[News] Blizzard speaks about Mages. Impacts multiboxers?

[Tim]

So check this out, do you think that fire mages multiboxed style might become something viable? Sure, they speak about PVE changes, but I think this might impact PVP?

I dunno, what do you think?

Mage concerns
Those are good questions and sadly I don't have time right now to answer them all. I will try and address the infamous "pace yourself" comment.

First, I'm talking about PvE here, and that means I'm going to skip over Frost for the moment. Sorry. We know how Frost should work in PvE and we need to get it there without making it too good in PvP. With the Arcane changes in 3.2.2 mages should now have two viable raiding specs again, which is an improvement. I ask that you not derail this thread into a Frost discussion.

To be brief to the point of simplicity, we see the Fire playstyle as being more about lining up your cooldowns to maximize your damage (and that improves trinkets as well as spells). Mana is a consideration the way it is for most mana users, but shouldn't be at the fore front of every decision you make and you do have ways of restoring mana if you get into trouble.

Arcane is a little different. We want Arcane to care about mana more. Sorry if that offends casters who think their output should be unlimited, but if it really bugs you, I suggest you try Fire. A lot of Arcane mages like the way mana works for their spec, and Arcane Blast is pretty obviously designed with that gameplay in mind.

What we're trying to do is give Arcane two rotations: the low mana, lower dps version and the higher mana, higher dps version. The first rotation would mean doing things like keeping Blast at 3 stacks, and the second would mean going into 4 stacks. Your trade-off for going to the expensive rotation would be that you could do higher dps than Fire if and when you had enough mana to keep that cycle going. This then becomes where the player skill of Arcane comes in -- knowing when you can afford to step it up for max dps and when you need to pace yourself.

I say all that because we're still tweaking the Arcane numbers for 3.2.2 and that might include increasing the mana cost of stack 4, since the free Missile Barrage procs are already a pretty generous mana break as it is. I know some players will try and keep the 4 stack Arcane Blast up all the time and will then call it a class design problem when they run OOM. That's what those short cooldown Innervates are for. We also might lower the duration of the Arcane Blast buff / debuff to make sure Arcane Barrage is the clear choice for when you are time constrained (like say you have to move or do something else).

This means we are asking a little more out of Arcane mages. To be honest, some of them responded negatively to the Arcane buff in 3.2.2 because they felt like they had to sacrifice too much of what they enjoyed about the playstyle (which includes mana as a potentially limiting resource). We are trying to nail that sweet spot while still boosting sustained Arcane dps.

The goal is NOT to push every mage into Arcane next patch because it's the new flavor of the month for highest theoretical dps. We don't want you to have to regem and everything whenever we come out with a new patch and a new spec is on top. We want you to have a choice between Fire and Arcane (and maybe someday Frost). Arcane will "beat" Fire sometimes, but not all the time.

I know that's a lot of philosophy dumped quickly, and doubtless it will spawn a lot of other questions, but that's the idea in a nutshell. Try and take it at the high-level spirit in which it is offered instead of trying to read too much into every word I chose.

EDIT: I should have put the smiley face after Innervate. The intent of Arcane is that you have to watch your mana, but also have solutions for dealing it, principally Evocation.

[Tim]

Blizzard had some more to say about this...

Mages concerns
My point was that we don’t want Fire / Frostfire to have to worry about mana to the extent that Arcane does. Arcane is more about pacing. Fire is more about responding to what is going on in the fight. That is not to say that Arcane should run OOM constantly or that Fire has an unalienable right to infinite mana. Try not to take my comments to illogical extremes.

When I say we want Fire to be about cooldowns, I meant that lining up your spells at the right time is the hallmark of a great Fire mage. I know a lot of players will say either LOL mages just spam one button, or else LOL mage dps is entirely RNG. I don’t believe either to be true, and the evidence supporting this conclusion is that there are mages who can do much higher damage than other mages, consistently and with similar gear. This suggests there is a much higher skill component to mage dps than even some mages want to acknowledge. A lot of that skill component for Fire / Frostfire comes in doing things at the right time (which we hope to contrast with Arcane and ultimately Frost).

What those things are you are supposed to manage come in several tiers: first are Scorch, Living Bomb and Hot Streak. Yes Hot Streak has an RNG component, but not entirely so. Players still have some control over it.

Second are things like Icy Veins, Combustion, Molten Fury, trinkets and even things like Flame Caps. Yes, I know that both Fire and Frostfire mages don’t always take all of those talents. A note on Combustion in a minute.

Third are more external cooldowns like say Bloodlust and Power Infusion. Yes, other classes benefit from these too. But mages can inflate their damage dramatically when they line these up with their other cooldowns. In the BC days, a mage who really focused on that last 20% of a fight could see their dps nearly double. (I acknowledge this was a bigger factor when Combustion was a bigger contributor.)

Fourth are factors that have less of an effect overall. I’m talking about things like PoM and Firestarter (not included in most raiding builds), and Focus Magic and Torment the Weak (not trivial, but generally up nearly all the time too).

Combustion isn’t good enough right now. We get that. Fire used to be more about cooldown stacking when Combustion meant more. The problem is that we’re happy with Fire damage. We don’t generally like to nerf a spec in order to buff a talent unless things are really, really off. We’ll eventually (3.3?) fix Combustion, because it’s a fun talent. But we aren’t going to do it in such a way that just grants some “free dps” unless of course mages need it at that time. If you disagree that Fire is performing well, then I can understand how you’d disagree with our course of action here