This isn’t a “buff Mage” post. It’s about the full picture: spec diversity, survivability, and the growing attention gap between classes.
Look at Warlock this patch. Affliction is well balanced. Demonology is dominating and still out of hand after multiple rounds of nerfs. On top of all that damage, Warlocks are incredibly tanky. They put out top-tier numbers while shrugging off mechanics other classes have to respect.
Now look at Mage. Frost is our best M+ option and it’s still lackluster. Fire and Arcane aren’t functional enough to justify bringing. Our defensives got gutted, so we spend more globals babysitting our survival than actually doing damage. Warlocks get to be durable and dominant. Mages get to be fragile and undertuned.
Blizzard has the bandwidth to repeatedly try nerfing Demonology but can’t manage a single pass to bring any Mage spec up. They’re spending patch cycles on a Warlock overperformance problem while Mage sits untouched at the bottom with fewer survival tools than we had last season.
The ask isn’t complicated. We’re not asking for Demonology numbers. We’re asking for Affliction-level attention. One thoughtful pass that makes our specs work and gives us back enough survivability to focus on doing our jobs instead of spamming defensives.
Bring Frost up to genuinely competitive. Give Fire and Arcane enough love that spec choice is real. Look at what was taken from our defensive toolkit, because right now it’s not “glass cannon vs tanky caster.” It’s glass peashooter vs tanky cannon.
Every spec should be a real option. Mage doesn’t have one that feels good, has two that don’t work, and dies too much in the process.
You love sitting there spamming arcane blast to build up harmony stacks and finally casting arcane surge into touch and barrage orb then on your next barrage you hear “I need a target, I have to target something fist"
Um, no. There are PLENTY of arcane spells in the game from enemies (Ellisande, last boss in Highmaul, Nightborne, etc) that Blizz could easily give to us. Illusion would be way too complicated for them. We had working mirror images and they managed to screw that up.
My main issue with the spec right now. Having to spend 10 seconds building up salvo before I can actually dps while most classes just press cds and go nuts. And doing open world content is annoying because we can either take forever to kill a rare with AB spam or pop cds and watch it die halfway through then back to no damage for 90 seconds.
They design specs around +15’s and mythic raiding. I did a bunch of keys last week and when the tanks go pack to pack i do no dps. I love seeing halo hit 3 mobs lol and mind blast/voidblast on a 7 second cd. I’m not sure what make me enjoy the game less, the lack luster content or how boring the specs i liked are.
I genuinely don’t think they do. There is no physical way they don’t know Arcane and Fire are severely underperforming even if they don’t track the data internally because all of it is publicly available anyway. They simply have no idea how to shift the paradigm in a meaningful way without completely ruining the flow and feel of a spec (like they did with the Midnight reworks) and as a result have been completely paralyzed. The fact that they’ve also locked themselves into an untenable production schedule for the World Soul Saga doesn’t help either.
All of that said, there is absolutely no reason why they can’t at the very least do simple tuning passes to at least try and bridge the vast chasm in damage output. The more fundamental structural changes can wait. Though frankly I wouldn’t expect much on that front from developers who could not come up with anything more engaging than the Salvo mechanic…
Same thing for me. I get it’s a timed dungeon and the goal is to get through as fast as possible. But when ALL of my damage is in a 20s burst window with a 90s cd, it’s effectively blow up a pack, do squat on the next, maybe blow up the next one, repeat and hope I time it so I have cds for the boss. All the while praying that I have a healer who realizes I have 20% of the defensives I had last expansion and need constant babysitting.
DR back on mirror images 5% per image
Heal back on ice cold, it’s such a long cool down it will only matter for solo content.
Make barrier work like shimmer, off the GCD and castable while casting other things.
Let Touch of the magi us full salvo stacks (via the capstone talents). Get rid of the “ground aura” bit and have totm just explode for aoe damage when it bursts. Half the max amount of salvo we can spend at once, and adjust the talents to reflect it (not the damage boost, but if we can only spend/benefit from10 salvo at once but can have up to 20, it’ll make the rotation smoother).
Give combust the CDR mini game back so fire has something to do during down time.
Let frost open with Glacial Spike again, move all the benefits on ray of frost to glacial spike as well.
Adjust numbers so being this squishy is worth the DPS. Or give us more active defense since we have 0 passive defense.
I would love spike to be my opener again. Well, being honest, I would really rather play the TWW version of Frostfire versus what we have now, but eh. To be honest, my biggest bug bears that I think could be address relatively easily with frost at the moment are:
Provide a choice node of ice floes / shimmer like we used to have. I know shimmer has it’s fans, but I prefer ice floes in pretty much every situation.
Blizzard (the spell) needs to be addressed. It’s terrible. It doesn’t benefit from Frost’s mastery at all, so it’s damage is extremely lacking, and the talents don’t help much. Granted, the frost tree itself is a confusing mess, but it really doesn’t feel good to have to put a point into a spell I’m never going to cast in any content. I think that the spell should deal it’s damage in a much better time frame (rain of fire for context’s sake deals all it’s damage in 5 seconds versus blizzards 10), as well as generate shatter procs on enemies.
I think the entire class honestly needs a lot more work than what we have at the moment, but if at least these changes could be made alongside mirror image being made a defensive again it would be a step in the right direction. Oh, and give Arcane mages the Greater invis damage reduction effect, too.
M+ methinks the answer is easy, just make Frozen Orb a 30 second cooldown That allow frost to compete with all the specs that have a 30 sec or less AoE cooldown
20% DR back on MI and Blastwave would go a long way to bridge the utility and survivability gap. Increasing the soft caps on AoE by +3 would go a long way in closing the M+ dps gap.
You’re right. It isn’t complicated. It’s to the point where it seems quite deliberate.
Both of those would be huge. 20% DR on MI and Blastwave is a “give us back what we already had” change, no design wizardry required. And +3 to AoE soft caps is the cleanest way to close the M+ gap without risking single-target balance. I’d even be ok with them keeping the cap and just buffing the damage.
That last line is what gets me. When the fixes are this obvious and this low-effort, the silence stops reading as “they’re working on it” and starts reading as a choice.
I was mostly memeing, that said an illusion based caster could 100% work. They could draw inspiration from Mesmer/Mirage in GW2. They could use the tech they had on intelligent mirror images in Torghast and turn Mirror Images into the Illusionists main 2 min CD.
I’m not saying your idea is bad, but that there is a 0.0% chance they wouldn’t screw it up. This is the same “team” that nerfed arcane 4 times in the first month of the game then wonders why it’s dead last in raids and meh in m+.
Aside from the healer spec (which would need a dedicated specialization), these would’ve been interesting ideas for hero trees. I find our hero talents to be insanely lackluster (at least as arcane) and this would’ve put more pizazz into them.
Personally, I’m not a fan of pet or summon builds, so all I know is that I wouldn’t want to see Arcane turn into an illusions / conjuration / healing spec. But a hero tree that dipped into the concept a little bit would be interesting.