So this season is the first time I’m maining Mage. Which would be fine, except… Fire and Frost aren’t meta, and Arcane is a spec I have zero interest in playing. Like none. Since I’m not a meta chaser, I’m not switching arcane.
I feel incredibly gimped on my mage. My DPS is just… very subpar and it’s just not good enough, honestly. If I had the years of experience, then I could make up for being a middling pack spec and carry my weight in keys, but I can’t. So instead I come off as being an insanely bad player a lot of times when I’m not.
This week I almost, almost quit until the next expansion because I am just that burnt out on this season already and I hate almost all of the dungeons. I haven’t gotten to 3000 like “all the good players have” and at 2800 it felt like I hit a GD brick wall in terms of my progression… But I said eff that, hunkered down, made a lot of improvements to my UI and watched a bunch of mage guides etc. But it’s just not enough. Now I’m stuck at 2900. I have every dungeon except for 1 timed at 12, and 13’s just won’t touch me with a 10 foot pole it feels like. Literally cannot get invited to a single 13, lol.
For some reason my DPS on trash pulls is just sooooooooooo bad. Like the other 2 DPS will be doing 10 million DPS and I’ll be down in the dumps doing 5 - 9 million. Yes I’m doing the aoe rotation properly. The problem is that I am so unimaginably squishy that I have to spend so many GCDs casting my defensives because if I don’t I will die, whereas if I was on a mail class it wouldn’t really matter except on bosses. But no, on mage, I am forced to constantly be on my toes and if I make a single mistep ever, I’m dead. And my damage just isn’t good enough to make up for that - It’s the glass cannon without the freaking cannon. It’s so dumb.
And that stupid raider io addon? It doesn’t update. If people are looking at the “keys completed in 12-14 range” statistic, they’re only going to see I’ve done a few. When actually, no, I’ve ran like 10 +12s this week and timed most of them, but the tooltip still says I’ve only timed 2. So…
I dunno I could go on for ages about how bad this season is honestly and I picked the worst class to progress on during it. People were saying season 2 is easy compared to season 1? Lol yeah right, this is 10x harder.
Mage is a high skill class, fire in particular. With fire you are also at the mercy of the tempo the tank pulls at, and in pugs it can be a risky choice because you are supposed to coordinate combustion use with big pulls. Both frost and arcane are more pug friendly as their cooldowns are more forgiving in some ways than combustion. To survive as a mage you also need to use your defensive before the danger comes- between alter time, ice cold, greater invisibility and cauterize you are essentially unkillable if you know where the dangerous moments are
There’s like a thousand buttons on this class. But yeah I know where the dangerous moments are, mostly. I’ve ran these dungeons so many times by now. About 100 runs total this season. But I am not using alter time as a defensive. I thought it was just a movement ability
Can go and update your character on Rio site and it’ll update for the addon.
Random question: 2 actually. First. How familiar are you with the dungeons and the basic pulls? This leads into the second question. Based off the knowledge of the prior question, are you burning your CDs at the correct spots?
I don’t want to be a jerk, but at the level you’re trying to play you are coming across exactly as you’ve described.
this is the life of a solo-DPS. Time all your 12’s. To get invited to 13’s you need to show you can cut it-- rerun your 12’s and see if you can ++ some of them. Grind crests and cap whatever gear you can. Take some time to further research your spec.
When that all fails, make friends with a tank or healer that doesn’t bring bloodlust and is less likely to get into groups.
No one wants to invite a self admitted sub-par mage that brings nothing unique to the table other than bloodlust when there’s a plethora of other DPS out there in queue.
The problem with this, is that you need to know when the damage is coming-- your defensives as a mage should essentially always be cast preemptively. If this is the case, they will have minimal detriment on damage output (unless you’re playing block instead of IC)
Are you saying your taking damage and then pressing defensives? Because this is a whole other can of worms and would explain why you’re losing CD value and overall damage when using defensives.
From what you’ve said, it sounds like you’ve got the ST rotation down and you just need to practice your aoe sequence, and work on more efficiently reacting to procs.
No by now I am mostly using the defensives correctly before the damage gets applied onto me.
And then sometimes I still die, even through my defensives, lol. Or I use my defensives, and then, since the design of trash in these dungeons is so relentless, another thing will happen but, oh would you look at that, I’m out of defensives, dead.
Yeah the problem here is that you think you’re a better player than me based off of what I’ve said in my post. And maybe you are, I dunno, that doesn’t matter. You seem to have read my post and went “Hmm, he’s looking for help because he sucks, he said so in his post… let me tell him that he sucks.”
My definition of what good is might be different than your’s. Fine, whatever. Lol. The point is I came to the forums for help / to vent, and you wanted to rub it in my face for some reason. Always someone…
I am not terrible. Like I’m not a keyboard turner, for example. I can and do make my own macros, etc, I interrupt the important stuff. In the keys I timed, I did pull my weight, I wasn’t lucky with a carry or something. And in the keys I didn’t time, while not always not my fault, there were times it was.
And I said my aoe was bad but my boss DPS / single target is pretty good.
Trust me, being a mail class or a plate class is not going to overly help you either. Everything still hurts.
Using your defensives is fine at the cost of GCDs, if you don’t have anything left (even a shield) and die then there is not much you can do. Not trying to harp on healers, but as you do higher and higher keys the output needed becomes quite high even in low threat pulls.
There are certainly specs that deal very high burst with CDs so I wouldn’t feel discouraged at that. If you overall is generally like 3mil+ you are likely doing well enough.
Don’t get discouraged, life if a DPS in general is like this. Just try to do better each key and know that sometimes the poor situation isn’t always just your fault.
I got 3000 on my Ele shaman last season. It felt, like… 10,000 times easier to stay alive. maybe it’s the season though. It’s unlikely I’ll push this high on my shaman this season to be able to compare/contrast
Mage is one of the hardest classes to be good at in M+ I played one for a couple seasons and timed plennnnty of 20+ runs over the years but damn it has just gotten worse and worse. All 3 specs are unforgiving and you’ll just get out dps by a mongo melee class anyways. I switched back to my ww and haven’t been happier! So much more fun!
I feel like half the time I play that damn class I’m casting ice ward or whatever on my self or I’m busy getting out of the way of 500 different mechanics.
