As I briefly mentioned last post, mages now have access to a miniature mortal strike, via the talent Permafrost, at a 7/13/20% reduction to healing, afflicting all targets suffering from on of your chill effects.

My initial reaction is as follows:

Why?

After that… I thought about it, and then said the following:

Why?

The first “why” being in legitimate confusion, the second being more of a philosophical conjecture.

The Mortal Strike debuff itself used to be a warrior only thing. Nearly completely by itself, it made Arms the PvP spec of choice. It gave warriors the ability to provide massive pressure against enemy healers, and as a result warriors became very prevalent in PvP.

With only a little bit of exaggeration, every successful 5v5 arena team had a warrior for one reason and one reason only, and that was the godly mortal strike debuff.

Blizzard, apparently, decided that it was too powerful an ability for one class to sport. So it’s been spread around a bit. Rogues can do it, hunters can do it, and even Arms’ angrier, less eloquent brethren the fury warriors can do it. Well, I suppose troll priests could do it too back in the day, but that isn’t relevant anymore.

Thing is, Mortal Strike is powerful, and Blizzard decided to take the attitude of “bring the classes, not the class” for Wrath PvP.

As with all homogenization, this is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line, or as GC put it, when do you decide to just apply the debuff to everyone as soon as a match starts?

In the Wrath beta, enhancement shamans were given a mortal strike, in an effort to get them in a better place for PvP. Fearing homogenization, they lost the ability and in exchange received… well, nothing.

So with 3.2, mortal strike is getting spread around a little more.

Mages have it, as mentioned above, as do Shadow Priests, via Improved Mind Blast.

The latter makes sense, to an extent.

Shadow Priests aren’t exactly in the ideal… screw it, I calls it as I sees it. Shadow Priests suck, and suck badly. As far as being an offensive caster goes, they are stuck somewhere between a moonkin and an affliction warlock, but lacking all the perks and possessing all the crap.

A mortal strike debuff for shadow priests make sense. They need the PvP buff, and classwise, this fits rather neatly into the shadow priest mythos.

I mean, shadow priests already flay the minds of their opponents, leech their energy, wrack their bodies with disease, and can even cause them to drop their weapons from sheer terror.

Is adding a mortal strike to that skillset really a stretch?

But mages?

Warriors: my axe is coated in rabies, that’s why it’s harder for you to get better.

Rogues: it’s taken centuries to perfect this poison, a poison that rots you from the inside.

Hunters: well, yer see, there be this weetle spot right above yer heart.

Shadow Priests: hush, now, don’t speak. Let the darkness consume you…

Mages: Man, you know what sucks? Being really cold. It’s hard to heal when you’re really cold. I mean, that frostbolt is, what, -90 degrees?

Just as a quick recap, this is where mages are:

Arcane and Frost PvP are fine. Frost PvP, in fact, is in such a good place right now that Blizzard refuses to buff frost PvE out of fear of making frost PvP overpowered. Fire PvP, on the other hand, is pretty crap.

On the flipside, fire and arcane mages are in a pretty damn good spot as far as PvE goes. Sure, there are differences, but nothing hugely significant. Frost mages, of course, are pretty crappy, lagging 20-30% behind their non-frosty brethren.

So given this situation, what is your first reaction?

Is it to buff frost mage PvP? No? Why not? Clearly that’s the biggest issue with the mage class right now.

All snark aside, there are a few conclusions I can draw from this:

• This is not, in fact, going to go live, but merely Blizzard’s way of testing what a change like this would do. Consider Mortal Strike the Replenishment of PvP, and expect it to get spread around to multiple specs the same way.
• Following the same idea, mortal strike is going to be spread around, and nerfed across the board to 20%. Say goodbye to 50% mortal strike, say hello to the not quite as game changing 20%.

Personally, I think this change is following the same idea as the current Living Bomb change.

Oh, in case you didn’t know, Blizzard is currently testing with not giving LB a limit to the number of targets it can afflict. They don’t know whether they’ll go through with it, it’s just being tested.

Same thing here, methinks. It’s just a test, just to see, maybe it’ll go live, maybe it won’t. Mortal Strike is sort of in the same boat as the whole dispel game, it’s an out of control mechanic that is in desperate need of a do over.

So here’s the real question: why does MS need to be spread around at all? Why does it need to be in a place where it can be counted on to always be up?

In my opinion, Blizzard is doing this backward. Rather than weakening mortal strike and spreading it around, it should be strengthened and consolidated.

At its core, what is mortal strike? Well, it’s a way to pressure an enemy healer, just like spell interrupts, crowd controls, or other cooldowns and effects of that nature.

Why does MS need to be in a place where it’s always up? Can we not take the complete other direction, and have it be something that’s up only sometimes?

Rather than warriors having a 50% mortal strike that’s nearly always up, why not have a 80% mortal strike that can only be put up once every 45 seconds?

Instead of having it be a flat debuff that is always up, resulting in this current dilemna, why not have it be a cooldown? Something that is used to push for a kill and something that can be countered against… you know, something that actually requires strategy.

Look at it this way.

Healers have passive talents and abilities that provide small boosts to their healing. They have active abilities and cooldowns to provide large boosts to their healing.

So opposing DPS type classes should have abilities and talents that mirror that. Why should warriors, or anyone else for that matter, have access to something to passively reduce healing by such a huge amount?

And hey, if being unable to provide 100% mortal strike uptime somehow cripples warriors in PvP, then Blizzard is just going to have to buff them intelligently, aren’t they?

When one is months behind, it means they’re doing something like clearing Black Temple four weeks after Wrath shipped, or finally clearing Naxxramas once most guilds have cleared out all the Ulduar hard mode content.

Such is the case with me, having just now started to raid Ulduar, on the very cusp of patch 3.2.

And it’s fun as hell.

A quick rundown of past events (for those of you who don’t stalk me):

Stay Frosty, as a guild, kinda fell apart over the course of about a day. No blow up, no massive drama, just about 90% of the raiders deciding it would be more fun to join Shai Hulud, Duskwood’s premiere raiding guild.

Those that didn’t /gquit for Shai either left for other guilds, or quit the game altogether. Nearly overnight, one of Duskwood’s top raiding guilds became a complete ghost town.

This means that every guild I have ever joined has collapsed within nine months of me signing on.

Not that I’m superstitious or anything, but seriously… what the carp is going on here.

But anyway, I’m now sporting the banner of For Whom The Bell Tolls, which is basically the people from Anathema, Anathema being the guild I raided with in BC.

Hopefully I don’t kill their guild somehow this time. Though two people have quit since I joined, which was last goddamn week…

Ulduar, then.

I’m arcane, and at this point it would be very hard to convince me to spec otherwise. As I suspected, using Incanter’s Absorption and Frost Warding together is extremely potent on the fights where it can be used.

Oh yeah, did I mention one of the guild’s primary healers is a Discipline priest? Incanter’s Absorption is an absolutely amazing talent if there’s a Disc priest kicking around. Raid buffed I’m usually at around 2100+ spellpower, but with IA randomly proccing I’ve seen that go as high as 3100.

Oh yeah, and having infinite mana on some fights thanks to Frost Warding is pretty cool too.

And yet… I’ve noticed myself developing a rather bad habit.

Because I get such a large boost to either spellpower or my mana pool, I find myself intentionally “standing in the fire” for a tick or two, just to proc one of the two (or both!). I have yet to decide if this is bad or not.

I’ll let you know when I consider a 30% chance good enough odds and stand in a rocket strike.

I’ve also ran a ton of Heroics, bought enough BtA stuff to last me and my alts a couple expansions, and even built myself a modest PvP set.

Oh yeah, and I got a job, for those who aren’t obsessed enough to follow my twitter, too.

But through this all, I’ve only ever had two goals:

• Get pants that don’t suck
• Kill Kel’motherfracking’thuzad

I’m still, to this day, wearing Hateful Glad pants. Plenty of upgrades have dropped in, say, Naxx, but I’ve always lost the roll. I’ve also been obsessively running Halls of Lightning in the faint hopes that maybe, some day, my pants will drop…

But nope. That goddamn axe keeps dropping and getting sharded. I hate you Loken. I hate you so much.

But, on the bright side, I’ve finally been in a raid that managed to get Kel’Thuzad down. It’s taken this long to get Champion of the Frozen Wastes, but shazam, I am finally there.

I’ve even been in raids that quit on Sapph, by the way. KT just refused to die for me. And then of course I killed him effortlessly on alts, but never my main.

BUT NOW HE’S DEAD. WHERE IS YOUR PRECIOUS CAT NOW, LICH?

Oh yeah, and I got Flame Keeper too. Not that it was hard. I did everything (except kill Ahune) last year, so all I had to do was wait for Blizzard to fix it’s crap, and then I was fine.

If only I had any plans to go back to fire…

Oh yeah, been doing a bunch of PTR stuff too. Did you know frost mages have a mini-mortal strike now? They totally do!

Arcane

• Arcane Subtlety – now reduces threat generated by all spells and effects by 5/10% and arcane spells and effects by an additional 15/30%. The dispel protection remains the same.
• Arcane Focus – now applies to all spells, instead of just arcane.
• Arcane Stability – reduced to three ranks for the same effect, and now applies to Evocation.
• Torment the Weak and Student of the Mind have swapped places in the arcane tree. Torment the Weak now only grants a 3/6/9% boost to damage (down from 4/8/12%).
• Spell Impact now also applies to frostbolt, arcane barrage and arcane missiles.
• Arcane Stability – now increases spell damage and critical strike chance by 2/4/6, up from 1/2/3%.
• Mind Mastery and Arcane Mind have both been reduced to three talent points for the same effect.

Fire

• Incineration – now also applies to Frostbolt and Ice Lance.
• Burning Determination – now also reduces the duration of stun effects and disorients by 15/30%.
• Improved Scorch – now also increases the damage dealt with Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, and Scorch by 1/2/3%.
• Impact – stun effect has been increased to 3 seconds.
• Molten Shields – in addition to it’s current effect, your Molten Armor now grants 20/40% of your resilience as critical strike rating.
• Playing With Fire – instead of increasing spell damage taken by 1/2/3%, now reduces spell damage taken by 4/7/10% as long as Molten Armor is active.
• Blazing Speed – now immediately finishes the cooldown of your Blink spell when this talent procs.
• Combustion – redesigned. Renamed Burnout. Increases your critical strike chance with fire spells by 50% while costing 20% more mana to cost. This effect lasts 15 seconds.
• Fiery Payback – now also triples the damage of Molten Armor when below 35% health.
• Firestarter – now provides an instant cast effect to Flamestrike or Scorch. If Scorch is used for this proc, it has a 100% critical strike chance.
• Burnout – renamed Combustion, and the additional mana cost effect has been removed.
• Dragon’s Breath – the area of effect of this spell has been increased to match that of a talented cone of cold spell.

Frost

• Winter’s Chill – in addition to it’s current effect, now also increases the damage dealt by Ice Lance by 10% per rank on targets of a higher level than you.
• Brain Freeze – now grants an instant cast, mana free Frostfire Bolt instead of Fireball.

Anyway, those are are my ideas for what should happen to the mage trees to try and solve our little issues.

Fireball specs currently have mana issues. As it stands now, neither Blizzard’s changes nor my ideal ones actually provide a proper fix to it, merely a bandaid.

But seriously, what was the line of thinking behind the ignite change? Did they just forget Burnout existed? I mean, c’mon! Fire mages have mana troubles… you have a talent designed to cost them more mana… it isn’t possible for this to be more obvious!

Not to mention how broken the Ignite mana return is. Considering the Replenishment nerf with this patch, it’s a very small buff (in the area of 30mp5), and that’s assuming that ignite ticks properly every 2 seconds.

Which, of course, it won’t. Let’s say a fire mage, I dunno, crits again before the first tick of Ignite happens. What happens? Well, ignite refreshes, resetting the duration, meaning the mage doesn’t get any mana.

It’s basically exactly the same problem frost mages had with replenishment.

We now know from the Mage Q&A that Blizzard is actually ok with us having to go into the arcane tree to get those talents in there.

Let’s get this straight. Most of us are not actually all that concerned with spending 15, 18 points in the arcane tree. What we’re concerned with is that the talent is so necessary to our DPS, we literally waste points to get there, and even then, it’s completely out of our control whether or not we even get the effect.

But hey. Fine. So change up the early arcane tree so it’s actually attractive to go there.

Ideally, the early tree of every tree would be attractive to every other tree, but most classes operate under the principle that one tree is good for all the others.

Consider that all shamans want a piece of the enhancement tree, all priests want some discipline, all druids need some restoration, and all warriors want arms.

Natch, a little extra threat reduction boost for fire mages (one of the very few specs in the game that actually have threat issues) while keeping arcane threat reduction the same. Allowing that hit talent be global allows for mages to have access to 6% hit from talents, if they really need it, but more importantly, it gives fireball mages access to a hit talent.

Oh yeah, and a little extra mana efficiency will help fire’s mana issues just a smidge. Not enough to be a fix, but hey, it’s a bandaid. Nothing wrong with first aid.

Torment the Weak, as you noticed, is available a little earlier. It’s been weakened a little, as it requires somewhat less investment to get. It could probably stand to be nerfed a little more, actually, so long as that extra damage is buffed up elsewhere.

In my case, I added the missing frostbolt damage to Spell Impact, beefed up a deeper arcane talen, and let Imp. Scorch increase the damage of Fireball/Frostfire Bolt/Scorch by the same amount it currently increases their crit chance.

In total, the adjustments to TtW results in a slight buff to frost and arcane damage, a tiny buff to frostfire damage, while fire damage stays the same.

Speaking of arcane, the tree is bloated. No way around that, this is fact. Trim a couple of those big talent dumps, and now the arcane mage has an additional four talent points to goof around with. Nothing huge, like boomkins and prot paladins got earlier in wrath, just a little bit of fat trimming.

The frost tree… well, I only really have a couple ideas for here. The tree itself is actually pretty damn good. Adding frostbolt to Spell Impact would help raid viability a little.

The Winter’s Chill thing is something I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while. With Winter’s Chill fully stacked, thus giving ice lance a 50% damage boost, coupled with the glyph, should get ice lance into something more than worthwhile to cast when FoF procs.

I get Blizzard’s stance that having stuff that works differently in PvP and PvE is confusing… but seriously, come now. This is an old game, with an old, highly experienced, highly knowledgeable player base. Sure, there may be new players, but they are outnumbered by the old ones.

I promise we won’t be confused.

Though some may complain we’re just getting a copy paste of paladin mechanics.

The fire tree was the most interesting to toy around with.

I struggled for a bit with buffing up the early fire tree stuff, like Burning Determination and Molten Shields, but really, a mage has to make a choice there.

Sure, a frost mage could get Burning Determination and Impact, but they’d give up silence and Torment the Weak. Sure, you could go deep enough to pick up Molten Shields, use molten armor and gain a HUGE crit increase, but you’d be, again, giving up TtW and all the stuff mage armor gives you.

Yeah, using molten armor and getting Molten Shields is going to give you something in the area of 300 critical strike rating, if not more, but you give up a lot to use it. It evens out, I think.

Also, the Combustion change wasn’t really all that imaginative. It’s basically a copy paste of Arcane Power, except it applies to only fire spells. Combustion, as is, is horribly outdated and utterly useless in today’s raiding world. Sure, it’s not a very imaginative change, but it’s still a good one.

And hey, you can’t deny the fire tree would be really fun to try in PvP if it looked like that.

Anyway, feel free to add your own thoughts, bathe in the awesome, lambast my idiotic ideas, or weep that such changes will never happen.

So I got interviewed over at Grinding to Valhalla, so you should probably check that out if you haven’t already.

It’s… long. I warn you now, you will be reading for some time.

But hey, if you have any interest in how things work around here (”here” being  a general term for CQQ), I’d read it.

No seriously, I would.

I mean, I wrote it, and it’s about me, of course I would read it!

So last post seems to have become a sort of center for massive controversy and a great deal of debate.

However, an alarming number of comments have either misinterpreted the original post (as in the case of Bellwether) or my words have been twisted so as to be completely unrecognizable (as in the case of Garret).

So let’s try this again, shall we? Set the record straight and all that.

Don’t worry if you misunderstood me, it’s not your fault. As a blogger, it’s my job – well, hobby, technically – to communicate effectively and clearly. If my points were taken the wrong way, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

There are plenty of arguments that can be leveled at the Emblem of Conquest change. Things like “this change will ruin character progression” or “this will encourage players to skip content entirely” are legitimate issues.

The post was not directed at those holding that opinion. The post was not directed at everyone who has an issue with the Emblem change.

The post was directed at a specific set of people who have an issue with the change, an attitude that was summarized best by occam99:

Funnily enough, the people who have that attitude ARE the ones who feel that they should be worshipped for their gear…and that’s what this is all about. “Hey, I have T8.5. Obviously I’m a better person than you, which means that you don’t deserve what I have”.

It is ass-backwards, and supported by the fact that in WoW, we are all anonymous. If someone says to me, “I have a Jaguar and you don’t, therefore I am better than you, thus you don’t deserve the same things as me”, I’m gonna punch him in the throat.

It’s THAT kind of raider the last post was leveled at.

If you are NOT that kind of person, then that last post wasn’t directed at you.

Is that clearer now?

Alert readers will notice that there were two things missing from the last post:

• Any mention of Emblem’s of Triumph
• My actual, personal opinion on the matter

There was nothing in the last post about whether the emblem change is good or bad, merely that in the long run it won’t really change anything.

I’m ambivalent on the Emblem change. To actually get all the gear available from these badges will take a huge amount of effort.

Sure, you can get a bunch of pieces in four days, but you’d have to run every heroic each of those days. Who the hell has that kind of time?

To get every piece of gear possible from this change, it will take the average player weeks, if not months, to pick them all up. For the average player, all this will effectively do is act as a slot filling mechanic. You run Naxx for a few weeks, pick up some epics, but gosh darn it those pants won’t drop!

Whatever, just spend those badges, grab the pants and move on.

It’s also somewhat interesting that Blizzard is introducing a mini-gear reset in the middle of an expansion. Can we expect this to continue? Is Wrath going to be the last major expansion, and from now on we just have large patches, introducing new quests/raid content, complete with a miniature gear reset?

However.

Do I ever have a bone to pick with this Emblem change.

Remember how I was talking about how this system works just like it does with PvP gear? It gets a lot easier to grab the good gear, but it isn’t the best gear. To get the best, current gear, you need to be on the bleeding edge.

All a system like this does is give you the chance to not fall behind.

But then, there’s this whole Emblem of Triumph thing being available for completing the daily heroic quests. (Note that these emblems are awarded for both the “kill the final boss” quests and Timear’s “kill X thingies” quests.)

This… doesn’t make sense to me.

Awarding “last season” raiding gear for easy stuff makes sense. I’ve iterated why this post and last.

But awarding current season raiding gear for the same (relatively) easy content?

That, to me, is fundamentally wrong.

Though it may be irrelevant, as if you aren’t running the highest level content, those emblems are going to accrue really slowly.

I hope all that is a little clearer now. If not, I’m really struggling to find new ways to say the same thing. D:

I’m also getting really tired with this whole “WoW is EASY” thing. WoW is NOT easy. It’s more accessible, friendly, and easier than other MMOs on the markets, but it is not easy.

As I said in a comment last post, it took Ensidia two hundred and four tries to down the game’s hardest content. That is not indicative of an easy game.

You think heroics are easier? Try running Old Kingdom or Azjol’Nerub with a tank who hasn’t been there. Have fun wiping in Violet Hold when you get Erekem and a DPS that doesn’t understand “don’t DPS the adds!”

God forbid you have a new group and Xevozz.

Oh yeah, and Emalon is an absolute blast with a tank who hasn’t done the fight before, to say nothing of a DPS that hasn’t been there before.

In terms of straight up difficulty, WoW is not any easier. The amount of trash in a given instance is significantly lower, and of course attunements have been removed. All the tedious things have been removed from the game to make the game less time consuming and more accessible.

WoW is just as hard as it has ever been.

Problem is, the player base has not maintained the same level of skill.

Did you really think your skills would be at exactly the same level now as they were then?

Did you really expect a heroic instance to challenge you when you cleared SSC last expansion, let alone BT?

Did you really expect this expansion’s version of Karazhan to challenge you when you could clear last expansion’s in two hours?

As you may have heard, Emblems of Heroism and Valor have been phased out in favor of Emblems of Conquest. Everything that used to drop Heroism/Valor badges now drop the latter.

In short, yes, this means that as of 3.2, you can get T8.5 gear by running plenty of Heroics.

Naturally, the elitist are up in arms and furious QQ, the casuals are pleased they can gear up new 80 alts faster, and the intelligent realize that this, in essence, changes nothing.

There’s an attitude I’d like to talk about.

“I’m special.”

Let’s start with the basics. Nearly everyone suffers from this at one point or another, and in a single word, this is called “elitism”.

Some of us suffer from it a lot, some of us just have small, easily squashed inklings of elitism.

Pike over at Aspect of the Hare had a blog post up a while ago that exemplifies what I mean.

Essentially, Pike collected mini-pets long before they were fashionable. She had a random mini-pet button back when most people had a couple pets, tops.

I was different that way, and unique, because I was that willing to give up my bagspace for them. But I was never a collector so much as just a fan.

And then Patch 3.0 and Achievements came out. Minipets became summonable, and fashionable. Even though it sort of bugged me on a minor level that now everybody could and likely would become a minipet junkie, on the other hand the idea of actually having bag space again made me so ecstatic that any potential sadness caused by a loss-of-uniqueness was nullified.

And that, ladies and gents, is elitism in its purest form.

While Pike is nowhere near the level of this current QQ, it exemplifies the attitude.

You had something that was unique, something special. Something you sacrificed for and worked for. Then, suddenly, everyone else has it. You feel sad/bothered/betrayed, as “Blizzard has trivialized your achievements”.

Of course, Pike, being intelligent, recovered rather swiftly from this, and honestly never really felt any nerd rage in the first place.

Let’s get this straight here, Ulduar raiders. You worked hard for your epics. You raided long hours, painfully wiped, had triumphant wins and bitter defeats. You dropped Yogg-Saron before the nerfs, beat Hard Mode X before Y was nerfed.

People being able to get the same level of loot from much easier content in no way diminishes that. It’s all in your perception.

Brutallus being nerfed at the tail-end of BC didn’t diminish the prestige and skill of those who killed him before the nerf. You still beat him when he was hard. You can brag about it later, that you “downed Illidan before the nerfs” or whatever you want.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, can take that away from you. You have achievements now, that come with time stamps, to prove to everyone you downed the hard content when it was hard. You have unalterable, in-game records of your achievements.

And yet, you still complain.

Newsflash: You are not special, and never were.

You can try to say you are, act like you are, but you aren’t. You may be better than the majority of other players, be able to clear the hard content better and faster than 90% of the guilds out there.

How does that warrant your skills being worshiped? How does that warrant keeping the peasants in-line and the grand overlords (namely, you) in positions of, essentially, royalty?

It doesn’t and never will, and it is utterly insane to think for even an instant that it could ever work that way.

An elitist attitude means you want to deny the lesser mortals stuff on sole merit that you are better than they are.

Frankly, this disgusts me on a level I didn’t even know was possible.

I have three sentences  for all you egotistical, selfish elitist bastards:

Shut. The Fuck. Up.

Look, PvP gear has worked this way since BC launched. It takes a whole lot of effort to get the current season stuff. Then, when next season rolls around, the current season stuff becomes much easier to get. The skilled PvP players start getting all the new stuff, and those who aren’t as good now have access to the old stuff.

Let’s put it this way. The skilled players are always going to have the best gear. Those with less time or skill are going to have gear, too, but of lesser quality.

That’s how it works, that’s how it always has worked, and that is how it will continue to work.

(Holy crap, a post two days in a row? BELIEVE IT!)

Q: Where do mages fit in the current scope of things, and where do you see them from this point going forward?

A: Mages are the iconic caster class, squishy as hell, standing at range and chucking things at their enemies. We see them basically staying exactly the same with no major changes whatsoever. Mages are awesome, and we’re going to keep it that way.

Q: What is it that makes them unique when compared to other classes?

A: More than any other class, mages focus on a single spell to the exclusion of all others. This means mages are the only class that can effectively raid by pressing a single button. Kinda like how Warlocks worked in BC, except without all that pesky “sacrifice the Succubus” stuff.

Community Team: A lot of initial questions and concerns we received from mages around the world were concerning itemization.

Q: In particular, a lot of the newer PvE and PvP mage or caster items seem to favor Fire spec and, to a lesser extent, Arcane. Do you feel as though mages are being forced to focus too much on critical strike rating (crit) over stacking more haste, spell power, and intellect, stats that are much more beneficial to the Frost mage?

A: Yep.

Community Team: There are some funky cloth legging designs out there that are difficult to truly appreciate unless one wears a tunic.

Q: Even so, will mages get robes, or at least the option of choosing robes, over tunics going forward?

A: Nah. We decide these things by rolling a d6. 1-5, it’s a dress. If it’s a six, tunic, yo!

Community Team: The next few questions concern the number-one issue raised by mages on the forums as of late: mana efficiency.

Mana Gem and Evocation are commonly referred to as outdated mechanics. Many players feel the Mana Gem does not restore enough mana and should not be placed on the same cooldown with a warlock’s Healthstone, while Evocation has too lengthy a cooldown and is typically not a reliable means of acquiring mana during boss fights.

Q: How do you view these mechanics, and are there any intentions of updating mana recovery capabilities for mages in the future?

A: Meh.

Community Team: Compared to many other damage-dealing counterparts, mages feel their AoE damage is less reliable and way too costly.

Q: Do the developers feel that the cost to mages of doing AoE damage is appropriate?

A: BLIZZARD IS TOTALLY AWESOME GUYS.

Community Team: Spell Steal is a very costly spell, especially considering it can be resisted, an unnecessary buff can be stolen unintentionally or the stolen buff can be dispelled.

Q: Are there any plans to reevaluate the mana cost and functionality of this spell?

A: BLIZZARD IS TOTALLY AWESOME GUYS.

Community Team: Now let’s jump to some questions about specific talent specs. Firstly, the Arcane tree is widely considered too bloated.

Q: How do you feel about revitalizing the Arcane tree to thin out some of these five-point talents?

A: Hey, arcane totally isn’t the only tree that has five-point talents!

Community Team: To expand upon the last question, Torment of the Weak is used in several of the most popular mage talent specs for both PvE and PvP, however, the Arcane talents prior to this one are of very little use to Frost mages – and Fire mages to a lesser degree — in PvE.

Q: Are you concerned at all that Torment of the Weak is considered to be so important to mages, regardless of specialization, that a minimum of eighteen talent points must be spent in the Arcane tree to reap its full benefit?

A: No.

Q: Are there plans on the horizon to improve Fire mage representation in PvP?

A: No. I mean YES I mean… maaaaybe.

Q: Is threat generation from Fire mages a concern at all given their burst damage is controlled mostly by proc talents and critical chance?

A: Yeah, it kinda is. We’d like to fix this threat issue via Invisibility. Do remember that we have no idea how threat works with Mirror Images, so we need to look elsewhere to fix threat.

Q: Do the developers still consider it an objective to improve Frost damage for PvE?

A: We guess? We dunno, we kinda have this glyph of ice lance thing that would solve it perfectly, but we don’t wanna.

Community Team: Finally, this wouldn’t be a mage Q&A without a question about Blink. It has been discussed in the past that it’s the terrain that can cause the spell to fail and not necessarily an issue with the spell itself.

Q: While mages do recognize this issue, has there been any discussion about reworking Blink so it’s more intuitive and could recognize a mage failing to teleport any distance forward, wasting only a global cooldown rather than the mana and spell cooldown?

A: Blink is totally fine. Remember, WoW is a client-based game, so if Blink fails, learn to play.

I don’t think there has ever been a patch that has introduced such massive amounts of change for PvP. A new raid? New mounts, leveling crap and new druid art? BAH! This patch is all about PvP!

First off, we PvP afficionados have a new battleground to play around with. While it won’t appeal to those who prefer things like Warsong Gulch, anyone who enjoys Alterac Valley or Wintergrasp will get a hell of a kick out of it.

Actual review of the battleground pending me having actually played it. 3.2 PTR, here I come!

Oh, hey, speaking of Battlegrounds, guess what?

Battleground experience has arrived!

That’s right, battlegrounds award experience now. Anything that rewards honor (except HKs themselves) will award experience, too.

And in case that causes all you twinks out there to go “HHEEURGH”, fret not! All it takes to disable experience gain is to pay a visit to an NPC, pay 10 gold, and bam. You’re character is now incapable of gaining experience.

And I mean all experience. You cash in a quest? No experience. Run a 19 through Wailing Caverns? That guy gains no experience. Of course, this can all be turned back on for another 10 gold.

And the best part? Those characters who have XP gains turned off will only be able to play battlegrounds with other players who have the XP gain turned off. Naturally, the opposite is true, where those who can gain XP are only allowed to PvP against others who do.

This is perfect. Utterly perfect.

Those who want to level with some PvP on the side can without fear of being annihilated by horrifically overgeared twinks. Those who want to do serious PvP without leveling can do so without having to deal with horrifically undergeared or underleveled teammates.

Though I suspect there will be many twinks upset about this change, nearly every one else won’t be. I mean, really, how long have we been asking for a separation of twinks and non?

As for the speed of questing, apparently it won’t be as fast as proper questing, though still a viable means to level up. Of course, if you don’t actually bother to ever capture flags or anything you won’t be getting experience, so expect it to practically be pretty slow.

When standing at a capture point that you control, you will gain a buff called Honorable Defender. This buff grants +50% honor gained from kills. This currently affects Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm and Isle of Conquest.

Oh hey look, another thing the community has been asking for (though indirectly, in this case) and here it is. Though I nearly disagreed with having this active in Eye, I can see the point in trying to get people away from fighting in nowhere land.

Seriosuly, people. There are five points of contention on this map. They aren’t very big. If you’re not fighting at one of these five points, you are doing it wrong.

While playing static defense still may not be quite as lucrative as going on the zerg, it’s at least a lot better than it has been in the past. And really, what better way to convince people to play defense than to give them more honor for doing so?

Speaking of Arathi Basin and Eye, these two battlegrounds were apparently dragging on too long, so they’ve been shortened. The flag(s) in each can be captured in 8 seconds rather than 10, and each match ends when one side hits 1600 points.

I don’t really recall either one being particularly arduous in length… they seemed fine to me. I mean, the whole mechanic of collecting points for holding bases, gave the battleground a ceiling on it’s length. It’s impossible for one of these to drag on.

Really, what we need a timer for is Warsong Gulch. That one is still an ornery son of a

Warsong Gulch: There is a now a 20 minute timer on this battleground.

Oh. I see.

I suppose that works. I’m pretty sure when we say “there needs to be a time limit” we didn’t mean a literal time limit. I’ve always disliked Warsong, due to it’s propensity to take an absolute eternity to finish. This should go a great ways towards mending my Warsong Outriders reputation.

Oh, hey, remember last week when I said nobody cares about 2v2 arenas?

The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.

Apparently the developers agree. So if you’ve only got one friend interested in PvP… better find a third pretty damn quickly. 2v2 arenas are, officially, irrelevant. Feel free to continue practicing coordination here and use it as a neat place to pick up all the Furious Gladiator gear you can.

Think of 2v2 as a warm-up bracket. You go there, get used to playing arenas, get your coordination and strategies down, and use it to pick up decent PvP gear. Not the best gear, but still damn fine gear that will prepare you better for 3v3/5v5.

Picture it this way.

3v3/5v5 arenas are like end-game raiding. These are your big 25 man Ulduar hard modes.

2v2 arenas, then are Heroic instances. Easier to put together, require less people, but the gear rewards aren’t quite as good, and the skills you learn here will better serve you in the more serious brackets.

BGs, then, are like reputation grinds and crafted gear.

And if you’re one of those “but I don’t like 1 or 3 other people!”, well… raiders have the same problem.

Two more little tidbits.

First, gear is going to “drop” in battlegrounds, in what I believe is a similar fashion to how it works in Warhammer. Greens and the occasional blue piece of gear will appear that everyone can roll on.

These will, of course, be available from level 10 all the way up to level 80, so not only can you level up via PvP, but you can gear to help that process too.

But what I’m most excited about?

Rated battlegrounds.

A system is in the works, apparently, and we have only to wait until Blizzcon to find out what it is. And then patch 3.3 or something to play it.

Sure, none of this is, technically, set in stone. Say what you like, this patch is going to be HUGE for the face of PvP.

So… anyone else going to level alts exclusively through PvP?

EDIT:

Oh yes, one more thing.

Resilience no longer reduces the damage you take from DoTs, but reduces ALL damage you take from other players instead.

Seriously… holy crap. I mean wow. Resilience was important before, but now? I mean… man. People in PvE gear are going to be utterly destroyed.

To the tune of I Will Survive, I present this work of literary prose celebrating my inability to purify catchy songs from my mind.

—

First I was afraid, I was petrified

Kept thinking I could never ding with all this crappy gear

But I spent many nights proving how misplaced was my fear

I grew strong

I learned how to carry on

And so I’m back from the Outland

I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face

You should have rerolled a warlock

Or at least maybe a death knight

And leveled back when you had the chance, you see, it’s far too late now

-

Go on now, go cry for mommy

You might as well now

‘Cause your life is almost done

I’m the one that will end you with arcane, frost and flame

I hope you stumble

I hope you lay down and die

Because you see

No one will survive as long as I know how to cast

I know I will slay you all

You’ve got no life left to live

I have so much pain to give

No one will survive

Nothing will survive

-

It took all the strength I had

Not to weep and sob

Kept trying hard to cast

Through the jaws of interrupts

And I spent oh so many nights

Just feeling sorry for myself

I used to QQ

Now I hold my head up high

And you see me

Somebody new

I’m not that fragile little caster

Running in fear of you

And so you felt like dropping by

And just expect me to be free

Now I’m killing you and your alts

And everyone on your team

-

No, no one will survive (Pwnd)

No, no one will survive (el oh el)

No, nothing will survive (slash spit)

Or IoC, as it will soon be known.

In short: WANT.

In long: holy jiminy christmas people will complain about anything, won’t they?

The new BG is announced, and all the forums are alight with complaining, filled to the brim with tears, people will who will go to any length to shout how much vehicles suck.

In light of me being smarter than you (it’s true! Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me!) allow me to address the primary concerns behind your unintelligible hatred of vehicular mechanics.

You could say that IoC is like AV and AB meeting for a SotA party in WG. While an apt description to get the jist of the battleground across, it’s not what it actually is. Too easily does such a description lead to the sentence “Blizzard can’t come up with anything original, so they’re just recycling their old ideas.”

In other words, rather than coming up with a new, original battleground, Blizzard just stole ideas from their previous ones.

I can’t even begin to describe how faulty this thinking is, but I shall try anyway.

Let’s say that Warsong Gulch was the original battleground.

Arathi Basin, then, is just WSG with five bases instead of two and a bunch of flags that don’t move.

Alterac Valley, then, is just a much larger Arathi Basin with a bunch of NPC’s tossed in.

Eye of the Storm, then, is just WSG and AB shoved together.

On and on it goes.

IoC is not, in fact, a AV/AB/WG hybrid. This is simply the best way to quickly describe an otherwise complicated and unfamiliar concept with conventions that are already familiar.

For instance, a motorcycle can be described as a car, but with only two wheels. It’s nowhere near an accurate description, it’s only purpose is to get the idea across.

And, of course, since it’s a human being doing the describing/simplifying here, the description itself is going to suffer from things like opinions and biases.

Who knows? Maybe IoC really will play exactly like a horrid hybrid of AB and AV with WG slathered all over it. I suspect it won’t, considering this is BLIZZARD we’re talking about, but who knows? There’s a first time for everything.

Point is, if you write it off before trying it, you suck. Or something.

Sadly, for those of you who don’t actually like vehicles, there’s really nothing I can offer you in solace. They are in the game now, they are part of the game. If you don’t like it… tough.

I didn’t like facing down Warlocks in PvP last year. I could QQ as much as I want, but those ‘locks aren’t being removed from the game. I could argue as hard as I could, but I could never get those damn warlocks removed from my battleground.

I don’t like Death Knights cluttering up my battlegrounds either, come to think of it. Does anyone actually have fun fighting these guys? Bah! Bah I say! This expansion is lame! REMOVE DEATH KNIGHTS FROM PVP IMMEDIATELY!

If your vision of the game doesn’t agree with the developers vision… you basically have four options: ignore it, complain about it, offer constructive feedback, or quit.

Saying “Malygos phase 3 is the suck!” does nothing but prove you aren’t all that skilled with grammar.

I understand there’s a difference between disliking one aspect of a game and disliking the entire game, but whining about it does nothing. If you need to vent, that’s what friends and blogs are for. If all you decide to say is “gg blizz, you suck” all you do is make yourself look like an unintelligent, arrogant douchebag.

But I digress. We’re talking about vehicles in PvP, not the futility of QQ.

Look, if you don’t want to drive a vehicle, then don’t. There are those of us who will, do, and likely are better at it than you are. Fact: you do better at something if you enjoy it than if you hate it. Those who enjoy vehicles are, naturally, going to perform better than those who don’t.

It’s not like vehicles are horrendously overpowered or anything.

Vehicles are designed with specific purposes, fulfilling a specific niche in vehicular combat. And just like in the real world, somehow they never quite phase out raw infantry.

These vehicles don’t revolutionize PvP combat in any way. All they do is fill a specific niche for a given battleground, and complement the forces already at work.

Sure, they are a focus of PvP combat, but never in exclusion to everything else.

Vehicles are a focus of Wintergrasp in the same way that controlling the towers and machine shops are a focus. Vehicles are a focus of Strand of the Ancients in the same way the flag is a focus of Warsong Gulch.

It’s part of the battleground. Just another strategic element to be taken into account, and then used effectively (or not, as the case may be).

Anyway, for those things where everyone is forced to be in a vehicle (FL, Malygos, etc) that I can at least understand. I mean, essentially, you’re learning a whole new class system from scratch.

Not that it’s hard. You have… what, five buttons, tops? Except those biplanes in Icecrown, I suppose.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this newfangled Glaive Thrower thing fits in with our current trinity of anti-infantry support, battlefield support, and siege.

Oh yeah, one other thing I want to get clear in this post.

There is no such thing as a fair fight.

The game itself is designed in such a way that each side starts off on even footing. Ideally, at the start of each and every engagement, each side is in perfect balance.

Then, Blizzard slathers everyone with as many abilities as possible to make it an unfair fight.

Mortal Strike immediately cripples the opposing healer. That’s not very fair. Polymorph knocks a person completely out of a fight, as does Blind, Cyclone, and numerous other abilities of the same variety. Affliction Warlocks have this Unstable Affliction thing which puts an opposing dispeller in the awkward position of being impotent.

None of these are fair. All of these are designed with the implicit idea that they make things as unfair as possible.

You give your side as many advantages as possible, and take away as many from your enemies as you can.

The whole point of winning in PvP is to make things as unfair as possible in your favor.