Damplify Magic is gone, and Frost and Fire Ward are biting the dust, that we know “for sure”. What other magey things are getting the expansion banhammer?
Maybe teleports/portals are being simplified so that we have one button to port/teleport wherever we wish, similar to how an engineer’s Northrend wormhole machine works. Summon one thing, and then just select your destination from there.
Maybe Mana Shield will finally die.
It’s not that I dislike Mana Shield, really, it’s just that it is such a poor ability. And I don’t mean just WoW’s version of Mana Shield, I mean every single rendition of Mana Shield in every single game ever that has featured such a mechanic. Admittedly I haven’t played every RPG ever, but I would be quite surprised to find a game that featured a mana shield mechanic that was actually decent.
Decent as in “balanced and has a point”. The mana shield mechanic in, say, Fable, was truly excellent in that it could make you immortal and give you unlimited experience. WoW has one of the best versions of Mana Shield I’ve seen, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with mana shield itself.
The power of mana shield, and thus it’s worth as a defensive ability, is directly proportional to how the resource of mana is managed in its game. In WoW, mana is neither scarce nor abundant, at least for a mage. It is a resource that, should you abuse it, will break and wilt, but if you take good care of it, will remain vibrant and strong nearly forever.
DICK JOKE.
Compare to the extremes.
In Fable, mana potions are very nearly unlimited. You can purchase enough of them to never run out of mana whilst keeping mana shield permanently active for the entire game. Mana is thus unlimited, thus the power of mana shield is extremely high.
In Dragon Age, mana is an extremely scarce resource. Mana potions are few and expensive, and even if you wanted to craft them the mats aren’t exactly easy to get. Mana is thus extremely limited, each and every point of it a precious resource that needs to be carefully managed. Mana Shield isn’t so much bad as it is pointless.
Sure, mana shield saves a caster’s life, but at what cost? In Fable, there is no cost. In Dragon Age, there is a steep cost, and that mana could be better spent on any number of things. It would have been cheaper to just let the attack land and then expend mana to heal the damage, for example. Or use another ability altogether, using the GCD you would have spent on mana shield, to ensure the attack never lands in the first place.
I posit that mana shield is a pointless ability. Note that this is different from useless! Mana shield can save your life, it is after all a defensive button. But it is one that I don’t think needs to exist.
What does mana shield do, intrinsically? It trades mana for damage you otherwise would have taken. In other words, it is a more direct version of every single defensive cooldown every single caster has.
Ice Barrier, for example. You spend some mana, now you’ve avoided taking some damage. You still take the damage, it just doesn’t hurt you.
Blink, for example. You spend some mana, now the bad stuff you were standing in doesn’t hurt you, the rogue you ran away from isn’t stabbing you.
Frost Nova, for example. You spend some mana, now the warrior is stuck and can’t chase you and swing his axe at your face.
Every single time I’ve played a character in an RPG that has a mana pool, there is always some stupid mana shield mechanic I can use. Why? Was it so hard to come up with other, better defensive options?
Mana Shield is redundant. It doesn’t need to exist. Scrap it and find something else.
The loss of Fire/Frost Ward is a little more intriguing. These were admittedly extremely niche abilities that were nonetheless very useful and could be very powerful with the right talents backing them up.
Ghostcrawler mentions to consider if it was ever fun to push such buttons. Was it fun to push fire and frost ward?
Remember that time Ignis used his big spell interrupt explosion thing? Remember that time you were specced for frost warding as an arcane mage, and that big spell was completely negated, restored 8k mana instantly and boosted your spellpower by a thousand?
Remember that time you specced for fire on my advice and reflected a Conflagrate right back into a warlock’s face? Or that one time an elemental shaman crit themselves for 12k with Lava Burst?
Yeah, hitting fire and frost ward was a huge amount of fun. I’m sad to see it go.
But… this opens up a new avenue for Blizzard. With no elemental wards, we have an opening for mana shield to be ramped up significantly more into a less retarded defensive option. I can’t really say for certain whether us mages actually need any more defensive buttons, but it is now a possibility!
Rename it magic ward, perhaps, have it only work on non-physical damage. Spend 400 mana, it absorbs 4000 points of magic damage, and we can cast it on others to boot. Attach a 40 second cooldown or something.
Or have mana shield do extra things depending on spec. Fire can use it as a personal spell reflect, arcane uses it to restore mana from damage taken.
Or (now I forget who suggested this, and I think I’ve lost your e-mail on the matter) have mana shield behave similar to the shield thing in Halo. It just negates damage up to a certain breaking point, say any hit less than a thousand damage simply gets negated. But go over that limit and the shield breaks, costing some mana.
By the way, shamans, the key to getting mages on your side is not to get mad at us. Try to remember how us mages spent the burning crusade. The term “token mage” was used unironically. Our primary purpose in raids was replaced by an AoE buff in Sunwell.
We mages know exactly how you feel, dear shamans, and we would be more than happy to show some sympathy if you would only stop saying idiotic things.
did we just fucking lose Bloodlust???
You should give warlocks totems. That way everything we could ever possible bring to a group is filled by another class.
Stuff like this isn’t going to make you friends. We’re just going to crack jokes about how your rage and despair sates our desperate hunger for the anguish of others.
Though admittedly there are some extremely loud mages complaining about the changes too, despite the fact that we, as a class, have probably gotten the most promising and buff-filled preview of any class yet.
Not that I’m biased or anything. No sir.
…
…
…
AND SERIOUSLY YOU SHAMANS HAVE AN ABILITY THAT LETS YOU FUCKING CAST SPELLS WHILE MOVING WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU COMPLAINING ABOUT OH MY GOD.
While I’ve hardly done any raiding since ICC came out, I was there for the ignis/koralon/onyxia(absorbing her fireballs made me /giggle) fights and using fire ward on them gave me no end of pleasure. I honestly wasn’t perfect at remembering to use the ward whenever their fire damage hit the raid, but dammit the mana regen was nice! I don’t quite get why they’re tossing it away. Hopefully it does bring around a flat non-physical damage absorption, like the kind you mentioned. It plays perfectly into the mythos of a mage and would take care of the absorption nerf, allowing us to just take damage and turn it into mana.
As for shammy’s: I’m still pissed about shammy’s hex spell.. a polymorph which doesn’t break on damage?! WTF! Quit complaining you selfish bastards!!!!
As a shaman I completely agree. I’m sick of people whining about their class in general. I’m not in a raid just to hit heroism, I’m there to have fun goddamn it.
*cheer*
I always used wards and I think they’re quite useful spells but I like you ideas better 🙂 Shield dependent on spec and castable on others? That could be useful 😉
Halo-like shield could be fun too.
And it’s not as if BL/H was gamebreaking. We still need you, warlocks. Wait, you’re called shamans? Preposterous. Since when?! Oh and keep whining, you’re fuelling further nerfing. Cata changes are there for a reason; bring the player, not ze class. Then again, the WoW community will now see you as that ugly foreign kid playing alone in the sandbox. I joke. A player is a player, but a pack of priests won’t fare well alone in a raid. We still like dem fence posts you line up for us, dear shammys. :]
I wonder if there’ll be any fixes before Cata comes out…
Euripedes, you never cease to make me laugh by saying exactly what I think, or wish I thought of.
That final paragraph was solid win, with some awesome thrown in. Awesome.
[…] It seems like the mages are also tired of the QQ. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)March 25,2010 Tags: Cataclysm, Enhancement, […]
From a PVP perspective:
Mana shield is a less attractive solution that is a) not on a cooldown and b) not frost. So if your defensive cooldowns are not available, or you don’t want to use them because using them would put you in a worse position, you can spam mana shield. At the very worst, it’s a mana drain. At it’s best, its something that will trade a GCD for a little bit more time.
Watch Xmo’s recent video of War/Mage/Pally and you’ll see a situation where the mage has been locked out of his frost tree and is getting hammered. The solution? Spam Mana Shield until the Frost school becomes unlocked and he can Ice Block.
The intrinsic problem with Mana Shield is that if you make it too good, even by a little bit, Mages will run rampant because of all the defensive CD’s and control that they have. Think of how Shatter has allowed PvP mages to ignore crit and stack haste. Shouldn’t the decision to attain/balance the secondary and tertiary spell modifiers be a decision instead of being dictated by talents? Making Mana Shield too good and you’re looking at Mages using even more PvE gear (with hit/haste/crit) and upsetting the balance where players are expected to wear a certain amount of PvP gear (ie: limiting their offensive abilities while upping their survival).
To make it attractive, I believe that it should be tied to a high tier Arcane talent so that Frost or Fire mages cannot get it, and make it do something that ties well into the Arcane tree such as a shattered barrier variant: When Mana Shield dissipates, it empowers the next arcane spell with +x% dmg (or haste or and aoe slow/snare)
It could always be made into a PvP talent directly, and thus could be made to scale with resilience.
Think a subtlety rogue’s cheat death ability, which had the same design problems your citing.
Such a powerful defensive option allowed the rogues to stack PvE gear with impunity. So, by making it scale with resilience, the defensive cooldown is only any good of the character bothers to wear any PvP gear. Otherwise it is useless.
No.. let the Shaman QQ…
Everyone gets their turn… we have had ours, time and time again…
let them QQ.
Of course, you are right, we have and do feel their pain and as is often the case, we hate it when our rare happiness is spoilt by someone else’s despair.
If you ask me, there has been a severe lack of QQ lately…
Remember My Mage Sucks
I miss those days…
let them QQ.
I actually had a use for Mana Shield in PvE on my mage. In H ToC (the 5 man) the Black Knight shoots out a shadow bolt randomly at people. At a certain point in my gearing, I was doing enough damage to reasonably do HToC, but that shadow bolt would one-shot me. It was literally doing more damage than I had health. My solution was to use Mana Shield. Though in retrospect Dampen Magic would probably have been a better solution, as the bolt was only overkilling me by a few hundred HP.
None of us are “special flowers” anymore. All buffs can be replicated by another class (or, horrors, by DRUMS). Welcome to our world, Shaman.
Now if only I could get a tremor totem. Fear ward is fail.
I’ll miss the my fireward, really. Like I miss the good old detect magic spell an the hours of fun abusing it in every possible way, like proccing trinkets on a sheep before whirling up a pyro.
The minor glyphs to reflect elemental damage just made me think about the good old times where mages were able to onehit other players with double-trinket action from MC an Zul’Gurub. And – of course – those ingenieur trinkets to reflect such a pyro of doom. Hella fun!
For me this defines the way of how to play a mage-class in a rpg. In every rpg, especially in the early states, the mage was the class to choose if you want to abuse some mechanics with a cool spell.
In my five years of a raiding mage the most fun moments weren’t when i topped damagemeters. I don’t even remember this specific encounters when I was first.
But I remember the encounters where i topped the meters with abusing that lightning-trinket from Karazhan, before they invented the inner-cooldown mechanic.
I remeber the fun to solo a wing in the new Naxxramas, i remember the solo-fun in Zul’Gurub and I especially remember that Faxmonkey videos, showing all the fun a mage can have.
I’ll miss my wards, but I’m confident, the new features introduced with Cataclysm will allow us to have fun with.
“(now I forget who suggested this, and I think I’ve lost your e-mail on the matter) ”
I feel so used… and discarded. Like a cheap whore who you couldn’t even pay the already nominal fee that was asked of you.
Shame, Euri. Shame.
(Only kidding. Actually surprised this was remembered!)
Shaman tears taste like sweet honey on my lips. LOL!
I can’t imagine shamans being particularly interested in getting you on their side.
Not to argue against time warp per se, but arguing that mage’s had a hard time in previous points in the game seems kind of a harsh argument to use against shaman of all classes, given that there are probably more periods of the game where raids only brought a token bloodlust shaman than periods where we stacked raids with them.
People brought shaman’s to vanilla raids to have them stand out of combat for mid-fight resses for goodness sake. And you haven’t seen a token class only brought for buffs until you had to do BC enhance sham totem twisting (“Yeah, just keep swapping between Grace of Air and WF. No we don’t care that it eats up 40% of your GCD’s, the buffs are better than your dps”).
In honesty though, shaman’s probably be more ok with having so much overlap with our buffs if a) their dps spec’s weren’t so meh right now, and b) their buffs weren’t tied to the extra-clunky totem mechanic, which almost automatically makes them inferior to the stat-weight equal Pally/DK/Warlock alternatives. I think it’s kind of a “kicking them when they’re down…again” feeling that’s doing a lot of it.
It isn’t an argument against them, it’s an argument of “hey, as a class we’ve been there too. we can be friends if you’d stop flinging poop at us.”
Another reason why I’m arguing against a hybrid tax.
If the mage class is significantly behind, say, warlocks, oh noes big disaster!
If the shaman class is significantly behind… ehh, they’re a hybrid class.
That’s not really fair at all to the shaman class.
[…] Euripides over at Critical QQ, ruminates on the proposed mage changes and hates on Shamans, and even throws in a few references to Dragon Age in So This Will Mostly Be Rambling. […]
Manashield on the mage in Diablo I was realy, realy good. I think it is where they copied the idéa. But then again. Pots had no cooldown and cost next to no money so manashield in that day were… overpowered. But i totaly agree that is a very boring mechnic by todays standards.
Speaking as a shaman, I cannot understand the whining about mages getting Heroism/Bloodlust. Every other class has had it’s spells shared out. Heroism is the only(?) one left that only one class can use. And you’re whining because ONE other class will be able to use it. My raid slots is assured because I’m a kick-ass healer, and I chew up the DPS charts too. Remember when we got extra spells in Wrath? Yeah, other classes abilities. So now you could do the same job as them. If you lose out to another class doing the same job because they can now Heroism as well, maybe they’re better than you. Maybe you suck, but the rest of the raid wants Heroism. I’m pleased mages are getting Heroism, they can be the Hero-bot too.
And being pleased with it has nothing to do with one of my three mains being a mage. Nope.
[…] starts off with a squee over the changes, following it up with a rant about the loss of Wards, the crappiness of Mana Shield and the Shaman […]
They’ve removed the moves that I don’t have on my main bar, but introduced moves that I need to put on my main bar.
I hate mana shield cos it drains my mana heaps to replace a tiny amount of health. I still use it though cos an alive mage is a step closer to victory.
I’ve been jealous ever since DK’s were released and they got mechanics like Anti-Magic Shell and Anti-Magic Zone. As Mages being the masters of the art I think we should be just as capable at negating magical damage as dishing it out.
Lots of examples have been seen in various types of Mage lore of these types of mechanics like the Protego spell in Harry Potter to that Goblin Mage Yoda absorbing that Shaman Dooku’s Chain Lightning.
It makes more sense that mages wouldn’t necessarily negate magic damage, but rather redirect it or absorb it.
Things like totally negating a spell doesn’t really fit, but absorbing a spell to restore mana or the Incanter’s Absorption talent certainly fit extremely well.
Though a DKs spell copy thing is somewhat annoying. Total mage ability, that one.
Agreed–when I read about Shaman’s new spell of 10 secs of spellcasting while moving (and maybe swinging 2 weapons too), every 2 mins! I thought that is some sweet action. Can’t wait to try it on my shammie. The BloodLust backlash is just an example of destructive envy. Some envy is good–it makes you strive to be better. Ripping others down to make yourself feel equal is not–it is destructive by nature, and just makes you look like a hating douche.
I remember the days when people in WSG and AB were rolling around in their MC Fire resist gear just so they didn’t get blown up against geared out fire mages. It’s kind sad to see the Wards removed, as it was one of those things used to actually make a difference.
I’m getting Heroism! Squeeeeeeeee!
Oh sorry, was there some other point? 🙂
Indeed,
I will miss telling shaman to suck their Lava Burst up their ass with Fire Ward. I’m the FIRE MAGE DAMMIT! I AM, NOT YOU! FIRE~~~~~~~~
Hey I love my shaman but I can’t wait to start a goblin mage after cataclysm drops. I love the control they seem to have over a battlefield. Anyways, I don’t know the mechanics of mana shield but I had a cool idea after reading this. How about the shield absorbs the damage up to a certain point, then you get a buff that deals X damage in addition to the normal damage your next spell does. Also if the spell you cast is the same class as the one absorbed it would do an additional effect. So you absorb a lava burst, get the buff and cast a fireball next. You do your regular damage + the buffs damage, and since they are both fire spells a DOT is placed on the target for some damage. That sounds pretty magey
As far as portal simplification goes, I’d suggest an addon called Opie. It took me a while to get used to it but it’s easy to customize. 🙂
I would not be happy if they introduced any more shield mechanics which absorb a flat amount of damage. Having entire rend ticks absorbed by sacred shield and subsequently not being able to use overpower is not fun, it’s frustrating as hell. I imagine DoT classes feel similarly about it. Flat damage reduction mechanics are a nightmare for balance because they hit some classes so much harder than others in pvp. Hell, they completely retooled block mechanics because they didn’t like that. I don’t think giving mages or anybody else a similar mechanic is really going to be a great idea.
On another note, I will dearly miss frost/fire ward. Living an extra 10 seconds at level 70 in the 70-79 bg bracket because you CS’d one caster and absorbed the other’s spells makes you feel really good.
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