Big Ol' Mana Shields

One incoming change in 2.4 that has received little coverage here or anywhere else has been the improvements to Mana Shield. For those way out of the loop, Mana Shield now receives half of your +damage, and in PvP gear, we're talking about 500 more absorbed per shield -- this extra absorption comes at no extra mana cost, and with Improved Mana Shield, it will operate overall at near 1:1 efficiency. Time to put on those level 60 PvP gloves? Probably not, but the change should help pretty significantly in duels and 2v2.

I think that the mage player base is still largely disappointed with what 2.4 offers, but the class is undeniably significantly more powerful than it was a few patches ago. I'm not going to laundry list everything, but: Improved Evocation, Improved Mana Gems, Impved Spellsteal, Improved Mana Shield, Improved Nuke Coefficients, Trainable IB, Icy Veins, Lower Mana Costs, etc. Mages have really gotten the most improvements of any class in the past months -- the question really is, have the changes been effective?

If you look at all of the statistics, probably not. Even after playing priest in 2s for 2 days, I think I'd be more likely to hit 2400 on my priest than my mage. I also have way more versatility in forming viable teams. And I'm not a good priest, or a bad mage. =p

Maybe that's a stretch, but it's a not a crazy one.

A mage brings no healing, no healing debuff, no mana draining, and no defensive dispelling of any significance to a 2s matrix. These are not necessary by any means, and the mage does bring great burst, decent CC, and great survivability (in 2s!) without the need for healing.

I do think mage/rogue is a top 2s team without a doubt. But would that rogue be better with an equivalently skilled priest or druid? Even if I think mage/rogue has perhaps surpassed spriest/rogue and lock/rogue to be the strongest 2dps team, it doesn't change the fact that locks, priests, and rogues all have stronger matrices than 2dps right now. No matter how much I go on and on about mage potential in 2s, the representation has remained unchanged in the past months. But does this really mean much?

A quick diversion -- Mages have never felt as strong (Even Pre-TBC) as they do now in BG type PvP. I've said before that I feel that mages are the best class at leveraging small skill and gear advantages to great effect. Even if a warlock, warrior, or priest is a solid player, in a 1v3 against semi-decent players, they have really not much of a chance -- they just get zerged and can't do much. However, put a s3 equipped mage with good skill against 3 people with 200 resil and 8k hp, and I wouldn't bet against the mage. And this is arrogant and whatever fuck you, but a few months ago, when I rolled up a to a guared flag in AB and saw 3 defenders, I'd hit fraps and hope to get a good clip, now I think, there's only 3. This isn't a testament to my skill or anything, but just the class has scaled pretty out of control in some ways and it looks to continue down that path in 2.4. With cooldowns, an AP/Fire mage can basically kill one target instantly, do huge damage to a secondary, and still have nigh invuln, IB, and a ton of other tricks left -- with pots and engineering in the mix, the potential is huge. It feels very much like playing 28/23 back at 60, except instead of cold snap, you have an IWIN, and honestly, the IWIN is more powerful. So while mages might not be getting the buffs they need to hold number one spots on arena teams, the class is undeniably becoming increasingly generally powerful in PvP -- just not the PvP that matters.

There's a probably a sizable audience out there who thinks that mages are fine, need no improvement and just need to man up to be competitive in top level arena. I felt this way about hunters, not going to lie, and am somewhat on the fence with mages. Hunters ended up receiving both a healing debuff and an offensive dispel to make them more competitive in arena -- mages have thus far received a dozen tweaks without really trying to add new class mechanics. I prefer this style balancing in a sense as it reduces class homogenization, but at some point, I worry that it makes trying to balance the classes a real fuckshow. Say you improve all this crap on mages and without a few core ability changes, mages are still never competitive, are you going to rollback these improvements and give mages a healing debuff? Leave the changes in and the class just starts to get retarded overpowered. Honestly, I think that with a little bit more damage scaling AP+PoM+Pyro could get retarded out of hand, almost to the point of the double trinket days. I get that the mage class is supposed to have tons of tricks and situational abilities combined with devastating burst, but I can't help but feel that our real weakness is lack of good synergy right now and not anything intrinsic to the class itself. These changes are great for pwning noobs in battlegrounds, but it all feels like a precarious balancing act.