Let me begin with a few nice things. These are things I like--things that do not, in principle, infuriate me. We'll get to things that do a bit later. I'll hide them after the jump, I suppose, so as not to annoy those of you who cannot stand to see even the most minor of complaints from any class but your own. For now, we'll be positive and cheery, and illustrate that--as it ever has been and ever will be--there are aspects of this game that I love, and aspects that I simultaneously do not. Such is life on the class-balance carousel. As a Mage with a pulpit from which to preach, I will never cease to celebrate the changes I agree with, and decry those which I consider to be affronts to Magekind.

Preamble aside, let me tell you what I love right now: our mana gems no longer share a cooldown with Warlock healthstones. Yes, though it wasn't in the patch notes, this seems to be an undocumented change that has made it live, and one that Mages have been lobbying in favor of for a very, very long time. For far too long, we've been largely unable to take advantage of the one good thing Warlocks have to offer, for fear that we'd use one and then not be able to pop our own mana returning item when the need arose. No more! Dying? Need a few thousand health in a hurry and can't wait for the healer to notice you're on death's doorstep? Ice Block on cooldown? Use that healthstone with impunity, my fellow Mages!

More good stuff after the break. Also bad stuff. If you dine on Mage tears, feel free to wring the second half of this column for whatever sustenance it might provide.

Have you noticed the new Blizzard animation? I never did on the PTR, but that could be because I never used Blizzard much on the PTR. Several of you guys pointed it out in the comments section last week, and I had to run out and take a peek at it. It's pretty cool. Turn your spell effect setting up to maximum and check it out. Even if you're not a Frost Mage, and your Blizzard spell hits with all the efficacy of a little girl throwing unpacked snow, you have to admit this new animation is pretty cool. I guess Blizzard (the company) feels like it behooves them to make the spell that bears their name look impressive. I feel compelled to concur.

Now.

On to other things.

Yesterday morning, I awoke to an email. As with all of your comments, I get each one in email form and tend to check them in that format first. When a column is first posted, I receive a deluge of them. As time passes, and the column slips from page one of the website to page two and beyond, those comments slow to a trickle. Tuesday's guide to Mage class changes for for 3.2 (in which I unveiled the musical masterpiece that is and always be known as "Living Bomb is Castable on Multiple Targets Now...Yay!") is well entrenched within that trickle phase, but it still garners an occasional comment. This morning, a reader who goes by "purduemeb" left one more. It was short, concise, and more than a little bit forlorn.

"Our song of joy has been nerfed."

I was immediately afraid, clutched by a cold terror that fastened its black fingers around the part of my heart that I reserve for my Mage. I ran to the official forums to see what purduemeb was talking about, and found this. Living Bomb had been hotfixed on the 6th, and since I hadn't been online since patch day, this was the first I was hearing of it.

Alright, I think we can all agree that I've already been emo enough about this. I'll leave the dramatics behind so we can look at it objectively. Living Bomb is still castable on multiple targets (Yay!), and now it appears it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. This is excellent.

One aspect that made this change so cool, though, was the (also new) ability of Living Bomb's periodic crits to trigger Hot Streak. It made for a great deal of fun, and very nice DPS increase in fights that involved multiple targets. It created sustainable, almost constant Hot Streak opportunities in those specific fights. It was awesome. For about 36 hours. If that.

Somehow, in approximately a day-and-a-half, during in which it's likely that very few guilds had even been able to access any of the new raid content (or even the old raid content), Blizzard had determined that "Living Bomb periodic damage triggering Hot Streak was too powerful." That's it. That's the reasoning. "Too powerful."

We can only guess at how they reached that conclusion. What data could they have possibly obtained in less than two days of live server testing? Are there some internal numbers Blizzard had access to that we don't know about? What were they? At this point, I can only imagine a testing process that went something like this:

Class designer #1: "Wow, Mages are sure enjoying their new Living Bomb. Just look at those Hot Streaks fly!"

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