Raiding again, huzzah!!
update on Blockfire: 17.01%hit, unbuffed 26.5%crit, 527 haste, 12.8% Mastery, avg Ilvl 356.
As I've stated in previous posts, I'm extremely impressed with Blizzards encounter design so far. Here are some observations on encounter's I've done so far and various thoughts on how to play better during them.
Magmaw - fire AOE is king here. When the head is exposed, make sure you use your combustion as early as possible, when the head goes away, all your dots come off so you lose alot of damage.
Omnitron Defense - Watch the energy bars because flight time is a bitch here. Again, I save my combustion for one of the energy pools and the damage buff you can spellsteal before using combustion but I always make sure to have my images up because you will come close to pulling agro.
Halfus Wyrmbreaker - I feel like the biggest thing on Halfus is not pulling aggro. Spreading your dots is dangerous especially if you do it on the whelps, although I can attest to the adrenaline rush of a screen full of yellow numbers. As always, dodging anything that damages your is pro.
Maloriak - Is really easy, I think. Spellstealing the healing buff is nice, and AOEing the adds in the green phase is really easy as long as you keep dpsing maloriak and spread the dots to the adds and then Blizzard. Red phase you all stack up to mitigate fire damage, mage ward is pro here. Blue phase you need to spread out to avoid ice tombing multiple people and use an instant cast to break out people quickly, only takes 5k dmg, if i remember correctly. P3 is nice, you can ring of frost the adds, (never done it, i think i saw it on another video) and avoid the frost orbs and win.
Chimaeron - Is easy as a ranged DPS and especially as a mage. Do mad DPS, blink into the stacked up players, blink back out and continue to do mad DPS.
Valiona/Theralion - A lot of movement on this fight, so you end up scorching more than I would like but as long as your head is on a swivel, keeping an eye on ability timers and such, it shouldn't be a problem.
Twilight Council - This is a tough fight, a lot of movement and a lot going on. The first phase I am normally on Ignacious but I set my focus to the other guy (frost dude) so I can interrupt when the tank has to run out. It's super important to keep them as close to each other the closer they get down to 25% to avoid extra health in P3. In the second phase, I am on the wind guy (whoever is on the right as you look into the room). Our strat is to get the wind debuff as soon as it pops and then get grounded as soon as the earthquake goes off. Once again, it's super important that they both are as close to 25% as possible before taking them under to move to phase 3. Phase 3 is really difficult and it's really important to let the tank grab aggro. I try and have my images up for the start of this phase just because I can squeeze out more damage by saving the images (not using them in p2) and using them to start p3 and invising before they come off. P3 is about spacial awareness. One has to do as much damage as possible without pulling aggro, and while the room grows smaller and smaller because of puddle the boss drops. The boss also casts a chain lightnign that really hurts so being spread apart is really important, there are times when I am not in range of the boss but using all of the room is critical to down this boss.
Cho'gall - Is a tough fight, just tough all around. One thing about being a dps or healer for this fight is that all of the damage is avoidable so your stacks should be nowhere near high enough to hurt you. DPS chogall as hard as possible, 2nd tank picks up the add and kites it to where it's goign to die and the ranged dps kill it while avoiding shadow volley(i.e. General Vezax). There is about 10 seconds to DPS chogall before turning back around and AOEing the adds that spawn. I try and keep a pyroblast if one has procced to get a dot up and then hopefully I can spread an ignite and flamestrike. Phase 2 of the fight is madness, adds spawn (4 in 10man normal) and need to be dps'd down. We dps 2 down and then hit hero, dps the 3rd set down and ignore the 4th. By the time the 4th set spawns, it's normally finished.
Al Akir - On normal, this fight seems like a joke until you get to p3. P1 is all about dodging cyclones and watching the knockback which is easy as a mage. I requested being put as far to the right as possible. It was very nice, the whirlwinds spawned basically right on top of me and I was able to just strafe to the right and avoid having to dodge them completely (or if your a fucking lock you can have your teleport on the edge and not have to move for anything, be it whirlwind or knockback) and could blink forward for the knockback. Blink is exceptional on this fight mainly because you skip right over the icy patch in the middle of the platform. P1 passes extremely quickly. P2 is all about stacking the lightning debuff, when we killed him, we stacked it up to 8 without any problems. We've dropped the stack a couple times and the healers complained because the acid rain stacks started to really add up. P3 is tough because of spatial awareness issues. I suggest moving your camer view to where your looking at your feet. The key to P3 is only moving far enough to avoid the new lightning clouds or you'll run out of room. There is also a lightning rod effect adn that person needs to move HORIZONTALLY away from the group, I think the effect has a 25 yard horizontal effect.
Council of Winds - A super fun fight, IMO. The video on tankspot is exactly correct, controlled DPS is key, everyone moves to the snow boss when he's doing the aoe, then moves back to their assigned platform, dps moves when they kill the boss at the assigned time and all die within a minute of each other.
Nefarion - Only boss I have not killed so far. We should have him down this Sunday or Monday night. A super fun fight where mechanics are more important than individual performance.
I'm going to try and FRAPS all of the encounters so people can see them from a mage's point of view and I'll put a link to each encounter into the mage explanation of the fight's above.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Sunday, January 2, 2011
DMC: BROKE
Finally, the Faire is back!!
I've spent over 50% of my liquid gold making decks for various people (myself included, lol) and I've got to say, it's damn expensive. I've bought every stack of any cata herb 100g and under since release and have made 75+ cards. I'm well ahead of my costs after selling a couple of decks and selling some at extremly under-market prices to others in the guild. I just feel like people think I'm lying when I tell them how much it costs to make a single card, so I thought I would share that with my audience (what audience, inoright).
The cards require 30 volatile life (5g-ish per), one high end inscription paper (2g-ish), and 10 of the uncommon inks (which sell for over 250g per and there aren't normally more than one or two for sale). If I bought all the mats required from the AH for ONE card it would, at an extreme minimum, 2652G. Oh yeah, the cards are random so if you have the luck of the dog turd like I do, then you'll make duplicates out the wazoo.
I mill stacks and stacks of mostly cinderbloom, getting 2 or ocassionally 3 pigment per mill, 4 mills per stack, so one stack of herbs ~ 10-12 of the raw, common pigment and an occasional uncommon pigment. I craft all the uncommon ink and then I craft all of the common ink into stacks from the pigment. It takes two pigment per darkflame(?) ink. There is an ink trader in Dalaran that will trade 10 darkflame inks for ONE of the uncommon inks. To sum it up, two stacks of herbs equal about one of the uncommon inks, so it's about 20 stacks of herbs per card.
I've been in the glyph game for a long time and have wrestled up some farmers who will sell huge quantities of herbs/V. Life's for less than market price b/c I can pay them no matter how much they want to sell, this allows me the craft these cards for under 2k per card. It costs me about 16k per card (in theory) to make a deck and they are selling for 25k+ on my server.
A couple of tips to make the DMC: Scribe life a little easier:
I've spent over 50% of my liquid gold making decks for various people (myself included, lol) and I've got to say, it's damn expensive. I've bought every stack of any cata herb 100g and under since release and have made 75+ cards. I'm well ahead of my costs after selling a couple of decks and selling some at extremly under-market prices to others in the guild. I just feel like people think I'm lying when I tell them how much it costs to make a single card, so I thought I would share that with my audience (what audience, inoright).
The cards require 30 volatile life (5g-ish per), one high end inscription paper (2g-ish), and 10 of the uncommon inks (which sell for over 250g per and there aren't normally more than one or two for sale). If I bought all the mats required from the AH for ONE card it would, at an extreme minimum, 2652G. Oh yeah, the cards are random so if you have the luck of the dog turd like I do, then you'll make duplicates out the wazoo.
I mill stacks and stacks of mostly cinderbloom, getting 2 or ocassionally 3 pigment per mill, 4 mills per stack, so one stack of herbs ~ 10-12 of the raw, common pigment and an occasional uncommon pigment. I craft all the uncommon ink and then I craft all of the common ink into stacks from the pigment. It takes two pigment per darkflame(?) ink. There is an ink trader in Dalaran that will trade 10 darkflame inks for ONE of the uncommon inks. To sum it up, two stacks of herbs equal about one of the uncommon inks, so it's about 20 stacks of herbs per card.
I've been in the glyph game for a long time and have wrestled up some farmers who will sell huge quantities of herbs/V. Life's for less than market price b/c I can pay them no matter how much they want to sell, this allows me the craft these cards for under 2k per card. It costs me about 16k per card (in theory) to make a deck and they are selling for 25k+ on my server.
A couple of tips to make the DMC: Scribe life a little easier:
- Get to know other inscription people on your server who delve into cards. It's much easier to swap cards around when you know that the person is going to be there next week.
- I don't count any of the uncommon inks/pigments I get from milling into my calculations on cost because they are unpredictable, so I use them as bonus cards when I get enough of the ink.
- Don't be afraid to look at the AH for the price of cards. Stones cards are selling for less then 1000G but the Decks are selling for over 10k. I took the extra stone cards I had, spent 8K buying up cards before the faire and made two decks when I wouldn't have been guaranteed one full deck.
- Watch the prices of the decks, prices will fluctuate wildly based on how desperate people are to unload their decks and recoup the money invested. If your extremely disciplined, trade the decks in and hold the cards until the faire is over to sell at an even higher premium
Saturday, December 18, 2010
The current state of Magery, Pre-Raid
I have a love/hate relationship with new expansions. It's exciting to me to play with the new spells, stat weights, etc that come out with any expansion because it feels like I have a knack of figuring out how to squeeze more out of my experience/knowledge of my class and get to share that with others. I hate how my character seems less powerful (for lack of better terminology) than before. I understand the why (less crit/haste etc) but it still makes me feel less like the good player I know I am.
The spec that feels the least impacted is frost. It seems like it's in the same spot it was before the expac. Extreme survivability, kiting is extremely simple, and it still hit's reasonably hard. The haste buffs in frost are superb, in my current gear (avg ilvl 343) my frostbolts are casting at 1.2ish seconds and my Deep Freezecrits for over 80k on boss's, I even had one crit for over 250k while attempting Omnitron Defense System. The elemental is pretty powerful and doesn't seem to ever die unless directly targeted, which is a plus.
Fire is pretty weak at the moment. I'm hitting as hard as I was hitting in ICC with the 30% buff, but without the crit rating to support it, I'm actually running oom really quick. The guild was working on Omnitron/Magmaw this past week and I was constantly surprised at how low on mana I was. In my current gear, I'm sitting at 26% crit and was getting very few Pyroblasts. I don't think, at the current level of gear, that we can obtain gear/reforge gear to get enough crit to make Fire viable, maybe with the T11 set bonus'eses this will be viable.
Arcane is in a wierd place, methinks. I am constantly dumbfounded by the mastery bonus of arcane and am amazed at the mana regen of Mage Armor. I think (and this is a personal opinion, to reiterate) the mastery bonus is upside down. I believe it would be better played where a mage does more damage the closer to zero their mana pool is, which would let a mage walk the fine line of keeping their mana pool low to do more damage, or walking a mana tightrope, so to speak. I'll admit, I'm having a hard time finding that switch between nuking and regening mana. I really think that Blizz is going to nerf the mana regen of Mage Armor, but who knows. I feel like I could dps at a decent level for hours
for all the mages who don't know what to gear for at the moment, all one should be concerned with is hit, followed by hit, and finally hit. I tell everyone, "until you are hit capped, nothing else matters". Missing is something that should make you die a little on the inside. Once you hit the hit cap, I'm not sure there is enough itemization to make any stat better than the other. I've been reforging mastery into what's not on the peice, i.e. my chest has mastery/crit on it, I'll reforge the mastery to haste.
I haven't really had time, except when I'm at work, to do some serious research into the extreme min/maxing of each spec, but I plan on remedyin'g
The spec that feels the least impacted is frost. It seems like it's in the same spot it was before the expac. Extreme survivability, kiting is extremely simple, and it still hit's reasonably hard. The haste buffs in frost are superb, in my current gear (avg ilvl 343) my frostbolts are casting at 1.2ish seconds and my Deep Freeze
Fire is pretty weak at the moment. I'm hitting as hard as I was hitting in ICC with the 30% buff, but without the crit rating to support it, I'm actually running oom really quick. The guild was working on Omnitron/Magmaw this past week and I was constantly surprised at how low on mana I was. In my current gear, I'm sitting at 26% crit and was getting very few Pyroblasts. I don't think, at the current level of gear, that we can obtain gear/reforge gear to get enough crit to make Fire viable, maybe with the T11 set bonus'eses this will be viable.
Arcane is in a wierd place, methinks. I am constantly dumbfounded by the mastery bonus of arcane and am amazed at the mana regen of Mage Armor. I think (and this is a personal opinion, to reiterate) the mastery bonus is upside down. I believe it would be better played where a mage does more damage the closer to zero their mana pool is, which would let a mage walk the fine line of keeping their mana pool low to do more damage, or walking a mana tightrope, so to speak. I'll admit, I'm having a hard time finding that switch between nuking and regening mana. I really think that Blizz is going to nerf the mana regen of Mage Armor, but who knows. I feel like I could dps at a decent level for hours
for all the mages who don't know what to gear for at the moment, all one should be concerned with is hit, followed by hit, and finally hit. I tell everyone, "until you are hit capped, nothing else matters". Missing is something that should make you die a little on the inside. Once you hit the hit cap, I'm not sure there is enough itemization to make any stat better than the other. I've been reforging mastery into what's not on the peice, i.e. my chest has mastery/crit on it, I'll reforge the mastery to haste.
I haven't really had time, except when I'm at work, to do some serious research into the extreme min/maxing of each spec, but I plan on remedyin'g
Cataclysm - When did they introduce this Sheep spell??
Impressed.
The word that pops into my mind when I think about Cataclysm and the response I give when asked what I think about the release. I was online about 30 minutes before it went "live". I put live in quotation marks because my server never went down...at all. There were a couple, maybe 4, of times the server lagged for a couple seconds but nothing to cry about.
I logged out at 02:57 and chatted with my guildmates until 0300 and logged on. The only issue I had was that I was parked at the Sons of Hodir quest hub and turned in 3 quests....and received no XP. Soon, all realized that XP outside the new zones wasn't enabled so it was a mad scramble to the new zones/instances.
I leveled from 80 through 82 in instances with guildmates. It was unbelievable how much XP per kill we were getting. We started with Throne of the Tides and then moved on to the new Black Rock Depths instance. BRD was awesome. We were running it while the bug where we were getting XP from that big bastard that cleaves all those guys as long as we tagged them first (which was fun, blink..arcane explosion..iceblock or tank CD's and spamheals) but at 7k xp per kill, it was well worth it. Started questing in Deephome(Deepholme?) and really loved the improvements to the quest info, map, and continuity of quests. I wish I had mining on my mage, because it was ridiculous before they nerfed the mining spawns, it was fricking everywhere and at over 400g a stack the first couple of days, wow!
Uldum was great although it grew pretty monotonous after a couple of hours of uber-egypt influenced stuff. Harrison Jones was funny for about 3 quests and then became an enemy of the state, IMO.
Twilight Highlands, a great zone. I enjoyed every second while I quested in this zone. I hit 85 while about 1/2 through the zone. Uggh, 9million XP to go from 84-85 was gross to look at but not really a huge issue. It didn't seem to take any longer to level this level than any other while questing.
HEROICS-ARE HEROIC, regular dungeons are not. The difference between them is enormous. I have run one heroic NOT in a guild group and will not do so again for a long time. I love the fact that CC isn't strictly mandatory, but drastically improves the time it takes to get through the instance. The group I ran most of the heroic instances with initially was priest (of both specs), warrior tank, ele shaman, mage(myself), and a rogue. Massive amounts of CC, sap/hex/sheep/fear/shackle/shaman elemental lock thingy, it's about the perfect group for cataclysm heroics.
Gearing is painful at the moment, most of my gear is level 346, 333trinket and 318 trinket, green wand (oh how I hate you wand, you never like to come from the same tier I currently raid). I'm sitting at 16.92% hit and will be over the cap as soon as I change one of my gems. I was a little irritated by the dps meta gem still requiring more blue gems than red gems but at this point, most people are going to have to gem for hit anyway so using a 40hit gem in blue slots and int/hit in others should favor that meta gem.
Tol Barad, or as I like to call it at the moment, Tol Bad is terrible. The server I am on is horde dominated but somehow lose TB during the day and if you have ever been on the offense, it's terrible. I can't wait to read what Gevlon has to say about bads in TB, lol. It seemed like when one is on defense, all you have to do is turtle from one base to the next and you'll not lose. The towers are inconsequential to both offense and defense, serving only to prolong your suffering. It seems like the match is decided within the first five to seven minutes and the rest is torture, but that's just me....I COULD be wrong.
Overall, I'm extremely happy with how things have been done with the release and most everything with the expansion. I'm super excited to get in and play in some of the new raids.
The word that pops into my mind when I think about Cataclysm and the response I give when asked what I think about the release. I was online about 30 minutes before it went "live". I put live in quotation marks because my server never went down...at all. There were a couple, maybe 4, of times the server lagged for a couple seconds but nothing to cry about.
I logged out at 02:57 and chatted with my guildmates until 0300 and logged on. The only issue I had was that I was parked at the Sons of Hodir quest hub and turned in 3 quests....and received no XP. Soon, all realized that XP outside the new zones wasn't enabled so it was a mad scramble to the new zones/instances.
I leveled from 80 through 82 in instances with guildmates. It was unbelievable how much XP per kill we were getting. We started with Throne of the Tides and then moved on to the new Black Rock Depths instance. BRD was awesome. We were running it while the bug where we were getting XP from that big bastard that cleaves all those guys as long as we tagged them first (which was fun, blink..arcane explosion..iceblock or tank CD's and spamheals) but at 7k xp per kill, it was well worth it. Started questing in Deephome(Deepholme?) and really loved the improvements to the quest info, map, and continuity of quests. I wish I had mining on my mage, because it was ridiculous before they nerfed the mining spawns, it was fricking everywhere and at over 400g a stack the first couple of days, wow!
Uldum was great although it grew pretty monotonous after a couple of hours of uber-egypt influenced stuff. Harrison Jones was funny for about 3 quests and then became an enemy of the state, IMO.
Twilight Highlands, a great zone. I enjoyed every second while I quested in this zone. I hit 85 while about 1/2 through the zone. Uggh, 9million XP to go from 84-85 was gross to look at but not really a huge issue. It didn't seem to take any longer to level this level than any other while questing.
HEROICS-ARE HEROIC, regular dungeons are not. The difference between them is enormous. I have run one heroic NOT in a guild group and will not do so again for a long time. I love the fact that CC isn't strictly mandatory, but drastically improves the time it takes to get through the instance. The group I ran most of the heroic instances with initially was priest (of both specs), warrior tank, ele shaman, mage(myself), and a rogue. Massive amounts of CC, sap/hex/sheep/fear/shackle/shaman elemental lock thingy, it's about the perfect group for cataclysm heroics.
Gearing is painful at the moment, most of my gear is level 346, 333trinket and 318 trinket, green wand (oh how I hate you wand, you never like to come from the same tier I currently raid). I'm sitting at 16.92% hit and will be over the cap as soon as I change one of my gems. I was a little irritated by the dps meta gem still requiring more blue gems than red gems but at this point, most people are going to have to gem for hit anyway so using a 40hit gem in blue slots and int/hit in others should favor that meta gem.
Tol Barad, or as I like to call it at the moment, Tol Bad is terrible. The server I am on is horde dominated but somehow lose TB during the day and if you have ever been on the offense, it's terrible. I can't wait to read what Gevlon has to say about bads in TB, lol. It seemed like when one is on defense, all you have to do is turtle from one base to the next and you'll not lose. The towers are inconsequential to both offense and defense, serving only to prolong your suffering. It seems like the match is decided within the first five to seven minutes and the rest is torture, but that's just me....I COULD be wrong.
Overall, I'm extremely happy with how things have been done with the release and most everything with the expansion. I'm super excited to get in and play in some of the new raids.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Initial thoughts on Cataclysm
I'm pretty excited for the Cataclysm expansion, although i'm not too sure about where Blizzard is taking mages. There seems to be two different thoughts that have come out in the preview. Here's the link to the WoW site about mage changed for cataclysm (for now).
The new mage spells are the Flame Orb, Time Warp, and Wall of Fog. The Flame Orb spell looks like it can be a lot of fun, but seems to be mainly for heroics or other gimmicky uses. I look forward to casting this down the WSG tunnel while hordies try to run out. It would have to really do some damage to be usable in a raid encounter, as I imagine the cast time is pretty serious. Time Warp (mage heroism+movement speed increase) seems like part Blizzards plan to pseudo-homogenize raids, not that this is a bad thing. I like having heroism from another class, but the speed increase I find most interesting. It seems like a very useful talent/spell (hello defile, lol) but one that Blizzard will inevitably design encounters around. Wall of Fog, overtly a PVP skill, but I'm kinda disappointed that the level 85 spell is designed for PVP or for trash mobs in a raid to the annoyance of the raid leader and anyone tanking. On the PVP side of things, all I've heard from anyone else is how frost mages don't need another way to kite, blah, blah, blah. I can see having some serious fun with this spell, 10 second duration on a 30second CD? Yes please.
Blizzard is also changing some class mechanics and some abilities like Arcane missiles, Scorch, Wards, etc. They are making Arcane Missiles proc based? I'm not sure what this means, if it's not going to be castable without the proc? I think this is a huge mistake, making arcane less viable than fire. Scorch is going to buff fire damage for the mage (a guess on my part) in addition to the spell crit buff, which makes sense to me. They are removing frost/fire wards, amplify/dampen magic, and possible some other "situational spells" because Blizzard doesn't feel like they are used. I'm not sure where they came up with this thought, I use frost ward/fire ward all of the time in ICC. amplify magic gets used on two different encounters in ICC, double that of ToC or Ulduar. PVP is the same, so I'm not sure why those spells are being removed to be completely frank, maybe they needed the room in the spell book?
Mastery, Cataclysms cherry on top. I've got mixed feelings about the Mastery stat. I think mages are in a pretty good spot personally...two viable raid specs, a PVP spec that 90% of mages play (which doesn't take much skill to be really annoying to most classes). I don't see a reason to change them much at all. Mastery, as I understand it, is going to be another stat to balance around no matter what spec you choose to run. Arcane will be SP, Haste, Mastery; Fire will be SP, Crit, Mastery, etc. I get the feeling that mages will be alot like how Enhancement Shamans are currently, there max dps charts are more of a Sin wave instead of slopes. This means that, for example, you want to stack haste until 550, then stack AP until you get to 5000, then stack haste again until 700 and back to stacking AP. I feel like this is what Mastery is going to do to mages, which I feel is a bad thing for anyone gearing up. I don't find gearing up a mage very confusing at all, but I'm constantly amazed at the questions I get whispered all of the time, stuff that is easily researched. Another thing about mastery I'm confused about is the deep arcane mastery talent, Mana Adept. I'm confused. I'm very confused. As an arcane mage my mana usage is based on two minutes of button smashing, racing my mana pool to zero, evocating and then making that 60% last two minutes, BUT NOW because of the mastery talent, i do "significantly more damage at 100% mana than I would at 50%." This is rediculously counter-intuitive to an arcane mage. Ideally, the last two seconds of a fight, I should be finishing a cast leaving myself with zero mana.
The new mage spells are the Flame Orb, Time Warp, and Wall of Fog. The Flame Orb spell looks like it can be a lot of fun, but seems to be mainly for heroics or other gimmicky uses. I look forward to casting this down the WSG tunnel while hordies try to run out. It would have to really do some damage to be usable in a raid encounter, as I imagine the cast time is pretty serious. Time Warp (mage heroism+movement speed increase) seems like part Blizzards plan to pseudo-homogenize raids, not that this is a bad thing. I like having heroism from another class, but the speed increase I find most interesting. It seems like a very useful talent/spell (hello defile, lol) but one that Blizzard will inevitably design encounters around. Wall of Fog, overtly a PVP skill, but I'm kinda disappointed that the level 85 spell is designed for PVP or for trash mobs in a raid to the annoyance of the raid leader and anyone tanking. On the PVP side of things, all I've heard from anyone else is how frost mages don't need another way to kite, blah, blah, blah. I can see having some serious fun with this spell, 10 second duration on a 30second CD? Yes please.
Blizzard is also changing some class mechanics and some abilities like Arcane missiles, Scorch, Wards, etc. They are making Arcane Missiles proc based? I'm not sure what this means, if it's not going to be castable without the proc? I think this is a huge mistake, making arcane less viable than fire. Scorch is going to buff fire damage for the mage (a guess on my part) in addition to the spell crit buff, which makes sense to me. They are removing frost/fire wards, amplify/dampen magic, and possible some other "situational spells" because Blizzard doesn't feel like they are used. I'm not sure where they came up with this thought, I use frost ward/fire ward all of the time in ICC. amplify magic gets used on two different encounters in ICC, double that of ToC or Ulduar. PVP is the same, so I'm not sure why those spells are being removed to be completely frank, maybe they needed the room in the spell book?
Mastery, Cataclysms cherry on top. I've got mixed feelings about the Mastery stat. I think mages are in a pretty good spot personally...two viable raid specs, a PVP spec that 90% of mages play (which doesn't take much skill to be really annoying to most classes). I don't see a reason to change them much at all. Mastery, as I understand it, is going to be another stat to balance around no matter what spec you choose to run. Arcane will be SP, Haste, Mastery; Fire will be SP, Crit, Mastery, etc. I get the feeling that mages will be alot like how Enhancement Shamans are currently, there max dps charts are more of a Sin wave instead of slopes. This means that, for example, you want to stack haste until 550, then stack AP until you get to 5000, then stack haste again until 700 and back to stacking AP. I feel like this is what Mastery is going to do to mages, which I feel is a bad thing for anyone gearing up. I don't find gearing up a mage very confusing at all, but I'm constantly amazed at the questions I get whispered all of the time, stuff that is easily researched. Another thing about mastery I'm confused about is the deep arcane mastery talent, Mana Adept. I'm confused. I'm very confused. As an arcane mage my mana usage is based on two minutes of button smashing, racing my mana pool to zero, evocating and then making that 60% last two minutes, BUT NOW because of the mastery talent, i do "significantly more damage at 100% mana than I would at 50%." This is rediculously counter-intuitive to an arcane mage. Ideally, the last two seconds of a fight, I should be finishing a cast leaving myself with zero mana.
Introduction
Welcome!!
I am Block, I'm an arcane mage on Laughing Skull realm of World of Warcraft. I play every spec and use them in every facet of the game, PVP, raiding, soloing, heroics, etc. This blog is an extension of the theorycrafting, advice, and ranting from a mage's point of view.
I am Block, I'm an arcane mage on Laughing Skull realm of World of Warcraft. I play every spec and use them in every facet of the game, PVP, raiding, soloing, heroics, etc. This blog is an extension of the theorycrafting, advice, and ranting from a mage's point of view.
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