I don’t know… I have a mage alt. I play as frost. Sure it’s kind of mundane but so are many other specs in the game. Anyways… at ilevel 377(no 4 piece either) I was pumping 40-45kdps in a raid, single target, depending on fight. I did a little research on rotation and found some frosty boy mains on YouTube that helped more so than the guides on wowhead/icyveins. Made a difference. Also mastery is king as frost if you spec hailstones(I think is the talent) and it makes a massive difference. I ran with another frost mage in guild who had about 10% less mastery than I did at 20 ilevels higher (390’s) and he was consistently 5-10k lower DPS. Sim your toon. Find proper rotation. You’ll be doing well.
Also imo being “bottom %” has always been subjective for each individual. What I mean by that is, sure you can look at the overall stats on Warcraft logs and see that mages maybe are in the bottom but what about the individual group or perhaps even the pugs that you run with? I played Shadow priest for a few expansions and it was at a time that they were middle of the road to lower end according to logs. But for the group I ran with I was always top three DPS so it’s subjective and you can’t always look at the logs overall.
I’ll just say mages should put out more damage across the board in most cases than they do. Why? Because the pay for it dearly with low mobility, they are fragile as can be, they have lots of down time between the management of mana and the ridiculous time a lot of spells take to cast …while standing still (re:while vulnerable).etc
The mage forums have been a pretty pessimistic place since Rune of Power became a thing back in MoP. I think it’s hyperbole to say that the complaints are “Mages aren’t #1!!!1111” but I’d agree if you said it’s just a miserable place.
Mage does also have some glaring issues at the moment. Frost’s optimal rotation is just frostbolt + BF spam, ignoring Ice Lance for instance. The new set reinforces this which means it’s either intentional or Blizzard just isn’t paying attention to anything mage related right now.
Honeslty OP is 100% correct. Mage is pretty much a dead class. Even shaman is better and that’s saying something. Objectively the hardest class to play well out of all the classes. Meanwhile a lock player is rolling his face on his keyboard due to the fact that he has the HP and armor value of a warrior, lmao.
Frost is fine, that’s easy enough to spam frostbolt and proc your stuff, use blizzard and frozen orb for AOE and keep spamming frostbolt to proc stuff.
But fire, even after all these years since I first started mage, and I started a mage back in Classic, I still can’t figure it out, forget arcane, it just makes no sense. It made no sense than, it makes less sense now, it’s a dumb spec and I don’t care how strong they can make it, if you need a PHD to play, it’s not good.
