I think Frost is the easy MAGE spec. Which isn’t saying much since all the mage specs are pretty freaking tough to learn at a baseline let alone master.
I went dev evoker and it just feels so SO much nicer to play in all forms of combat.
I agree it’s really freaking obnoxious how every single caster requires a ton of set up to start dps in more casual content feels terrible. By the time you’ve ramped up things are already dead by the hand of any hunter or melee in your group.
This translates directly to PvP where unless you’re in a coordinated team, the time it takes to set up everything up really feels horrible at lower brackets.
Mage exemplifies this problem more than any other caster imo.
If they’re going to build up new identities from the ground up I’d rather they just made a new spec or class entirely.
People actually LIKE to play mage and their specializations even, or sometimes, especially in their current state. If they changed all these specs a much larger portion of the mage player base than is present on these forums would be alienated.
I think there’s a middle ground in terms of allowing near maximal dps without such insane rotational optimization as mage currently has in all of it’s specs.
You have a very SMALL point. At average levels and dungeons they can be entertaining. But once you are in heroic, or running 18+, the margins for errors start to shrink. And
thats when other classes star to pull away. Many don’t find the mage class design enjoyable at all. It needs to be a spec that can be enjoyed by not just the low lvl and the super sweats. Do you know why fire is playable? Because it exploits server information processing speeds for double pyros. And thats just to get on the damage board. The Arcane mana gem needs a macro to delete so you can recast to get full charges (broken), Frost is a collection of adding spells because the developer needed to come to the table with something. It is so utterly painful to admit. There is noone at the helm of the mage class development. Just look at ALL of the topics on the forum. Not a hey buff this, or hey give us this. The resounding sentiment if all 3 specs, is a need for some SERIOUS attention. Hell just bring back the specs at their high points. Zero dev work, and they can continue to leech their paycheck. I have shelved my mage and am boycotting it until they do something. Maybe if less people play mage they will notice. If not there is alway DD2.
The fewer people there are playing mage, the less they’ll want to commit resources to it. Most companies want to put their time and money towards the things their customers actually use. If people stop using mages, the corporate side of Blizzard is likely to say “Spend less time on mage. People don’t play them anyway.”
If there are 400,000 people playing mage but almost 1 million playing paladin (as is the case for some generic M+ stats), they’d make more players happy by improving paladin gameplay than they would by improving mage.
That’s certainly true but we’re getting into chicken-or-the-egg territory here. Yes, developers naturally want to spend the limited resources at their disposal (although not really so limited in Blizzard’s case, lbr) on the most popular classes but this just begs the question: why are players drawn to certain classes? Is it just a matter of personal preference or is it because the other options simply aren’t viable precisely because no resources are being devoted to them.
I would argue it’s the latter because as a general rule of thumb the magic user archetype is by and large the more popular pick in virtually any fantasy based game. All things being equal, it’s just more fun throwing a fireball or calling down a lightning bolt on an enemy than it is to shoot them with a bow and arrow or stab them with a dagger. Yet in higher end content we don’t see that trend hold true in WoW because non-caster ranged and melee DPS are just the more practical choices. If casters were easier to play, didn’t feel dated, and brought in the same (not better, just the same or similar) numbers as other DPS I would be willing to bet the entire paradigm would shift almost overnight. But none of those things are true hence why so many people are calling for reworks and overhauls.
Yeah, sadly its a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation with that. If there are plenty of people playing it, then they look at it and think “hey, people are playing it, we must be doing a good job” (hence why talents like RoP stuck around for so long), and if people don’t play it then it’s “we won’t devote resources because no one plays it”. Personally I’d prefer option B at the moment, because it’s already clear that they arent devoting resources to it. But it’s not enough to just swap classes, because thats still $ in their pockets.
It’s definitely worth noting though that Evoker has taken a lot of attention away from Mage, simply because they’re essentially the same thing at heart, but designed better for modern content - though they still have loads of problems.
Not that they’ve been meta for a while, but Boomkin somewhat fill that niche, and when they aren’t broken, it’s been Warlocks for raids. Simple specs with loads of utility that pump the numbers. For all the talk of “Mages are the devs favourite class”, both of those have been stronger than Mage and a better choice in all but the highest content (and part of me thinks that is because of Timewarp and Fire being able to exploit massive pulls that only 0.001% of groups can do).
I still the main issue with Mage is that they’ve never had massive redesigns for 20 years. They’ve been hotfixed and band-aided, but its almost always been borrowed power systems that have made them playable rather than their core design. Legion onwards especially, because each expansion had 3 versions of borrowed power to fix the underlying problems with design. The ‘new’ talent trees really did nothing but hurt Mages as a whole.
War Within should have been the opportunity to gut them and rebuild them from the ground up. It will be close to 18 months since the 10.1.5 “fix”, and could have been the chance for Blizzard to gut and rebuild the specs with 12 months of developmental testing, but it looks like we’re just getting another borrowed power system and our core issues are being ignored again.
This x1000. That’s the main reason I’m glad I dropped mage after WotLK in favor of a melee class, and why the most fun I’ve had as ranged in years has been… WotLK Classic. I guess I just don’t like complex rotations. I’m supposed to be watching the road, not staring at my speedometer.
I feel like locks get invited solely for the utility, especially in PuG raiding where a lock closet can be the difference between finishing a raid in 2 hours versus 4 with the ever present revolving door.
Boomkins I don’t know. Frankly, I can’t stand the eclipse gameplay. Moonkins are literally lunar beings created by Elune, the goddess of the Moon, so the solar thing makes absolutely no sense to me and always breaks my immersion when I try to play the spec. I guess it’s one of the pitfalls of trying to put vastly differing ideologies under the same class umbrella. It’s a major problem for all the faith based classes like Druids, Priests, and Paladins. Solar magic makes sense for a Tauren Druid devoted to An’she but absolutely no sense for a Night Elf Druid. The angelic themes work for human paladins and priests but feel decidedly foreign for virtually all other races that can be priests. I get that it’s a technical/resource limitation but in this day and age how hard is it to have purely cosmetic race based skill visuals without really altering gameplay in any way?
I better stop before I go off on a tangent… whoops too late!
Mage doesn’t need any pruning whatsoever, Frost just needs another talent shakeup. It’s either GS (which I like) or GS with resource overload because of FoF+BF+Cone+Orb+Blizzard.
Changes like increasing the cap of FoF to 3 and giving Glacial Spike some talent that causes it to sometimes cast 50% faster or even instantly would be huge.
Yeah I’ll disagree with that. Arcane could use 1 or 2 less damage modifiers in it’s rotation.
Frost just needs another talent shakeup. It’s either GS (which I like) or GS with resource overload because of FoF+BF+Cone+Orb+Blizzard.
I do agree with this 100%. Frost needs a good middle ground between what it was before the rework and the hot mess of interconnected mechanics it has now.
Whole reason I went back to arcane is cause frost now has to be in melee range in keys. If i’m gonna have to be in melee as a ranged player I might as well go for the easier aoe rotation than what frost goes through now.
Can’t comment on Fire as I haven’t played that since Sunkings Blessing became “the thing” but imo they missed the mark totally on mages in DF and the rework didn’t make the class feel any better to play.
Likely sticking with maining Lock for S4. Frostfire mage might be tempting in WW … Spellslinger isn’t going to bring me back to being a mage main.
I genuinely feel like Legion was the easiest and and most fun version of arcane personally.
I’m not arguing that arcane today isn’t significantly better than mage of SL or pre-rework in DF, but I enjoyed the clearcasting proccing missiles and using the missiles to make arcane power windows do metric truckloads of damage / for movement.
While Arcane is the worst offender it is by no means the only mage spec that struggles with the bloat. And it isn’t just rotational abilities that suffer from it either. Defensives are bloated and so are CCs. The sheer volume of these abilities also adds a layer of complexity in of itself because it can often cause you to pause at a crucial moment because you can’t decide which one to use.
I mean just look at our CC abilities, we have:
Frost Nova
Ice Nova
Ring of Frost
Blast Wave
Dragon’s Breath
Super Nova
That’s half a dozen spells! Do we really need that many? Imo, pruning is well overdue and should be a major part of the spec reworks.
I think in general mage is pretty reasonable right now, but I think a huge problem with the class is what it takes to min-max the frost spec in 5 man content.
Having to use frost nova, ice nova, and pet freeze at the right times in the middle of an already packed burst window feels really bad. especially when you consider the fact that this requires macros to use the pet’s ability even somewhat effectively.
