Spooncraft

I’ve known many mages in my time and I don’t really understand where the whole AOE kings came from. Though there is something to be said with how in old school PVP the most god aweful annoying thing was a mage healed to hell running around in a pack of us in AV just spamming the crap out of Arcane Explosion.

Or sitting on top of a cliff side and spamming Blizzard channels all over the front line. Or even to a lesser degree flamestriking the ground under a rooted front line… you know what? Mages WERE the kings of AOE until Seed of Destruction.

There are some significant Fire changes coming in an upcoming build, I’ll see if I can get the web team to update the calculator.

Fire is intended to do compelling single target damage, as it’s traditionally been. When first designing the classes, we always intended the Mage to be the king of AOE and for AOE to be an important part in the game. Living Bomb, and other talents in the tree are intended to bring the Mage back in line with our original vision. Part of what pegged the Mage down a notch was Seed of Corruption, which ended up being better than we anticipated.

That said, again, we do want Fire to be a strong single target DPS spec along with Frost and Arcane. Frost is not intended to be the Mages “PvP spec” and Fire isn’t intended to be the “PvE spec,” they only turned out that way because of unintended factors. We’re trying to make Frost more viable in raiding by allowing you to effectively freeze the target without having to nova it, allowing you to throw in some “shatter combos” in your rotation. Arcane, Frost, and Fire (and a mix thereof) should all more or less be viable in as many aspects of the game as possible. Where they should be different is in playstyle and gameplay differences (stacking Scorch vs. freezing and shatter etc.).

AOE will be more prevalent in encounters in the game, yes. However, Fire mages are assuming they’re being converted into a pure AOE spec, which is not the case. We want the strong AOE to just be a feature of the Fire Mage. The Fire Mage doesn’t need a new single target DPS nuke or ability as a 51-point talent in order to continue to be a good single target DPS class.

As an edit, we dont want ANOTHER single target nuke, we want the one we have to not suck, make it stronger fix a talent to say Does more damage than a warlock because we have less health less mana less utility a *%*! version of a pet less and worse CC and theres no damn good reason to bring more than one of us to any given raid, and in sunwell if you buy water from a vendor, you dont even need a single mage for anything.

The talent isn’t finished in design, this is beta. A new iteration will be presented in a future build.