Mage runes

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Mage runes are all over the place right now without any consistency in them. It honestly feels like they just added in runes they thought would be good and placed them into a new rune slot for the phase they got released. This was all well and good for P2, but now that we’ve hit P3 it seems a little wonky and can be easily cleaned up.

We currently have 3 specialty bolts: Balefire, Spellfrost and Frostfire. We also have 3 specialty modifiers: Hot Streak, Missile Barrage and Brain Freeze.

The problem is that all these runes are all over the place with Brain Freeze competing with Spell Power (50% increased crit damage bonus) on the boot rune which is a great dps increase for frost and fire mages spamming FFB, but not letting them get procs to insta cast FFB.

Fire mages have 2 playstyles with the brain freeze issue already discussed it leads to Balefire Bolt, Hot Streak and Molten Armor. These 3 runes are on 2 rune slots not letting you get the benefit of all 3 and a dead rune for one if you use this build, or choosing between short and long fights.

Missile Barrage and Spellfrost are also competing on the waist slot together. This isn’t that big of an issue because currently spellfrost isn’t that crazy of a DPS gain for arcane or healing mages. They could use Balefire Bolt if Molten Armor wasn’t also tied to the wrist rune slot.

So currently you have in runes and slots:

Helm - Deep Freeze, Temporal Anomaly, Advanced Warding Belt - Missile Barrage, Hot Streak, Frostfire Bolt, Spellfrost Bolt Wrist - Molten Armor, Balefire Bolt, Displacement Boots - Brain Freeze, Chronostatic Preservation, Spell Power.

What I would suggest is:

Helm - Deep Freeze, Temporal Anomaly, Advanced Warding, Molten Armor Belt - Frostfire Bolt, Spellfrost Bolt, Balefire Bolt Wrist - Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, Brain Freeze, Displacement Boots - Spell Power, Chronostatic Preservation

Displacement could be moved elsewhere also, just wasn’t sure where to put it. This hopefully helps make more sense of rune design and choices.

This will help some of mage DPS hopefully. Arcane/Frost will still probably be low DPS and I think reducing the cast times of frostbolt/arcane blast/spellfrost bolt and making missile barrage reduce the cast time more would be a good way of buffing them without tweaking their rotation too much.

7 Likes
2

blizzard doesnt care about your feedback, they havent listened to the 100 pally threads why waste your breath, Druid runes are still not fixed and they said they made a mistake.

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3

Lets be honest. Sod focus for mage was healing, and thats about it. Im amazed at the utter lack of fun runes. Why doesnt fire get dragons breadth? Why doesnt frost get water elemental? Why does ice lance do no damage? They dont care about frost or fire. They want mages to heal.

3 Likes
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I feel like mages have some of the best runes that have left you in this position where you have runes overlapping that let you get to make these choices.

Then we have rogues who have one rune option for each slot that’s just outright the best and 2 options that don’t mean anything at all.

5

They should add another bolt that’s arcane, frost, fire, shadow, nature, and holy and call it rainbow bolt

4 Likes
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I’m not sure their sole focus was on healing. I do think that they never fully thought out where runes will go in future phases though.

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Its clear they have no idea what they are doing.

Brainfreeze should be on the waist slot, 100%

All of the random bolt spells are just clunky and weird, we finally get to use one but for an entire phase they were just bad and unusable. Spell frost is still bad and unusable.

Ice lance is one of the lowest damage abilities in the game doing less damage than a single GCD of living bomb. No one used it for any reason.

FoF and Frostbite override and proc at the same time reducing their value.

Deepfreeze damage portion can only be used with a FoF proc because bosses are immune to roots. You can’t take FoF because it’s a huge DPS loss.

They nerfed Living Flame way to heavily. It was overpowered but now it’s borderline trash, especially in PvP.

The runes have no cohesiveness, design, or fun in mind just seems like they panicked and through some random bolts in, some healing spells, and called it a day. Then nerfed the healing to second worst healing with no utility outside of raw healing.

Its just sad that they ruined a potentially amazing experience, I don’t think it’s just mages either. Many of the runes are just random and messy.

1 Like
8

FoF and frostbite proc at the same time because it is meant to substitute when the bosses are immune to snares.

I agree that there is no real cohesion or synergy between rune slots and where they go. This is more to do with pumping out cool runes during specific phases then not readjusting their slots when other runes get added.

9

Yeah, it just feels bad when FoF and Frostbite overlap in PvP or really any time it happens outside off bosses. At least it apparently has always worked that way.

Agreed. I wish they would shuffle some slots and tune some underperforming runes so build diversity could actually exist, still inhaling copium that they may “balance” the game at 60, we shall see!

10

Would help if they ensured the runes actually work correctly.

Example, frostfire bolt is not benefitting from crit from burnout and/or talents, and rumor has it burnout is not being applied to fireball (can’t confirm personally but have scoured tons of WCL on fights > 2m to see that frostfire bolt is not critting as often as it should).

And yeah - feels like mage class was just rushed.

11

Ya they can definitely do a lot to help out mages going forward. It doesn’t even have to be crazy changes, just minor tweaks would go a long way to improving the mage experience.

I do wish FoF and Frostbite had 2 separate id’s for proccing, would be a hyge pvp buff.

1 Like
12

I CAN BLINK 3 TIMES THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST MAGE IVE EVER HAD.

It would be broken in pvp.

i DO NOT WANT to be a stupid pet class

bake the water elemental water bolt into my casted damage and let me cast frost nova like hunter trap with 1 or 2 charges, do not give me a dumb pet!

13

I don’t know what the runes are trying to accomplish at this juncture.

Some of them are severely underpowered already and will never be used. They need to stop adding this garbage if they are never going to tune it ever again or better yet remove it and replace it with something better.

They need to add like 15 more runes for each class. The amount is too low right now. The under powered ones become forgotten leveling things or they are just never used. Most of the Rogue runes are garbage already. We need more.

(They added Focused Attacks AND Combat Potency, both basically do the same thing, but they made Focused Attacks the easy, leveling one. Focused Attacks becomes obsolete the very moment you get Combat Potency and will never be used ever again. It’s completely stupid and wasteful.)

For the next phase, if they lock Runes behind stupid sh, I think I’m done.

14

That’s crazy if FFB doesn’t benefit from burnout, but also not surprising considering a ton of runes don’t benefit from talents/runes unless stated.

It feels rushed for sure, but it can very easily be tweaked to let it feel more natural and fluid when choosing a spec and runes.

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I believe it is working correctly but WCL/details and such is just including dot ticks which makes it seem like its not.
That is last I heard about the topic.

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Thats not true. Frost fire is critting as much as it should.

Youre being misled because damage meters and logs are also counting frost fire dot as hits, and those dots cannot crit. To get the actual number of crits youre getting you need to look at the number of crits vs number of CASTS, not hits, since the latter will be inflated with dot ticks that dont crit

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I don’t know for sure - but if you start looking at WCL, and find fights that are longer than 2min (because short fights, combustion masks crit issues), you will start to see a crit rate on FFB as low as 8%.

It seems impossible to me that FFB would be consistently under 20% (our buffed crit is minimally 32% or more) fully buffed in raid. So something is not applying, and burn out rune seems like a good candidate. Not sure how I could trace what is being applied because logs don’t break down how things are calculated?

Someone said fireball is in the same boat too.

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Crazy to me you just ignored both the above comments replying to you and continuing using misleading data.

19

Ok grumpy - I’m on mobile, and hit the reply button from the notification menu which skips past the posts after the person I got a notification for…if that makes sense.

But thank you - it looks like WCL made a change to correct this too and reran the calcs from old logs too because my logs from last week, the numbers have changed. Shows the crit chance that I should be seeing. I could have sworn that I looked at casts but probably overlooked.

Thank you - I’m kinda sad now, because I was hoping a bug fix would buff our damage a little but no dice.

20

Yeah, that would of been nice xD

1 Like