You’re the one lecturing people on how to use Rune of Power. You think you know better than people who actually do high M+ keys, raid or PvP? You think you know better than Mage theorycrafting and simulations?
Because I can assure you, Mages don’t only use RoP on bosses. It would be a gigantic DPS loss if we kept it off cooldown 80% of the entire dungeon.
Oh but no, “I use RoP on rares and I think it’s fine, therefore everyone else needs to stop complaining about it”.
That kind of talk is about the meters and never about downing any mobs or the challenge.
Did I say anything about the correct way on how to use the ability? The answer is No. the only person who did this is you.
All I said is “how I use it in my situation” (albeit paraphrasing)
Yes, here:
Which is just false.
That’s not telling people on how to use the spell. That’s just my personal view on how I see the spell. But obviously you’re gonna deflect.
I don’t think mages can deflect.
Using “is” and “used only on” is you claiming something as a fact. Next time, say “I use it only on bosses and rares, I don’t use it on normal mobs.”
They are which is why the people advocating for RoP to be removed should be ignored.
Problem is, our burst windows keep getting nerfed as well due to the power creep of RoP. Combustion was nerfed for fire b/c of RoP’s imbalance.
Yeah — basically, if you can’t entirely skip a throughput talent you don’t like and make up the difference elsewhere in the tree, there’s probably a problem. There really ought to be more throughput talents than you can fit into a single build, such that there are several reasonably competitive builds available and no single talent needs to appear in all of them.
I was just calling out your statement because it’s wrong. RoP is used a lot more than you made it out to be.
I mean many players already have. There are at least a few people in these forums who either picked up a different class, left retail, or quit completely. The issue is that many of us are long-time Mages and don’t want to see the class become a shadow of what it once was. We remember when the class was amazing to play, and are disappointed at what it has become or the direction we are pushed into (for example mandatory talents). I don’t think that after telling Blizzard for 10 years that we don’t like a talent it’s unreasonable for these same players to be unhappy that ROP is becoming more and more mandatory. I personally am not interested in raiding as melee and find the other casters to be bland or weird to play, so at this stage I am passing on DF.
Which in itself is a design flaw, and pushed more and more recently due to the increase in focus on M+ rather than raid bosses which tend to be longer and even out in the end. I have no personal issue with high-burst specs, provided they are balanced right, and Mage still has that in the form of Fire and Arcane. Frost however is not a burst spec, and short of a massive redesign it won’t be. However, even for sustained damage profiles ROP is well ahead of IF which makes it feel bad and means the talent is mandatory for all 3 specs.
It basically is at this stage, and that’s what a lot of the complaints are about. Having a mandatory talent that doesn’t feel fun to use and is realistically nothing more than a damage cooldown to stack with your spec cooldowns isn’t what a lot of players want. If there were actual viable choices then it wouldn’t get the complaints it does, but as it is right now there are plenty of Mages who will not play a Mage if ROP is baseline or the only option.
I guess I’m insane for liking both old mage and current mage then. I was at my absolute sweatiest in Wotlk (world 50-60 hard mode ulduar kills, server top 5 sarth 3d, yadda yadda) and sure I loved the playstyle of arcane at the time… deciding when to turn a mana bar into insane dmg, getting innervate over a healer (I can’t remember if that carried over from BC or not tbh, I don’t play classic now), etc. But current arcane is also fun…the build up to that huge barrage is a ton of fun to me and in between it doesn’t feel much different than it used to, except mostly missiles instead of ab.
And more importantly I think the discussion around what is mandatory has gotten confused. There were always optimal talents, which to some makes them mandatory. And in the modern era I’ve done 15s where I was in a new covenant and forgot to set up a soulbind. Literally no conduits. And it was fine. I wasn’t top dmg obviously but it was fine, we timed. You could still be competitive against most average DPS with IF (maybe not without conduits though 
)
If you wanted to play at the high end in wrath you had to take the good stuff, same applies now. If you want to play content that most people do and take whatever talents you want, you can still pull your weight.
Maybe I’m wrong but I think a lot of what’s necessary and what isn’t comes down to community perception. And if there are mandatory talents now then there have always been mandatory talents.
Maybe we like our mage, but just don’t like it being chained to RoP?
funny how the conclusion that some people draw from not liking one specific spell is to just quit the class entirely
I’d agree if RoP weren’t a 40 percent power increase with high uptime when incanter’s flow at its best is a 20 percent increase and mage base damage for sustain wasn’t pitifully low.
Players of every skill level will just take RoP. Even low-challenge players.
Players who do the mid-difficulty stuff (normal to heroic raiding, 10+ keys) will always take RoP because it’s required to pull weight.
Nah, some of us just take IF and call it a day. One less keybind.
when the spell is SO overpowered that the entire class revolves around it, then yeah… that seems like a reasonable conclusion. Is like Paladin and wings, if you don’t like wings, then you probably shouldn’t play paladin because the whole class is built around that spell; but wings is a much more fun CD than ROP could ever be.
To back up my argument that for most content it really doesn’t matter, I went ahead and did a weekly key with IF tonight. 2 chested a 17 streets, was 3rd overall by 100 dps (14k for me, 14.1k on a 290 fury warr, and 16k on a 294 outlaw rogue), top dmg by FAR on 3/5 boss fights and 2nd on the other two. Most 5+ target pulls I was still able to pull anywhere from 30-50k in combust.
I still hold that “mandatory” is a community perception issue more than anything. I’ve spent a lot of my wow time playing whatever I wanted to (which sure, sometimes coincided with what was best) and had a ton of fun along the way.
I don’t disagree though that with a 5-10% buff IF would feel better to play while still not remotely outperforming rop.
I know this thread really has become circular, but just wanted to try it out to see. It wasn’t that awful and I’d argue at an even lower key level it would feel better because things more often don’t live long enough to really squeeze all of the benefit from rop.
I do agree, and certainly even in classic talent trees there were always those you took over others. I think in part that was why the initially changed to the Cata/MoP style talents, because there was so much cookie-cutter going on. That said, while I understand there will always be optimal talents and a ‘meta’ build, it becomes a problem when the dps gap between the two is so wide that the other is not really an option if you do anything outside of world quests or heroic dungeons.
Unfortunately with its current tuning RoP fits that to a T and the alternative ‘choice’ is so far behind that you are going to pick RoP for 99% of content. I don’t know too many Raid Leaders who will happily allow you to do 20% less damage than you could because you won’t take 1 talent. Imagine if BM Hunter had a talent node where the choice was to use a pet, or have your abilities do 10% more damage. Of course they will all take the pet, because 50% > 10%.
I also won’t argue that a good player can’t produce numbers using sub-optimal talents. If you’re a 99% parser with RoP consistently, and the RNG gods smile on you then yes you can perform well with IF. Likewise, if you do content with 50% parsers there’s a very good chance you can compete/beat their damage. For the majority of players though, they are going to see a very noticeable difference by not taking RoP and as anyone who pugs has found, community perception can affect your chances of getting a run.
Fair, and my main arguments here have really been more that rop is more interesting to me than IF, that I don’t understand why IF is more fun to others (not that I have to understand it to be valid), and that I don’t think removing rop entirely is the solution (which has been an argument by some, though not all)