Another point of view.

Beside my mage I have more or less decided that I will level my shaman as my second character, and due to the healing situation in my guild I have been thinking about getting it leveled rather fast.

As you might have guessed I want to play restoration and this is due to several reasons:
1^st Shamans is in my humble opinion the “best overall” healing class and perhaps the one who have been changed the least for the release of Cataclysm.
Chainheals initial healing has been nerfed, but I do actually thing that it is a good change since it will force you to use a larger part of your healing arsenal instead of just spamming Chainheal because it was such a strong heal both for AoE, which it still is, and for single target healing where it would crit for 14-18k and leave a massive hot on your target.

One of the major changes to most of the healing classes is that they now have the opportunity or they must do damage now in order to keep a buff up on themselves. There is those who think that as a healer the only thing you should be able to do is – Heal, and then there is those who adjust and see the opportunities in the changes as for an example I will take restoration shamans since it is the class which I am most familiar with. The talent “Focused Insight” – “After casting any Shock spell, your next heal’s mana cost is reduced by 75% of the cost of the Shock spell, and its healing effectiveness is increased by 30%”. This is a massive “on demand” burst healing one can launch while not feeling guilty of doing damage to the boss with a few GCDs add this 30% effectiveness with our mastery Deep Healing I think that Shamans will have the opportunity to specialize more in either raid healing or tank healing.

In addition restoration shamans gets a new heal “Healing Rain” which in its current state isn’t that healing impressive (from what I’ve read) it heals for close to 2k pr. Tick if there is 5 or less people in the area and then heals for less as more and more people is in the area, but since it is capable of proccing Earth Living on the target it is in my opinion a decent AoE heal. One has to remember that the amount of “burst” both on the tanks and the raid is being reduced and the tank dying within somewhat near of 1 second shouldn’t be that much of an issue anymore.  

Another new talent is “Telluric Currents” which will allow you to cast Lightning Bolts and essentially will allow you to do damage instead of just ideling / throwing a heal which you know will be 70/80% overhealing aswell as the druids hots would heal the target up without your help. And again it is the idea – Healers can do if they please do damage, and this is not a new thing you could take a look at almost every single video released by Paragon or Ensidia; If the healer got mana and a free GCD he or her usually throws a DoT on the target and when you search through some of the wipes you have had on 1-2% imagine if your healers would have had a DoT running almost constantly.
Another aspect is in my opinion that since most guilds most likely will run with 7 healers until they get the hang of the fight, enrage is first a problem when you actually manage to stay alive for that long, you will not be as penalized if the healers can do some damage. I am well aware that they won’t top damage meters or do billions of gazillions of damage, but every single bit of damage counts for a first kill! – Why else would we do theory crafting, respec for encounters and use pots and flasks.

Getting closer to Cataclysm.

Patch 4.0.3

Another patch fixing more bugs – yeah, right – I have NEVER experienced as many bugs /glitches and general problems with my mage.
Firstly I switched from my 0/33/3 spec to a theoretically higher singletarget output 2/31/3 spec, but what I accaulty managed to get was lower, and not just by a few 100 dps, but closer to 1000 dps which honestly should be impossible when gainng 2% dps. Though it might be added that my crit rate on fireballs was … well, playing with almost 62% crit, gaining 5% from critical mass and then 5% from the Fireball glyph I should in theory be at approximately at 72%ish crit on my fireballs, but I noticed that I several times was below 60% and my fellow mage who has less crit that I was around 80%. Crit is ofc. Unreliable, however this is just maddening along with the fact that my dps was significant lower than the previous raids.

Though when we started on Festergut I really started to become annoyed – I got Vile Gas as one of the first during heroism and as usual I used my Ice Block and used my Cancel Aura macro, but despite I’ve used Ice Block didn’t have the Vile Gas debuff my character still acted like I had the debuff.

On Rotface (Yey, for 3 DFOs in 5 months and no caster trinket from Halion in 3 months) I was surpassed by quite a lot of classes which I never have trouble beating despite having shit luck with my RNG, and I’ve encountered a new bug with Blink or atleast in my experience my first bug with Blink in ICC.  I blinked to avoid the big ooze and his slime spray, but instead of moving anywhere I just used a GCD and stood right where  was when I pressed blink.

From that point I was pissed and it didn’t help that my damage sucked mooseballs on the remaning fights and you might say: You just suck, isn’t that a reasonable reason ? Sure, if it wasn’t due to the fact that I changed my spec to gain more single target dps, I did exactly what I’ve always done and I committed very, very few mistakes during that raid, oh yeah and Living Bomb CAN STILL be fucking overwritten by another mages, or glyphs is still bugged (to our benefit though) and nothing has been fixed. Brilliant just brilliant.

But as the running joke in my guild current is “It will be balanced / fixed at 85”, and I do realize that the current raids is not really of great importance, but it is of a damn great annoyance

Issues with fire atm.:

Combustion: It has become more “regular”, but during the majority of my experience with it has it only been one mage who would “benefit” from it, an example is Deathbringer Saurfang where I haven’t encountered a single time where I and my fellow mage both have had Combustion work equally. I do know that there is a certain amount of factors e.g. crits / hs / ignite and the RNG luck with the far from 10% proc chance on Impact, but when one does 50-70% lower dmg with Combustion while doing almost the exact same thing I do suggest that there is a problem with it. It must be said though that during our last Halion kill it did seem as it was fixed, but since I only have been once I won’t say that it has been fixed.

Another problem is Impact sometimes overrules the other mages Living Bomb, it has become better, but there is still several of fights where I put up Livinb Bom and get an Impact proc just to notice 2 seconds thereafter that my Living Bomb seems to have vanished, and when I then ask my fellow mage “Did you use Impact?” his reply is always YES, and this also works the other way around.

In theory fire mages should also be capable of putting out a decent amount of damage during movement with the talents Firestarter and Hot Streak, but I find that about in 50% of my fights either Scorch “acting” strange meaning: You cannot cast it while on the move, but you can start cast and then move which either is a bug or the talent is unclear. When Hot Streak procs you should get an instant Pyroblast and this should just as Scorch be castable while moving (and has been so previously), but sometimes you are unable to cast it and have to make a “quick” stop in your movement in order to get it to cast.

Impact: The tooltip says a 10% chance to proc Impact, but I have done a little testing and it does seem as if the proc rather is lower than 10%, one might say that the proc rate is more or less the same as the one on Arcane Missiles before patch 4.0.

While taking about annoying bugs there is also quite a few bugs which gives us damage :

Pyromanic should only be up for 10seconds with an internal cooldown of 35 seconds, but it may bug and you run around with a constant 10% spell haste increase.

Oh yeah, while whining I doubt that mastery ever will come close to being a “primary” stats since the idea is decent, but since a high amount of our damage is coming from Crits (Hot Streak, Ignite) and we still want a decent haste level and this is for several reasons: 1. Faster casts is always win, 2^nd: the “haste caps” on Living Bomb 5-6 or 7 ticks.

And now to something quite closely related

Yes, Cataclysm is no longer far, far away in a developers head, but is getting closer and closer every day and is now less than a month and most of the information has already been released so it is only to wait and get ready to some powerleveling, after my examination on the 7^th that is, but the main question now is – How will the mage class work in Cataclysm and since I haven’t been playing on the beta and PTR I can’t really tell.  However, I do sneak around at most forums and a general problem seems to be the mana. However, several things may still be tweaked / fixed and if we come to face problems with our mana you are really going to see the difference between a good and a mediocre mage.

Beside that I have more or less decided that I am going to level as arcane and this is for several reasons:

1^st : Insane burst – No class or spec comes close to the burst damage an arcane mage can make.

2^nd : Arcane Blast (talented) will put a slow effect on the target and therefore become almost as good as frost regarding CC (ofc. Pet and Deep Freeze does still give frost the upper hand, but why spec frost if you can obliterate mobs before they even get close to you.

3^rd: Glyphed Evocation + a 2minute cooldown … it is just insane along with Mage armor imagine your downtime where you have to sit and drink to gain mana / hp.

This is for questing and solo leveling if I were to enter dungeons I would spec fire due to the superior AoE damage and fun factor.