Let’s hope all of this gets some attention mate
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Displacement off the GCD, coldsnap 5 min cd, ice barrier 100% scaling and were straight set with ZG set
The issue is that mage does too little damage overall. Everyone does more damage.
Starsurge, Holy Shock, Shadow Word: Death, Chimeara/Aimed Shot, all hit way harder than Pyroblast. It is ridicolous how many instant cast spells hit harder than a 6 sec Pyroblast.
Interesting suggestions but I think the dev team also need to decide what their vision for mage is in PvP. In regular classic I’d describe mage as highly mobile with enormous burst potential and great cc. They could try to make mage fit this description in SoD but I think it could be very interesting to try out a slightly different approach to how mage could play in pvp.
My personal vision for mages would be giving them lots of shields and reactive buttons they need to press (make advanced warding baseline and adding some tool to mitigate phys/nature more as well probably) and making them bursty but requiring setup and timing for the burst to work.
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In Era Mages have a lot of tools to cast freely. This is where their burst comes from. In SoD all of these tools are lacking because most classes got way more tools to get out.
On the other hand base abiities deal barely any damage in SOD. Rune abilites are strong and abilities with massive bonuses. Some examples are flameshock with 100% bonus damage, holy shock with 50% bonus damage and lots of Spellpower, Star Surge, Shadow Word Death etc. Other abilites got massive buffs to their cost or cast time. Like 2 sec Star Fire or 30 energy backstab/Ambush. It is really hard to keep up as mage.
So your baseline blast wave or Fire Blast do barely anything. Ice Lance is the only rune ability that is worse than baseline abilites.
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buff mage pvp
/10char
Would love to see over heat or living flame changed back to their prenerfed state. As well as fixing the dmg modifier on pyro blast so it didnt feel like it was hitting so softly. Also wouldnt hurt to change the dmg modifier on scorch as well but maybe im asking to much…
Living flame moves waaay too quickly. Meanwhile, shaman wolves…
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They probably should remove the big fire res enchants too. Everyone runs around with 30 fr on cloak. Many with 25 more on shoulders. My pyro tickles because many have 100+ fire res in bgs.
So cut the enchant on shoulders/cloak. Then reduce H2 and H3 requirements by 50 and we’re good.
The thing about mage compared to the other classes is that all our talent trees really work in exclusion from each other and arcane itself is so bare bones it’s barely a talent tree. We could have every single talent in all three trees and it wouldn’t be that ridiculous compared to the modernized SoD versions of other classes. We can’t press all of our buttons all of the time, so what defines our spec and our gameplay is our mental choice to spend a GCD on the highest DPET button or a button that keeps us alive.
It matters little whether that button is a frost, fire, or arcane spell, the design theory of mage is:
stay alive GCD → DPET GCD
sometimes we spend a stay alive GCD proactively so that we can have our next choice to be DPET, but we will always be maximizing DPET. The best mages understand this and it applies to both PvP and PvE.
Developers can make choices to dress it up all they want, it’s fun and flavor, but that’s what it comes down to. At the moment, our stay alive GCDs are proportionally less effective than they were in actual vanilla because the power level of everyone else increased to, in my opinion, where we were around MoP more or less. That means our stay alive GCD choices should resemble MoP: we need Greater Invis, Cauterize, and that sexy 3 min Cold Snap that also healed us. Remember Glyph of Evocation? That could be a rune. It really doesn’t matter, passives like Flameglow save a GCD and offer better survival to a wider player skill base.
My point isn’t for a broad statement of “we need buffs everyone else OP” - my point is logical because you can trace the development of this game and its history. We have always been in an arms race among classes. In SoD, you do not get to say that mages are balanced because we can heal now because you have to spend your GCDs on those heals and when you do that, you are not doing any damage. We’re missing dozens of gameplay elements from talents, glyphs, and abilities that they gave us over the years to be able to maximize our damage output.
The answer is in MoP, not because I liked that expansion, but because that’s the most comparable to how all our SoD classes are functioning right now except mage is still divided into 3 exclusive talent trees and struggling to survive. That is why it feels bad and that is why there are so many threads about this right now.
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The answer may be in MoP, but it’s also been on these very forums and other venues for months. People have a million ideas for how to improve mages and Blizz just needs to go with a few.
Issues (in BGs particularly) that I think are universal
- Food and Water need 3x effectiveness and boost evocation and reduce its CD. Mages still struggle with mana more than any other class. Countless examples of simply dying because cant even cast a spell anymore. Food is even worse. Sacrifice more of our wet noodle dps for a heal spell if you want to heal up quicker and sacrifice more mana or spend 1.5mins (literally) sitting and eating to restore 8kish fully buffed hp. Its more effective to die as a mage and res than to sit and eat - at least WSG has guaranteed hp huts. AB is random.
- Most, mage runes are dispellable. Obviously most power in SoD comes from runes and ours are simply taken away. As alliance in particular, this is complete nonsense. Mage healers have all healing tied to runes that are dispellable and dps mages spamming, for example, BF procs often have them dispelled before they launch somehow.
- HP needs to be baseline 1500-2k more.
- Casting speed and/or range of primary abilities needs to be addressed. You cant expect the squishiest class in the game to have the shortest range and the longest cast times. nonsense.
- For mage healers in particular, address the dmg reduction and heal reduction in BGs double dipping as well as the standard reduced heal to self. These percentages add up pretty quickly to really cripple any effective healing. This is also, again, reliant on very short range spells and long cast times. CSP is a bit better for self healing, but the amount of hp others have takes huge CSP spam to even top people off
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