I genuinely do not think they put any thought into how the specs will actually play. There is just no way someone tried Spellslinger Frost and thought “that’s great. Not weird at all. In fact let’s also never update the UI and force everyone to use weakauras because it isn’t possible to do any of this without addons”…
I think the devs just slap this stuff together without a second thought, wait for theorycrafters to make some kind of rotation out of it, and then wait to balance later.
I find mage to be in a pretty good spot, maybe im just not on your same wave length, then again im comparing it to balance.
I actually think that Blizzard has “leaned” on the talents of addon developers for quite some time now, and not just to supplement their UI. I find it akin to how Bethesda never has to test or quality control any of their products because once they are released the modding community will fix everything for them. 
Thanks.
Well I don’t mean to diminish your point of view so I’d appreciate your thoughts on this. Here is where I am coming from with my current perspective of the mage class right now:
The Frostfire hero talents for Frost are currently bugged and do not apply damage multipliers the way they should, which means we really only have Spellslinger as an option right now. I find the rotation for Spellslinger Frost to be very awkward. It has a lot of drift in the rotation so even if we start out strong, it can fall apart quickly and devolve into confused ice lance spam which sometimes pays off…sometimes not. It’s like being punished without being fully aware of what for. Manather’s description of this spec was “unintuitive”. I can’t agree more.
Evidently Arcane is doing fine. I am trying to learn how to do it properly, but since I’ve only ever played Frost and Fire, this is not very comfortable for me. However none of my criticism is about Arcane. My awkwardness with the spec is due only to inexperience with it, so I’m not blaming the spec for that.
Fire currently does less dps than tanks. That is my sole input on that.
Yeah, I agree, but I think it’s more of a problem regarding the way the game is over reliant on third party things. The way people usually figure out rotations is through simulations, where the bot creates the ideal scenario in which you can squeeze out as much DPS as possible, then theorycrafters smooth out the rotation where it can be smoothed out, unfortunately, however, it does lead to a situation where the design doesn’t feel deliberate, where you can tell that the devs originally intended for the class to be played a specific way, but in order to do proper DPS, you have to do a rather weird rotation comparatively.
Out of the mage specs, I think Fire is probably the only properly designed rotation because it has a solid foundation with Hot Streak, but even then you pull some weird stuff like the double Pyroblast opener.
Forgive my ignorance on this as I am new to frost but I dont understand what there is to track other than your big damage cooldowns like icy veins alter time and shifting power.
Frost is spam frostbolt until fof proc and followup with an ice lance. If brain freeze is proced flurry and follow up with ice lance. orb when its up (immediately blizz to try to get a cd on orb) add some comet storms for aoe and extra damage.
Spellslinger frost specifically adds unintuitive interactions with Icy Veins, Ice Lance, and Splinterstorm. Long story short, Splinterstorm generates Winter’s Chill procs (the Flurry debuff) and goes off every 8 Splinters generated, Icy Veins doubles the splinters generated, so and causes a weird interaction where the best thing to do to generate splinters, and thus storms, and thus chill procs, thus more of all of the above, is to just spam Ice Lance.
So during Frost’s biggest CD, your rotation devolves to mostly just Ice Lancing. Occasionally you toss a flurry and an orb.
Thanks. Ok I think I am on board now and that does sound like a pain to track.
Exactly. So the problem here is that as long as there’s decent damage at optimal use of splinterstorm, that is what we’ll be balanced around. The points you mentioned previously are not wrong, they are the core mechanics of Frost. However they won’t get you very far because the priority now is this splinterstorm mechanic.
I completely agree. It’s one of the main reasons I decided to go with Sunfury over Spellslinger (the other being that I think Sunfury captures the mage fantasy much better). The only thing Sunfury really changes, or rather adds, to your rotation is hitting your ABarr button when it lights up indicating that a Glorious Incandescence has been primed.
The Arcane rotation is convoluted enough and WoW default interface, especially when it comes to buff tracking, is lacking enough that we really don’t need any more mudding of the waters.
At the moment it’s not a huge issue. Most things are being killed so fast you very rarely notice the down time you’re speaking of. I’m pretty much ignoring any guides because I want to enjoy my time playing wow.
Trash pulls are Orb Comet COC resets Orb and comet so then spam ice lance might cast a free blizzard if things are still alive. This basically wrecks any aoe pulls.
Single target I’m basically just popping all my cds and hitting whatever lights up.
Single target I’m almost always 1 or 2 on dps. Aoe is a toss up if I don’t have orb and comet it’s ugly I if do again 1 or 2 on dps.
Mage hero talents are beyond disappointing in my eyes anyway. I don’t want to play frostfire didn’t like it when it was a spell not sure why you made it a whole tree. Spellslinger is bad as well. I specifically didn’t take talents (glacial spike) cause I don’t like them.
Nothing about these talent trees screams cool and awesome power ups and it’s depressing when you see how good some classes got it. DK comes to mind.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m glad you’re having a good time. However we are not talking about the same thing. The way you play the game is perfectly legitimate, but this isn’t satisfactory for people who are simming their character, then going to a target dummy to play the rotation optimally and prepare for mythic key runs and raiding. It is necessary for many players to be comfortable playing their spec competitively.