PvE you are C tier. There aren’t really any D tier specs in TBC, so I retract the trash statetent.
Man you really are a meta gamer huh, you even got the tier list videos loaded up!
Actually those place the mages higher. I know better.
Thats right you got that actual tbc memory.
This is pretty much what all the Gatekeepers are currently touting.
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Its so funny to me the way people think.
Not quite what they said.
The argument, from what I gather, is that Mage isn’t #1 in terms of DPS, and is asking for you to prove otherwise in TBC by out DPSing the Hunters and Warlocks, which are your most obvious competition for the #1 DPS slot.
Even the most uncharitable interpretation of his argument would be that if you can’t beat a Hunter or Warlock, you are trash.
To be clear, I don’t really agree with that assessment, but let’s be fair.
That doesn’t really make sense. The scale changes to reflect the bottom and top.
If the difference between the lowest DPS and the highest DPS is only 5%, the lowest DPS is still F tier.
If we’re using the standard S > A > B > C > D > F, then Mages are a solid A once you get into T5 content.
No, they clearly aren’t.
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What unique utility do Mages bring? I think most run Arcane, and I assume Ignite is still a thing, but outside of having a few Mages for it… is there a reason past the first Mage?
EDIT: A google suggests that Fire is the go-to spec, so that makes things a bit more obvious with Ignite, but even then… again, what utility? I assume rolling Ignite is still a thing so there’s a critical mass of Mages?
Nope.
Arcane Brilliance, Amplify/Dampen Magic, Counterspell, and Spellsteal, the latter of which is pretty important for some (an?) encounters.
Ah, Ignite doesn’t work that way anymore?
Right, but like the sole Arms or Ret, that’s covered by one Mage. Might be a bit of heavy lifting that way - but it’s doable.
I was just curious if there was a reason to bring more than one for a sweaty comp. Since, honestly, they seem to do less damage than Rogues especially in later tiers.
The Burning Crusade Patch 2.0.1 (2006-12-05):
No longer limited to one Ignite per target. All mages now get their own Ignite debuff.
Ignite no longer gains stacks from subsequent critical strikes.
Ignite will now reset the DoT duration when reapplied.
Yeah. That’s why I said there’s no reason for another Mage past the first. You only bring 1.
Fair enough, so yeah. Not really a huge reason outside of lots of Mages right now.
Well, depends on availability I guess. I’m not sure all the Mages will reroll, especially with RMP being popular.
With raid sizes cutting down to 25, there’s going to be a lot more people looking for a guild than there are raid slots available.
All the super populated classes in Classic because some of the least populated in TBC, i.e. Mage, Rogue, Fury Warrior. At least as far as raid comps go, anyway.
Maybe not, but they don’t need to raid to do arenas.
I think that’s taking it a bit too far, and what he’s saying can be legitimate (without commenting on the accuracy of his specific statement, about which I don’t know enough to judge). If that 5% between bottom and top is small compared to expected differences in individual performances, and also small compared to the gap between successful and unsuccessful teams, then it doesn’t really make sense to grade specs in such a way–to take it to an extreme, let’s say that SD of parses (over the population, within-class) is ~20% of the mean, but the difference between classes is <1%. Then, a very slightly above average player of the worst spec beats an average player of the best spec, which means the specs are practically equivalent. Do you still rate the bottom spec as F?
Furthermore, many people find it more intuitive to use a sort of hybrid of relative and absolute grading systems where, say, A-D are relative but F is reserved for options that are seriously flawed to the point where they can’t handle the task in question and S is something that clearly dominates the other options with no significant drawbacks, or something to that effect.
e.g. let’s say you need to do ~800 DPS average to clear the content and the raid impact of the top spec is ~1k or so and the second best spec is ~500, worst is 200. Then, you can’t really say that the second best is a B-tier spec–you would say that everything is F except the top-rated spec, because that’s the only one that’s not a millstone.
Then you cant make an accurate tier list in the first place as we dont know the health pools of the bosses in TBC and we sure dont know an accurate dps count for all specs.
Yes, because the difference the difference there is the skill of each player. The worst spec is still the worst spec, so assuming equal skill level, they should fall into their relative gradings.
Now I say good luck getting the specs to be within <1% DPS of each other, because Blizzard hasn’t managed that for even a single tier in the entirety of the game’s lifespan. They’re a lot better about it now in retail (last I checked, anyway), but it’s still something like 5-10% difference between the best and worst specs, but retail also has a lot of other factors like survivability cooldowns, raid cooldowns, etc.
Okay, that’s fine, then just make D the worst and F a special case of abject failure.
In that sort of grading system, Arcane is still an A because its damage is great but not the best, and some specs are still a D, capable of dealing sufficient damage to kill bosses but being notably the worst at it of all the specs available. To say there are no D specs is to suggest that there is no relative gradings; it is all absolute. I think that sort of defeats the purpose of grading them like that in the first place.
I see what you did there, clearly its rogue loot, these peasants just don’t know.
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Nope, Shadowlands was terrible because the top was 30% more dps than the bottom specs, it was insane.
They literally have a balance patch every week.
This week for example they handed out another wave of buffs, they gave 3% more dps to the bottom specs, after they had just buffed them the previous weeks.
Blizzard has become trash at balance and making good expansions.
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They do this on purpose to keep the playerbase in a continual state of dissatisfaction. I think the goal is to keep people thinking, “Next patch is when they’ll fix it…just gotta wait until next patch…”
This is retail in a nutshell. So many people are continually falling for this.
It will never be balanced.
…until next expansion…maybe…maybe… 
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Retail is just going backwards.
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