Intellect REALLY needs to add spell damage. Both Agility and Strength add attack power as a main stat, making the primary start very good for those classes, but Intellect just adds mana and spell crit as a main stat, making it far worse than spell damage.
As things are, greens that have spell damage are far better than blues with a lot of int on them, and this won’t be changing even after we reach lvl 60. They can add items that will have spell damage, but the original gear will remain terrible, which just feels bad.
As an example, the new Inoker’s Mantle (green 7 spell dmg shoulders) is better than the BRD shoulders (10 int, 5 spirit). If even the raid loot is getting beat out by greens, you know there’s an issue.
You will go oom in nearly every PVE boss encounter, but even if you calculate the additional damage you would do with the more mana you get from Int, it still is out paced by spell damage for DPS.
Stamina is good for survivability in PVE situations, which is why I’m advocating for the change so that I’m not missing out on all the juicy Int/Stam gear that drops. The minor surivivablity increase from stam still won’t take priority over a damage increase. The longer the fight goes, the more likely people will die.
The way this actually works in practice is you drink before the boss, you evocate halfway through, and you use a mana gem and/or pot and you spam cast. So you’re not getting more casts from your int realistically and SP is always better. It’s different in pvp because duels are often determined by who goes oom first and you’re vulnerable to interrupts. No-one trying to parse stacks int, you stack SP and crit. Locks don’t care on bosses because anything over a minute you’re lifetapping and SP/crit will pull ahead again. It’d make more sense if every 3 int = 1 sp or something.
I agree And for the record I say this as a milay main mainly And i’m not a big fan of castors however I completely agree int Should give some spell damage even 1 sp for 10 int and 30 int for 1% Spell crit It would be completely fine.
It doesn’t and I agree with you but the go play retail if you want something is just unhelpful and why the wow forums are considered a bad place to look for discussion. It’s just a useless and unfriendly response to someone crying about their class not being as easy as they want.
The problem now is casters do worse damage than physical even with a full mana bar. And you run oom so fast in this bracket. Warlocks have life tap, but it returns pitiful mana back without spellpower.
The OP has identified partly why physical dps is so much better. Casters have no improvement to their damage until they start getting spellpower gear, which is almost entirely absent at this level before stepping into BFD. They added a couple crafted recipes which help, but they are low on int so really only helps if you’re able to kill bosses fast, which most guilds are probably at that point now.
This problem showed up back in original vanilla. Casters would get gear with more stam, int, and spirit but their spells did the same damage. Meanwhile physical progressively got stronger when they got more agi and str. Intellect has a very poor ratio for adding % crit. Blizzard solved this fairly early on by adding spellpower to gear.
Casters have to trade off mana pool for spellpower. Physical only needs to trade stamina if they want agi and strength on gear.
Casters are just a mess right now. All classes that can do physical damage are higher than every caster right now in dps charts, though maybe warlock will eventually surpass ret paladin with top gear. They don’t have the tools for longevity and the lack of spell ranks for certain spells make some specs unplayable. I’ve sort of written off this phase for my mage and warlock. They will never be top damage and I hope that the level 40 bracket, with more spellpower gear and better longevity tools will even things out. But I still think physical will be stronger throughout SOD unless something is fundamentally changed with caster glyphs.
One of the big challenges in classic for casters was that they simply didn’t scale like melee classes do, Int not adding spell damage/healing was a big reason for this. Most of the buffs really scale up physical stats, and while int will go up, it doesn’t really help improve things like damage, just endurance.
It will be interesting to see if runes are added which address this, where healers/casters get +X Healing/Spell damage per point in Int.
I agree. Casters need more powerful runes than melee to make up for the scaling issues. But they could be super broken in pvp. I’m really annoyed that only one living flame can be active on a target. The spell can only be used by one, maybe two mages in larger raids. Will anyone bring more than one mage to raid in future phases?
The only thing they have going for them is doing pretty good damage while healing and that could maybe allow the raid to drop healers (ie bring more warriors). That doesn’t make the class very exciting if that’s the best you can say about a traditional pure dps class.