Biscuit Bitch, or Maging in SWP

Ah, Sunwell Plateau. The pinnacle of raid progression. The end-game goal of every hardcore raider out there. The creamy filling of the WoW raid twinkie.

I admit I was tremendously excited about this zone going live. Our guild had just downed Illidan and it was a heady feeling being in a position to experience bleeding-edge raid content at the precise time it was meant to be experienced. Juicy!

After spending a fairly appreciable amount of time raiding Sunwell Plateau, I'd like to express my feelings in the form of haiku, tentatively titled "No mages needed in Sunwell."

Hey! Freebie int buff
Biscuit table at zone line
Warlocks, fear that mob

It is truly bordering on the comical how hard Blizzard has worked to phase the mage class out of high-end raiding. Our raid synergy is nearly non-existent. Our dps can be matched and easily beaten by warlocks. You could argue Kalecgos for decursing, but if you didn't have mages, there are other classes who can decurse. Mages have been reduced to a class where you bring one for scorch to make the fire locks happy, CC the trash, hoover up the excess Vanquisher drops, and portal out the people who need to respec mid-raid. Our DPS is secondary. Secondary. There is a zone-wide int and stamina buff that overwrites Arcane Brilliance, but does not overwrite Fortitude. If that's not a swift kick in the magenuts, I don't know what else is. I do not enjoy the feeling of having my beloved class treated thus. Once we were MIGHTY. We pew-pewed with wild abandon and produced jaw-dropping damage and topped the dps charts and epeened ourselves because we were MAGES, DAMMIT and yeah we sheeped some stuff too but we were really there for DOING BIG DAMAGE MWAHAHAHA! Mmm, damage.

It bothers me that I have to bust my absolute digital balls off in terms of consumables, cooldown management, and group synergies in order to even match a warlock's standard dps. If they've got the same advantages I do, forget about it. This is not the fault of the individual mage. It is a simple factor of game mechanics and until some things change or get tweaked, that's the way it's going to stay in Sunwell, at least. My raiding guild has gone down to 1 mage per raid being "optimal." If there's more than that, the other is along merely as filler, not because they're a mage. If there was some way warlocks got sheepcoil and summon biscuits, I bet we'd go down to no mages a night.

That being said, I do like Sunwell. I enjoy the challenging aspect of the fights and I like the idiot-check nature of the zone. Rule Number One of raiding: Respect the Zone. The minute you stop respecting the zone, the zone eats your face. I have seen this hold true in everything from Sunwell to Karazhan, regardless of gear level. Sunwell is a really steep learning curve. It will eat your face the second you drop focus. I like that. What I don't like is feeling like a second-class citizen on raids in Sunwell. Oh Sunwell, why must you be such a cruel, yet seductive mistress?