Those who frequent the forums will know I have contributed to the discussion for a very long time and I have played the game even longer prior to that. I have always mained a Mage, specifically Arcane, going into every expansion all the way back to the early Vanilla days. This will change for the first time ever in Midnight because of Blizzard’s ill-advised overhauls to virtually all classes and specs in the game.
Despite being a veteran mage of 20+ years, in the current state of things I can only bring myself to play mage as Frostfire Fire. All other mage spec and hero talent combinations were significantly impacted by, frankly, incompetent changes that made their overall flow and rotations feel cumbersome and frustrating.
Despite being significantly impacted by the excessive ability pruning that has come to define Midnight, Fire largely maintained its core identity while Arcane and Frost completely lost theirs. Frost is unrecognizable and its new Freeze mechanic is deeply flawed, as is the choice to make Ray of Frost its main DPS cooldown without fixing any of the myriad issues that plague the ability. Similarly, Arcane which has long been beleaguered by its inexplicable reliance on mana and lack of coherent talent synergies, has been completely upended by Arcane Salvo, the new gimmick masquerading as a core spec mechanic.
Hero talents also did not make it unscathed with Spellslinger and Sunfury changing to accommodate the Midnight changes and forcing players into a very narrow set of talents and offering virtually no build choices or variety. Frostfire is the only hero talent tree which was not impacted by the spec changes and Frostfire Fire is the only spec/hero talent combination that doesn’t force obnoxious floating nonsense hovering over the player’s head.
At this late stage with only… “minutes to Midnight” I find myself pretty despondent and may not even main Mage for the first time ever unless Blizzard see the error of their ways and correct course in time for the first raid tier.
In this post I am simply sharing my personal views but if you feel the same way I encourage you to sound off below and make your feedback known because while it may go unheeded it definitely won’t be heard if we remain silent.
32 Likes
At this point it feels like Blizzard’s development and story team have some personal grudge against Mages:
- They destroyed our home (Dalaran) and following it decided to not reconstruct it and disband / spread Kirin Tor (Fate of Kirin Tor questline).
- They almost killed our
dawg NPC representative (Khadgar) and left him in the invalid chair.
- Apparently Blizzard decided not to stop at half measures and in Midnight also made a heavy attack against Mage players population with their class changes. It takes literally several minutes of thinking to understand that their general tree and spec changes (especially for Frost and Arcane) would scare many players away from Mages, so i doubt that it happened “accidentally”.
- Most changes made to Mage gameplay either were made by very inexpirienced developers or people that have grudge against Mages specifically or even AI. I doubt that any experienced and non-biased developer would think “lets put AoE Comet Storm behind long and stationary cast of mostly single-target Ray of Frost and lets also remove most kinds of mobile casting including for Ray simultaneously, players would surely love that”.
Don’t take the mentioned above too seriously as it is half-sarcastic, but if Blizzard would just leave Mages in current sorry state for another several patches or even whole expansion it would stop being half-sarcastic and become sad reality.
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Arcane is in such a weird spot ;_; I totally get what you’re saying. I just want fixes to Sunfury. I don’t need it to be #1 damage, I just need it to be not dealing HALF OR LESS than Spellslinger in many aoe pulls lol 
And I need it to do better in single target than it does right now. The patch this week deeeeeeeeeestroooooooyed Sunfury lol
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Is this just about it feeling cumbersome to you? Nearly every video I watch about how classes are performing on beta talks about how arcane mages are in a league of their own right now when it comes to dps. If you don’t like the way it plays because of the pruning, that’s an issue, but I’d hardly say mages are in a sorry state on the beta. Frost is above average and arcane is crazy. Fire is a dead spec though until they do some major tuning. I switch mains every expansion and I know when I frequent this forum because I’m maining mage it tends to be…uh…a wee bit melodramatic, to put it nicely.
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That may have been the case before the recent nerfs (though not to the extend you’re implying) but it definitely isn’t now. Sunfury Arcane was not performing 30% better than any other spec, let alone all of them, and yet that’s roughly what the nerf came out to be. But again, this isn’t even about the DPS tuning, it’s about the core identity of each spec and the proverbial hammer they took to it.
So you really can’t understand how it feels when they absolutely gut the class you’ve played for 20+ years. And that’s fine, that’s your experience and it’s valid but please don’t minimize how others feel because you can’t put yourself in their shoes. I assure there is nothing “melodramatic” about what I’ve said, unless you consider being invested in a video game histrionic but I think we all crossed that bridge when we decided to post on an online forum about it…
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I can’t even play it, logged in twice logged out within 5 mins, always loved the flow of frost, its is a cracked shell of what it once was, its mind numbingly boring in..Just ugly design. But hey frost numbers are up because everyone stopped playing fire and arc so I guess some body likes it
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I’m still shocked that they’re going live with this 12 seconds on / 48 seconds AFK version of Fire.
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The numbers aren’t really relevant right now given it’s beta/prepatch, most valid criticism doesn’t really have anything to do with dps performance. In recent modern WoW, Blizzard has been pretty good at balancing dps and allowing even the “worst” specs to be competitive and clear content outside of maybe hof/rwf.
The class just feels absolutely awful to play now. Most specs have been pretty heavily pruned so it isn’t just mage that feels bad to play, and it’ll be interesting to see how the playerbase writlarge adapts. At least part of the reason that this feels so outsized for mage is that it’s almost always been a higher skill ceiling class. Even with the immense simplicity of TWW’s sunfury arcane rotation, the mechanic capacities of mage were (relatively) highly dependent on individual player skill, so it makes sense that the oversimplification of the game feels disproportionately impactful to mages. An easy example here is comparing the speed of fire to the past few expansions vs. now, the spec has been absolutely destroyed in terms of its playstyle. Even if the dps were to be top-tier, it feels like playing a watered-down version of legion’s play, but without even the skillcheck on cinderstorm.
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I was talking about Spellslinger, since that was the broken one that was blasting everybody. But yeah, if it’s not about the DPS tuning then fair enough.
However, I absolutely do know how you feel. I mained a wizard in EverQuest 2 for 11 years and they gutted it (made it feel bad AND do awful dps in that case though), which is when I started bouncing around from class to class in MMOs. So I’ve been in your shoes and it sucks. That’s why I was genuinely asking if it was just about whether it’s cumbersome, because the numbers we have available show that Spellslinger Arcane is at or near the top in the beta, so if this were about DPS I would feel as if it’s a “the sky is falling” situation considering Frost and (especially) Arcane are performing well numbers-wise.
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Right, which is why I specifically asked that. Like you said, it’s beta/prepatch so the numbers are subject to change, but obviously if it’s about dps we have to go off the available data.
I was asking because the post didn’t seem clear to me whether complaints about dps numbers were included. It seems like a good idea to clarify whether that’s a part of the complaint or not, because if anybody looks at this thread for feedback and they think it’s a dps complaint but arcane is performing at or near the top, they’ll almost certainly just ignore the post entirely and write it off as exaggerated.
This is what I do not understand in the slightest. I can comprehend something being too strong so it’s nerfed (though I struggle to understand how things need 28% nerfs). I can grasp the concept of seeing something potentially posing a problem in pvp so it’s nerfed in pve or vice versa (even though I still maintain pvp and pve should be entirely separate trees). What I cannot fathom is why you OBLITERATE one spec because it’s “over performing in single target” and want to “increase it’s aoe potential” and decide nerfing it’s main aoe spell is the way. Nor can I grasp how you do the above but then make the other hero tree a 3 button overpowered spec.
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Oh I know. That was my point. It was Spellslinger that was “overperforming” but they nuked Sunfury instead because reasons, lol. It just goes to show they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and whatever numbers they’re looking at are completely skewed.
Yeah, like I said it’s not even about the numbers. It’s never been about that for me. The way I see it, someone always has to be at the bottom of the DPS charts and as long as you’re not detrimental to your group’s overall performance your place on the damage meters makes absolutely no difference.
I just don’t understand what they were thinking with these changes. I know what they said they wanted to do at the outset and it all sounded great on paper but in reality they didn’t accomplish anything they set out to do and in many, if not most, cases actually ended up making things worse. Which is wild to me because they should know how to do these things, it’s literally their job and it’s not even that difficult to do especially when the players (many of whom know more about the game than the current developers themselves) were telling them exactly what needed to be done.
I have been on the mage feedback thread on the Beta forums almost since the start and the vast majority of the feedback provided was stellar and 100% on point. Yet it all went completely ignored. The worst part is that they’ve never even said why they disagreed with what the players wanted or why it wasn’t possible to do. That’s the part that frustrates the most, the complete lack of communication.
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Overall tuning means nothing in beta and prepatch. Gameplay is in shambles.
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That’s simply not true. When you have people pushing +20 keys on beta it’s ridiculous to pretend that means nothing, especially considering it’s the ONLY data we have to go on with a 10 level increase coming. Balancing is subject to change, but that’s true 100% of the time whether it’s live or beta.
Either way, I don’t want to turn the thread into a back and forth about the usefulness of beta numbers out of respect for the OP, so I’ve said my opinion on that and if you disagree then we’ll just have to leave it at that. For you, OP, #makemagesfunagain.
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It means nothing because that’s hardly ever going to translate into tuning for the expansion. Prepatch is always a joke and beta isn’t the final product when it comes to tuning. There’s also always major tuning after Heroic raid week. Prepatch and beta overall tuning means nothing. Prepatch is always a clownfest of unbalanced specs because they are unfinished and WoW is always balanced around max level when everybody has access to all their tools.
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What part of “it’s not fun to play” don’t you understand? Long term spec players don’t give two hoots about how much damage their spec does, they want it to be fun to play.
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You need to re-read the whole conversation and see if you have any more luck comprehending it the second time.
For real - could not care less about numbers right now. It’s just straight up not mechanically enjoyable. I’m all for change/simplification - nobody wants their spec to get stale or be staring at a bunch of spinning weakauras - but the moment-to-moment gameplay just feels really lacking right now (speaking mostly to Fire).
On one hand, sure, Fire had its problems - namely the punishing aspect of constantly chasing CDR and being hugely uptime reliant. And sure, everything you were doing was in the name of trying to get to a ~1m CD on Combust, which we were just handed. BUT: that was what kept you actively engaged between Combust/SKB cycles. By just setting Combust at 1m, with virtually nothing meaningful to do 80% of the time, it just feels super boring and incomplete. Nobody wants to just hardcast Fireball/Flamestrike with nothing else interactive going on. It just feels like there’s minimal agency to anything.
All it really needs is ONE additional ability or mechanic beyond Hot Streak to bridge the Combust cycle gap and (in my opinion) it’d be rotationally good to go.
And no, Pyroclasm ain’t it. We all loved Fire for its mobility - an RNG “opportunity” to hardcast yet another thing (without SKB to make it exciting and Ice Floes to make it manageable) just flies directly in the face of that.
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Numbers matter a lot. They are essential to ensure that we have the freedom to choose the playing style we prefer; otherwise, the numbers themselves end up forcing everyone to follow the same rotation.
At the moment, a significant portion of the complaints is specifically related to performance.
1 Like