I legitimately wonder how many times people have brought their fire mage into M+ without Spriest/Augovker
Don’t get me wrong they still do very good damage but it is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, and there’s actually a handful of specs that can beat them rather easily .
These latest nerfs are completely out of line. They deserved their last set of nerfs but that’s where it needed to end. A large % of their power is due to them being paired with other classes.
They do all this work on a mage rework and they’re just gonna dumpster it cause of their dreadful balance of Augvoker.
Mage mains have already eaten so much poop this xpac. They finally get good again and now they’re being targeted by weekly nerfs because of power provided BY OTHER CLASSES.
Augmentation needs to be balanced around giving another player a boost equivalent to the DPS they personally lose. A 1-1-2-1 with an Aug shouldn’t be doing more than a 1-1-3 without an Aug.
Yep.
I expressed the same sentiment earlier too.
Specs that are marginally better are going to be blown out of proportion because Aug will amplify the top 0.1% of players who already flock to the same specs for minor gains.
Then the question has to be asked, why are they not just a regular DPS spec?
I’ve disliked the concept of Support specs since the start and I so far its been going as expected.
Sidegrade, not upgrade. That should be the philosophy behind comparable classes. A class’s playstyle shouldn’t set it above or below any others. This also helps to avoid ‘pressure’ to bring particular classes and make a wider range of team comps viable for larger spreads of content.
The whole idea of fixing the Exodia comp by nerfing every spec in it just some of the most laughable garbage I’ve seen.
The Exodia comp is based around ONE SPEC
ONE. SPEC.
Bears and Hpals is no different than any other tank or healer taking their turn of being the meta favorite. Literally no different than everyone wanting Prot Pally and Resto Shammy for the latter end of season 1.
But what exactly is the class that empowers these specs to new levels? What’s the spec that’s empowering fire mage to levels they’d otherwise never see.
It’s one problem and they treated it as 5 problems. SOooo stupid.
Augmentation is the problem child here but the issue primarily stems from the fact that Augmentation is trying to do something that WoW really isn’t prepared for. For Augmentation to exist the whole of the game’s classes need to be re-evaluated. Alternatively, Aug’s buffs need to be re-assessed to be less problematic, though this may also rob Aug of its primary gameplay loop of focusing on boosting allies by shifting it more toward being a ‘generous DPS’ instead of a ‘support in a DPS slot’.
Speaking as a Warlock who has one spec being absolutely reliant upon the existence of PI to reach those fabtastical numbers people relate Warlock to, and still ends up getting nerfed rather than having the effect PI has on the game looked at… yeah, this was obviously going to happen.
WoW has been built and balanced around personal DPS for… well, forever. There’s been very very few instances of DPS being increased by external factors. About the most you’d see are buffs like Arcane Intellect and Battle Shout, debuffs like what Monks and Demon Hunters put on the target, and Bloodlust, which affects everyone. There were a couple other examples ages ago, like Windfury Totem, which ironically was removed because it was way too important for others DPS.
So it’s only natural that when Blizz starts dabbling in supports and big external DPS cooldowns like PI and Augvoker, especially when you can stack them, that they’d mess up with what semblance of balance they managed to cobble together, and take the wrong lessons from trying to fix it.
Fire Mages are just basically going to get the same treatment that Demo locks and UH DKs have been getting for some time now. Be in a good spot without external buffs, but be overpowered with external buffs, and will be balanced / nerfed because of the effect external buffs have on them.
The main problem is augvokers will either be good and taken in every group or bad and not taken at all, there is no middle ground. This whole spec was a mistake.
Fire before wast terrible. Completely unusable in low keys, and was niche in high keys with coordinated groups.
And that’s not even where fire mage is heading - it’s just heading to be another underpowerd dumpster spec that’s a victim of blizzard playing favorites or refusing to admit their huge Augvoker mistake.
Well, then you run into another massive problem; if pure DPS classes always deal the most damage bar none, then other classes can’t make it into M+; why suffer the hybrid tax when your support character already handles all of the healing duties and your tank handles the defensive duties? A DPS unit’s most important contribution, bar none, is damage. Anything that reduces that effectively reduces the class’s worth in a team. In low-tier content that’s not usually a massive problem, but any M+ progression dreams a player might have are dashed if they’re playing a hybrid DPS class rather than a pure one.
A 1-1-3 should ideally perform the same as any other 1-1-3 or 1-1-2-1 with Aug.
But the entire point of “Support” is to play a spec as if it was a DPS but it actually provides utility.
So if it should:
Play like a DPS
Perform like a DPS
That’s a game design problem though. Dungeons can be more interactive and design decisions can be made so that it would beneficial to bring certain class. Kind of like Court of Stars with the professions. I contend that Mythic+ isn’t healthy to the long term longevity of the game.
Also, the end game for mythic+ IS cookie cutter. Every single high end group is guardian druid, holy paladin, shadow priest, fire mage, augmentation evoker. There is very little deviation from this. So the problem is already happening.
Maybe I’m incorrect about this, but virtually every single leaderboard has fire mage at the top for mythic+ for basically every dungeon for every season.
I’m not arguing that; Augmentation should be a different playstyle of DPS, trading one’s own damage to magnify another’s. A 1-1-3 should perform with 15% of damage coming from the Tank, 10% of damage coming from the support, and 25% of damage coming from each DPS. A 1-1-2-1 with an Augmentation player should still add up to 100%, so to throw numbers around, say 15%/10%/30%/30%/15% or whatnot. The problem is currently arising because, depending on the comp, Aug is causing the party to hit more than 100% of what should be ‘total’ damage; the sum is becoming more than the parts. The necessary evil of standardization is the only way to beat that.