Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: blizzard, entertainment, Mage, video games, world of warcraft

World Of Warcraft – Mages, The Glass Cannons Of Legion

As announced at Blizzcon, the character classes in World of Warcraft are going over a revamping to make them more in tune with the lore of the class and to make the different specs more distinct. There is also a move to streamline the game play. So far we've talked about Hunters and Priests, now we move on to the somewhat overpowered Mage class… or as I've heard them referred to: Glass Cannons.

Mages are unique in that they already have very different lore and game play for each of their specs. Frost, Fire and Arcane all feel very different to play and the mechanics involved vary greatly. With the basic themes already in place, designers focused more on "propping up" game play rather than making any wholesale changes. I can hear some of my Mage friends out there breathing a sigh of relief.

The big change for Arcane Mages has to do with how their power source is managed. Arcane Charges go from being a stacking buff to an expendable resource maintained under your mana bar. The hope is to make this easier to work with. Also there is a change to their Mastery (high end passive bonus) that will make their mana pool larger as they stack Mastery. With mana conservation and management everything for Arcane, a larger pool is a very good thing.

The changes for Fire Mages seem to be focused in two areas. First is simplifying Inferno Blast that use to serve two purposes: spreading Ignite and getting a Hot Streak out of the Heating Up mechanic. But now Inferno is moved off the global cooldown and will be used for Hot Streak only. Spreading Ignite will be tied to Mastery now. The second thing was a redesign of the overly complicated Combustion which would lead to either big blasts or big failures and too random to properly gauge. The redesign will move it into the regular Fire rotation.

Now for Frost Mages… besides the problem of the Water Elemental always being on top of your character, there really wasn't any big issues here to fix. So instead they focused on a small issue called Frostfire Bolt. Since they already removed the fire portion of the spell, it really was just another Frost Bolt (along with the contradiction of something being both fire and ice at once). So they have removed it from the game and increased the importance of Frozen Orb.

Seems like other than some basic tweaks, Mages have skated through the changes pretty clean or better as some confusing things were cleaned up.

For more on the changes to Mages, check out this piece by Blizzard.

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