The Mage and WotLK

Beta is up and running and I don't have a key. Poor me! I really wanted a beta key but in the end it might be good for me that I didn't. I don't enjoy levelling all that much and investing a lot of time on it having to redo it all again later might not serve my psyche very well. This doesn’t mean I can’t join in on all the speculations about where the Mage as a class is heading in WotLK.

If you haven’t already read it I recommend that you take a look at this thread that was posted on the mage forums:
Hayzaboona did a really good job in getting this together. I think Christian Belt on wowInsider wrote a lot of it but that doesn’t really matter. Mages are broken. I'm not saying other classes like Paladins and Shamans isn't but this isn't about them. I agree to alot of what is being said in this post. I picked my mage to do damage. I knew I picked a fragile class and I knew I would have trouble staying alive if those melee grunts came up close. I was Ok with that. But things have happened. I went from beein to notch DPS to mediocre. If you don't play the mage you might say: "Maybe you should just l2p." As true as that might be, the class as pointed out lacks a real role. I believe this to be one of the biggest problems.

Looking at WotLK talents and spells I have very little to get excited about. We will probably be out DPSed by Warlocks, Hunters, Rogues, Shadow Priests and Fury Warriors. Perhaps even balance druids and death knights. I heard that Shamans will be pretty awesome too but to be fair... I don't know much about Shamans yet. So Mages won't be killing on any damage lists it seems. Are we there for utility then? Not really no. Polymorph can be replaced. Pretty much all classes have some sort of cc now, so that polymorph won't be needed in the same way anymore. Arcane Intellect? Sure. We can do that. Or you can bring your own scrolls from the inscription profession. They don't stack anyway so why bring us. Then we got that food table. That’s pretty neat. They could just buy their own food and drink. Does not really cost much. Last but not least. A big reason to bring a mage to a raid is of course the Mage portal. The ability to transfer an entire guild from an instance to a major city. Then again. How many still have a cooldown on his HS at the end of a raid.

So I'm not overly optimistic I guess. But ok lets disregard everything that makes other classes more useful and focus on the new talents. I must admit that the Arcane tree looks quite interesting. There are a lot of good must have talents to pick. They seem to have made some changes since I first looked at it. Magic Absorption again gives 1 point of resistance per level and the Missile Barrage talent no seems somewhat interesting. Arcane potency no longer require clearcasting but instead presence of mind. I find that abit odd since it needs clearcasting to actually work. Anyway. Some new exciting changes. I experimented some with the talent calculator. I ended up spending all my 71 talent points in the arcane tree. Probably needs some tweaking but I'll save that for later.

Since they seem to be mixing it up a bit tonight I'm going to continue this post tomorrow. Maybe they have done some changes to the fire and frost trees by then. Hopefully they do something decent with that living bomb joke!

Bad Timing?

I know that we still have a long wait until WotLK is released. Beta test is ongoing but we probably won't see the expansion in the next few months. I think Blizzard timed this expansion a lot worse than the Burning Crusade. Summer is here and that means a lot of players are taking some time off from the game enjoying the weather and taking some vacation time to even warmer locations. This reflect heavily on the raiding community A lot of raiding guilds are struggling to fill their raids trying to invite new (lesser?) players to fill their ranks. It's the same story as every summer. But it seems to me that this summer is even worse. I see a lot of people already making preparations for a new expansion. Be it creating lvl 1 alts to ensure they get the name they want for their Death Knight or leaving guilds creating small communities of friends to level with in Northrend. This happened pre TBC also but only when an actual date was set for release. That’s when all the guilds started to fall apart. If I'm right about this we are looking at pretty dull fall. I'm no PvP fan but I think that’s where we are heading. Casual guilds, casual PvP awaiting a new expansion. Less 25 man and more 10 man raids. Bear Mount anyone?