Ive been reading some of these posts about the good, bad and ugly and as a mage fire main.
I have to agree, we have the same spells all the way back from vanilla and to be honest, the class is starting to show its age.
I love my mage, portals to everywhere, food, nice looking spell effects but the playstyle just feels so punishing.
For fire if you arent popping combust at the right moments your dps tanks, some fights i can stand still im doing okay in damage. Miss a SKB due to mechanics? Your dps tanks.
Im sorry to say this but, i feel like its time for a complete rework of the specs and make the specs feel fluid and i know Blizzard can do it with their resources.
10 Likes
It’s because mages (specifically Fire and Arcane) feel like the most CD dependent specs in the game at the moment. I can’t think of any other specs quite as reliant on their CD cycles to do any damage at all.
Set up your burst perfectly as Arcane? Doing great. Miss the timing? Trash DPS.
Get a good combust? Doing great. Miss the window? Trash DPS.
Frost isn’t like that though. They’re more consistent damage. They don’t live or die by Icy Veins or any other CD.
Fire has been that way for a veeeery long time back to the days of the Combustion DOT… Very high highs and very low lows. I’m not exactly sure what you’d want if you want to get rid of spells like Fireball and Pyroblast that have been there since Vanilla though lol. That’s Fire’s identity. Fireball, Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Flamestrike. The surroundings change but they are eternal.
Arcane has also been a very bursty spec traditionally tied to CD cycles (Since Cata at least?) but I feel it’s become too bloated in its set up and execution to get good damage out of it. I despise the interaction of Touch of the Magi and Radiant Spark and the gameplay loop it breeds. It’s effective but it’s absolutely ruined the spec for me. The rotation has 3 different phases all with 15+ steps to follow and priorities to manage on top of managing mana and if you mess the timing, CD alignments, mana management or the rotation at all then well… guess it sucks to suck.
3 Likes
I agree with the above posts. It’s a consistent flaw in Blizzard’s design philosophy to have certain classes be more dependent on cooldowns than others. The problem is that a lot of top players tend to gravitate towards those classes and the particular playstyle they offer because, generally speaking, a burst damage profile is heavily favored over a more sustained one, especially in cutting edge end game content where everything is a DPS race. And because those are the only players devs get direct feedback from (since they’re in regular contact) they don’t see the problem and perhaps even think that’s what players want.
What they don’t seem to understand, however, is that the average player who makes up the majority of the player base doesn’t like that type of playstyle or even if they do they simply can’t perform at the same level. This results in a terribly skewed data set where these classes and specs perform incredibly well at the high end and that trickles down because most people naturally wants to play the best performing spec only the numbers aren’t there and so people quit. But Blizzard don’t see that because from their perspective those players simply aren’t active.
Add to all of this the fact that dev presence on these forums, which are the only means of communication with Blizzard that regular players have access to, is virtually nonexistent and it becomes painfully obvious where the problem lies. As far as I am concerned, there is no more important job at any company that makes video games, especially MMOs, than a community manager who does regular outreach and liaises directly between the devs and the players yet in WoW those people don’t seem to exist. I’ve played WoW for nearly 20 years and I couldn’t tell you the name of any community manager, yet in other MMOs I’ve played I’ve had direct communication with them and had them answer questions and concerns promptly. Hell, in some official game forums you can even tag a community manager to a thread and have them read exactly what’s being discussed.
It’s frankly inexcusable that Blizzard don’t invest in community outreach in any of their games. It took Diablo 4 being labeled a complete failure and the death of a genre defining franchise for them to start doing regular “campfire chats” and more community outreach. WoW already had a similar episode with the debacle that was The Shadowlands but they continue to largely ignore the community. Until that changes I don’t see any of these much needed class overhauls taking place.
7 Likes
I couldnt agree more.
A mage overhaul is needed yet thinking blizzard would ever rework fire and arcane is wishful thinking which is a shame.
Ima keep playing my fire mage but as it stands right now i see the major flaws in the playstyle of the spec.
Hell even preheat who is the theorycrafter of fire and evoker has stated the flaws of fire.
3 Likes
Here is what I would like to see.
1-Scorch baked into fireball. You can cast while moving, the cast time is reduced, and it has the crit chance mechanic where if you dont crit it continues to increase its own crit chance. The damage would have to be reduced to make up for this, but essentially its fire mages version of MM’s steady shot.
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The unholy DK treatment. Less reliance on CD windows and more reliance on rotation execution. Increase damage outside of combustion. Reduce combustion impact.
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Remove double time warp. It reinforces the “you only do damage during this moment” gameplay.
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I really think what Mages need to modernize them and bring them up to speed with other classes is some unifying mechanic. Some resource shared among each of the three specs.
Warlocks have soul shards, DKs have runes/runic power, Warriors have rage, Rogues have combo points, Monks have Ki, etc. I know not all classes have this - but I really think it would help to streamline Mage and Mage’s abilities.
3 Likes
Uhm… Sin and Sub rogues, MM hunters, unholy DK, etc.
Burst CD oriented specs are quite common, mages are not unique there.
Yeah, too many if you ask me. And they’re all over-represented at the high end for reasons I described in my other post. It’s fine for burst specs to exist, of course, and I don’t even mind them performing better than more sustained damage profiles but the difference in performance just cannot be so drastic.
It’s gotten to the point where if you want to participate in high end content you have no choice in what builds to run and that’s not okay in my book. And yes, I do realize that has more or less always been the case but that doesn’t make it any more okay and it’s only gotten worse in recent years.
1 Like
I knew instantly when they announced dragonflight at blizzcon 2021 with the new talent revamp what was gonna happen.
If you wanna run high end content you have to min/max your build. It will always be that way.
I think only arcane needs significant gameplay changes.
Frost is very good.
Fire is good.
All specs can use a few changes, but i think they should prioritize arcane. Frankly speaking i think arcane setup is too long.
Things like arcane echo should scale with damage %, not with each hit, this way you would not use spells like nether tempest, radiant spark should be removed, not a fun ability that only serves to prolong the setup even more than necessary. Mana gem should simply be a cd, not a literal gem, that stuff belongs to classic, not retail.
Fire needs a new mastery, ignite should be a baseline passive with a fixed %, flamestrike damage increased, it’s not good that ignite spread does more damage than flamestrike even at 6 targets. Ignite should shine at 3 target cleave, and st. Not 1 to 6/7 targets. And then they need to fix secondary stat scaling for fire mage. And flamestrike should work with skills such as kindling.
They are cooldown dependent. It is very annoying as well. Unholy dk is just as bad.
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Arcane is probably the worst off in the bunch and needs a rework the most but the others could definitely use it too.
Frost plays fine but it’s also super bloated and the constant wack-a-mole type procs and the proc munching can get really frustrating. Also the Shatter mechanic is just boring and uninspired.
Fire’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Combustion has become so strong over the years that playing Fire without it active just feels terrible. So much so that frankly at this point it just needs to be a togglable battle stance or something. I honestly don’t know how they can make that happen and I haven’t really played Fire much at all but a spec can’t revolve around trying to maximize the uptime of a long cooldown. That sort of gameplay loop doesn’t even work in A-RPGs let alone MMOs.
1 Like
Wrong. Frost has a burst profile now. Fire has a consistent damage profile now.
I’m no expert in data / analyzing trends, but the data in warcraftlogs makes it look like fire and frost have relatively similar damage profiles now. I did only look at a handful of “top players” so my sample size is low and it’s got a strong bias towards hyper-optimized (and probably lucky) play, but I think it’s still worth noting.
To me (and you’re allowed to disagree, I won’t take it personally unless you want me to) it looks like Frost has “phases” that slowly reduce in DPS over time until cooldowns are up again while fire has more extreme peaks and valleys. Frost’s damage is “spikey” in the sense that Glacial Spike puts some big bumps in the charts, but I wouldn’t call that a burst profile.
However, both look pretty consistent and non-bursty compared to arcane.
Regardless, I think it’s pretty safe to say that all 3 specs rely heavily on cooldowns no matter how you spin it.