Is the (Shadow)Priest the better Mage in WOW?

[Skandranon]

Not true. Firstly minor speed increase to boots enchant (increased run speed) is a godsend, secondly your party has many snare abilities. Earthbind, crippling poison, curse of exhaustion, ice/freeze traps, etc. Frost nova is to put range between you while your party focuses on one, not anything else. It buys time. That's important. With the various snares, aoe and otherwise, its very useful to kite.

I strongly disagree that kiting is a strategy with more than marginal application. You can't seriously say that you see mages kiting every battle.

Simply standing still = death, or at very least does not take advantage of snares, immobilizers, and range.

Consider the implications of this. In other words, upon getting a breakout, I should FN/CoC, and start running in circles while pitching Frostbolts. Let's look at the implications of such a tactic.

Employing this basically gives up any chance of the tank retaking aggro. After all, if I've got aggro, I've clearly dealt more damage than I should. This prescription involves dealing even more damage, compounding the problem, and dealing more and more damage just to keep it snared while I run. Meanwhile, the tank, especially if it's a paladin, is having more and more difficulty getting aggro back, because I keep building it. He also has to chase the mob which is chasing me, which means that the other mobs are chasing him and he's likely getting chain-dazed. The priest has to keep track of a moving target, we're going round and round and could easily pick up patrols or another group as adds. I start moving, now everyone has to start moving and the opportunities for things to go wrong increase exponentially.

Of course, I could always pick a mob out and go kite it on my own while the rest of the party handles the rest of the mobs. Of course, now I'm out of mutual support range and one of the DPS roles is off doing their own thing and not concentrating on the primary target.

The alternative? I stand still, put up mana shield and wait for the tank to grab aggro back. After a suitable pause, I go back to attacking the main target. Every mob continues to attack the tank, who has the best armour and defence. We dispatch the enemies one at a time in a measured fashion.

Tanks cannot hold aggro on every target at all times.

This is true. However, they can hold aggro on every target most of the time, and much of the remainder of the time breakouts will be singles. Talk to any tank player - one of the hardest times for them to do their job is when the player starts running, which starts the mob running. It's hard enough for tanks to target and take aggro from every creature. Fleeing and running in circles just makes it that much harder.

Not 5%. Seeing that the rate of health going down will result in 5-10 seconds signals everyone to go all out, thus bringing the mob down whether its at 50% health or 5%. Just getting to the 'last lap' psychological point is extremely important.

I'm not quite up to including "warm glowy feeling" in the list of mage advantages. That said, it's not as simple as you say. No class, including mages, can put out enough burst damage to take down a 61 elite from 50% health. Mages can try, but they'll take aggro almost immediately, and if they continue to pour on the damage they'll just be sealing the mob to them. Death in ten seconds.

No, not for warlocks. They're too spread out with the aggro going nuts everywhere. 4 seconds of hellfire = 2000 mana cost mininum. 1300 for the spell itself, 4 * 212 health costs.

It takes a fraction of a second to locate the correct spot to stand and to get there. I do move during the Rivendare encounter, but only to back out of the aura when he's not summoning skeletons. Warlocks can feel free to stop channelling Hellfire and do the same thing when all the skellies are dead.

I've spent a lot of time learning the art of applying AoE, and can usually identify the right spot to go to in every encounter that requires it. However, I do realize this is a function of experience. Once it's learned, however, it takes a great deal less time than you realize. Much of the advantages of moving, such as being able to rein in additional targets that you didn't get initially due to poor positioning, disappear.

Almost all instances have sheepable targets. Do you see banish/enslave being any use in Strat? UBRS?

Not much use there, true. Of course, you can't forget Dire Maul. And this little place called Molten Core.

See my response to KV's thoughts on the subject. I don't deny that Poly is the best CC out there. I deny that it's so good that every other part of the mage can be second-rate. And if it is, then I support the removal of Polymorph as a skill to enhance mages' capabilities overall.

Detect magic, and Curse removal do add to unique utility of mages.

In the same sense that Water Breathing and Beast Lore are unique warlock and hunter abilities, I suppose. Curse removal is important, but non-critical and certainly not something that helps mages execute what's supposed to be their primary role.

Maybe you're used to playing tanks, or alongside tanks a lot.

Neither of these statements is true. I have a 60 paladin, but I've spent far more time on my mage. I've played her since the very day of release. As for alongside: I've run instances all the way up to ST with a party that was hunter, warlock, mage, mage, priest. I did the Sharpbeak quest with a 3-man party of mage, mage, priest, and recently went to see Haleh in Mazthoril with the same party. I have extensive experience in all things, and one of those things is non-standard situations and I still don't see advantages to moving around that aren't outweighed by its disadvantages.

Furthermore, just what kind of endgame instance run is done with mages and no form of tank at all? By the endgame, you basically have one or you're toast. I tried rogue, mage, warlock, priest, hunter in Stratholme and it was very difficult indeed. Not to say I couldn't have done it, but these situations are in no way common enough to declare the potential usefulness of mages in them a significant positive.

Mages have got them. Ignore your mobility strengths and you're ignoring the value of magi.

You keep saying this, but mobility doesn't have inherent value. What does mobility do for me? You can claim that it lets the mage get hit less, but this is categorically untrue. Take a character - any character, they all run the same speed - and plunk yourself down next to a mob that aggros you. Then turn and start running. In the next ten to fifteen seconds, you will get hit the same number of times as if you'd just stood there, even if you don't get dazed. You can blink to move out ahead, but then you're out of IAE range, and if this isn't an AoE situation, see previous thoughts on why kiting is overly complicated.

Are warlocks replaceable too? Can their abilities by outstripped by other classes individually? Let's see... Uh. YEAH.

Sure, but that's a matter of replacing a warlock with four other players to cover all the capabilities. The mage problem isn't so much with power level of abilities (though it is that, too) but with scope. There simply isn't a large variety of things for mages to do that are effective.

Seduce isn't as good as poly. But you can pull it out when you see a humanoid. When you see an elemental, you can reach for banish, when you see anything in a room without other mobs in it you can hit fear. On any enemy you can stop its spells, dispel its magic effects, keep it distracted with an off-tank, keep it from running or reduce its resistances. You can give your party lots of stamina and soulstone or summon them for ultimate wipe recovery. And of course, you dish out the best AoE damage in the game and respectable single-target damage, third behind rogues and hunters, and easily sustainable by way of HRB + Life Tap. That's not even getting close to everything.

In comparison. Mages can stop spellcasters. They can buff intellect. They have the best humanoid CC. They can do second-rate AoE damage and fifth-rate single-target damage, with the least sustainable damage of any class (including paladins if you designate battles of 20 min or over). They can remove curses.

I can make up a list like this for every class. Even leaving aside the power issues, mages have a short list indeed. When, as a party leader, I wonder what I'm getting in exchange for using up one of my party slots, I find mages don't offer a lot. Rogues have a similarly short list, which leads to their oft-discussed problems with usefulness in the endgame. The rogues' case is widely accepted: I'm not sure why the mages aren't heard, too.

You have options where mages don't; something is better than nothing. And as a party leader, options are the most valuable thing you can have. It's part of what makes the warlock so good. I'm not asking for the warlock's capabilities to be curtailed, but especially when your arguments all come down to polymorph and mobility, it's hard not to see that mages have very little relative variety. I obviously don't ask for the warlocks' range of capabilities, but the mage's is very small right now.