User:Shuni/Mage Thoughts

'''This page is under construction! Don't interfere :)'''

DISCLAIMER: Many of these issues/improvements are about casters,and even all the classes, in general but since I don't know as much about the other classes as I do with mages this will be done from a mage point of view. Also these point of views are only valid for patch 1.8.0 and probably 1.9.0.

Introduction
Usually when people talk about mages it's either "mages are fine" or "mages whine too much". I wholheartedly agree with both these two statements. But this does not mean that mages don't need fixes, attention or additions. Below I will try to list several improvements that can be made to the mage class. All these points are made for the post-60 mage since pre-60 the game content is pretty fair to all classes.

Gaining new ranks of spells or spell scaling
The most immediate problem one will find with casters post-60 is that you don't gain new ranks of spells/abilities. Casters relied fully on getting new ranks of spells in order to advance their damage/healing and supplementary spells. An (emergency) fix to this was to introduce spellcrit, spelldamage and healing attributes to items. Even though this system has it's flaws it works fairly well in general. Sadly enough a lot of spells aren't covered in these upgrades.

Example: Conjure water/bread
A classical example of this would be mages and water conjuring. Ever since mages started to gear up they complained about not getting a new rank of water at level 60, which was a very valid complaint since mages had been gaining new water levels every 10th level. However a problem that is very obvious is that a caster's mana pool does not stop to grow after hitting 60. This means that the efficiency of water to replenish your mana pool fully went down as gear got better.

An obvious way to fix this would of course be to introduce the %water that basically regenerates your mana/health by a percentage. An argument against this would be that it would disrupt the balance with vendor food since mage food would be better. But all you would have to do is to give the vendors the same kind of food and also add a level modifier. The level modifier would make sure that lower level food would give you less regeneration. Another argument against this would be that the enjoyment of leveling might be disrupted since no new ranks of water would exist, thus negating the "happiness" people would feel when they got their new water. Personally I think that would be fine since I personally hated the bumpiness of downtime when I leveled up. Also I think that's a price that can be paid in order to fix these regeneration ratios.

This of course does not only apply to mages. Have you ever played a warrior? They usually have about 5k hp which means that they have to eat two chunks of bread before restoring their health. That's a one minute downtime and completely unacceptable in my opinion.

Other spells that don't scale with spelldmg/healing
There are of course other spells except for water/bread conjuring that are affected by not getting any upgrades. As an example I have mana shield, fire ward, frost ward, conjure mana ruby, amplify/dampen magic. All these spells do not scale and the impact really shows. There are talents such as "improved fire ward" and "improved dampen magic". But as these spells don't scale the effect of these improvements diminish as other people's gear gets upgraded. Basically, talent versatility is hurt since the effectiveness of the talents goes down as people upgrades.

An example would be frost ward. When you hit level 60 as a mage your frostbolts do about 500 damage. The frost ward is capable of absorbing 430 frost damage which is almost a full frostbolt! An epic geared mage can do 700 damage average frostbolts. The loss in effectiveness of frost ward is evident.

Comparison to other classes
As you may understand this is not just a mage/caster problem. There are a lot of other classes that have ranks of abilities/spells that don't get upgraded at all and gets more inferior as more gear is upgraded. But as mages/casters are more reliant on the different abilities they have at their disposal it shows a lot more. Now, blizzard aren't unaware of the problem since they have added new spell ranks as of 1.9.0. But the abilities upgraded are really questionable.

Honestly though, mages didn't need a new rank of fireball. There were plenty of other spells that really needed an upgrade.

Talents
Personally I think that the divsion of "arc, fire and frost" is pretty silly. Especially with the current raid instances having a lot of fire resistant mobs. However I think that's nothing that will ever be changed.

Itemization and item attributes
Since Blizzard added several new attributes to items

Discussion
Adding this section in case someone wants to reply. Highly unlikely but ya.. who knows!