Mage vs Player

Moving

2010-12-19T09:59:00.001-08:00

This blog is now being continued over at my guilds new website.

Check it out at: http://intentguild.com/category/blogs/mage-vs-player/

Peace

"The Arena Mini-Game"

2010-08-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

Also known as "Duels in a box" and similar disparaging names. There seems to be a large portion of the playerbase (well, the forum-going playerbase, lol) which has a distinctly unpleasant view of the arena. Be it a hardcore raider or a battleground hero, most of them proclaim that these sandbox duels aren't "true pvp" or the real world of warcraft. They equate it to some sort of mini-game, like say, the snake vs monkey game-mode that came with metal gear solid 3.

A friend of mine I hadn't seen in a long time recently moved nearby. I was thinking of showing him a bit of what wow was like. At first, I considered him showing some footage I caught of us fight heroic halion on fraps, but I quickly came to a realisation. Raiding does not look exciting from a gameplay perspective. Why is this? The answer is quite obvious: large amounts of raiding involves standing in one place, pressing 2-3 buttons over and over. Now, alot of people who say that are disparaging raiding - I'm not, I enjoy raiding. However, it's hard to deny that alot of what drew me to wow in the first place - the large variety of class abilities, the interesting ways of handling mobility vs damage, and in the case of pvp, the fast pace is absent from raiding. Not to say that raiding holds nothing of what initially brought me to wow - the "epic feel" of raiding and the very cool and stylized environments are sweet too, but that's less of a gameplay feature.

In fact, in many real ways, raiding is the actual mini-game of wow. Arena has certain restrictions of course (largely the inability to use external items such as potions, flasks, grenades along with a very few certain abilities), but at its core, arena incorporates far more of what wow actually -is- than raiding does. There's a big thread on the wow forums I was just reading, where people are complaining about being forced to spec into "situational" abilities such as dragon's breath in order to learn living bomb. Dragon's breath is an absolutely core, iconic fire mage ability that is extremely useful in any situation... except for fighting raid bosses. There are plenty of other abilities like this too. Any fire mage who focuses on 5mans, battlegrounds, arenas or even just farming will tell you that they love dragon's breath and how it's saved their butt plenty of times, but it suddenly becomes situational when applied to raiding. There are many, many abilities like this, but how many are the reverse? How many are only useful in raiding and nowhere else? Well, there's a couple of threat-based abilities such as soulshatter which serve no real purpose in pvp or soloing, but those are only there to support the shoe-horned in "aggro" system that wow uses (as do most mmos, in all fairness). Not only does raiding have no way to make use of a large number of class abilities, it has to create a few new ones simply to make it work. The reverse could be argued of arena and pvp of course, an example would be dispersion, which was most likely implemented with pvp being the primary idea behind the ability, except that all such abilities are useful in all other aspects of the game (except only "situationally" in raiding).

When you're leveling your character, learning how to play wow, when do you use soulshatter? How about dragon's breath? All that arena does is take all of the abilities you learn while leveling (bar a very few ones) and force you to learn to use them well against thinking opponents. To be sure, arena has a few limitations of its own, but they are nothing like the staggering suspension of disbelief required to deal with pve because of the completely different ruleset created by the aggro system, combined with the majority of mobs being immune to various defining class skills.

So what is the real "mini-game"? What is the real wow? I'm not so sure I'd necessarily chalk anything up to being the real wow. WoW is a package deal. Even rated bgs will still have their own ruleset, I expect that (sadly) stuff like swiftness potions won't be allowed, and I'm not sure playing capture the flag truly captures the essence of warcraft. But one thing is for sure, having almost all of your abilities actually useful is a big part of what makes pvp so involving, so fun, and raid encounter designers would benefit alot from taking that on-board.

Wizard Cleave Woes

2010-03-09T05:24:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, I know I haven't posted for a while, but there's been a good reason for that! My teammates on Kolz quit for HoN, so I haven't really had a whole lot on the arena front to use a basis to report from. I have just started gearing up my human mage a little, I've been playing wizard cleave with like 200 resil and it's been.. interesting.

Frankly, I don't like wizard cleave. Now, there can be some fun parts, I often find myself laughing at loud at how ridiculous our burst can be. But at the end of the day, I often don't feel we outplayed the other team when we won. Rather, they made a small mistake and our absurd damage won it for us when that happened. Someone gets a little out of position, misses an interrupt, choses the wrong target or doesn't go defensive extremely quickly and they will end up dead insanely fast.

Both of the two wizard cleave variations I've been running have a shaman, and I've gotta say that while I've generally been of the opinion that our damage is either fine or, on occasion, low, with heroism it just feels stupidly high. You can sit in one place and turret so much damage into someone it's absurd, and packing so many casts into a short period of time makes it easier to hang onto your procs till you've got a bunch lined up (fof/brain freeze/trinkets) before blowing someone away.

The 3.3.3 mage changes look nice. I'm not sure how I feel about more burst being tied to the rng proc that is brain freeze, but I guess proc management is an almost unavoidable part of frost these days. My rough estimate is a ~3% damage increase to frostbolt, and around 1k more damage on a crit brain freeze against resil targets. 1k extra damage on a shatter combo is certainly nothing to sneeze at, I expect that I will feel pretty happy with our pvp geared damage once again after this patch.

Other than that, I've just been playing dk and holy paladin in arenas. Doing okay, but I didn't get alot of games in early season so points have been a little slow. I expect to replace my skill'troll with a tier 2 wrathful weapon in 3 weeks on my dk... 3 weeks >< Well, what're you gonna do. Priority on the paladin is still to replace my furious and conquerors pieces. I'll try and get some decent teams on a mage so I can start blogging on more mage arena-based stuff again in the near future, and maybe I'll fit in some dueling/bg related stuff. 'Till then, adios!

MS getting changed?

2010-02-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

Ghostcrawler on healing debuffs:

I agree it's an issue and we do have some plans.

However, we're going to back off of talking about Cataclysm for a little bit. We're excited about it, so we've been wanting to share our philosophy, plans and ideas as they relate to class design. However, it may be a little too soon. I think it's clear that some players are mistaking our excitement for Cataclysm as our giving up on Lich King. ("Cataclysm will fix it.") That's not our intent nor plan, but I can understand how you might draw that conclusion. We'll talk more about the upcoming expansion soon (tm).

I'm sure I'm not the only player who thinks that 50% mortal strike is just too hard to balance. I've taken to playing a healer class again recently (holy paladin this time), and the difference between mortal and no mortal strike is just mind blowing. As long as mortal strikes exist in their current form, you would need absolutely mind blowing burst (alot of the popular wizard cleave variations) or a very very high amount of CC in order to get anywhere without one of the three classes that have a 50% MS on your team. For comparison, although the frost mage and shadow priests 20% MS is somewhat noticeable, it's not a night and day difference when it comes to attempting to outheal damage like a 50% MS is... more of a nice but not overpowering advantage in terms of sustained pressure.

So how do you balance mortal strike? There are a few different possibilities that people (including myself) have suggested. The first and most obvious one is simply to nerf all mortal strike effects. 30% seems like a much more reasonable number, large enough to notice but not bringing the same black-and-white qualities of current MS. Would you buff or nerf the current caster MS effects? Maybe even remove? I'm not sure.

Another possibility is just to give everyone an MS effect of some sort, or just make it so widespread that almost any team is going to have it. This has the advantage of freeing up arena team compositions alot, but blizzard has already stated they want to cut healing and damage relative to health pools. If they implemented this change, they would probably have to buff healing appropriately to be able to keep people up through MS a bit better, which is something I don't think they will (or should) do.

One possibility that I believe was first suggested by Affix was making caster mortal strike and melee mortal strike both 25%, and making them stack. I'm actually not a big fan of this - for a start, it does feel like "artificial" game balancing - using a single debuff to force teams into certain compositions instead of how the classes work together in general (like how rmp works for example, classes that amplify each others strengths and cover each others weaknesses). On top of that, it restricts the amount of viable comps even further than the current mortal strike system. I understand alot of people feel stacking melee or stacking casters can be cheesy, to an extent I agree. However, it's important to remember alot of people feel that say, RMP is cheesy as well... whatever beats you often gets described as so. Also, personally I don't have a problem with the idea of stacking two wizards so much as the way it's played right now - spamming damage on whoever is in line of sight most of the game instead of focusing on scoring interrupts + CCs.

Lower the uptime of mortal strikes. This is probably my favorite solution - maybe even leave them at 50% (or nerf them a little, who knows), but make it so that they're not up all the time. Rather, you apply them when you need to burst, much like you might apply a CC to a healer. There would probably have to be a bit more to applying them than just hitting an instant ability too - maybe it could have a very high energy/rage/focus cost. Something that makes you make sure you want to do it before you actually hit it, or penalizes you for using it at a bad time.

CCing Pets

2009-12-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

This is one thing I'm sorta surprised I don't see that often. Alot of teams tend to either kill pets or just ignore them (or fake cast around spell lock, perhaps). CCing pets is a pretty powerful tool that will let you force cooldowns where you otherwise wouldn't have been able, albeit it's somewhat situational.

Example: You're on a warlock. His felhunter is on you. Frost nova it, then move around a corner before casting. I don't think I've ever seen a warlock command a felhunter to self-devour nova to deal with this (admittedly, devour is probably usually on cooldown from trying to catch sheeps), so you've just guaranteed yourself an easy 3-5 frostbolts without having to fake cast around spell lock. This is easier than ever with square pillars.

I also sometimes blow deep freezes on felhunters (usually just on openers, it makes it alot easier to force trinkets vs some comps). A guaranteed shatter with your entire team winding up on someone can be pretty brutal as pretty much any mage comp. Also, remember to try doing a quick fake as the felhunter comes out of deep freeze, there's a pretty good chance the warlock will be spamming spell lock going "wtf".

Sapping felhunters is a great way to get sheep to stick to warlock at the start of a match - it's a little hard to pull off on certain maps, and in 3v3 in general I find, but it's very powerful playing rogue mage in 2s (vs shaman lock especially, you can force all their cooldowns pretty much immediately with this strat if you do it right on most maps). Keep in mind that felhunters drop combat as soon as they stop moving to attack you, so while alot of warlocks will send their pets in to get in combat (and their pets as well), as soon as they pull it back to prevent you from beating it up, your rogue can sap and you can move in.

Sometimes you will be winding up a shatter vs a DK team and see the ghoul heading towards you (well, it will leap when it gets in range most likely). Usually if you're freecasting like this, the dk is going to use his ghoul to stun you, so try pet freezing it, ideally catching a player (probably your target) with it as well. The same principle applies to BM hunter pets somewhat - but frankly, most BM hunters aren't too concerned with using their pet stun to interrupt frostbolts I've found.

Sheeping priests

2009-12-15T06:11:00.001-08:00

Almost anyone reading this probably knows of the ability for priests to use the kickback damage from shadow word: death to break polymorphs - it seems fairly common knowledge these days even in the lower brackets. Here are a few tips and tricks I've picked up playing against priests.

1. Catch him in global cooldown. This is alot easier if you use 4pce pvp (which tbh, you should be right now). With 4pce bonus and a bit of haste, you should be looking at 1.15 or so polymorphs without icy veins. With IV, PI, berserking or hyperspeed accelerators, you should be pushing 0.8 sheeps pretty easily, so it becomes a simple matter to wait for the priest to cast an instant (pw:s, dispel, prayer of mending, whatever) then fire off a rapid sheep before he can shadow word: death it.

2. Sheep someone else. When it seems ridiculously obvious that you're going to sheep the priest, just sheep someone else instead to make him waste his sw:d cooldown. A great example: You're running rmp in a mirror, and you catch the rogue in a kidney with his trinket down, you have full sheep dr on the priest and he has no trinket. Sheep the mage instead, probably interrupting an incoming sheep or frostbolt in the process, and sheep the priest immediately afterwards when he's blown his sw:d.

3. FoF Deep freeze -> sheep. This one is pretty obvious, but I figure I'd throw it out there. Obviously you can do it with regular novas etc as well, but usually you'll find priests are pretty quick about getting nova off themselves to avoid that.

4. Juke it. This I feel is the worst option as it results in the most wasted time and is the riskiest (ie with priests not blowing sw:d on your juke giving you absolutely no results), however you should still go for it if for whatever reason, the other options can't be used. I understand that in the bursty environment of wotlk, it can sometimes feel like it's not worth "wasting time" doing stuff like fakecasting sheeps and putting up anti-dispel debuffs. But at the end of the day, having a 10 second sheep stuck to them is always going to be worth it.

Farmin dat rep

2009-12-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

Ashen Band of Endless Destruction

Epic

Binds when picked up

Unique

Finger

+73 Stamina

+73 Intellect

Yellow Socket

Item Level 277

Equip: Improves hit rating by 51.

Equip: Increases spell power by 101.

Equip: Improves haste rating by 64.

Your offensive spells have a chance on hit to increase your spell power by 285 for 10 sec.

Needless to say, you're looking at the best in slot ring for pvp in 3.3/season 8. Totally aside from being 51 ilvls above the worse of the two available pvp rings (Furious or Titan-forged), hit/haste/sp (and a socket!) is pretty much perfect itemisation only seen on one other ring this expansion, and you'll certainly never see it from pvp.

Given blizzards penchant for only offering one pvp ring per season, along with keeping the offset lower ilvl than pve equivalents, and the high probability next season ring is a crit one, getting this should already be a no-brainer. But the proc is what makes it. This ring can basically be seen as the new reign of the dead, any mage with it is going to have considerably more burst potential than one without it (regardless of what other ring they use), and burst is what wins games.

Oh yeah, one last thing? All this takes is rep, and you can get rep from just farming trash in the icecrown raid. It'll definitely take a bit of farming, but if you can get a few friends in a similar situation to you to come with you, you should be able to get this after a while. There is no excuse for any pvp mage NOT to be using this thing by halfway through the next season.

3.3 fire

2009-12-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

So, how does fire pvp stand in 3.3? It's... still really bad. Check the end for TLDR.

Now, having said that, alot of stuff is better. Or perhaps, "less bad". With dragon's breath and blast wave both reduced to a base mana cost of 281, mana feels alot more manageable as fire now. At least, most 1v1s don't carry a ridiculously high threat of running oom without touching mana shield.

The new glyph of scorch is very nice. A quick test on a ret paladin wearing 887 resil revealed these numbers for scorch:

1770
2629 crit
1762
1791
1770
2609 crit
1754
2552 crit
1761
1789
1757
1787
2557 crit
1824
1794
2565 crit

This is with the glyph of scorch, 5/5 burnout, 5/5 fire power and wearing 2564 spell power (copied over earlier in the season with not so amazing gear).

I know it's a small sample size, but we should get a very rough idea from this. I got a 2582.4 average scorch crit damage, which is okay (if not amazing) considering the lowish spell power and a highish resil target for a 1.5 sec cast. Average hit of 1778.1

So, scorch spam works out to roughly 1200 dps in "decent" gear in 3.3. Now, it's pretty clear that 1200 dps is not enough to make anyone fear a freecasting fire mage. Throwing in hot streaks changes this somewhat, but at the end of the day, it's still too low. However, replacing fireball or frostfire bolt with scorch spam in pve with the glyph actually doesn't result in a particularly large dps loss, from what I understand it's around 400-500dps below fire when accounting for increased mobility.

The problem here is living bomb. Living bomb is quite alot of damage, and if you're keeping living bomb up while you spam scorch, along with the occasional fireblast you will put out pretty respectable (though certainly not over the top) dps. Enough that freecasting dps actually feels about right. However, living bomb has some serious issues in pvp. I'll post more on this later, just expect to spec living bomb if you want solid freecasting damage even with the glyph.

Firestarter is not particularly amazing. The general clunkiness of targeting it along with its poor single target damage make me hesitate to put more than one point in it. I do feel it's situationally useful enough to merit one point, being obviously very efficient dps that you can use while on the move. Also, you can do a few neat los-related tricks with it. Still, I feel you will usually have it when you need it with only one point.

TLDR:

Burst unreliable but fine
Sustained damage requires living bomb but is okay with
Mana is okay
Survivability is still pretty meh.

Snowfall Key Press

2009-11-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

This addon deserves a post all on it's own. It causes your spells to go off when you press a key, not when you release it. There's pretty much no downside to this - and it is very noticeable. I can't count how many games I've accidently held down the ice block key a split second too long and died.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info15078-SnowfallKeyPress.html

Hopefully, blizzard will see the popularity of this addon, and incorporate its functionality into the default ui options.

3.3 and you: What to expect.

2009-11-14T09:26:00.000-08:00

Figure I'll open this up with a bit of commentary on the new patch, and how it affects mage pvp.

Frost

Okay, not much is changing here. With the frozen core change reverted, the idea of speccing deep frost and grabbing burning determination just feels alot less appealing, since you lose alot more damage from TTW. Additionally, burning determination seems to have a hidden cap on absorbing only one silence/interrupt. Probably a good thing for balance overall, as 20 sec aura mastery each time you get wind sheared would be a bit much, but don't expect to see yourself moving any points out of arcane for the moment.

PVE LOL

Okay, we've all seen the 4pce pve bonus and jizzed over it. And just cause I'm that nice a guy, here it is again, so have at it:

Now, mirror images will once again be one-shottable by aoe in the next patch, however reading this seems to indicate that the buff will remain with you regardless of whether the images die. It's basically an arcane power you can get as frost, which is pretty damn ridiculous as I'm sure most of you realize. The 2pce isn't half bad either, I may end up pulling a point from CTTB or replenishment to max out brain freeze if I get it.

As good as this bonus is, the buffs to the pvp set bonuses (50 more resil from 2set, 29 spell power from 4set), the real decider here IMO is how the stat bonuses are laid out. The stats came out on mmochampion, and hoo boy...

3 pieces of the set are itemised with spell power, crit and haste. The other two are both crit and hit. The best part? One of the hit items is the gloves, so you can grab 3 pieces with haste, and one with hit to help you hit cap, and still retain your gloves bonus (as lackluster as some make it out to be, I feel it's a bit underrated, especially vs BEASTCLEAVE).

So how do you get these magnificent items? It's similar to the ToC system. You can buy "welfare" versions with the new emblems of frost. You can then upgrade your welfare versions by trading them in with a token from the icecrown raid. The emblems of frost themselves drop from the heroic daily, the new boss in vault of archavon, and both versions of the ICC raid. Now, it greatly depends on the ilvl of the pvp sets, but it may be worth grabbing these welfare versions which are ilvl 251 from joining ICC pugs. Certainly, if you think you have any shot at joining a run which can obtain the tokens (one assumes they only drop from 10m hard and 25m normal like toc ones), you should be doing that. The token versions are ilvl 264... I expect the pvp set to be around ilvl 271 so they will definitely be worth wearing over that. Time to get your pve nerd on!

I'll cover fire changes and thoughts in my next post.