Cast and you have plenty of time for a shatter combo before a heal can land, which is often all you need.
5. Playing 4DPS is not about just dumping your CD into one target and hoping to win. HOWEVER THIS DOES WORK PRETTY WELL EVEN AT THE HIGHEST RATINGS. I think as we get more comfortable, we learn to move damage around a lot, and I see one of the major advantages of a caster-style 4DPS setup as the ability to switch between targets VERY quickly. The advantage to being Water Elemental comes from the frequency you can use shatter combos compared to just a single AP-PoM-Pyro-Fblast.
6. I've said this many times, but you should never be using your pet nova defensively. Sheep and use personal nova to protect your teammates, your pet nova is the entirety of your burst. You should never be trying to manual nova for shatter combos; there are always better things to do than use a personal nova "for damage."
7. You can always check my armory for gear and spec, but for those who don't care THAT much, I favor damage heavy gear with a balanced spec -- I don't run around with Emp Bolt instead of Perma or AW. Perma is extremely strong in 5s, it's the most underrated frost talent imo. You can very often rank 1 bolt while your lock dots at the beginning of games when teams like to poke at each other and often you're getting a good length snare on a target that can't be safely dispelled as combat actually begins. Plus CoC > hamstring. ^^
8. When 4DPS play 4DPS, sente is critical. The team who sets up CC and their first offensive has a huge advantage as neither team is designed to be on the defensive or recover from being on the defensive. That being said, the CC aspect is more potent than damage in 4DPS vs 4DPS, whereas I don't find this to be true against more conventional teams. That is to say, you gain momentum against normal teams by putting out damage and forcing defensive play, but you can momentum against 4DPS teams by getting out the first CC and forcing them to dispel and adjust while setting up your damage.
   
9. After second pet nova, you should be summoning your next pet; it's pretty sad how often I play against 4DPS teams and see mages not snap-second pet till the game is WAY over. Especially when your pet has heroism or lust, he will go OOM fast, 13 bolts per pet generally either way, so might as well get that second pet out early and keep or retake control.
10. Lock+Classic is surprisingly effective against 4DPS caster; the idea is to CC spam to stagnate the damage effort of the 4DPS team and to protect the warrior from too much initial burst. Once a few offensive cooldowns are wasted or opposing healer control is down, the team shifts to the offensive by leaving the lock to CC the pally while the mage and warrior burn down the weakest link on the 4DPS team, which is generally the elemental shammy or shadowpriest. Trying to just zerg damage is not going to win this with any consistency; you need to counter the opposing CC and this can be done by having your shaman use grounding and tremor to protect your lone healer while you control the opposing mage. You should definitely get first pet out before you get into a poly war, but worst case, you waste a few seconds and put both you and the other mage on DR, which is great for you as you just wanted to reduce the effect of CC on you while you do your initial damage. Of course they can use spell locks and CS on you, and you should expect this and adapt accordingly by letting your teammates know quickly if you're locked and quickly switching to missiles and fireblast for damage. If you're a baller and it's a good time to snap anyways, don't forget snap removes spell lock.

That's all I have on my mind that I can quickly jot down for now. ^^

This week is going well for us, went undefeated in 3s and 5s again tonight, and generally I'm having a lot more fun playing these damage oriented teams than last season's "CC and manaburn till they lose their will to play" type of games.

The WSVG finals are up on WCM and are definitely worth a watch for anyone amazingly out of the loop. It's a bit hard to learn much from the fights because of the persistently changing camera perspective, but they're entertaining to watch at least.

NiP Dominance

I'd be extremely remiss if I didn't at least briefly give credit to NiP's new team, Trounce, for their 2140 first week rating, which is pretty insane. First week rankings don't mean a ton, but I definitely didn't think we trailed by as much as 100 points. For those not on Stormstrike, NiP was one of the few 2600+ teams Season 1 and was unable to attend the tournament due to Canadian player restrictions (and one hailing from MD). They were without a doubt the strongest 5s team I've seen play, and even with the loss of what I felt was their strongest player, their mage Makoplux, they seem to be having no problems this season tearing the battelgroup up.

Avick, their priest, is also number one in 2s, 3s, and 5s this week, a pretty ridiculous accomplishment on this battlegroup. Think what you want, but that is just CRAZY. Of course, I believe we'll be dethroning Avick's teams shortly, but damn. o.O

Week 1 Recap

Queues have been atrocious all week; it sounds like this is a persistent problem across all battlegroups, but we're spending 5-10 minutes in queues even for 2v2 games. That being said, it's been an awesome week, and probably about as much as I've had in WoW. The Shadow Gaming crew are awesome to have around and are going to really elevate the play level on Stormstrike.

The goal was to hit 2k in all 3 arena sizes, but with queues so slow, it's going to just be 5s. As 5s is my main interest, I can't complain too much. I think most of us mages are going to hold off on buying set gear till we see the changes and instead hoard points, so it isn't like I'm in a huge rush to start earning serious points.

I've really moved away from survivability oriented play into a more aggressive style; I've replaced nearly every Elune with Nightseyes or Rubies and have moved away from the pretty typical 10.5khp/350resil/850 damage setup most ran last season into 9.2k/300/960 with a fair amount more crit. My goal is to probably turn it into a 9.5k/300/1000+ which looks very simple if one sockets for damage and picks up the season 2 honor gear. (NO PVE NEEDED!) As a player on a 4DPS team, I'm an awful target for opposing teams when compared to our elemental shaman, UA lock, or shadow priest even with the damage oriented gear. I run DPS lineups even in the small arenas, and on each team, I'm the least squishy regardless.

We've seen some pretty solid teams throughout the week in 5s though haven't run into our main competitors from last season when they were running their best five. There are a pretty large number of 4DPS teams in the higher range of rankings right now; I'm not sure 4DPS is "too strong" but I definitely see the frustration from classic teams who even if they play well can still lose to lucky big crits or resisted CC. As a player on a 4DPS team, the perspective is quite different and you really feel the dependence on gaining early momentum, protecting your lone healer, and executing strong CC on opposing healing (especially on the 3-4 healer setups). We're definitely able to recover from failures to do early damage, and despite the whole stigma that the DPS teams "have to" get an early kill, I think the strength of a lot of the 4DPS teams is not only their damage but abundant CC, and medium length games need not be brushed off as automatic losses.

For 5s, looking forward I see other 4DPS teams, classic+lock, and the 3-4 healer teams as are our main challenges and fortunately our battlegroup is almost entirely these compositions; it isn't going to be a coast at all. ^^

For 2s, druid/lock, priest/lock and rogue/druid have been seriously frustrating. (Though not surprisingly frustrating) My skill at these matches is not sufficient to overcome the matchups yet, but I'm sure as the season goes on, we'll at least do well against the mid-tier teams of these matrices. Fortunately, warrior/pally feels like such a free win and is relatively common so we can at least collect back a lot of what we lose to the Warlock/X teams.

For 3s, I've only played a very small number of games, but it's been awesome. I forgot how I much I missed playing with a rogue in arenas; Yecal is as good as it gets and a ridiculous team player, it's a shame rogues suck too much to use in 5s. =p Actually, I think 3s is probably the most fun to play and create strategies for, WSVG looks fun as hell. I think I'm still really bad at 3s compared to 5s as the pacing is very different, so I hope to zerg games in the upcoming weeks to learn to counter some of the harder matches.

Evertras is creating a new site dedicated to mage PvP, check it out. It's still very new and under construction but I'd be remiss to not point it out to those interested.

I've been watching the Zizek and Loganz 2v2 video a ton this past week hoping to both learn from it and get some background beyond what I saw at WSVG. It's probably my favorite arena video in BC, so if 2s doesn't sicken you, watch it!!

Pandemic Repeats @ WSVG

There were some great games (not necessarily the finals) that you definitely missed out on if you didn't at least casually watch the tourney.

I learned a few things for sure; I hope that vids will be available online reasonably quickly for people to analyze and study in greater detail.

3v3 does seem pretty sick but I've never really played it much. Last season, with two active mages on our 3v3 team, I didn't really feel like playing much. I played with the team up until about 2200ish rating and then never really played it much after that. I spent about a week on a warlock/shammy/mage team but found that it had very little versatility. The two matrices in the finals both strike me as fun to play, and hopefully at some point I'll get a chance to try them out. It does seem that competitive WoW is really moving away from 5v5 into the small arena sizes and I'm not really sure how I feel about it yet. It's somewhat hypocritical of me to dislike the small arenas given my love of dueling and the value I place on dueling, but dueling is generally pretty friendly and there is a reasonable code of conduct most people follow: no engineering, no cheesy resistance gear, no restealthing for 5 minutes to reset full CD, no healing behind walls for LoS, etc. I'm not saying that the above are all "cheap" and shouldn't be in arena play, but just that I'm not sure how comfortable I am with how significant the dark side of dueling is in small arena matches.

Either way, I'm very jealous of everyone competing at WSVG and hope the "professional" attention spills over into the competition we see during weekly play. ^^