Give Mages a real shields in stead of wet toilet paper

Classes Mage
1

After another futile sosl attempt at Desmortaeron on my level 212 Frost Mage, I realize that Blizzard has never attempted to balance mage survivability with their glacially slow melee performance. The concept of “ranged” dps is a stupid joke: every fight winds up with the mob in your face, hacking through your “shield” with contemptuous ease, after breaking your crowd control and teleporting into your face.

With Fleshcraft and Glacial Insulation I can usually survive one elite mob, although the painfully slow casting speed, and the tendency to not get the procs you need, make every fight a crapshoot. But Blizz has arranged that you never get to fight just one mob: there are always several more after you kill the first, stunning and slowing you with both your shields on cooldown.

With no armor, no shield, and no corpse walk to recover the several thousand stygia you lose, it’s like playing against rigged dice.

I remember the initial “glass cannon” theory Blizz foisted on us: mages great damage balanced by lower survivability, but our dps is no longer earth shattering, our spells take too damn long to cast, and we are helpless if the second elite makes an appearance, which they always do.

Give us a better shield or faster casts or something to make the questing grind, and these elite-heavy areas that Blizz has chained us to, bearable and doable.

Plate wearers have their armor and fast damage, locks have a tank, rogues can stealth, demon hunters have rush and flight, and hunters have a pet. What the heck do mages have except standing there with no shield, being punched in the face, with their bedsheet armor hanging out?

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Mages aren’t supposed to get hit. That’s the whole point of the class. It’s either kite or die. Kiting is our forte, especially as frost. If you don’t use all the tools at your disposal to kite you’re a bad mage. We don’t have reliable heals or shields because we’re not supposed to get hit

If the mob can’t be kited oh well go arcane and hope u can burn it before it kills you but that won’t work for almost all current content minibosses/bosses that can’t be kited cuz they always have a lot of health m

I hate it too and I wish it weren’t like this I do wish we were given the ability to solo stuff like other classes can bc I’m tired of having to group up for stuff other classes can solo just fine (desmotaeron is a literal joke on my DH but my mage I’m forced to group it sucks) but I don’t see mage ever being that class, it’s just fundamentally not how mages work /:

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It probably has more to do with the fact that you’re super undergeared.

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So Level 212 is undergeared? Odd, isn’t it: my 213 lock has no problems, nor does my 212 Demon Hunter, nor does my 207 Rogue.
It is almost as if you’d rather ignore the problem. Imagine that.

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Yes it is when the majority of player base is between 230-240

It’s almost like different classes have different strengths and weaknesses. I personally had zero issues in torghast at that level.

The problem is you not the class. Make triunes ward if you’re struggling that much.

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I have low ilvl and I survive just fine in all outworld content. It could be easier, but mages are actually pretty tanky. Way tankier than hunter or priest…

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Being undergeared and in an area full of elites that sees you as breakfast, lunch and dinner isn’t a Blizzard problem concerning your shield.

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Lmao! No they are not. The vast majority of player characters probably aren’t even 210, with the average more likely closer to 200-205 or even lower when you consider how many alts people have still in covenant gear. But we will never know for sure since Blizzard don’t release any kind of statistic about the game and to the best of my knowledge there is no third party software that crunches those numbers because the data is encrypted and meant only for internal use.

OP’s problem isn’t his lack of gear it’s the fact that the entire area he’s referring to was purposely designed to be as annoying as possible to slough through. Not to mention that the mobs have charge abilities and staggers/slows on top of having a crap ton more health than similar mobs in other zones making kiting then virtually impossible regardless of how skilled you are. It was a conscious decision to make the zone feel more “threatening” and has been something they’ve done for years with the release of new areas with every X.X patch.

That said, kiting in general has not been viable for close to a decade and really something that was largely confined to Vanilla WoW. Casters have long been the absolute worst classes for any kind current open world solo content and that’s not going to change any time soon. It’s simply something players who choose to main a caster have to make peace with because the caster archetype of the glass cannon who is supposed to be able to blow up any mob before they ever get a chance to close the distance and therefore doesn’t need to have any major defenses is largely nonexistent in WoW. Again, the result of another conscious decision to artificially increase playtime by having mobs take longer to kill. Casters getting screwed in the process was just an unintended but certainly foreseeable consequence.

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I am not gonna rehash what I said above but it definitely is on Blizzard when they intentionally designed the zone like that and force you to go there for mandatory things like getting to a world boss or the current raid entrance. Even if it’s not difficult it is annoying and that fact shouldn’t sit well with people or be accepted as just the status quo because you’re paying Blizzard money to have fun, not be frustrated.

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Actually false. Considering floor 12 is literally designed for people to be 235 or higher clearly shows he’s undergeared.

And yes the averages of people who actually play the game are around 220 or higher due to tazzavesh and korthia.

207 may be average for people who sit and complain on the forums all the time though.

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Is someone going to tell him that mages are the hardest class to kill in the game?

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What do you mean “floor 12?” Layer 12 of Torghast? If so according to the rating Blizzard themselves put on it, it’s designed for people ilvl 252 which in of itself is ridiculous but that’s another topic. Anyway, what does Layer 12 of Torghast even have to do with what this thread was about i.e. obnoxious mobs with bloated HP in an open world area of the Maw?

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I doubt anyone would because it simply isn’t true.

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Played at a high level, and since the introduction of triune, mage is, in almost 100% of cases, the least viable kill target in any arena game. Mage is the least viable kill target against rogue mage, you don’t go mage against shadow play, you don’t go mage against mage lock, WW mage. There are niche situations when you go mage against mage warrior.

Their ability to perpetually slow the game down with little to no effort and triune / alter to rely on while poly DRs and nova / DB is on cooldown makes good mages virtually impossible to kill in arena. Generally speaking when playing at a high MMR most people don’t waste their time trying to kill mages.

I’m telling you this as fact as someone that has a lot of pretty high arena XP. Checking your character out you literally have zero XP on mage. Which is fine. But i’m telling you that mage, when played well, is the vast majority of times the most pointless kill target in the game outside of particular situations.

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It actually is.

You honestly should stick to mythic plus because outside of that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

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You’re talking PvP. OP and myself are talking open world PvE and in a specific area of the Maw at that. Apples and oranges much?

But since you bring it up, Truine Ward while an indisputably powerful legendary is solely a defensive one, meaning that you are giving up damage for survivability which in turn means you’re going to be taking even longer to kill a mob.

Furthermore, this item has only existed for as long as this expansion has been out and the problems I was referencing have been ongoing for at least a decade. It’s also not staying with us after this expansion end (if that ever happens, lol) so to point to it as some kind of an end all solution is at best naive and at worst disingenuous.

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The problem is not Torghast. It is

The problem is Desmortaeron, not Torghast.

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Typical deflection. So, you have nothing useful to suggest to solve the problem except throwing shade.

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Reading is hard i guess.

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I know this is late, but I never said anything about torghast…

At all…

Des has a lot of elites running around.