Fire Mage and Enhancement Shaman PvP Tuning - March 15

PVP Arenas
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Representation is never a good argument for how strong a spec is. Players are really really bad about even giving anything off meta a single glance and rogue mage players in particular are the worst at this. The fact we don’t ever see outlaw rogues despite having strong comps and being monsters in the 2s brackets are a good example of this.

Yeah I forgot about dks. But the rest you can play around at max range easily.

This entire bit right here tells me you either don’t actually play a frost mage or you’re just awful at it. Between your snares, blinks, roots, icewall, and poly. You shouldn’t be struggling to control enemies. You can run ice nova and root every charge/roll/fel rush you want. There’s tons of tools available to you, you just need to actually figure out how to use them.

Yes.

Has slight ramp up time isn’t ranged and isn’t all instant and off the gcd.

Has slight ramp up time isn’t ranged and isn’t all instant and off the gcd. Also what world do you live in where ret damage is ranged?

Has slight ramp up time isn’t ranged and isn’t all instant and off the gcd. Everything dies in a stun, that’s how dots have always worked.

Mages are already ungodly tanky and hard to punish in arenas. Even in 1v1s if your class doesn’t have certain tools any good mage can just reset forever against you until you run out of stun and 100-0 you in a combust. Which is still, 0 ramp up, all instant cast damage, half off the gcd. strongest burst in the game.

If you could achieve the goals you want while playing the strongest comp in the game that’s also one of the easiest and most forgiving would you? If somehow got nerfed to not be S+++ tier half the people who play it because it’s a fun skillful comp would reroll overnight.

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I guess it’s back to using diverted energy. Until you nerf that too.

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Warrior mage/ww mage are solid overall too, they were repped on the top of the ladder on EU

Godcomp gets dunked by RMP though

RPS only gets played by one team who goes through the hit or miss cycle of is RPS tourney playable in this patch or not

Bad comparison to those different patches because if we went there mages literally were in AWC finals with rogues/wws/shadowpriests/eles/warriors so far

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Not really max range, simply because both Polymorph and RoF are not max range. Also:

  • Warrior can interrupt and CC you with Storm Bolt from range.
  • Ret can interrupt and CC you with HoJ from range.
  • Monk can Paralyse you from range which will also stop your cast.
  • Rogue has Shadowstep(s) that he can use to quickly get to you and interrupt / CC (SS is also off-GCD, so he doesn’t even need to wait a GCD to do that)
  • Enhancement Shaman has 30m ranged kick on 12s CD.
  • DK has not only ranged interrupt, but also multiple ranged pulls and ranged stun / silence that he can use to disrupt your casts as well.
  • DH has not only ranged interrupt, but also ranged stun and ranged Imprisonment he can use to disrupt your casts.
    So, almost every melee spec has one or several options to disrupt your casting from range and Delasam is right - lately casting is very counterable and punishable.

About this whole Frost Mage toolkit - okay, let’s see:
You are against Ret / War as Frost Mage. Ret has Steed. After he uses it, if snared / rooted, he can just pop undispellable BoF and both remove current roots / snares, get immunity to new and get increased movement speed for 8 seconds with 25s CD. Ret can duplicate his BoF to Warrior as well, so War also often can’t be snared / rooted. Warrior also has 1-2 charges and a leap to chase your Shimmers. Ret hasn’t, but does not even need them - if they want to kill you, they can just pop burst CDs, ret’s burst is mostly ranged. Warrior also has his 2 own root / snare breaks - Avatar and Bladestorm.
Question - how much useful are your snares / roots against this comp?

Now take Jungle. Feral has stealth to open right on top of you, has lots of passive and active movement speed boosts and can remove movement impairing effects with just shapeshifting. BM is a ranged spec, so is less subceptible to root and snares as a CC.
Question - how much useful are your snares / roots against this comp?

Now take DH / Boomkin. DH has 3 charges with 10-15s CD to just ignore your snares. They are subceptible to roots, yes, but not a big deal - when you root them they still have all their 3 ranged tools to disrupt your casts - Imprison, ranged stun and ranged interrupt. Boomkin is a ranged class.
Question - how much useful are your snares and even roots against this comp?

Now take RMP. Rogue has stealth to open right on top of you, can remove roots and dampen snares with Sprint modified by PVP talent and Vanish, plus the mentioned double shadowstep. Mage is a ranged spec.
Question - how much useful are your snares and even roots against this comp?

You have Shimmer? Melee have either ranged burst (Ret, Enhance), CC chains (Rogue, Feral) or several gap closers (Warrior, DH, DK (2+ pulls), WW).

Ice Wall is mainly an offensive tool to LoS healer when needed and kill the kill target. It can be used defensively, but enemies can often just run around it.

Polymorph? Good luck with any Druid comps.

If you run Ice Nova, you do get 2 additional ranged roots, but lose 25% of your damage from Lonely Winter, so it is quite a big tradeoff especially since roots are countered, as explained above. If you run Lonely Winter, you don’t have both Ice Nova and Water Elemental root leaving you with just Frost Nova roots and random proc root from Frostbite PVP talent.

You aren’t wrong though that Frost Mage has a lot of potential tools against melee enemies, but melee enemies lately just have lots of tools to counter / remove them, so aren’t affected that much.

Combustion does have ramp-up time. If you want its biggest burst that is comparable to mentioned here burst from other classes, you need to proc Disciplinary Command with a Frost spell (to do that from range you need to cast a Frostbolt, which can be interrupted, in melee you can use Frost Nova) and start with a Meteor cast (which can be avoided). If you don’t do that, your Combustion is much weaker.

How is WW ramp up time different from ramp up time mentioned above? Also, WW burst is melee and Combustion is dispellable and negated by Roar of Sacrifice, so both have their counters. So, +1 strongest burst with its pros and cons.

The same argument about Assa ramp up. It is melee, but Rogues don’t have much trouble getting into melee range, CCing you and blasting you with burst that even if you trinket and kite will continue hitting you. So, + 1 strongest burst with its pros and cons.

You don’t even argue about Ret’s burst, so + 1 strongest burst with pros and cons.

Totally we have 4. Why can classes with similar level of burst be from good to very good in 1v1, but Mage can’t? Mage has CC as well, but Rogue also has CC, WW has crazy mobility and Ret has crazy sustained, so this is not a justification.

Maybe you were even right about tankiness, but latest nerfs partially addressed that with both Triune nerf and Tempest Barrier nerf. Shields are 25s CD and pale in comparison to Ignore Pain, Alter Time is counterable. And against classes who do posess the tools you mentioned you are a nude maneken, they can dispel you from up to every defensive CD (Priest will remove even Ice Block) and major offensive CD (Combustion).

Do you also really complain about dying from Combustion 100-0 as a Hunter, who has a Roar of Sacrifice Combustion deleter with similar (maybe now even lower) cooldown than Combustion itself?

I don’t argue about RMP being better than Godcomp, the point was that RMP is currently preferred to both RPS and Godcomp, just that.

@Dillon - but what are we even arguing about? We are discussing a situation when RMP is hypothetically bad and Mages and Rogues try to find a new comp. Mages can go to Godcomp and Rogues can go to RPS. You wrote that Rogues will not have a viable comp being abandoned by Mages - well, no, they will.

Not exactly different patches, they played RPS even in 9.1, which is the last season. If they can play it competitively on top level and compete with all the Mage specs you mentioned, what exactly makes this comp worse than Mage comps excluding RMP?

And what about my last question from previous post?

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You can drop a ring at the farthest range you need to and play around it forcing them to go the long way or run right into it.

Those options run out eventually and aren’t unique to melee. You can shut down people at any point doing a wide variety of things, learn to play around it and stop making it a caster vs melee issue when it’s not.

Pretty useful the rest of the match that isn’t this weird scenario you’ve conjured in your head as being the only important part of the match. Watch Venruki or Graycen que into this comp as frost and make everyone hate life.

Jungles an awful comp for pretty much every mage based comp and isn’t a good test for how viable mages are.

If a boomy burns solarbeam to kick you he’s either trolling or scared. Both are good for you.

Pretty useful. I played godcomp last season against all the dh boomie teams and we farmed them hard. This might be a shock to you but roots are a dhs worst nightmare and frost has them in spades, just train the boomy while the dh is sad in africa and it’s an easy win.

RMP has the tools to answer to basically everything in pvp. It’s one of the many reasons people hate queing into it and mentioning it isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Also sprints a minute cd and you can root and slow the rogue all you want after it ends.

I don’t know where you keep getting this weird bit about ret having ranged burst from. Verdict having a 10 yard range with the legendary doesn’t count as ranged burst and you’re dumb for even thinking it does.

So do you?

Use your gap openers and don’t burn blinks on tokyo drift polys you don’t need. Problem solved.

Your not using it right and not positioning it right.

Wow god forbid mages have a counter.

Utility and damage are situational and sometimes you want to sacrifice one or the other. This isn’t unique to mages.

No you don’t.

No you don’t. You can literally just nova arcane explosion to proc it. Wow so much ramp up time.

Build up your chi, use your stun, pop your cds which are all on the gcd. Start actually doing your burst damage now. Wow that’s really comparable to pressing 1 cd and then spamming 2 buttons back and forth with 1 of them being off the gcd.

I don’t even know what you’re trying to say with this but it’s still not comparable and dumb.

There’s plenty of ways to play around ret burst and it’s one of the many reasons why people say its a noob stomper spec at lower cr.

duels don’t matter quit trying to make it matter. 1v1s that happen inside an arena are vastly different from duels and have different ways you can outplay like pillars and being able to reset and go eat while the persons stuck in a poly or ring.

I am.

Play a priest into any mage 3s comp and tell me how much it feels while also trying to do all the other stuff your supposed to as a priest and dealing with ooming. Against the classes who counter mages it still feels awful to face them and if you don’t have the tools to counter mages it feels like you’re being hit in the face by Mike Tyson in his prime.

Wow you actually have a counter. Welcome to every other class in this game.

Hey guys do you want to work hard to win this game or do you want to cheese out wins while also having the easiest time doing so Man it’s such a tough choice.

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once melee connect your hp will drop a lot, is not like casters have a lot more oportunities to flee than melees to chase, while you runing away from a melee you not doing damage but when they chasing you they do

fire being focused can still pump out damage, other casters without reliable instant spell just can’t, at least fillers shouln’t be kickable or castable walking like it used to be.

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And? When casters cast your hp will drop.

You do. You’re not using them properly or playing with your partners properly to get away.

They don’t do any damage to you when they run but you can do damage to them. Funny how that works.

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gonna have a PhD in RMP by the time this thread dies

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how much often that happen, like 90% of the entire match melee is on their targets the only time casters have to drop their castable spells is when no melee is targeting them because there are other mechanics in game like, runing thru in and out a toon to avoid casters to face that are not being adressed ever, they increased melee “range” to 5 yards but didn’t put a minimal cast facing range

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If you’re playing 2s you should have time to cast and do your own burst with proper set up. And in 3s your partners should be peeling for you while you aim to get a good set up. Good melee know to run when they see the frost mage turn into a spooky skeleton, bad melee die to 30k frostbolts cause they didn’t respect it.

Or when you juke. It’s part of being a caster.

Learn camera control and swivel your character around to prevent it.

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to have to learn those things than aren’t implemented in game on porpouse is what makes casting in pvp miserable

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Are you guys the latest grad class of Murrk’s school of whining or Alumni

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Having to learn those things is part of every aspect of arena. You might as well play a COD game and complain you gotta learn to aim and move your character.

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Yeah, I didn’t even think about that. It should be an actionable offense to win on mana after one of your team mates die.

Anyone that defends it in the form of “clutching” a 2v3, just get better, don’t let ur team mate die/get a better team mate and clutch the 3v3 and save everyone time

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If you’re playing meteor that’s your problem

Just nova even if no one is nearby or just set up a ring

Then send your damage and go

If you need to db sheep someone but you need to proc DC you just nova as your sheep lands and it wont break it and you don’t really set anything else up, then tinder fireball combust two fireblasts pyro and you’ve gotten 90% of your burst off instantly, without anyone having much time to prepare

I mean it’s literally just press nova or just ring then send bust which procs a rune of power so you get your arcane school instantly, super easy for this to be on demand.

WW burst requires them to have SCK procs :slight_smile:

I said sub rogue is much weaker without RMP

Mage and Hpriest are 99% of why sub rogue is playable

Without those on their team sub rogue is not useful, they’re going to be assa playing with RPS.

9.0 and 9.0.5 are entirely different patches as are 9.1 and 9.1.5 but ok

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People usually don’t waste RoF on that, it is used to AoE CC targets that are CCed by other AoE CC or to CC Druids.

But you’re insane if you think current frost with its control and damage is in a spot where casting is dangerous to them.

These options are limited, but are the answer to your statement above. Almost every melee spec has option(s) to make casting dangerous for you. As a Frost Mage it is double dangerous - if you are locked on Frost, you don’t have access to Ice Block - your main defensive ability.

Why do you pretend that these abilities have a cooldown, but Frost Mage roots don’t? You use snares / roots, they counter them with BoF. By the time you get your roots back (25-30s CD), BoF counter will be available again (25s CD).

Also, having such a CD allows them to remove and immune snares / roots when it is needed the most. Of course it is not 100% of time, but when they actually need BoF, it is usually available.

Don’t try to blur the meaning of my post. It is DH who has ranged interrupt, not Boomy. Point about Boomkin is that it is a ranged class that is much less affected by snares / roots than melee classes. Root / beam was not even mentioned.

“Sad DH in root” can still disrupt your casting with his ranged abilities. He won’t train you and deal damage, but even a rooted DH can be quite disruptive.

Rogue also has a ranged disorient. Even if you root him and he doesn’t have Sprint up, he can just CC you to stop your go on his partners. If you go Rogue, root will break very quickly. As a last resort, he can also use Vanish, which also removes movement impairing effects - losing an important defensive is bad, but better than losing the game.

[Final Reckoning - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)](https :// www.wowhead.com/spell=343721/final-reckoning)
[Divine Toll - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)](https: // www.wowhead.com/spell=304971/divine-toll)
[Judgment - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)](https:// www.wowhead.com/spell=20271/judgment)
[Hammer of Wrath - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)](https:// www.wowhead.com/spell=24275/hammer-of-wrath)
Last ability is usable with any health level with wings.
Next time please actually search information before you post such responses. “Weird bit”, right?

Mage CC chains break on damage. Rogue and Feral stun chains don’t break on damage. It is a massive difference.

If you knew the CDs of these abilities, you would understand how funny is actually to see such a statement.
Shimmer is 2 charges with 21-25s CD. After you use them, each charge separately will recharge 25 seconds, not 2 at once when CD is over.
Warrior has 1-2 charges with 17-20s CD and a leap with 45s CD. Yes, leap CD is longer, but it is available from the very beginning. They often don’t even use Charge to engage you, but just rush at you on their mount. You Shimmer → he charges, you Shimmer again → he leaps. Alter Time is useful to survive in his Spear of Bastion, so use at your own risk. If you don’t use any of these, he will just stick to you as glue. By the time you get 1 charge of Shimmer back, he will also have his Charge CD back.
DH has 2 charges with 10s CD and a rush with 15s CD, so it is even easier for him to stick to you.
WW has 2 rolls with 20s CD and either 3rd roll with CD of all 3 charges reduced to 15s, separate Chi Torpedo rush with movement speed boost with 20s CD or movement speed boost with snare / root break with 30s CD, also a 45s CD teleport, so has no problems with chasing your Shimmers.
DK has 2 pulls with similar CD, 1 for each Shimmer charge, can snare you better than you will snare him (70% spammable ranged snare), especially with Death’s Advance with 2 charges that blocks them being slowed below 100% of base speed and can Abomination Limb pull you back every 4 seconds, No problems to chase the Mage after Shimmer either.

It doesn’t matter whether you preserve Shimmer charges in the open - they have more than enough tools to catch you still.

In some maps Ice Wall can cover the whole passage, but not in every one. Good luck covering something for a long period of time in let’s say Blade’s Edge arena.

Mages have 4+ counters, don’t be shy.

This part is correct, but didn’t you yourself write about “powerful damage and CC of Frost Mages”. Now you know that it is one or the other.

Yes, you’d better proc Disc Command and use Meteor. 20% damage increase for Combustion and Meteor crit damage is nothing to sneeze at.

WW have to use a stun and Mages have to pre-CC to even land the Meteor, otherwise people will just run away from it. WW builds Chi (and has CD to instantly get it like [Energizing Elixir - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)](https: // www.wowhead.com/spell=115288/energizing-elixir) or may even not need Chi for their burst like [Serenity - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)](https: // www.wowhead.com/spell=152173/serenity) and Fire Mages have to build up Combustion after it is used, is that so much different? And why do I know that these abilities exist and you don’t?

No, Assa burst is comparable in power to Combustion, also unlike Mage he can do it in a CC that doesn’t break on damage.

There are also plenty of ways to play into Combustion. Purge it. CC Mage when he is on fire. Line it. So, both these burst abilities have comparable power and both are counterable. That doesn’t make Combustion better though.

Correct point, but why do you think that arena setting is beneficial specifically for the Mage? Hybrids can use pillars LoS to spam heal themselves. People can use pillars to run away in circles from your Combustion. Eating while target is CCed is comparable to Druid Cycloning target and spam-healing himself. i don’t think Mages get any specific advantages that are not available to other classes.

Priest can and usually does find time to dispel the Mage from Combustion. If he doesn’t, but plays with a Shaman, Shaman can do that instead. RPS for example.

Don’t be shy, still 4+ counters.

Your sarcasm about RMP doesn’t even contradict my point and just shows you as a person who dislikes RMP very much, and such person’s arguments are very questionable.

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Mages do not play Meteor

Stop playing meteor

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198

If you play with Kindling instead, your goes are more frequent, but weaker. We are comparing the most powerful goes. Sure, you can just pop Combustion without any preparation, just as WW can pop SEF + Xuen without any preparation, but then the effect will be diminished.

Empty Nova is an option, but if your target is not CCed, it is much better to have it at least snared by a Frostbolt, so it is harder for her to escape. Also, Eorc tried to claim that Fire Mage does not need to make any preparations for best output, well, that is not correct. You can insta-pop everything, I don’t argue about that, but the effect will be reduced.

From what I saw on PTR, not necessarily. Just summon double Xuen, pop SEF and here we gooo.

Does it matter that they would need to switch to Assa? How is that different that Mages prefer to switch from Fire to Frost if they want to play MLD?

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Maybe, but that is not the point. People who complain about Combustion usually complain about it at full power, when they also get smacked by a Meteor. So, it is relevant for comparison I make for Eorc.

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I thought we were upset that rmp could live forever until they got bored and fed a trinket.

When? Early sinful?