A Guide to Mages comment thread

[playingtokrush]

Littledude is level 31 at the time of this posting.  His wand skill at the time I made the other post was 132/155.  What I do not see from you here or apparently in the thread that you are referring to is any factual data to use to see your real postion on where you are at.  While you refer to the thread on the WoW forums as "a wand suggestion/discussion/rant thread"; all I really see there is lots of ranting, a minor suggestion and not much discussion.  Very light on anyone stating what their skills are at or what level of mobs they are trying to use them against.

The reason I never bothered to post cold, hard numbers is because it's simply not necessary to see that wands are one of the most tedious aspects of WoW. Anyone who plays a mage to 51 will realize that trying to make use of wands is a complete exercise in drudgery. First and foremost, WoW is supposed to be about good gameplay. The current implementation of wands is not good gameplay. I'm fighting for a better game; others seem to be fighting for Everquest-style tedium.

WoW servers being as wonderful as they are, I'm not able to log in right now and give you all the exact details on how much my wand sucks for me at the moment, but I'll recount for you some of my experience during my low 40's. After running Scarlet Monestary three times, spamming my wand like crazy, I was only ever able to get my wand skill up to about 8 points below the cap (at which point I leveled and it was now 13 below cap). I can only imagine how much more mindless wand spamming would be required to get one's wand skill as close to cap as all weapon-based classes have theirs at all times.

Suffice it to say there have been times in my mage's life where his wand skill has been as high as 10 below the cap, which took way too much effort on my part. Outside of instances, my only good chances to make use of my wand were when I fought mobs with fleeing AI. At that level, it is safe to assume that the mobs would generally flee at around the 250 to 300 health mark, as my approximately 270 damage Fire Blast would usually, but not always, finish off the fleeing mob. For comparison, Scorch at that level did about 150 damage, meaning two casts of Scorch did similar damage to Fire Blast.

Now, my 32-60 (46 average damage), 1.40 speed wand (with "32.9 DPS") would generally take about 5 or 6 successful hits to finish off. This would take anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds, depending on the exact health of the mob in question when it started to flee, resist rates, and critical hits. Many times, before I was able to kill the fleeing mob with my wand, it would kick out of fleeing mode and come back to attack again. Melee mobs on occasion would score more hits on me, while ranged mobs were almost guaranteed to damage me further.

So in theory I saved myself some downtime by finishing off a mob with a wand. However, instead of finishing off a mob in 3 or so seconds, I spent the time that would've just been spent drinking chipping away at it with a wand and sometimes ended up losing more health anyway. And of course you'd have to factor in that killing a mob sooner in an area with aggresive mobs is also safer.

Situations like the above have proven for me the general crappiness of wands in typical solo combat. Factor in their painfully slow skill-up rate, a general lack of opportunities to make use of them in solo combat (the majority of mobs do not have a fleeing routine, and the fact that mages are not afforded the time to slowly chip away at mobs while being pounded on, and we have what amounts to "garbage" for mages.

Additionally, the scenario described above is what I am forced to do all the time if I want my wand to be the least bit reliable when I'd actually want to use it. Regardless of any numbers that one might record, the above completely violates Blizzard's design philosophy of "World as toy," which is why wands need to be fixed.

It looks like my server has come back online, so I'm going to stop here for now. I would like to know what your testing methodology was for gathering your data, as mages are not capable of standing toe to toe with similar level mobs for the extended periods of time required to fire 30 or more wand shots. What are the stats on your wand, as well? If you want me to be more specific, you should follow suit.