Well I’ve been a Mage main, Arcane specifically, since Vanilla and there have been lots of ups and downs over the years but I’ve stuck with it. These last few expansions since Legion, however, have been really taxing. BfA was boring as hell until the very end when corruptions were allowed to get out of hand on purpose. SL was a nightmare and felt like such a slog I ended up quitting a WoW expansion for the first time ever. And now in DF almost every spec feels bad to play because of how poorly the talent trees were designed across the board. Even if you do manage to create a build you enjoy chances are it will almost certainly not have the numbers and the builds that do feel awful and terribly clunky to play. Pretty much everyone I know, including myself, has done lots of alt hopping trying in vain to find something they actually enjoy but alas it’s just not there. At the end of the day I think it comes down to playing the spec you least hate rather than the one you like… unfortunately that’s just the reality of DF.
Thats reallly bad for the game over all so i hope they get it together.
I tell my highschool students the best advice ive ever been given was find the job you hate the least. Only a few lucky people find jobs they actually like and fewer who love them.
The game we play shouldnt follow thr same ideology.
I’ve been reading posts here on the mage forum and playing Mage to AoTC since it all began in early-mid 2000’s and this is one of the first posts I have ever responded to.
This is the MOST ACCURATE (Pusple’s) post I have ever read. Mage is Very Sweaty to just reach mid pack DPS in any raid content that has any movement at all. Designing Mage DPS around RoP is horribly flawed and Incanter’s Flow is a poor option.
At this point, with the many many years of Mage I have played, I won’t abandon it. That being said, if you are just starting I fully agree with Pusple’s recommendation against rolling Mage.
Other than just sticking it out with MM hunter and ita flaws because i do enjoy the general game play deapite the flaws, what range class do you think is a good option.
I was looking at mage because ice veins fb build looks similar to MM style hunter. But it sounds like they basically have the same issues in design in a game that keeps adding more and more movement requirements.
Yup, mage main since UO, (Yes, I know most of you have no clue what that even is) my guild migrated to wow on release. Mage was incredibly fun when wow came out and stayed that way for the first few expansions. If it were not for how fun it used to be a lot of us would have re rolled long ago. If you get a taste of playing a mage that is designed/tuned well, you will never want to main anything else. There is people who un sub when mage is bad and come back when new changes are made just in hopes it will be like it once was. I say all of this to say, rolling mage now is not a good idea. As much as I love this class, now is probably one of the worst mage experiences you can have. I don’t think you will have fun as a fresh mage at this time.
Hey, I thought I’m giving a piece of my opinion on this matter.
So… in my opinion, you can totally reroll to a (frost) mage. Now I don’t have much experience in PVP… in PvE I am a mage playing on EU since legion ToS, multiple CE-s, so I pretty much saw periods when mages were super bad and super good.
Right now frost mage is in a pretty okay/good situation. Blizz addressed a lot of frustrating elements of frost mages, like in Legion/BFA I had situations where I was just spamming frost bolt and after 7~ casts still did not got a single FoF or BF procs… now in DF I have 0 issues like this anymore, which is pretty cool.
Although we have clear weaknesses:
Notably 3-6 target AoE, burst AoE and situations where both AoE and ST are needed. We either spec full ST or AoE and cannot really do both without damaging the other part significantly.
Right now theoretically frost mages sim the best on patchwork ST and there are some bosses with 2~ ish targets where frost mage feels godlike. More notably Sennarth and Kurog.
(using 10.0 and 10.5 logs cause in 10.7 other classes got buffed over us more notably affliction warlocks become OP)
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2605&dataset=95®ion=1
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#boss=2592&dataset=95®ion=1
Another thing you might want to consider that is frost mage right now is one of the most secondary stat hungry classes out there. You will see significant differences between a 380 ilvl mage and a 418 ilvl mage with optimal stats. A lot of people in the forums complain here about their mage being out DPS-ed, but honestly, most of the reason is that their mage has low and awfully secondary stat distribution.
This is similar to mm. I got a side grade item, same ilvl, but optimal secondaries and it was a 1k dps increase.
If you find mage fun then go ahead and play it. All three specs are middle of the pack in all content with frost being the best raid spec. If you enjoy M+ I’d advise against mage because all three specs are bad except for fire in keys higher than 22. I play every caster and I regret not making my warlock my main. With the buffs they have surpassed mages in all forms of content. Also all three warlock specs use haste/mastery unlike mage where all three specs need different stat priority so you can easily changes specs whenever you want. The one thing I love about mage is we have the best defensive’s and you should be the last person to die in a wipe if used correctly.
The defense and mobility a mage has available to me is what draws me. I was thinking ice anyways as it looks like it would fit the style of what i feel a caster should be. Pvp wise they have a good level of control and are always at high level of play despite any down sides.
I actually hate m+ and only do it because i need to fill vault sloghts for better itemization and valor.
Also mage is literally the only thing ive never played past 20.
Uh imagine being mage, but only getting nerfs and a rework that didn’t fix clipping. Stay away, we are worse off than mages. There are no evoker dps in the top mythic+ runs. There are mages in top mythic+ runs.
I hated my evoker.