Mages are always good because the baseline kit of the mage is very good no matter what spec to play in any meta. Nova, Blink, Ice block, shield/armor and Polymorph DR will always mage good no matter what they are just a very good core set of abilities.
So why doesn’t it matter if mages are always good with atleast 1 spec:? Because they are a linchpin of many different types of compositions such as rm, most wizard cleaves, mage melee X. Every class in the game to some extent should have viable alternatives to playing one comp or archetype of composition.
What is extremly degenerate about mage is how well it can dampen with slows yet do all of its damage with instant casts and to that I agree mages are dumb; mind u it is an arms race between what the mage can do and what melee players /shamans can do to stop the mage from playing the game.
How I would fix mages is give EVERY healer not just priest 2 dispels instead of 1 and reduce all the stupid interrupts cooldowns from the game and make mages cast for damage with shatter combos or glacial spike type abilities. I think this would make mages more easy to play against while also easier for mages to play the game.
The current Klepto change is also a massive change and may make pally mage alot weaker. If you haven’t seen the change it is that only arcane mages have kleptomania now meaning that any druid team cant have hots klepto’d, so since druids are already very hard to CC as a mage this will potentiall make them very powerful into mages.
TLDR: Mages are always good for reasons that don’t matter but are very dumb at the same time due to how they deal damage and can turtle a game.
Mage spells should go back to costing mana, like Poly now consumes the same amount of mana as spellsteal and main dps spells should consume like 2-3k mana on the dot. Basically make them disc, but dps.
One of PvP devs is mage main probably. The old PvP dev who left the team, Chris Kaleiki was a Disc priest main, Disc also has always been a strong spec until recently. After his departure disc slowly started to become choice of only low cr people and jungle players’.
One of PvP devs also mained Destro Lock at least during BfA most likely. The most disgusting thing in the PvP history.
The reason why mage has been op this expansion is, if you lock them on arcane, they use fire school, if you lock fire, they use arcane, if you lock arcane and fire, they use frost school. There is no way of stopping them but if you interrupt an Affli lock, they can only use covenant ability, Soul Rot, lol.
I believe it comes from the last few years of mages doing well in tournaments and ladder because of the broken things I mentioned.
Mage Pally Rogue/Warrior- The great basic kit + instant Damage added ontop of paladins that have stun, blind and immunities to keep the mage agressive and reseting damge.
Mage Lock healer- the great basic kit + insane amounts of slows to dampen out matches.
Both those comps contribute to these mindsets because to be fair those dumb things I mentioned are why mages have done so well in the last 2 xpacks especially.
I like the dude’s IRL personality but in-game his bias is sooooo bad, not only towards mages but towards any aspect of the game that mildly inconveniences him and it disgusts me
last time i saw him ganking darkshire on stream he cried when ally grouped up and killed him back, then literally called for me to get banned by blizzard when i killed him and stayed full hp with leech
get ganked back in trivial content that comprises 0.1% of his total stream content? cry and call for bans
pre-nerf triune turning mage into a raid boss able to global someone with combust, in rated? nope, not a peep from the xar
Not gonna read all that, but just to answer title:
Mages are always good for the same reason rogues are almost always good, because they are the most well-rounded embodiment of what PvP is supposed to be: Control, setup, damage. I don’t know how people don’t see this while these mage complaints keep arising. Fire is very clearly over the top right now, and has been for too long, but there are signs that it is being addressed (albeit slowly).
If Mages are ever not good, the meta is probably some turbocleave zoomer garbage that wouldn’t even be worth playing to anyone that wants a modicum of depth in gameplay.
Accurate.
Same. At this point I chock it up to zoomers not having the attention span to tolerate sitting a full-length CC when they could alternatively just be zugging it out for 2 minutes, but I wanted to give a rationalized response to start.
I mean to put what you’re saying in a more eloquent way; mages are always good because they aren’t privy to tuning making them good or bad.
Their kit is one of the most valuable ones in the game in a 3v3 setting; much like warrior. Warrior can play with literally any spec in the game and be good (current iteration) because they bring a ton of value.
Mage is even more valuable than warrior though because poor tuning could drop warrior out of it’s S+ tier position; I don’t see a world where any poor tuning could ever make mage not the best class in the game. Poly is way too good and their map control way too insane to ever not have a spot in any comp they want.
This is more accurate, and even more accurate would be to simply say that their kit is almost perfectly designed for PvP purposes. Therefore, if their kit is perfectly designed for PvP purposes, and somehow they become bad without that kit significantly changing, there’s a good chance PvP has had its identity reshapen.
Mage should not be head and shoulders above everything else as it is now with Fire (with the exception of Arms Warriors). But if it’s ever bad, that’s a pretty grim omen for the state of PvP at that time because it signals that the values of CC and general game control are at an all-time low, which means that PvP is basically just a slugfest at which point we might as well be PvEing.
In general I think polymorph needs kind of a complete redesign in it’s interaction with the game. I’m not saying get rid of it, or give it a short cooldown or anything like that but it is way way WAY too easy for mages to press polymorph over and over again with no backlash at all outside of maybe messing up a DR when you might need it in the next 20 seconds but that is hardly an argument for the ease with which they can just press the button relentlessly.
I’m so tired of watching and participating in arena games where mages just stand there and press poly 40-50 times a game while they just buy time to for set ups. The fact that we live in a world where they have no mana pool to manage poly presses and dispel CD creating a world where mages start pre casting the re-poly before you even press dispel because why not is 'really incredibly dumb.
I have no clue what the answer to this problem would be but I think it’s this kind of degenerate gameplay from mages that sends them to the stratosphere.
This is the whole point, either you’re CCing the healer or you’re CCing a DPS to freeze the game until you can CC the healer again, because with the way mage does damage (by design) there’s not much point in doing that damage unless the enemy healer is CC’d in most cases.
You’re probably right about this, but that’s a problem with those players, not the game, so no solution is required from a game perspective. This is textbook ‘working as intended’ (without the meme of it); if this type of CC gameplay was undermined, all we would see is melee cleaves and the game would be unplayably boring.
This could be a part of the problem that might be more worth looking into… But poly itself is and always has been fine.
Im with you here and anything we can do to move away from that i’m all for.
It’s a deep issue that I have zero clue how to fix but I do know the current iteration of fire mage, and worse Sub rogue mage, where they just do nothing for incredibly long stretchs while they run away because their class CAN’T do something even if they wanted to absolutely needs to change.
Maybe if mages felt like they could do something outside of combustion they wouldn’t need to constantly be rotating polys and effortlessly buying time where they pay no price for pressing polymorph over and over and over again because why not.
A big step in the right direction for Fire mage would be to put DB on Poly DR as they did with Scatter/Trap… It’s far too idiotproof right now to secure these polys without coordinating with teammates for them to be 12+ second CC chains for free.
This spec just has terrible design right now all around. There’s too much emphasis (and value) on restealths and modifiers that make it completely not worth playing the game for 75% of a given match.
This is why I always preferred Frost to Fire. Fire is too gimmicky (although these days it’s less of a gimmick than a lot of other specs, but I digress).
Frankly I don’t agree that there’s some huge fundamental problem with Mage or that it’s ‘degenerate’ … There are a couple things about Fire specifically that make it pretty dumbed-down (i.e DB as mentioned, cauterize), but outside that all I see is one of the last remnants of old-school WoW PvP, and the only reason that might be a problem is because perhaps the new-age WoW playerbase wants a different style of PvP gameplay than what WoW has historically provided.
The growing popularity of zoomer games like LoL and Fortnite suggests that perhaps the gamer community at large is leaning in favor of extremely fast paced gameplay, which causes friction with the more slow-play aspects of WoW PvP (i.e CC). It’s hard for WoW PvP to reconcile this without devolving into something with very little depth.
In a nutshell, IMO, it’s a ‘players’ issue, not a game issue.