You are technically right, and all, BUT :
This kind of feedback could make them think that “It is only a number problem but the mechanic itself is ok enough”
It’s been 5 years + they did only tweaks this counter-interesting mechanic. And each time, it’s still a problem. It’s still not interesting. Because the core consept isn’t. And that will never change if they don’t take the problem seriously.
That’s why i think this kind of balancing feedback should be made later, imo, at a time when there is no hope for anything new.
This is my personal opinion, but at a time like this, where things can still change a lot, this is the time to ask for something else, very very different.
They should adjust the base and burst potential ,spreading the removed potential on the whole tree instead. I’m confident that with the right adjustments, the mage would still be very desirable where burst is necessary. They just have to put this missing power on the different burst actives and passives and a bit on the base damage spell of the mage.
I don’t know what to put instead of rune. Could really be something like a choice, but not necessarily, as everything seems like a choice in DF.
Could be a CC, a Damaging or Defensive (we already have alot in class tree) ability, or anything else actually.
Something like a black hole like in Diablo could be really fun and increase the number of classes that can grab and/or pack ennemies actively. Although Mage already excell in control, so could very well be unbalanced in pvp, by design.
An Arcane Ray working similarly to the Azeroth heart’s ray could also be really funny and satisfying, with the counterpart of still not being very interractive with the specs mechanics.
But it could be simply anything. Anything but something like a base damage buff. Forcing them to just kill our base damage to keep the burst controllable. Typically with a whole spell multiplier like that, every single spell can become a problem for balancing. Perhaps the real problem is actually the Rune and IF ?
I’m not against some skill that also need to be setup. The arcane Ray idea (for example) could be something like that, preventing from moving without cancelling it, and do increased damage over channelling time to make it rewarding for the risk. But this shouldn’t make our other damages go that low when out. As this is a self contained spell, powerful by itself, and preventing you to do anything else during it.
I don’t want my ideas to be implemented, i just wanted to show that skill that are powerful by itself and don’t boost your whole damage give devs a lot more options of balancing keeping the classe’s health good in every situation.
(Burst too strong or too weak ? Change some burst things without affecting direct damages)
(Constant damage is causing problem, just boosting them should not affect that much the burst)
They have to understand the RoP and IF are not OK. It’s been a lazy, unsatisfying and troublesome design from the very start and we are very aware of it. Each additional year feels like they just given up on working on interesting mechanic for the Mage or just don’t want to see how much people hate this from the very first day it was added. Personally, this day, i just felt they removed the Mage class i decided to play back in vanilla to replace it with the RoP class. It was like a betrayal.