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

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.

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.

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.