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. It's about as pointless as me whining about getting owned by warriors, hunters, and rogues. You want to talk about lack of mobility? Elemental shamans don't have a single decent instant cast spell. They've got their shocks but they can't use them for damage because they have to be saved for interrupts. Or warlocks - sure we can dot something up but at best it means we might get a kill after we've died. Most of the bursty spells we can have are in the destruction tree which isn't particularly good for pvp - it's basically a gimp mage with none of the mage's more useful pvp tools..I'm sorry if you're butthurt about being killed by warlocks, QQ, get over it and go spec arcane so you can two-shot them
Oh and ice lance spams don't help me win games. "Instant cast" with no cooldown just isn't as happy as it sounds. And I'm sure fear has about as bad as polymorph for pvp CC
.Once you've specced a PvP build to get PvP gear, there was absolutely no point in speccing anything else. Why spec frost to struggle getting gear, then respec fire/arcane to get facerolled with it? Think about it from a realistic perspecive. Anyway, I saw resto shamans plenty of times even during S3, they were far, far more common than any mage I've seen. I guess mages had it even worse than that
I play a shadow priest and I die to everything so.....maybe I just suck?
Not bad for about 6 hours I don't think.), but rather the fact that there is no effective way to recover it. The next point people will make is: "Well, you're a mage, you have evocate and mana gems to cover for it". Sorry, but the reality is that they do NOT cover for it. If you EVER get to use a full evocate in an arena, the other team must have been sleeping. I have yet to encounter a game where I could fully utilize my evocate to recover my mana. Evocate is just such a gimmicky way to recover mana in relation to other classes who have much more effective and gameplay oriented forms of recovery.This mage pvp discussion is killing me. Although I am by no means a mage pvp expert, I do like to keep up with what some of the better players have to say about mages and how they fare against other classes. However, I will say that since all I do is pvp and my main is a mage, I do understand EXACTLY what they're saying.
I have skimmed through the last few pages, in particular the discussion between Yoshiyuki Blade and Daggah, and I thought I'd inject some of my own thoughts and echo some of the thoughts of some of the better mages in the US PVP community. Some of these may have already been pointed out or discussed, but I thought I needed to put in my own word here.
1. Mages are the only class (I believe this is the case today) that have a HARD limit.
2. Mages have far too inadequate sources of MOBILE burst.
3. Mage mana regen is pitiful, despite what other people may claim.
4. Mages don't scale well (This isn't a mage exclusive problem.)
Let me elaborate:
1. Mages are the only class (I believe this is the case today) that have a HARD limit.
This point ties in directly with point #3. Mages are currently the ONLY class in the game where you live and die by the clock. Your clock being your mana pool. Mages are desired because of their high amounts of control and reliable burst damage. The way mages play today are almost completely condensed down to this strategy: Crazy burst on your opponent and hope they die. If you don't kill them within the first X number of minutes, you lose your mana and the game is lost. And I'd like to make it clear here that X is NOT a very big number. X is usually like 2 or 3 at the most. This sort of hard limit completely changes the way mages synergize with other classes. Any mage/healer team is virtually impossible to do because of this hard time limit.
Now, some may say, "Well, too bad. That's your problem, mana isn't supposed to be infinite. So what are you complaining about?". Well, the problem isn't that we don't have infinite mana (no class should have easy access to infinite mana, but I also believe no class should have infinite rage/energy either
For example, warlocks can potentially have infinite mana as long as they have health for lifetap. As a warlock, you have to consciously make the choice between trading off some health for mana and as such, you're also consciously making the choice to stop doing damage for that global cooldown. But in the end, the choice that you make is something that always has a benefit; return of mana. As a mage, you don't make the choice of having to give up health, but what you do give up time doing damage. "What's the difference?" you may ask?. For a warlock, the issue of lifetapping is, in most cases, completely trivial. You're running out of mana, you have health, lifetap. You used one global cooldown, lost some health, but gained some mana. For the mage, you have to sit there and channel a spell for 8 seconds (for maximum benefit) that happens to have a 5 minute cooldown. I should also mention that since it's channeled, you can get interrupted which could potentially net you ZERO mana even though you used the spell and now you're shit out of luck for 5 minutes and if you get locked out it's even worse since now you can't do anything in arcane for the next several seconds.
I haven't kept up with some other classes, but from what I understand, hunters now have an ability which lets them recover mana at the cost of damage. This is what mages really need. They need a more effective way to recover mana. There needs to be a gameplay rooted recovery system where if you CHOOSE to use the ability, you ALWAYS recover some mana, but it costs you something else to do it. At this point in time, mages must completely sacrifice doing damage to use a 5 minute cooldown ability which can be interrupted (and thus potentially locking out a school) AND give you nothing even if you used it.
Oh, and mana gems are BS. They only delay the time it takes for the mage to hit the inevitable brick wall.
Some of the suggested changes/improvements to evocate suggested on the beta forums a few weeks back was to either reduce the cooldown on evocate significantly (one suggested cooldown was 1 minute) while significantly reducing channeled length and reducing mana recovered. Another suggestion was to copy the paladin's Divine Plea and just make evocate a buff instead of channeled.
A great example of this hard limit rearing its ugly head was in the last few arena tournaments that have been held. In all of these events, RMP (Rogue/Mage/Priest) was run by one team or another. One of the big questions people had about the teams running RMP was whether or not they could beat WLD (Warrior/Lock/Druid) effectively. I personally think the results speak for themselves. WLD just dominates RMP if you can stay alive through the initial burst (which is not much of a feat considering the makeup). Once that's done, RMP virtually has no chance. The way RMP plays is just so ineffective when the games go on longer than a few minutes, and it is only because of the fact that the mage will never be able to recover mana.
Now, on to point #2:
2. Mages have far too inadequate sources of MOBILE burst.
Now that everyone knows how devastating mages can be if left alone, virtually every arena game where a mage is involved has the following strategy: TRAIN THE MAGE! It's just ridiculous how bad it is. Every mage should go into an arena game and EXPECT to be trained and spend the entire game running around using expensive, nonscaling instant casts. Some people will say we have the most instant cast spells in the game, blah blah blah. Honestly, having more != better. All of our instant cast spells are EXPENSIVE, are on long cooldowns, and to top it off, they have terrible scaling with spell damage (which is very much related to my point #4). Virtually all of the mage talents (frost in particular) are based on the assumption that we can cast frostbolts. It may (or may not be) shocking to some of you out there, but I seldom cast frostbolts in arenas simply because of how hard I get trained in arena games, and oftentimes when I do get a chance to use one, some other issue can prevent me (ie - LOS).
And ice lance does not count as a viable instant cast spell. The only time you use ice lance is either to keep someone in combat or to follow up a frostbolt for the shatter combo. Very rarely are you going to use ice lance to do damage. So for all of you out there saying ice lance is a viable instant cast spell, in most cases, it's not, so stop acting like we have such an insane spell called ice lance.
Also, the expensive nature of these instant casts do nothing to help the situation which I bring up in point #1.
On to point #3:
3. Mage mana regen is pitiful, despite what other people may claim.
I pretty much explained this in point #1 so I'm not going to re-explain it here. But it's such a huge problem with the mage class that I basically have to point it out twice. I would also like to mention that this isn't a PVP exclusive issue. It's just as big of an issue in PVE where our only real way to recover mana FORCES us to completely stop doing damage.
Point #4:
4. Mages don't scale well (This isn't a mage exclusive problem.)
Mages (and most other spell damage based classes) simply don't scale. There are two parts to this problem in respect to the mage. First part is that in general, the scaling of spell damage is just pitiful compared to the scaling of melee. Mage damage in S1 was virtually the same as mage damage in S4. Warrior/Rogue damage, however, just kept skyrocketing.
Second part, is tied in with point #2. If mages were to make the most of spell damage scaling today, we'd only be casting frostbolts and nothing else. But this simply isn't feasible. Every team and their mothers know that if a mage is in the game, you train them. When you're getting trained like this, you simply can't afford to cast a frostbolt, so you do the next best thing: Fireblast and cone of cold. The thing is, these "next best thing"s are absolutely terrible in terms of mana efficiency and damage scaling. We lose our mana FASTER now and we also use spells that don't utilize our spell damage very well. In other words, we run ourselves out of mana faster, we do less damage, and we get less bang for the buck with the spell damage we have from gear. I can tell you already that if melee scales the way it did in Burning Crusade, mages will do well in S1 and S2, but once the later seasons come around, melee will start doing outrageous damage again and mages will start dying much quicker to melee.
Conclusion
As you can see, this is a multifaceted problem and each problem directly or indirectly leads to or adds to another (ie - Strategy vs mages force mages to use expensive instant casts which aren't mana efficient and don't scale well which doesn't at all help with the mage mana problem nor the mage mobile burst problem. Also completely ruins mage spell damage scalability). To top it off, many of these problems aren't easily identifiable because abilities/talents look good on paper, but if you're looking at PVP, looking good on paper just doesn't mean shit. If the environment of the game doesn't let you utilize the talents in the first place, then you've got a problem where you're using talent points but not getting any benefit out of them. This is illustrated greatly by the fact that mages just get trained every single game now and casting a frostbolt just isn't feasible in many games so all those frostbolt enhancing talents don't get used very much. Yet, in PVE, you can frostbolt to your heart's content. Blizzard isn't going to sacrifice the entire PVE game for the PVP game (although some would disagree).
This wasn't a very well thought out post or anything since I basically wrote this up in one of my classes, but I wanted to at least get some of these points out there. I'd also like to mention that while mages do have some of these glaring problems, that isn't to say that they're broken. I'd have to say that mages are one of the most capable classes in the game and one of the best pvp classes (if not THE best) if played by the right player. I don't have any doubt that if played correctly, mages can 1v1 every single class in the game and win every time. But there are just way too many factors with the mage class that forces a player to close off potential strategies simply because class design is so prohibitive to many of them (ie - pairing with a healer to get a control/outlast kind of strategy with the mage just isn't feasible)
's tend to hurt really bad in some fights.