RSS Comic #22 Sneak Peek, Blue posts

World of Warcraft Comic #22 Sneak Peek The latest issue of the World of Warcraft comic is on sale August 19. Check out the <a href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/misc/wccomic/issue-22-sneakpeek.html" target="_blank">preview pages</a> now! According to the last page of the preview, the new Council of Tirisfal will also include users of Nature and Divine magic, including Thrall. We have an <a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=96339.0" target="_blank">interesting topic on the forums</a> about that. <div align="center"><a href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/misc/wccomic/issue-22-sneakpeek.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/august/wowcomic.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></div> Blue posts <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote"><img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/images.gif" alt="" border="0" /> Mage 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. <img src="http://www.mmo-champion.com/Smileys/classic/smiley.gif" alt="Smiley" border="0" /> 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. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/19110160602-the-new-real-top-mage-questions.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarlocks.gif" alt="" border="0" /> Warlock New shard system I don't make many promises because even when I say "there is a very slight chance we may eventually consider changing this at some point in the future" that then becomes "promised us next patch." <img src="http://www.mmo-champion.com/Smileys/classic/smiley.gif" alt="Smiley" border="0" /> But we are excited about the shard system and we think warlocks will view it as a cool component to their class instead of a hassle they have to put up with. I wouldn't view it as a "buff." I'm not sure your dps really needs a buff at the moment if that's what you mean. If you mean taking something kind of marginal and perhaps annoying and making it cool, then that's what we intend to to. Too often our recent design has just been to marginalize shards more and more. That isn't the direction we want for the class though. We want shards to be one of the main things you think about as a lock, but that includes rewarding you when you use them well. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/19378788796-soul-shards-revamp-announced-at-blizcon.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarriors.gif" alt="" border="0" /> Warrior Rage mechanisms We'd like to fix rage and we have a plan. However it's clear from the OP that he or she shares the view that a lot of warriors do, specifically that you don't have enough rage until you get epics at which point it finally "feels right." The implication is that our fix for rage should be that you always have the same rage you do in epics, or more to the point that you should always generally have enough rage to do what you want to do and lack of it never really holds you back. If we changed rage to normalize it more, then it would mean that you would have say 60% of rage all the time instead of having 20% in green gear and 100% in purple gear (to use made up numbers). (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/19377449515-if-rage-mechanic-isnt-fixed-by-next-expansion.html" target="_blank">Source</a>)</div></div></div>

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