11-22-2007, 12:00 PM
Quote:The point is, it's a frivalous change to give Ice Block to all mages. You yourself said it, it doesn't help mages in any serious way. As such, it should be left alone, it doesn't fill an adequate change. I won't argue the issue involving the mana gems because I can see the issue, but I will say that Mages get their way far more often than any other class in WoW. IMO, frivalous changes like Ice Block should not be made and it seems that the whining and crying that non-frost mages made on the WoW forums is where you should really direct your whining charge.
In current content - yeah. There's nothing that Ice Block really does aside from help out on Archimonde a little bit. Most high-end raiding mages know that, in current content, trainable ice block changes nothing.
We'll see what Sunwell is like. After all, they made Innervate trainable specifically because they finally introduced mana limited fights (and the first truly mana-limited fights were introduced in Naxxramas). It may very well be that a Sunwell fight has something that every class needs to be able to answer, and that mages didn't have it. Hard to say. But if Blizzard says (which they basically have) that they're tuning at least one Sunwell encounter around the assumption that all mages have ice block, they'd better make sure all mages have ice block. You might say, well then, change that fight, but we all know it's not that easy. Viscidus never got changed, and he certainly was one of the top five fights that desperately needed adjustment in their time.
The PvP explanation isn't really believable, though. Adding Ice Block to a fire mage isn't going to make them any more competitive in high-level arena than they are now. You still need Water Elemental and Cold Snap.
Quote:And if you look at the DPS charts, you'll see that Mages are right up there at the top on DPS. If they were not doing so well, I could see boosts being handed out, but in the case of Ice Block, you have a talent that is being given as a class skill frivalously.
The experience of numerous guilds suggests that this statement simply isn't accurate. Before the broken MSD/TLC/AToI AM build of 2.2, extensive statistical analysis of WWS parses was done (on the official WoW boards, it was true, but it was no less statistically rigorous for that). The only time mages actually do competitive DPS are at the Karazhan to early SSC/TK levels, when they outgear other people via tailoring. At these foundational stages of raiding, you'll see the DPS meters look like a mix of mages and locks, as well as rogues with epic weapons. But by mid tier 5 content the scales begin to shift, and by T6, mages are solidly behind rogues, destruction warlocks, beast mastery hunters, and DPS warriors. The majority of complaints on the official boards are whining, to be sure, but thoughtful, skilled mage players as well as mage and non-mage high-end raid leaders throughout WoW are coming to the same conclusion regarding mage viability.
Briefly, it goes something like this: at the high end, mages don't do enough damage to be taken for DPS, don't survive long enough to be taken for survivability, and don't have enough utility to be taken for utility. It's not that mages are useless; far from, and every high-end guild has a number of mages. The problem is that mages are about 1-2% behind DPS warriors and consequently up to about eight or so percent behind the class which directly competes with them for raid slots, destruction warlocks. Obviously, a gap of 1-8% isn't going to stop any good guild from progressing. On the other hand, in terms of game design, there's clearly a flaw if a class exists for which, in terms of PvE 25-man boss encounters, they are the best at nothing. And I want to make it clear: I'm certainly not saying that mages are awful or that they aren't sufficiently good to be in the raid for any encounter in the game. But it is a design flaw when a class is strictly inferior to another, and, as it happens to be, multiple others.
Trainable Ice Block and Icy Veins are in the direction of potentially addressing this flaw. It's actually a baby step, but Blizzard tends to take baby steps on class balance, and at least it's heading in the right direction, in my view, which is to accept that mages don't functionally have PvE utility (PvP is quite a different matter, of course; Polymorph is fantastic in arena), and to re-emphasize the damage aspects of the class and to provide a little survivability help. Most importantly, making iceblock trainable is a way to improve mage PvE survivability (since the PvE tree is clearly intended to be Fire) without making already-survivable Frost mages more durable in Arenas.
Kalgan made a post a long time ago where he talked about balancing for Arena. He got a lot of flak for it, because he was asked "So you're just balancing Arenas around the very top brackets?" and he responded "Would you rather we balanced classes around people who are not good in Arena?" The questioner took umbrage, because Kalgan implied that the majority of people are not good at Arena. Of course, the majority of people are, in fact, not good at Arena, but my point in bringing up this example is to illustrate how Blizzard frequently has its eye on the high end when it comes to balance. In this case, I can see these mage changes in the context of repairing faults in the mage class that only become visible at the high end.
It's about balance. I'm not really interested in comparing lists of who got the most talents turned into skills. What's important is reaching, as close as possible, a decently balanced state, and Blizzard feels (and I agree) that they'll turn as many talents into skills as is necessary to achieve balance. Arguably, all that turning fewer talents into skills for a class signifies is that the class' talent tree was better designed in the first place, instead of including things that should have been skills. There's certainly more than one perspective on it.