I’ve been silently screaming all season because there is basically no time in any M+ dungeon to dig into damage. I am constantly pressing other buttons, mostly stops, dispels, and on-GCD defensives (despite mage having a ton of defensives I’m constantly out of them)
Then, either stuff in dungeons dies near as fast as a leveling normal, or by the time mobs have enough health to not die so fast then you have to lay out your defensives on a spreadsheet.
I do think one of the biggest culprits causing this is the botched job Blizzard did on trying to spread damage out over time more. Somehow this instead wound up being the most one-shotty season ever, still. Well, two shots – because just about any two spam casts will kill me on anything above a 10.
And the thing is you can’t see who the spam casts are targeting without addons, so I will put it out there that the way that the game is designed, you are not going to time 12’s if you don’t have addons, and a healthy amount of weakauras/plater/etc to tell you that you are being targeted by a spell.
Maybe it is just that I am a clothie. Every dungeon I run there are moments where I have to dump all my defensives and stops just to survive, and then I don’t have something effective for when I’m “supposed” to use a defensive like on a boss AOE ability. But I -had- to use it on the spam casts or I would have died.
Ultimately I’m not having fun this season, I’m sick of the stress of staying alive. It’s very annoying to die to invisible things WHILE rotating defensives and dodging everything, but two throw fleshes and I’m dead without any in-game warning (aside from my addons).
M+ has lost its way. It used to be way more fun, pulling a ton of stuff and doing big damage. Frantically fighting to stay alive vs a one-pack pull just isn’t the same, it’s not fun for me.