I’m trying to level a Mage and I’ve managed to get to lvl30 but I literally left in the middle of the dungeon because it as SO BORING. I’ve messed around with all three specs and they all are just so boring, does it get better?
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Since everyone defines fun differently, you need to define what you think is fun first and then someone can answer.
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I can only speak for Arcane. It is a high skill spec that is not boring at all. I suppose if you play it poorly, it could be boring.
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I liked Arcane Mage in BFA.
Easy, few buttons and even fewer cds.
I don’t like this new version of Arcane Mage. It doesn’t appeal to me at all to have to pay attention to 5 or 6 cds and do it with the precision of a watchmaker.
Fire Mage I liked the Legion version.
It doesn’t change much, but it’s not my thing anymore.
The one I’m enjoying right now is Frost Mage.
The problem with the latter is that its damage is in procs and until you have a good amount of talents it can feel pretty boring.
Personally I prefer classes with 2 cds, max 3.
And in the best case only one. That way you know that all your skills do as much damage as possible.
That’s a problem most of the current classes have, all their basic skills are practically useless if they are outside their cds.
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Fury is without a doubt the class for you in that case. If you wanted to, recklessness is the only cd you’ll have (and you can press it at basically any time off cooldown).
You have to press a lot of keys though
I got to play Fury during Legion.
It was fun and when Whirldwind had its full and real damage.
Now WW doesn’t do any damage at all. It’s just a resource for your ST skills to do AoE damage.
I understand that for many the change is good. But for me it makes no sense.
There are many classes in this game where they have a skill that has no interaction with ANYTHING but a single skill.
Use this BUTTON every 45 seconds to make this other BUTTON do X% more damage.
What for?
Out of two skills you can make one.
It does not add complexity. It is something that after repeating on the dummy for a few minutes becomes part of your muscle memory.
The real problem is in the abundance of skills. It is more difficult to create the macro or find a place on your bars than to learn how to use that skill within the rotation.
An example of this is the Hunter.
At least 4-6 defensive and they are practically a joke.
Fury Warrior on the other hand has I think only 2 defensive skills and at least in PvE you only use one and the second in a very situational way.
You can actually talent into a way that whirlwind and slam become pretty decent hitting abilties (with like a 5 second or 7 second cd on each). The amount of customizability fury warrior has (and just warriors in general) is incredible.
I highly recommend you try it out. It can be optimized to be quite a bit complex, but when I tell you it is the most fun you can have in WoW if you’re looking to just enjoy and not worry about burst timings/lining up CDs, I mean it. You feel like you’re on a mindless rampage.
I will be playing Arcane mage though mainly; it is without a doubt the most fun and rewarding its been since legion quickening. Also my hands hurt too much from fury warrior lol
Frost is extremely boring to me, because it’s all the same thing, and we are still having the same balance issues They’ve already nerfed FO. At this point, I’d rather they just reduce the cooldown and get rid of the blizzard interaction and balance the damage correctly. Either we need to get the payout for being in groups that can giga pull or have the functionality of the blizzard CDR removed entirely. I don’t want to play something that’s optimized around the top 1% of players that I’ll never be.
And, some balance issues are even worse, like the water elemental/lonely winter choice, there’s no payout of any kind for not taking LW (like bone chilling), WE doesn’t scale with nearly as many talents as LW and bubble boy doesn’t have nearly enough damage to even compensate for the base talent. The biggest irony being he gives an extra charge of BF every 1ish minute. OO! You mean I get to cast a weaker version of the spell once every minute? Pretty sure LW itself cancels that out just fine.
Insult to injury Frost didn’t get anything new with the talents, whereas I feel like other classes got far more novel reworks/mechanics baked in.
If you’re having fun, great! But this feels boring and it ignores warcraft mage lore pretty bad imo. WE should be a viable choice. I’m fine with non-WE builds being viable, but mage shouldn’t be forced to be an EQ wizard and I feel like the dev behind the frost tree just can’t be bothered. I’m really curious what other specs they designed because I want to see the full breadth of their creativity, if only to be disappointed that they have literally 0 vision for the spec. Most of the specs I’ve played so far have felt really great and even better than their previous iterations I’ve toyed with. Pretty sure all the brain power for the frost tree went somewhere else.
Arcane surge imo was huge in terms of changing how arcane feels. It’s a massive upgrade combining evocation and AP.
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Not really. Things die too fast in normal dungeons before you even finish casting. It’s hard to have to kite everything you want to solo. Can be very fun running keys with fire though.
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From memory someone on these forums stated the same dev also did the Hunter tree and another one (not sure which though). This was around the time that Mages were desperately calling out for any interaction from Blizzard to let us know what the hell was up with the trees, meanwhile Hunters were getting almost daily updates. At the end of the day we got nothing, and barely got some talent positions swapped. It’s pretty obvious at this stage that they simply don’t care about Mage, or a lot of other specs or gameplay as long as world 1st and MDI is popular.
Between LW and ROP the devs have me conviced that while they can write code, they don’t know that 12 is not the same as 25.
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Well my irl bro plays hunter so he’ll get all the brainpower from my dev it seems. XD. Thanks for the clarification. This is going to be my backup character. So far it’s nice playing a hybrid for fast queues/leveling. It’s sad too because to SL mogs for this character are insane.
Yes mage is fun arcane is great tyr best its ever been rught now most mages are playing it, thr ones i see at 70 anyway
Bring back vanilla Frost Mage rotation please. Everyone complained about it and talked about how they want gameplay to be engaging, but sometimes relaxing gameplay is what makes it fun. Complexity has ruined this game for me, but then again I’m old now so maybe that’s what ruined it.
Would love to see Frost Mage simply be Frostbolt, Fingers of Frost/Ice Lance + Splitting Ice, and Deathborne (I guess Fractured Frost is fine as well). Frozen Orb w/ Freezing Rain & Blizzard is fine for AoE… especially with the talent that reduces the CD every time Blizzard hits during Frozen Orb. And Icy Veins as your DPS CD w/ Thermal Void & cd reduction from Ice Lances… And Ice Barrier, Ice Block w/regen as defensives. Everything else aka Flurry & Icicles/Glacial Spike & Ray of Frost & Comet Storm is just bloat. Please remove and boost Frostbolt damage to compensate. Also take GCD off Mirror Images and it can stay. And reduce Shimmer CD back to what it was originally. And give us Ice Floes as an additional utility ability that doesn’t cost us Shimmer. That’d be pretty fun.
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You’re a monk, you want complex, play WW.
I second this. I just want to play and have fun. I don’t mean to make WoW to be as easy as Diablo’s controls, but that’s the right direction at least. Watching dots and procs and combos and a cast bar kind of ruin it. A rotation for burn phase, conserve phase, large packs, questing solo? Meh. I sort of want to enjoy watching my mage fight, and watching where I stand, without having to watch a multitude of spell buttons and bars.
This is one of the reasons why I was never able to play Affli, Balance, Shadow, etc.
I want to play and watch the fight, not be hanging on whether I have the DoTs or not on the objectives.
Some classes are really unplayable without addons.
The same thing happens with some melee classes.
If your intention is to AoE up to X amount of enemies you have to do ST rotation on each enemy.
What kind of joke is that?
To do the same damage as a Fury Warrior then you must do 5 times the work he does.
It’s true that the classes were very simple and needed some more complexity, but I think right now Blizzard is going out of control.
It’s more noticeable now with these new talent trees.
With my Holy Priest I gained about 5-6 new keybinds and I’m trying to make room in my bars.
Sometimes … less is more.
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You don’t find micromanaging the CD on RoP or the buff from AM stacks as bad?
I feel like compared to other classes this class is put in the meat grinder. For example in balance, the talent that triggers eclipse when you spend x AP is permanent. I.e. the amount spent doesn’t disappear after a while, where as on frost, if I take the talent that launches FO after 30 FBs, if I’m not killing things constantly the buff that counts it goes away. Also if I’m remembering correctly, the timer is only 1 minute, whereas a similar mechanic on shadow priest is like 2.
Also I find brain freeze a tad janky in the context of the current charge system. I think BF should just refresh flurry and flurry’s base damage should be buffed.
To me, it doesn’t feel like a developer is invested in mage as much as other classes, though i’m talking mostly from the perspective of frost. There’s definitely similar qol that could be applied to frost that other classes get without breaking the game. and the lack of that qol being applied tells me whoever is testing it is only testing it in certain circumstances (like a raid DPS golem, where the buff duration wouldn’t matter). The arcane rework is interesting, but I’m struggling to find my footing in it.
I do agree that micromanaging dots can be annoying. But the full moon procs make it feel worth it for me.
I will always consider it more difficult to handle dots than RoP.
About AM I can’t say, I didn’t play Shadowlands and I also refuse to use a Spec whose DPS revolves around 6cds and not on its own basic abilities.
Strictly speaking, once you know the fight or once you know the tanke that goes with you, you can decide by pure muscle memory when to use Icy Veins or RoP.
Dots on the other hand is something you are continually seeing and it also doesn’t matter if it’s one enemy or 5.
What I HATE about RoP is how mechanically INEFFICIENT it is for a class like the mage.
mage shields usually take 1-2 hits before breaking.
2)
we have no healing abilities.
3)
our armor is non-existent.
It doesn’t make sense.
My solutions are:
1)
When we use Blink then we drag RoP with us, this applies to other talents that work together with Blink.
RoP becomes an elemental, one of those pink ones that Khadgar likes to use so much.
We have no control over the elemental and it has more cd, 2 minutes or something similar.
RoP is integrated to the Mage’s own body.
It increases our damage in X time, but after that time the effort or mental stress makes us lose intellect for a few seconds.
I don’t know.
Any variant is better than the class with less defenses to stay still.
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