I’ve been strictly a Mage player since TBC and have poured over 700 days played into my class to perfect my playstyle and abilities. I’ve raided heroic level 25-man raids in the past, downed AOTCs, and achieved challenging raid feats like the Immortal title, all as a Mage. I’ve played every spec across multiple expansions, so I have a firm grasp on where mage has been, and where it currently is now.
I have always loved my class deeply and taken pride in being a mage main…until this expansion.
Even after the changes to fix our broken class earlier in the xpac, this new mage playstyle feels punishing and…well…just not fun. Playing as a pure-DPS class and still pulling up behind everyone else in DPS rankings, despite having equal gear level and playing your rotation 90% on-point makes for a really awful feeling.
You missed your combustion window? Now you’re last place in DPS. You need to use personal cooldowns to stay alive? Now you’re last place in DPS. You ate one bad mechanic? Now you’re dead because you’re squishier than everyone else…enjoy being below the healers in DPS. It’s demoralizing and punishing in too many ways.
Please fix this class to make it fun again. We can’t heal, we can’t tank, we can only DPS, and even that is sub-standard now compared to 3-button classes like BM hunters. The class is already punishing enough with us being more susceptible to taking higher damage, having a lack of mobility options, and needing to deal with cast times. I won’t cry and say “it isn’t fair!”, but it doesn’t feel good right now to be a mage.
It pains me to consider rolling a new class after all these years invested in my mage, but I’m afraid it may be necessary if I want to keep enjoying this game. I hope blizzard does something to address the punishing aspects of playing this class…
Honestly, mage design has fallen behind the times and it’s incredibly obvious that all innovations that the spec would have received were instead cannibalized to create Evokers, which is a “dragon mage” class.
You should have seen me when I saw Disintegration (which I always wanted for mages since Khadgar nuked that person in a cinematic) and AoE arcane missiles given to Evokers. I’m so glad we got the hand-me-downs in our set bonus, though I want to see it carry forward in 11.0. Won’t get started on them actually getting time-themed spells when all we had were scraps for years.
That’s part of the reason I jumped ship to warlock. I tinker with my druid as well but mage is just over complicated these days. It’s a mess to be honest. I’ve played a mage since WotLK and I just don’t have the same feel about it. To be honest they have over complicated a lot of the specs I think.
Man that hits hard, but you may be right on the money. Evoker stole mage’s “magic” so to speak. I don’t know what internally Blizz did, but maybe they just pulled the mage dev team apart to make the Evoker dev team. And they probly had lots of fun doing it.
To OP: feel your pain…every day. For me, I’m still having “fun” but most of that is wrapped around making weird trinket combos work (Caged HORROR will work!!!) and solo’ing the new follower dungeons. Also trying to get 20s on all the dungeons.
I only play mage and only arcane, so it is what it is. Mage seems to be very low on the developers priority list (for whatever reason), and although I have been surprised by how much of my feedback they took on the PTR, they always stopped short of addressing oft cited issues and poor design. I mean we still have clearcasting bugs in the game while the entire tier is based around clearcasting. They also ignored the conflict between talents and tier and myriad feedback on arcane talent tree in general. They did bring us orb barrage (love) and missile battery (also love), but stopped short of making either truly epic.
As far as damage goes, we are Very RNG based right now (Orb barrage and Clearcasting procs) But they seem to have balanced us around a higher proc chance than currently exists. I mean if I let loose 8 back to back orb barrages I’ll top some meters! But I don’t see that very often, if ever. So when RNG runs low (I once cast arcane explosion back to back the entire 20 second duration of the 2-piece bonus and did not get a single CC proc…), we suck bad, like really bad. When RNG is good we break even and when RNG is hot, we look slightly better than others for one pull. My consolation is that at least on a boss fight, Single Target where I know the timing and mechanics I can be on top with double time warp and some fast button smashing.
My background is largely the same except I started my journey as an mage even earlier just a few months into Vanilla. The things we’ve been through since then, huh? The good, the bad, and the ugly! It sure has been a bumpy ride over the years but it dropped off a cliff after Legion and we’re still falling (thank god for Slowfall, LOL). As I’ve said many times before, the only thing that can save us from the brink at this point is a complete overhaul. The reworks halfway through DF didn’t go near far enough.
It pains me to even think about this but like you said, it’s impossible to ignore when it’s staring us right in the face. And unfortunately the main culprit here is the notion that classes must be distinct and that homogeneity is a bad word. Unfortunately, when you have a massive game like WoW which has dozens of different specs that’s just not a realistic standard and it actively hurts the game.
And sadly it’s mages that have historically taken the burnt of that policy too because iconic magic has be denied to us in favor of other classes since day one. Why can’t we use lightning spells? Because it’s a shaman thing. Why don’t we have more and better arcane spells? Because Balance druids have to exist. Why can’t we have access to iconic mage spells like laser beams and barrages of magic bolts? Evokers say hello. Frankly, it’s exhausting and has been sapping the joy out of the game for me for far too long now.
I don’t PVE but definitely notice the damage thing in solo shuffle. My role is to somehow damage, CC, and stay alive – all at once. But even when the latter isn’t an issue (because the other team is training the other DPS), I am still doing low damage. I’m having to sheep both DPSs to keep my teammate alive, while also being expected to control the healer and get blamed if I can’t stop every castable heal from occurring. Even games where I win, I am still the lowest DPS of the 4 classes. (with the exception of sub rogues)
Definitely hear you on that, lol.
I jumped into a few solo shuffles and it was a miserable experience as a fire mage.
One healer even complained and said I sucked because I couldn’t simultaneously interrupt, polymorph and DPS down the other team by myself. I just hung my head down and never queued again. Mage in arenas used to be fun, but now it seems to be suffering pretty heavily.
It sure has been a wild and crazy trip getting from there to here.
I agree that we need a good overhaul to get us back up to speed. It’s also reassuring hearing from other veteran mage players that they too feel this way about the current state of our class. I think I may be hanging up my mage robe at the end of this season.
The problem with this is that you don’t top the meters though. Even with cds popped and the planetary alignment string of orb procs, a ret or < insert melee class here > will beat you.
I completely agree, but I would argue that Mage (specifically Frost) is better to play now than it was in both BfA and SL, though that is a very low bar.
The “new” talent trees and fixes in .15 did a little to make it seem less terrible, but the reality is that integrating previous spells and borrowed-power mechanics just compounds the issues that we’ve had for the better part of a decade, or longer in some cases. The underlying mechanics haven’t really changed that much on paper, but the implementation is the result of dozens and dozens of quick fixes and band-aid solutions. The end result is that the class feels messy.
Really, what Mages need is to be completely redesigned from the ground up. No more “reworks” where 90% of the spells are the same. No more 100 talent points where only 4 actually do anything. Start from scratch, redesign the specs, and spend 12 months taking on feedback.
That would be a great project for them to tackle during the upcoming season of “we got nothin’ till the next xpack comes out so have this rehash of old crap instead.” Honestly, if they did a poll rn asking if players would rather have the next wave of expansions delayed in favor of them giving all classes a proper overhaul I am sure most people would want that instead. However, it’s never going to happen because they can’t sell us anything if they did that…
This made me literally lol because it’s so true. Of all the mage talents, about 95% are just spells we used to have that were taken away (always a fun feeling), buffs to spells that should just be baked in, overcosted talents (Improved AM looking at you) or spells that serve no other purpose than to buff other talents (NT) which is just terrible design.
Reading this was in a way cathartic. I am a beginning mage player. I absolutely loved leveling my character, except for the PUGs. Now I’m doing LFR and low keys and that has flip-flopped. The groups are quite pleasant, but the play style is grueling, and man I mess up the CDs all the time. I do know the rotation, but like Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” If I cast evo on the run up, the tank stops. If I don’t he barrels in and then I’m casting it. I feel like more that 1/2 of my RS ramps are not complete as I have to dodge throughout the whole thing. Most times mobs are dead before I’m done with AS or ToM, so I end up waiting on bosses, which I believe is not the correct thing to do. The timing is beautiful at the dummies, but I feel like the dummy when I’m running a dungeon and getting smoked by folks >20 item levels lower than me. I did however get a ridiculous number of consecutive orb procs tonight and for a spell was around 400k. That was gangster.
Well said. The sync with tank behavior and/or Aug Evoker behavior makes a HUGE difference. So many times tanks hesitate and waste both evo and 2-piece, or pull smaller packs than needed, losing the advantage of orb barrage; their behavior can really mess with our damage. And at ilvl 485 I still get smoked sometimes by people 20 ilvl lower. PUG life is hard. What’s interesting to me is I can usually perform better the higher the key, because of the sync with other team members, which tends to be more predictable. I know when we are gonna need Timewarp or have to respond to other mob-specific behavior (like throwing my ToM onto the guys in everbloom that leap away is a bad idea). This week with incorporeal also sucks because very often I am throwing in a sheep that is out of place and wastes a few casts of damage dealing.
