Wrath of the Lich King Mage News from the Weekend – Nov. 3rd

Arcane mages are insane fun right now (been fiddling with a friend’s not Nessaja’s) but it feels REALLY overpowered in PVP. The mana regen too with Mage Armor is something I wasn’t expecting.

Mage Armor OP?
For what it’s worth, Mage Armor is quite powerful, but it’s a trade-off. It’s going to make mages harder to kill by some classes but easier to others. That seems like a decent design, so then it just comes down to numbers. We’ll keep an eye on it, but it’s not something slated for an imminent nerf. (src)

Slow – Reducing the PvP duration to 10 seconds
We are strongly considering this. (src)

Arcane Stability and pushback reduction talents
I think some of these talents probably need to be tweaked with the new pushback system in place (assuming that we like the way it plays out). (src)

Arcane tree balancing
We think we know how to adjust Arcane to make their rotations work better in PvE (which will also help the PvP burst at the same time). It involves changing a couple of spells though so it will take some time and isn’t the kind of thing easily hotfixed (as it will make tooltips incorrect).

We don’t think Arcane is so broken that it’s useless to take raiding. We just want to make the rotations a little smoother and perhaps bring up PvE damage a little bit. (src)

Arcane tree balancing #2
We are very concerned about the burst damage of Arcane in PvP. If we end up nerfing Arcane Barrage in particular, nobody should be surprised.

We understand that it is fun to have an instant spell that does so much damage, even on a cooldown. But we also think Arcane is a bit of a one-trick pony at the moment — run around and Fireball or whatever, then Barrage when it’s on cooldown. A more interesting and balanced rotation would be something like getting an Arcane Blast out first, which then buffs Barrage up to its current big numbers.

In PvE, Arcane doesn’t seem to be OP and might even be low compared to Frost and Fire. Buffing Arcane Blast might help in this situation too. (src)