the 4 piece and 6 piece tier 2 set bonuses are unusable. They require the use of an inferior spell to the runes we have received. 40% dmg is not enough to make it a decent option, which is underwhelming for a 6 piece tier bonus. Only the 2 piece tier bonus will be used.
Other classes are getting some significant damage upgrades in their tier sets, please don’t make 3% bonus damage from the tier 1 set the best option.
please fix
sounds like you can take offset pieces like back in the day
That sucks. Thanks for sharing.
Many specs have completely terrible or unusable bonuses for T2. Seems to be a design goal.
Lol look at Hunter T1 2 pc that wasnt changed
It’s actually atrocious. For context, our t1 bonuses were super underwhelming too.
The 2pc is immunity during Evocation, but fire mages only have small windows to use Evo because we spend most the fight with no spirit.
The 4pc is essentially a flat 2-3% dmg buff. Fine, but boring.
The 6pc is useless for fire (mana regen when, again, we don’t have spirit most the fight) and isn’t even used for frost despite looking good.
Now for t2 our 2pc bonus is a flat threat reduction…which is pretty irrelevant most the time, and the 4pc and 6pc buff or incentivize Fireball…a spell we don’t use because Frostfire/Balefire do more base damage plus benefit from both frost and fire talents (as in, they do a ton more damage than Fireball or Frostbolt). On the other hand, even if the tier bonuses end up making fireball better than our other rotational options (which I don’t think it’s close to yet) then it’s a huge negative because we go back to being a 1-button spec.
almost all the tier sets are pretty bad. Good thing most can just core-forge, but I do feel bad for warriors, eles, mages, and warlocks. They just get to be cucked for 2 phases.
I would blame that stupid spell that drains all your spirit… who the heck came up with that idea 
You’re not wrong. Mages were pretty happy we didn’t have to use it in p3 and weren’t ecstatic about it being our main spell in p4. Kinda wild that our rotation causes one of the five primary stats to be worthless (at least they took spirit off most our best gear) and literally kills us if we’re not careful. Pretty sure no other class has a rotational ability with such a significant drawback, let alone one that can straight up kill them.
That’s fun though. Entertaining moments generated from time to time. Having no mana Regen as the class most dependent on mana is not fun.
They changed mana gems so you can remake them for “free” as a stop-gap but it’s not particularly satisfying and also requires GCDs which feels bad. I’d much rather Balefire Bolt just not lower your spirit, lower Evocate to like a 3 minute, and make mana gems something different then they are (I’d prefer if using them didn’t consume them, so you could spam them on CD).
As it is they’re the least fun class to play in a dungeon. Slow mana regen used to be balanced against being the only class in the game with AE damage. Now Mages are just clunky in dungeons and rely on external sources of mana regen like shaman/paladin/SP in raid, on top of relying on fast kill times to not oom.
The only way I see this set being usable at all is if they make taking Frostfire bolt rune also make Fireball, Pryo, Fireblast and Scorch frostfire dmg. Or at the very least just Fireball. If they don’t do that, then these tier 2 set bonuses need to be scrapped.
Or better yet, change the useless threat drop 2 set to make Fireball FROSTFIRE damage. They could also make it lower the mana cost of Fireball, because going from FFB (144 mana) to Fireball (rank 11 and 12 are around 400 mana) is going to severely dent our longevity in fights w/o shadow priest support even with spamming consumables.
not for mage healers. they’re going to be broken lol.
Same can be said for Shadow Priest. 4 pc is useless since we have infinite mana already, and 6 pc is a miniscule 2.5% chance per Shadow Word Pain tick to proc a 20% increased DoT damage buff, but you also need to reapply your dots to gain the effect, spending 3 globals and a 1.5 sec cast time on that. Plus it kills mindflay as a viable spell again, as Shadow Priests repeatedly warned about months ago during the P4 PTR feedback. I guess maybe you’d use MF only under the effect of Spirit Tap’s 20% dmg, but I don’t know the math for that yet, delaying MS/MB/SWD just to use MF w/ +20% dmg probably isn’t worth, so MF is dead still?
So its such a low proc chance, it adds a new annoying element of luck that you can’t control, so your full dps capability is dependent on very good luck and not skill. And to get any benefit from the increased DoT dmg, you need to pause all your damage for like 6 seconds to clumsily reapply all DoTs (though this time TOEP and Power Infusion won’t be up so you lose the TOEP+PI snapshot, or you wait to use both and pray for a crazy high luck early proc? see how this isn’t good?) all while dealing with boss mechanics.
The saving grace of P5 is the despair 50% crit dmg buff, and the option to reuse last phase’s set bonuses, so the big flop of a T2 4 and 6 set bonuses isn’t really felt very much since we can just pretend they don’t exist.
forgets that threat is mechcanic in Classic
No, it’s very irrelevant when tank threat is so high, threat is NEVER an issue. Especially when we have 30% reduction from fire, and another 20% reduction in threat from frost talents. And depending on if you’re Horde or Alliance another 20% or 30% respectively from Shamans and Paladins. Threat has never been more irrelevant than it is now.
lol nothing is as bad as Hunters T1 2pc
Mage Healer is going to be awesome with Tier 2! Try healing guys. Yall been pressing frostbolt for like 20 years… Try something new.
Lol what makes you think i want to heal i dont even decurse thats the restro druids job my job is to spam fireball and ask for evocates
lol. mage parsing is such a meme this phase.