Intellect is Garbage

Ok I’m getting kited and 4 shotted in wsg. Is that better?

4 shotted? do you not have a healer? Most classes can four shot.

Caster druids are still god awful in pve.

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No I am solo queuing to exalted on chaos bolt everyone on this server has trash gear. Dude good boomkins are not awful at all in wsg

I really don’t like the “go play retail” response but all of your posts just seriously sound like your problem is with the core gameplay and style of classic wow. They’re also terrible misinformed, there’re plenty of caster classes that were never “the strongest in aoe” and melee, warriors especially, have always been better in shorter 2-4ish target scenarios (which almost all trash pulls in current dungeon/raid content are), with mages excelling in mass pulls.

Most aoe situations casters were better in classic. But yes in the 3-4 range, warriors usually came out on top, but mages still did well. It’s not even close to that right now. It’s probably a fact of it being level 25, I admit.

Mages right now are really bad compared to wow classic. With SOD, other classes have gotten huge QoL improvements and/or do far better damage. Mages got better, but but not as much as most other classes.

One of the annoyances of classic mage is drinking. And it feels worse now that it ever has. It will get better at later levels, but I’m speaking of experience doing BFD. I use my highest dps spells and I have to drink after the pull for 30 seconds. or I conserve mana and do mediocre damage. Physical has virtually no tradeoff and the small tradeoff they have hasn’t impacted their ability to do great damage or have no downtime.

warriors also have to stop to eat after every pull while leveling and can’t frost nova-AOE an entire camp of gnolls to death, what exactly is your point here? “different classes do different things”?

Warriors can do extreme things with a healer. And raid balance has never had anything to do with how well a class can farm.

lol anyone can do “extreme things” with a healer, this is an extremely silly thing to say.

your argument isn’t about “raid balance”, it’s about downtime caused by drinking in raid. and yeah, that’s how mana works, I don’t really see the counter-argument here. should warriors have to eat to autoattack? or are you complaining that the classes good at autoattackings’ autoattacks do more damage than wanding?

In general I agree, it would have been better to have intellect or spirit give some additional spell damage during the original vanilla development. I do dislike the retail version where all you need is intellect, the stats in retail feel a bit too pruned for my tastes. Caster scaling just sucks and is very linear compared to melee classes. Direct damage being even superior to dot abilities. That’s what why I made this post. There’s many factors like weaker coefficients at this level, less spell damage gear until 60 basically, spell ranks, and runes just being superior. I don’t know if they want to even address it since we’re only 25, but there’s many ways to improve it and this trend may just continue unless some runes drastically improve scaling for casters in the next level bands. In any form of classic+, I’d want to see classes in a better state.

The experience of downtime vs. damage isn’t balanced currently. the drawback is too extreme for the damage done. It also isn’t very fun to watch physical get to “go go go” and use all of their abilities with minimal to zero dowtime while if I try to do the same, I’m stuck drinking for long periods of time.

Not that I care much about ashenvale event balance but the generals last longer than bfd raid bosses. you have to run out of combat to drink if you go full rotation as a caster. maybe that is balanced cause melee is more dangerous, but sustain is really bad.

People act like wanting to get to full resource quickly out of combat in raids is something extremely imbalanced. having to sit and not move is already a drawback. If you reduced downtime, it means casters can contribute higher dps to trash more consistently. They wouldn’t be doing more damage than physical, that’s for sure. they’d just get to have more fun and the overall raid would be more balanced for everyone.

Naming the retail player and telling them where to go is the best defense against them. Call them any other name and it will simply roll across them like water. But call them a retail player and they are aghast! How did you find me out? This isn’t vanilla they shall cry, go to era they shall wail as they scream to play the game less. Unfortunately you simply can’t trust retail players, they must return to their homeland which they have ruined with their ideas.

Listen man I don’t really know what to tell you. I don’t think drinking is the most compelling gameplay or that classic is flawless but mana not being an infinite resource for every class all the time is a core component of how vanilla wow works, and changing it would irreversibly change a lot about the game. Melee characters are good with weapons that do more damage than a wizard in a robe flailing a stick or shooting a wand. this is kind of just how fantasy video games have worked for a long time. I don’t really think retail should necessarily be the model here.

I’m not asking for retail. I’m asking it to be more like wrath/TBC. I’m not asking for infinite mana in combat. I’m asking for less downtime. It’s a bit impractical to implement these tools at level 25 and it’s better at 60. That’s why I think a raid specific water would be a good solution bandaid fix now, because it’s really bad. Casters wanding is not a good answer. It is something, but they do bad damage even with full mana.

Maybe the root issue there is that despite all the new tools Blizzard gave you (healing as a mage, seriously) you can’t enjoy them because the grass seems greener on the melee side.

And just before you accuse me of having a secret pro melee agenda, I say that as someone who only plays seriously with casters or healers, and is playing mage in SoD.

That’s great if that’s your experience. I’m speaking to my experience and it feels really bad in this bracket. It’s still kind of bad at 60, but it is much better. I like spells and the mage playstyle. I like pretty much all casters.

I am especially bothered by the downtime in comparisons to physical. It doesn’t seem fair when their damage is also better.

I don’t think I’m asking for much. Just want to play my class more.

Strength gives 2 melee AP per point to druids, paladins, warriors, and shamans, and 1 AP to other classes.
Agility gives 2 ranged AP to hunters, 1 ranged AP to rogues and warriors, and 1 melee AP to hunters, rogues, and druids in cat form.
For druids in bear form, warriors, shamans, and paladins, it gives no melee AP, just crit chance and dodge chance.
Besides hunters and rogues, if you use melee, you’re going to want both strength and agility. This is reliant on correct itemization - which I’m not arguing that gear is incorrectly itemized, just stating that most classes are looking at more than one stat still for dealing damage. (And even for rogue and hunter, they’re not just looking for gear that gives agility, but agility and attack power.)

If you roll in pure greens that are just “of (Element) Wrath,” you’re going to severely gimp yourself in terms of spell hit, spell crit, and your mana pool, for not a massive amount more spell damage. I just spent some time rolling up a phase 1(of Classic) mage in mostly pre-raid BiS on a gear planner, then compared it to almost the same gear, but replacing pieces with “of Frozen Wrath” gear where it would result in more spell damage. The results, unbuffed?

  • 2660 health(147 stamina) drops by 300(30 stam) to 2360.
  • 4398 mana(231 intellect) drops by 615(41 int) to 3783.
  • Spell hit drops from 11% by 5% to 6%.
  • Spell crit drops from 9.08% by 2.69% to 6.39%.
  • Frost damage increases from 424 Frost damage by 59 to 483.

And this is only on gear that would get at least some increase to Frost damage, not drafting up a full pre-raid set of nothing but “of Frozen Wrath” gear. Doesn’t really seem like a great idea to forsake other stats - including int - for spell damage.

I also tried this for SoD at level 25 with BFD gear, and I know the play for mage in BFD is Arcane right now, not Fire, but there’s more non-green gear that gives Fire damage specifically than other caster specs. My results:

  • 655 health(52 stamina) drops by 80(8 stam) to 575.
  • 2511 mana(154 int) drops by 630(42 int) to 1881.
  • Spell crit drops from 7.52% by 2%(all attributed to int; no spell crit% gear is present in either) to 5.52%.
  • Fire damage increase from 108 by 43 to 151.

Invoker’s Mantle and Cord each give 7 spell damage and 5 int. Combined, that’s 14 spell damage and 10 int. Combining the shoulders from the Horde version of Allegiance to the Old Gods(6 int, 2 stam, 5 spell dam) and Ghamoo-ra’s belt(8 int, 8 stam) comes out to 14 int, 10 stam, 5 spell damage, or 4 more int and 10 more stam for 9 less spell damage. If you’re playing Alliance, you can instead go for the shoulders off Lady Soveress(10 int, 5 spi), giving you an extra 4 int at the cost of 2 stam and 5 spell damage.

I won’t be dishonest and say casters aren’t in a great place right now in PvE; they’re significantly behind most melee(I think enhancement shaman is the sole outlier), they’re doing less damage, and many of them have the potential to go oom. On top of that, the ones performing best are relying more on spells granted by runes - all of which are base mana % cost, rather than a flat cost with multiple ranks - to deal the lion’s share of damage. That having been said, itemization later in the game balances it out far more than it is currently sitting at, and tying spell damage to intellect would either have to be so miniscule that it’s essentially worthless, or it would be so good that you may as well remove spell damage on gear, as it’d be far more effective at increasing your damage and your mana pool to simply stack int.

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(Yes, I’m aware my post are way too friggin’ long too often. It’s not intentional, and I’m not a huge fan of it either. I do try to at least keep a high information density when I can.)

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I wasn’t saying rogues should be the best single target because I want them to be. Idc. I was saying when I played vanilla that’s just how it was. They were single target beasts.

This is Season of Discovery.
If you want to play classic go play on a Classic server.

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Casters are there to support the melle zug and look pretty :slight_smile:

On a serious note, casters are really strong and the top ones will do good DPS eventually - but not everything is about PVE dps in vanilla. The game is a little bigger than that.