I have played a Mage since the original beta; it is my favorite class by far; and I, like most people, am a casual player. Jobs, kids, etc.
I was really excited that thanks to the new regen and living flame runes, that solo questing (especially in areas where mob groups of 2+ is unavoidable) was finally viable, fun, and not the miserable grind of death and endlessly spamming “LFG”.
It went a long way to fix some of the classes issues that have existed since before Vanilla launched. Really squishy, limited self-heals, overly vulnerable to pushback and interrupts, and despite wearing cloth, Mages have never been the DPS monsters they should be (Classes with huge pool of hit points, and wearing Leather, Mail, etc. shouldn’t out DPS warlocks and mages, yet they do, by a significant margin).
I tried out the new regen this morning, and it is worthless now. Even attempting to face tank 3 yellow mobs, and a few lvl 15 elites with a fairly well geared out lvl 25, resulted in requiring pots, and death. Sadly, yet again, developers have put in overly heavy handed nurfs, that impact everybody negatively to prevent less than 1% of the player base, from doing something they don’t like: Boosting.
If someone has 10’s or 100’s of hours to practice and run boosts (and the skill required to pull it off) all so they can solo pull WC at 25 and kill everything without dying, whatever. I can’t do that, nor do I have the time to sit there and figure it out. Outside of a very small number of people, no one has that kind of time (especially now in “Season of Dads”.).
Please stop doing this. Devs, you care FAR too much about these 1% players, and not enough about everybody else who only plays a few hours a week that pay the bills. Stop that. You did something great; you found a way to make 20+ year old game fun, and playable for everyone; and now you just reverted right back to messing it up with heavy handed “fixes” that were not at all required.
Personally, I suffered though grinding a mage from 0-60 in Vanilla, I did it again in Classic, and I am not going to do it a third time in SOD. If you want to stop boosting, then to stop boosting, but don’t nurf the whole class and kill solo questing for everyone else.
Please restore regen to its previous state and seek a better solution if you want to stop boosting; Or 80% healing to other, 50% to self, with 80% reduction if the spell impacts more than 20 targets? Won’t that stop the boosting without hurting everyone else?