Despite the new abilities, mages still seem to lack:
A healing debuff
A mana drain
A way of recovering lost health
A way of reliably getting off casts in PvP
A dispel resistance mechanic
A reliable way of dealing with mild pressure (pets, dots, etc)
These aren't things that are necessary or even desired necessarily, as total class homogenization is boring, but at least one or two of the above would open up options in gameplay and team composition a lot for the class.
Dispel is really a huge problem. Basically we still rely on winter's chill to frustrate dispels which is sort of neat, but sort of clumsy. I think offensive dispel resistance might be too potent on the class (especially with all of our crap debuffs), but our buffs could be more resilient to dispel as some are extremely critical. Icy Veins, Ice Barrier, Combustion, our Armors, etc. If it were only priests and shamans stripping us of this stuff, this would be less an issue, but with so many classes able to dispel, I was really hoping for an improvement on this front in WotLK. Even with all the new toys, fighting against mages looks to be again dispel-and-train.
All three talent trees are plagued with too specific talents. I know we're not supposed to compare talents across classes, but mages have a ridiculous number of talents that simply improve one ability in one way, and even then, sometimes only marginally. I had planned on going through the new trees, but apparently Blizz has gone all NDA-enforce-y on people, so I'll let shit blow over a few days.
Anyways, I'm gone starting tomorrow till Tuesday -- maybe I'll get one update in between now and then, but otherwise pc and <3 till then.
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11 comments:
FRST
Frost seems to be the PvP tree yet AGAIN seeing as how a 1.5sec stun doesn't work on bosses.
Living bomb is cool and all but looks bit gimmicky and is probably dispellable lololol
sigh maybe its time for AoC, demonologist looks kinda neat
UI? ^^
I'm playing a Rogue again. Find a Horde Mage on Tich and let's blow shit up in 2s.
IMO
ETHUGG
posted this in response to your previous entry? on the alpha wiki they have posted shatter shield as the lvl 80 mage trainable ability. looks like it'll help non frost survivability. i'm sure it will be easily dispellable though >.<
EMO OUT MORE
"A reliable way of dealing with mild pressure (pets, dots, etc)"
Shatter Shield is totally anti-pet pushback.
Well said raddy. Without defensive dispel resistance (offensive would have been nice for slow though....), most of our new buffs will be entirely useless. Same thing with spell pushback. If our new frost and arcane spells have 0 pushback resistance they will be very limited in their uses (see arcane blast and frostbolt w/o ice barrier).
As for shatter shield I would expect it to be dispellable, not to mention it has a 1200 mana cost. Either way more dependability on freezing your targets for damage/utility is not a good thing thanks to DRs.
Shatter shield + mana shield + PW:S + pain suppress for dispel resistance = massive pain inc with Incanter's Absorbtion if it works that way hehe.
Raddy! I need your opinion. When stacking haste next season do you think 33/28 (the good ole build) or do you think that the huge amount of crit reliance to make frost *better* will be compensated for the faster casts.
The reason I say this is sure people will be more likely to get off frostbolts, but most of the time you're spamming instants (barrier, fireblast, coc, icelance, nova, blink etc etc. With the pom build you have more avoidance with blazing speed/imp blink and a better mana efficiency with scorch which is less spell power reliant than frostbolt, and can get off more scorches due to stacking haste.
And last but not least... full haste gems or sp/haste so far I'm looking at about 340ish haste for s4 assuming all the pieces you recommended including sp/haste gems.
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