A Disturbing Trend

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Azeroth's Biggest Failures

Tonight on Azeroth's 3 Biggest Failures

A guest column by Voxmortis

Heyo, Voxmortis here, you may recognize me from such posts as “why Voxmortis needs to re spec frost” and assorted rantings about how I fail. Damn good reading IMO, you should take it to heart.

Now, being the epic failure that I am, I am gifted with the magical ability to spot and write down even bigger failures than myself. The following 3 transpired over this AV holiday weekend.

#3: The alliance on Stormstrike.

Okay, this is more of a cheer for the horde on stormstrike than anything else. If you didn't notice, or just don't play on the stormstrike realm, some moronic alliance members decided that it would render more honor if they turtled then tried to push us back into mandatory cave defense. Now, this may seem like a good idea to you for the following reasons:

1. It pisses off the horde (and who doesn't want that?!)

2. It renders more honor per battleground

3. LOL! I KILLED A ZMOBIE! LOL! ROFL! I LIKE ANIME AND FAIL HARD BECAUSE I PLAY A GNOME! (totally unbiased here....)

Now, this is why it is a bad idea:

1. Horde has a shitstorm of druids.

Despite wave after wave of alliance defense, successfully pushing us back into the cave, the alliance failed to look at the score sheet to notice that we had 10 druids in this particular battleground. There were a couple feral tanks, a tree or two and a handful of boomkin & feral dps. Guess what alliance? Cat form+stealth+walk north a bit=well-constructed 10 man to take on Vanndar. Now anybody who looks back on the days of 30 folks or more on cave defense KNOWS that thats all you need to take out Vanndar. So guess what? We Won. Eat it gnomes.

#2: A particular hunter who I repeatedly saw in AV

This hunter was a troll. He left his pet on aggressive entering Vann's room. Nuff said? I thought so. It took this rube 4 wipes to realize what was going on and by then, alliance had gotten bored of defense and killed Drek. GG ebay character, GG

#1: Though I regret to do this.... The mages of Anathema

Though I am deeply excited to join Anathema, that I can finally see some endgame content and be able to actually defend my spec as viable (arcane raid DPS ftw!), I look on with trepidation and absolute horror at meeting Anathema's mage community.

Case 1: Their Frost Mage....

He is specced for arena... only no piercing ice... /facepalm

Case 2: One of their fire mages...

She is specced 13/48. Sure, there are ways you could feebly argue its superiority over 10/48/3 as the bread-and-butter fire raid build. But not for this one. Instead of elemental precision, my toasty comrade has chosen ARCANE FORTITUDE and WAND SPEC. Yeah. I know.

Case 3: I havent slept in 21 hours, and have no motivation to go to the armory to remind myself about what I was talking about.

Well thats it for me, this was a rant by Voxmortis. Oh, and next time you see me in the arena? Put fire ward up, and ice block when the big orange burney thing comes towards your head. I'm tired of shitkicking frost mages who don't know what they're doing.

Nukeymcsquishy, AKA Voxmortis,

Signing Off.

!BOOM! Headshot.

Hunters and PvP. Blech. Anyone who's played a mage in a battleground knows that, as a general rule, hunters are to be avoided.

To put it quite plainly, hunters are designed for squishies. Sometimes they save our tissue paper wearing behinds, other times they giggle and shoot pointy sticks into those same behinds.
Anybody who's fought more than a dozen hunters in PvP knows that there are some general rules to fighting a hunter.

1 - Take the pet out of commission. (Fear, Frost Nova, Hamstring...)
2 - Take away the hunter's mobility. (Frost Nova, Hamstring, that druid root thingy...)
3 - Unload as much damage as possible on the hunter, as fast as possible.

To quote a certain large angry feline, hunters provide "Massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS".
The key word here is "ranged" and "sustained". Countering both of these is the only way to win against a hunter that has any experience in this game.
As a mage, your guiding principles are simple. Polymorph the pet if possible, root the hunter, and the whole time, unload any and every instant spell you have to get that hunter down as fast as possible. As a general rule, taking the pet out removes anywhere from 30% to 50% of the hunters damage, depending on their spec, and marksman hunters are the only ones with any real amount of burst damage.
So, as mages, our strategies are as follows:

• Polymorph the pet, if time allows. This is risky to do, BM's will simply break it and trash your squishy behind. As well, you waste at least 1.5 seconds of the encounter to this, which is time you could be damaging the hunter. Another downside, the hunter gets a free 1.5 seconds to do whatever they want. Shoot you, drop a trap, whatever.
• Blink is a very effective spell to use againts hunters. It has two uses: 1 - getting into dead zone territory faster, 2 - breaking LoS when hunter pops SquishyKiller...err, Beast Within.
• While first running at a hunter, use every instant you have. Fireblast, Cone of Cold, Presence of Mind, Dragon's Breath, Blastwave, hell, even an Arcane Explosion won't hurt.
  
• If you're fire, use Dragon's Breath to get off a fireball, or at least a scorch or two. You will desperately need that damage. If you're Frost, pop Frost Nova as soon as you can, and try very, very hard to get off a Shatter combo. Chances are very good you'll be met with "Scattershot" or "LOL MY PET IS BIGGER THAN THRALL'S CHAIR". If the former, trinket out of it if possible, and at least get an Ice Lance nuke out of it.
• Beast Within is very dangerous, if you let the hunter use it to it's full potential. This is your strategy for countering it : RUN. You have to survive the next 19 seconds on your own. Break LoS, blink away, /beg, have a paladin bubble you, whatever it takes. Having Ice Block immensely alleviates the difficulty. You only need to survive 9 seconds. Again, break LoS, whatever. And congratulate yourself if you survive, you just wasted a BM's most powerful weapon. Feel free to /giggle.
• DEADZONE! This is your best weapon against a hunter. They cannot melee you or ranged attack you, and is currently the only way to deal anything remotely approaching serious damage to a hunter. If you can manage to get a hunter rooted with none of the "IWIN" buttons, you can get a full cast off here.
  
• Silencing Shot. /shudder. If you get hit with this, two things you can do. Ice Block out of it, or break LoS so the hunter can't take advantage of it. Drop behind a pillar, run into a building, whatever.
  

At this point in the game, unload your instants again. If the hunter's not dead by now, chances are pretty good you're going to lose. BM's are easier than the others, they have nothing now. Frost Nova again, Shatter combo, you win. Marksman may have Scattershot up again; if you have a cooldown monitor addon, it is invaluable against hunters. If you don't have one, get one. If he doesn't have it, Shatter with impunity. If you're not frost, props to even living this long.

Please note that having a Water Elemental is incredibly useful for fighting a hunter. Basically, free extra damage, and an extra root. Heck, you can even get another Shatter combo off of it, if you're deadzoning.

If you can make it into a second deadzone cast and pull it off, you've basically won at this point. Some hunters are tougher and require another Instant Cast smackdown, but they drop easy once their cooldowns are gone.

If you find yourself unable to break LoS when you need to, unable to somehow get the pet out of the picture, or find yourself trapped/wingclipped to a standstill, be prepared to eat some very painful pointy things. Blink can be a help here, if you have the cooldown, you must make every effort to stop that hunter from gaining range on you.
If the hunter does get range and keeps his mobility, you've lost control of the situation. And when you lose control of the situation, you lose the fight. Plain and simple.

This also why Blizzard's announcement of dispatching the dead zone worries me so much. A class flaw it may be, but this class flaw was the only thing we mages had to get an actual cast off against a hunter. Without the deadzone, we will be stuck with Instant Casts. With only instants, we simply will not have enough damage to drop the hunter before they drop us

IN CONCLUSION

How to beat a hunter
1 - Remove the pet from the equation
2 - Take away the hunters mobility
3 - Drop them as fast as possible with Instants
4 - Abuse the deadzone so hard, the hunter trainers /cry



APPENDIX

Ever wonder how a hunter does so much damage to us? It's simple. Almost all of their attacks are based on physical damage. This is mitigated by armor... and guess what? You got it. We mages have no armor. This is why we eat auto-shot crits of over 1k damage each, from undergeared beast master hunters who didn't put points in marksman.


EDIT: Fixed a few typos

A swift kick in the pants (Patch 2.3)

Patch 2.3 is on the way, and as any serious wow blogger must do, here is my thoughts on it.

Ritual of Refreshment will allow players to pick up their own stacks of food and water

Any mage that complains about this deserves a swift kick in the pants. There is no downside to this. It summons mannabiscuits, which restore both HP and MP. Each Ritual has 50 charges. The fact that it costs a reagent is a minor inconvenience to an otherwise great, and long overdue, spell. I don't care what some mageholes say, the ability to get food/water to an entire raid group in one spell is fantastic. If you're running Gruul's, which would you rather do...
1 - Summon a stack of food/water for every single member of the raid.
2 - Cast one spell, and let everyone else take what they need.

Seems obvious to me.

Damage coefficient reduction removed from Improved Fireball and Improved Frostbolt

FANTASTIC. It's about time this senseless nerf was removed. Mages doing too much damage, my sweaty ass. Over half of "damage" IS "mage" for crying out loud. While this will not have much of an impact in PvP, a 10% increase in damage is still nothing to sneeze at. In PvE, especially high-end raiding, this could have a huge impact. Fire will climb right back up those DPS charts (assuming standard rotation of Scorchx5, fireballx2). Raiding mages, rejoice. Unless your Arcane, in which case you're going to be looking jealously at those fire mages again. Sorry 'bout that. And for any frost mages in the PvE area, you will notice this right away, since frostbolt is about the only spell cast in an instance.

Evocation changed to restore 15% of your total mana every 2 seconds

Thank you, so very very much! As it stands right now, 8.5k mana and no + spirit, I get 3k mana from evocate. Embarrasingly sad for an 8 minute cooldown. This new way will grant me 5.1k, which is far better, but still leaves evocate as "meh". I mean, its an 8-minute cooldown! Why not have it restore our entire mana bar? It's channeled and can be interrupted by literally anything. How is it overpowered to have it simply restore 25% of our mana every 2 seconds?

Arcane Meditation increased to 10/20/30% mana regeneration

. . . ? Ok, now I'm just confused. The new evocation basically says "Ok, sorry about spirit there. You'll never need it again". This new change says "STACK AS MUCH SPIRIT AS POSSIBLE" Confusing, yes? Nonetheless, a very solid buff (arcane mages rejoice!).

Ice Barrior gains additional benefit from spell damage bonuses

Learn to spell, Drysc. Anyways, on the surface this looks cool. But lets dig deeper... The base damage absorbed by Ice Barrier is going down, and will benefit from (correct me if I'm wrong) 10% of bonus frost damage. For me, at a sad amount of +625 frost damage, this lands me a nice... 62 damage absorbed. Woo. Awesome.
This will provide some much needed scalability to this spell, but depending on how much + damage you have, ranges anywhere from a mild nerf to a huge buff. If there are any raiding frost mages out there with 1200+ spell damage, congrats. Your Ice Barriers will be the envy of everyone.

Fire Ward and Frost Ward now gain additional benefit from spell damage bonuses

See Ice Barrier above. Hazzah Scalability, boo for reduction in base damage absorbed.

Detect Magic removed, all players will see their target's beneficial effects at all times

Very, very interesting. This will certainly shake stuff up on the PvP scene. Being able to see all positive buffs will provide a LOT of information about your opponent. In a 3v3 arena, and two peeps are visible? Check 'em out. What buffs they got? Arcane Intellect, and no mage? He popped Invis, prepare for imminent nukeage. Mark of the Wild? Can't see a druid? Kitty is incoming. No out of place buffs? Paladins, beware, there's a rogue behind you.
As for mages in specific, some are lamenting the passing of this debuff. Gone are the days of detect magic/polymorph macros. Now paladins can debuff their allies at will, blah blah blah. Shut the hell up. Seriously. If you see a Paladin and a warrior running at you, who do you polymorph? If you answered Warrior, you failed. Ice Lance the warrior to prevent Charge, then sheep the Paladin. Then unload an instant or two on the warrior (Cone of cold is best). This forces the paladin to bubble/trinket to keep his warrior buddy alive. Then you kill the Paladin. Simple. Put it quite simply, paladins can heal one thing at a time. Themselves or someone else. Attack the paladin's friend, he heals his friend. Attack the paladin, he heals himself. Make sense? Hit the warrior, pally will try and save him. Thats your cue to mess that plate-wearing healbot up.
Detect Magic was only ever used as a way to protect a sheep. Detect Magic/Polymorph would tie a mage up, easily, for 3 seconds. And for what? To keep an opponent player sheeped for an extra few seconds, while waiting for a cleanse/dispel magic/somethinglikethat.
And who has enough time to spend a GCD on Detect Magic in the smaller arenas anyways?
This change will be, basically, an inconvenience to mages in 5v5, where they could afford the time to spend 3 seconds on sheeping a target.
This change will go largely unnoticed in 2v2's and 3v3's. Right now, it's simply too much time spent on a single polymorph. Time that should be, nay, NEEDS to be spent elsewhere.

There are a couple of other changes in 2.3 that are pertinent. The most alarming change is this:
Arcane Shot will dispel one magic effect in addition to its normal damage

Well, so much for frost being able to fight hunters. "You're overreacting!" No, no I'm not. As frost, how you fight a hunter is pretty much always set. As you get in close, you unload with at least 2 instants (fireblast, cone of cold), root them (by them I mean hunter and pet). Sheep the pet if you have time. Get to Deadzone. Shatter combo. Instants again. If they're still alive at this point, try to get another frostbolt off while waiting for an instant to finish its cooldown. Or, if you have the incredibly useful WE out, root 'em again, and repeat the Shatter combo.
In order for this scenario to work, you have to assume some things:
Assumption #1 - the hunter is not beast master spec, and if he is, BigRedSquishyKiller is on cooldown
Assumption #2 - the hunter is not marksman spec, and if he is, Scattershot is on cooldown.
Assumption #3 - you have Ice Barrier up, so the hunter doesn't kick your ass before you can start unloading some damage.
Ice Barrier is an incredible tool against hunters. At the very least, it allows us frosties to close to dead zone without getting too banged up. At best, we get an uninterrupted frostbolt.
If Arcane shot destroys my precious Ice Barrier, there is very little chance I'll win. No longer is having all my cooldowns and WE out the best scenario, it is the only scenario, and contingent on the hunter not having scattershot or any ability that breaks a root.
For arcane, this also can have a huge impact. How'd you like to see Arcane Power, a 3 minute cooldown of sheer awesome, get eaten by a glowing arrow on a 6 second cooldown? Or better yet, watch Presence of Mind get dispelled.
Fire mages, this won't change anything. Ok, nevermind, kiss goodbye to combustion, yet another 3 minute cooldown defeated by a shiny, pointy stick.
Well, hey, at least we get spellsteal. Situational and very expensive. Woot. /wrists
So it seems I'm going back to the days of getting my ass kicked by hunters again.

One other change I want to talk about before wrapping this up. Blizzard is changing the way the servers communicate with the client, effectively removing the need for /stopcasting macros, unless you actually want to stop the spell. Again, the mage forums are alight with people crying about how this effectively nerfs Shatter combo, Goodbye super burst damage, all this stuff.
So far, Dr. Boom tests on the PTR compared to the real servers seem to be producing... no real result. I'll post the data later, right now, it looks like mages are, once again, whining about nothing.

Oh, and one other thing... "Hypothermia" is being increased in duration to 45 seconds.

*Goes and swears in a corner*

Blizzard has kicked me in the balls, and my life is pain. Mechanics like this shouldn't even exist in competitive PvP. Arenas are, in essence, a battle of cooldowns. Forcing people to wait even more time to use a cooldown is simply ridiculous in a competitive environment.
Mechanics such as Hypothermia, Weakened Soul, Forbearance... they simply shouldn't exist.

IN CONCLUSION

2.3

PvE = HUGE THUMBS UP

PvP = Swift kick in the pants