Beta Thoughts

It's quite premature to really talk too seriously about the state of WotLK. It is so ridiculously broken at the moment that whenn I read people TCing about "X is so OP omgz", I think, thank you Raptor Jesus from sparing me from The Downs.

I'm going to talk about mages here, because well, I like wizard hats and robes and stuff. Especially that Mickey Mouse Fantasia shit. Mages need brooms. Conjure brooms on a motherfucker.

I'm going to talk about both PvE and PvP a little -- with WotLK, I'd like to PvE again, as I feel a little weird really only understanding half of the class, and well, I miss talking about dicks with my friends.

From a PvE perspective, I'm of the opinion that all that matters is that the class is fun to play and warrants a raid spot so that I can talk about dicks with my friends. To that end, being in a "high" end guild (they sucked in TBC without me, but I'm used to bitches sucking without me), it needs to be optimal for me, as a mage, to be in the raid. In TBC, it is not optimal to have mages in raids. You're better with zero. You can bring more. But there are better raid compositions. If you're a mage in a raid, you're bringing the team down like that fat kid who was the coach's son in soccer. Fatty. Fatso. Fats. Yeah you. Fatty.

At some point, gameplay evolved, i.e. people got less retarded, and PvE became less about individual performance and more about designing the best groups you could. It doesn't matter what your single DPS is, it matters how much you contribute to the raid DPS. If you do 2500 DPS as a mage, and your Shaman friend does 1800, this doesn't matter if you add that same 2500 DPS to the raid but he contributes 3000. This is pretty obvious logic by now, but when I raided, it wasn't really the conventional way of thinking. Bring people who didn't suck and die was basically our mantra. Die-rs fucking suck.

What about utility? Food and water can be bought. I know. I buy them in Beta. It doesn't fucking matter. Arcane Intellect is probably the worse group buff in the game. Warlock Felhunters will be buffing Intellect more.

What about crowd control? Everyone has CC. Hunter traps. Repentance. Blind. Sap. Hex. Fear. Banish. Poly is a good PvE CC. It's useful for clearing trash. Never necessary. Rarely relevant in boss encounters.

What about AoE? Everyone has AoE. Warlocks do, and look like they may continue, to outdamage us when it comes to AE, and they can do it at a safe distance. What mages do bring here is the ability to mass snare and control mobs. Hunters can do this (perhaps better) and so can Wars with PH, but mages are undeniably good as any spec (better with imp blizz obviously) at controlling big groups of mobs.

You can try to break out the utility functions and justify the potency of mages, but realistically, you bring mages to raids for their damage. And to this end, a mage, because he does not increase the group's damage (beyond imp scorch) has to do enough damage solo to make up for his lack of synergy. Now obviously if a mage does so much damage that the synergies provided by the hybrid classes are not worth more than a mage, these hybrids won't find raid spots, and we'll be back to WoW 1.0 with 8mage-6rogue raids.

This is all very long winded and very very beaten to death, so I'll stop with saying mages need zomgdamage in pve, and get to the point, does WotLK look like it will provide it, and how?

Maybe.

Starting off, the fire tree is useless.

Fire benefits from having the most multipliers of any of our trees. It loses a lot of this advantage, and all of the new talents suck. Fireball is a dead spell with Frostfire Bolt in the game. A 0/33/38 type spec or even a 0/36/35 will destroy any deep fire spec.

In PvP, fire has been pretty terrible post 60. The tree relies on scorch in PvP, which is just not potent enough with the bigger health pools. (No, I don't think survivability is the issue, the issue is that you have no good weapons as fire) Fire also has no controllable burst. Arcane has PoM. Frost has Shatter. Fire has...DB and Blastwave? Dragon's Breath will continue to suck. The spell needs a severe redesign, which it doesn't seem likely to get. The tree will need huge changes and it's basically not worth talking about as everything about it sucks, and sucks hard.

Frost is neat, but frustrating. The best new talent is obviously Winter's Grasp. I'll hold off on a PvE WG discussion for now. In PvE, this talent, ignoring Ffb, is sick and actually makes you play the game. I really hope they don't nerf it to the point where Frost is back to spamming Frostbolt ad infinitum. To play "perfectly" as a Frost Mage while raiding will be a challenge, and it's possible you'll see differentiation effects depending on who can best use their WG procs. Managing WG gets complicated particularly if the boss moves or if your haste changes dynamically during the encounter.

In PvP, WG is a pretty low proc rate. I don't think spamming lance and hoping for a proc is that amazing. You basically would only do this against Wars, Rogues, Retadins, and DKs, and you realistically, will only be able to do this against Wars and Retadins. I say this from a 1v1 perspective, but tbh, they way you kite Wars and Retadins in arenas is pretty similar to how you would in a duel, and WG will be nice, but not OMG. It's just going to be the mage version of sword spec. Gay RNG stupidity when it procs that's going to cause severe nerdrage.

Deep Freeze. Sucks. I already talked about this. But it really sucks. Really. The animation is gay too.

Chilled to the Bone is amazing. It's the other "really good" talent that people TC'd about it when the talents first dropped, and it lives up to expectations. CoC is beast with it. Frostbolting to snare beyond hamstring also has good arena potential. You have to remember that, relatively, a hamstringed priest will move 60% faster than a CoC'd war. Here's hoping for a 10% more snare inscription. =p Who needs roots. ^^

To be Continued....