World of Warcraft developers have answered some players' questions regarding mages, and Vaneras has posted them in the class' official European forum. The questions are quite specific, ranging from why the molten armor spirit change is a nerf to so many players, to why frost is lackluster in PvE. The last question focused on the the fact that some fans feel their mage concerns are not being heard. Here's the team's response:

"Just understand that your concerns and our concerns are not always in perfect agreement. We like to get feedback from the community, but ultimately we don't sit down and say "How can we address all these problems that the community wants us to fix?" We have to do what we think is right for the game. Sometimes you are going to applaud those changes and sometimes you might not 'approve' of the change."

You can read the Q&A below. What do you think about the answers? Head on over to our Mage forum if you'd like to take part in more discussions surrounding the class.

The developers have answered a few Mage related questions. Some of you may have seen this already elsewhere, but in case you have not, you can find it below:

Q: Why is the molten armor spirit change a nerf to pvp, solo, and anyone not in full 25man epics / raid buffs?
A: Realistically, most mages are never going to notice a change to crit while soloing unless it was a really large number. Soloing is generally not difficult and you are generally going to defeat everything you fight within a few GCDs. For PvP it is a nerf to those mages using Molten Armor, but very few mages use Molten Armor in PvP. If we like what the Molten Armor change does, then we might consider doing something similar to other mage armors down the road.

Q: Why is spirit still significantly less valuable for us than warlocks? Why is it still better to use non spirit items except for in the few cases where the spirit item's ilevel was higher to begin with?
A: Apples to oranges. Agility is significantly less valuable to mages than it is to rogues. Yes, We realize you don't share gear with them, but if your concern is that warlocks will end up doing more damage as a result of that Spirit on their gear, we understand the concern and we think we have it under control.

Q: Why was scorch singled out as too powerful when it is obvious there are other raid buffs just as powerful?
A: For starters, because characters already had very high crit numbers in the first tier of content. We aren't really trying to make all buffs equal at this stage. Sunder, for example, is still a huge damage multiplier for classes that do physical damage. But buffs that feel like they do swing the pendulum too far are good things to discuss on these forums.

Q: Why do mages still have an archaic evocation tool that is risky and can virtually kill our dps like no other class has to deal with? Why can we be screwed over through rng because of this?
A: We understand the problem with Evocate in PvE. We aren't likely to turn it into Innervate, but we would like to come up with a solution that keeps you from getting boned when you happen to take a big blast of AE damage. We will also point out that there is a skill difference here too. Good mages know when the best time is to use Evocate (say KT just did a big blast so you know it isn't happening again). Less-skilled mages hit it the second they need it without paying attention to their surroundings.

Q: Why do improved scorch and winter's chill still have no personal benefit? Why is it still a dps loss and the cost of a major glyph to make use of scorch? What is the point now that warlocks will apply the debuff with their main nuke?
A: Selfish benefits are something we would like to add to all talents. For those we haven't done yet, it is usually because we would have to nerf the tree somewhere else to make up for the inflated damage. One of the questions we often ask ourselves is whether a class would already take that talent just because it's such a good talent for them. For example, if Battle Shout was a talent, almost every warrior would still take it even if they knew 100% that another player could provide the buff in a group. Why? Because it still grants them so much damage when solo, in BGs, etc.

Q: Why is frost still horribly lackluster in pve? Why is frostbolt still spammed and the ice lance glyph does nothing to fix this?
A: We can't make Ice Lance any better without making Frost even more dealy in PvP. We talked about making the glyph better, and we still might, but the problem is most PvE Frost mages take the glyphs of Frostbolt, Molten Armor and Water Elemental already, *and* inflating the glyph to something like 8x damage would make Frost mages the most insane leveling spec in the world.

Ideally, yes, we would love to get Frost into PvE and Fire into PvP in a bigger way. In the grand scheme of things though, mages have Arcane, Fire and Frostfire specs doing very competitive dps with each other in PvE and Frost and possibly Arcane as viable in PvP. That's definitely an improvement over where the class has been historically, so while it is something we want to work on, it doesn't feel like a crisis.

Q: Why has it been some five ptr builds with absolutely zero attention to our concerns? We aren't just complaining for the sake of it, and we're not all looking for massive damage buffs. Some of us would like to see our legitimate concerns at the very least commented upon.
A: Just understand that your concerns and our concerns are not always in perfect agreement. We like to get feedback from the community, but ultimately we don't sit down and say "How can we address all these problems that the community wants us to fix?" We have to do what we think is right for the game. Sometimes you are going to applaud those changes and sometimes you might not "approve" of the change.