mages-in-cataclysm
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The Queue: Dala-ran out of portals
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley will be your host today. The portals are gone! Run for your lives! Actually, I don't really care -- that's what mages are for, right? To boss around and hound for hours until they take me to the Undercity? What's that? You want a tip? Oh, come now, it's just pressing one button, and I'm thrifty and mean. Start casting, slave! Hey, it's Queue time!
Cataclysm: Stat and system changes for mages
I have to say, there's an awful lot in the just-announced Cataclysm stat and system changes to take in. But if you're anything like me, you're able to cope with that dense heap of information by narrowing your focus to what's really important: what does all this mean for mages? Here's the short list of specific things we need to be aware of: Stamina - Like all clothies, we'll be seeing a bunch more of it on our gear. The aim is to have our max health be similar to that of plate-wearing classes. Spirit - We won't need it anymore. It'll be a healer-only stat, and we'll be getting our mana regen some other way. In other news, there is a God. Intellect - Now grants spellpower, but will provide less mana than it does now. I assume this is to balance out our mana pools with all that extra intellect we'll be seeing on all our gear. Spellpower - Gone from most gear, the only place we'll now be seing straight-up spellpower that isn't tied directly to intellect will be on weapons, and only to distinguish caster weapons from melee weapons. Haste - Still around. Critical Strike Rating - Still around. MP5 - Gone. Spell Ranks - Gone. Every spell will now have only one rank and will scale with level. The levels at which we learn many of them will change, to fill in the gaps. Mastery - New stat that will be tied directly to your talents. Supposedly, no matter your spec or class, getting more of this will always, always make you better at whatever it is that you're best at. For me, this means getting more mastery will make my mage incrementally better at making fun of warlocks. Existing gear - All of it will change to reflect this new statistical system, but we're being assured that the gear we have now will still be good for us. I have concerns about this, though. Brief (as brief as you're going to get with me, anyway) analysis after the break.
