Sokolov wrote:
Seriously tho, do you really think the people like our OP here really looked at the spells? Or just saw Devastation and Nil Distortion and heard some people talking in /ooc and now thinks what he does? If anyone objectively looks at the new spell selection they will plainly see that some of our more powerful DDs have been scaled back, but that many of our other previously useless single target abilities have been upgraded to a usable form in addition to the AE increases. The other remaining issue, is, of course, power efficiency. But any warlock who is truthful will tell ya we owned in that department too, so downscaling of that to be in line with other mages is hardly unexpected 
Actually Sokolov just loves this argument. He's been having the same argument with me for a while about this. His words = Scaling back vs. Nerf. Since now it costs us over 700 power to cast devastation and 1 round of Nil absolution, I just cant share your optimistic rose colored view of this situation. I have 290 int self buffed on live and over 3500 power. In beta my "scaled back" form my int is 230 and my power pool is down to right around 2800. So we got double whammied, less power pool and more expensive spells.
When you are casting 2 spells and it takes 1/4 of your power that is a significant issue, no matter how many people like the neat front loaded damage on multiple mobs. I do share some of the views made about your numbers as you know I already disagree with them. By the way we didn't own the power efficiency world, wizards do. Their power dump is MUCH more effective than ours. I wish you would go level and try out the spells that cause the problems so you would quit telling people how wonderful they are when you've never cast a single one of them.