One Shotting Is Here!

[Xame]

All this does is illustrate what I prefer to call "the pathology of mage burst damage".

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I will agree with MongoJerry that the "defense" option is very much lacking in end game gear. Players will normally go for +dmg builds because of focus fire from the enemy means one-shot or 10-shot all equals 5 seconds of life. But with that said, I find the complete discussion about mage one shotting to be a joke.

Too many people get wrapped up on a very very rare event and use it to justify class balancing. As Skandranon points out, mages are a very weak utility class with a very high burst damage. For Vendetta's 6k shot to take place he required a lot of talent focus to get there, trinkets, epic gear, pots, a flask, a very lucky crit, wsg only feature (+30% to damage) and an interesting target to put all that damage into. Simply put, this makes a warlock 4k crit seem routine.

I will grant that mages have some of the most amazing burst damage in the game, but it comes at a cost. It requires choices. A Full-Arcane/Fire mage as shown in the image has gimped his solo'ing and steady damage for higher single target burst. Also mages must make the choice of health, mana, spirit (to stop the free HK's when drinking, since you cann't stand up to blink away from a rogue), +dmg, and +crit. Simply put, all of these form a balancing decision for the mage. I could setup my mage (currently in blues) to have +300dmg with 2.5k health and 3k mana OR +30 dmg +5 crit, 3.5k health and 5k mana. Take your pick. In one setup I have great bonus damage and scare the crap out of people but die quickly and in the other I try to balance damage with life and mana. I've found from my own play as a Arcane-Fire mage that I can harvest more HK's by a balanced approach working with a warrior/rogue then by max'ing my damage (although I will gear swap to +dmg in AV depending on what I'm doing).

Mages lose to almost every equally equip'ed and talented class UNLESS they get some lucky crits along the way. That is, if I equip and talent my mage for PVP and you do the same. Thus a PvP mage that fails to get a crit on a holy priest will watch the holy priest heal through the burst damage and have friends of the holy priest come to his aid (note that I view duels as a pointless practice for real PvP since standing alive for 20secs is equal to winning in PvP). Make this a shadow priest-PvP setup and I might as well just sheep him and run away (shadow priest is tapping silence while in sheep form and I'm pushing all my trinkets, when I hit him it breaks sheep and I'm silenced, then I'm mind controlled and all my friends die as the priest uses all of my skills/trinkets/cooldowns. Then he DoTs, vamps and fears me and the 20secs of life rule kicks in).

A mage's life in bg is sheeping, silencing and burst damaging a warrior/rogue's target to score some HK's. Most of the time it is
spent hiding from all other classes including fellow mages. The fact that a mage can set themselves up to one-shot a target with a 7-9% chance, blowing absolutely every cool down every 5 minutes (with a 5% chance of getting a complete resist and another chance to get a "fire damage" reduction resist) seems perfectly reasonable. This is a one shot kill about once an hour if the mage sets up the shot every 5 minutes (all trinkets and cool downs ready) with moderate damage or misses for the remaining 11 times.

Quoting the mage class trinket: "Unpredictability leads to both victory and death". And from my experience it is usually death for the mage and fewer HKs.

BTW. I've changed to frost spec for MC and to try out a more even killing model in BGs. I do miss Presences of Mind and Blast Wave (6sec daze instant cast +fire dmg) for PvP (not picking up AP and going for +6 crit in fire instead for a nearly 21% crit to fire blast/scorch and using PoM to use I-Flamestrike to farm HKs; 27/24/0 spec). Single target killing.... who cares you cann't win anyways or you win with 0 mana left, cooldowns blown and drinking for a minute for a single HK.