A farewell to mage

Community General Discussion
21

I like that they’re gutting the defensives, or rather making theirr purposes distinct. In fact, the defensives are likely to be every bit as good as they are now in delves. They tend to focus on misdirection instead of absorbing damage in the new version, which is fine in delves. This isn’t the problem.

Cause it’s same-y?

They’re made just like raids but slightly shorter and fewer people. They’re not “made to be AoE’d”, they’re AoE’d because it takes like 20 mobs to actually hurt tanks. The only reason you don’t pull faster is because you can’t control 20 mobs enough to prevent them from wombo-comboing everybody. Tank doesn’t gaf. Maybe, just maybe, tanks should actually gaf.

I still don’t see our defensives having the wind knocked out of them as a problem, but this is by far the strangest reason to have them nerfed I’ve seen.

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Prot paladin here and can confirm we have it far easier for all sort of content. I”ve been Paladin since vanilla eventhough I played all other classes. You always return to bring a Paladin or a hybrid class eventually.

Pet classes are great but they don’t compare to tanks.

However take into account your class will always be viable in PvP for instance, however if you are focused on PVE, tanks just get the job done far easier and quicker. I can pull the whole Delve +11 and cleave it down like its nothing. No DPS class can do this.

I am not trying to biased or to flex, I say it the way it really is. I have alts in all classes that do Delves, and some classes just feel much better to play than others to get stuff done.

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23

And? A Raid boss is not “same-y”? Delves are not “same-y”?

I mean. That’s is the #1 reason why PvE modes cannot be totally divorced (unlike PvP). Because people do actually play different modes when they get “same-y”.

No they are not. Raids dont have trash count.

And that is exactly what I said. They are not “made to be AoEd”. That’s correct. But they DO have trash you have to deal with. THEREFORE, the most efficient way of dealing with that is with AoE.

If you want to make ST more valuable. You need less trash. And a dungeon with less trash is simply a Raid.

And no. Tanks cant survive 20 mobs unless they play really, really good. Or play at really, really low levels where they over-gear everything.

OK. Il simplify the problem.

Are you aware that one of the tankiest classes in M+ at the moment are mages? What does that mean exactly?

That means that blizzard has to increase the frequency in which you get damage, and make it high enough, such that a healer can actually heal something. And you get the “rat-race” between incoming damage and burstiness you pointed out.

How to fix this situation? Well go back to the top where I mention “tankyness of mages” and try to fix the root cause.

I hope it makes sense now. But extend that to healer CDs, healer power. To all game modes (including PvP).

24

My experience exactly. I played delves with prot pally, BM hunter and Frost mage, and Your experience matches mine.

I hoped this would get addressed in Midnight, but since the changes seem to be doubling down on this disbalance, I won’t swim against the current any longer.

25

Just a couple of days ago you complained about stale metas.

This is the most stale meta in the game. By far!

That’s not differences in how dungeons are designed, that’s differences in the M+ system.

But yeah I mean raid trash is broken, too. That’s the main way it feels different. When we raid we literally just pull every mob to the next boss and AoE them down lol. I’m not sure this is a tank power problem though? Could be. It’s strikingly similar to the recent clips of Halo 1 being ruined of a sprinting Master Chief.

Some gameplay powers are just… too strong. Even when there isn’t a balance issue they just destroy the game.

The amount of trash in M+ and raids aren’t actually that different - but in raids the bosses are much more dangerous. But if you put infinite scaling and a timer on raids? Would work exactly the same.

As for the number of mobs, I was watching +21’s yesterday on YouTube (livestream) and the tank was holding 10-20 mobs the whole dungeon. It was Eco-Dome.

Yep - or rather one of the tankiest non-tanks, but yep! This is why I don’t have a problem with those nerfs. It’s absolutely fine. I am a-OK with it.

Not in the slightest :confused:

There are two major sets of changes to mages in the upcoming expansion. The first is a dramatic decrease in defensive capabilities. This does not bother me, but it has nothin to do with tanks, either, and it isn’t the reason Irisi stated for quitting.

She was upset about an inability to control enemies and use her offensive abilities in a defensive capacity. This is one of the cornerstones of frost mages; all your stuff slows and roots so you use that aggression to stay safe.

They gutted that half through class changes and half through changes to the companion, and that is gutted because it interferes with M+ AoE pulls, and those pulls are only possible due to the outrageous tank powers. If tanks were more reasonably tuned, these slows would assist tanks so they could kite better and stay alive better, but instead they are a liability, and now Blizzard gets rid of most of it.

You’ve got to two mixed up - it’s unintuitive I suppose that frost mage offence is a defensive capability, and so she’s complaining about defence even though it is her offence that’s being broken, but this is reflected in her comparisons with pets. I think she expresses herself very well, but if you haven’t played much frost mage outside of M+ it’s a bit… weird.

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26

Exactly. Give me tools to keep enemies at range and I won’t need defensives. I was still going to give it a try even with the changes presented on alpha, but changed to Dwarven Medicine is just too much. At that point:

  1. My abilities to kite have been vastly limited,
  2. I am actively forced into melee by the companion design
  3. My defensive kit has been limited and isn’t suited for melee combat

At that point I am no longer a ranged DPS, but melee DPS without the tools to survive melee. It’s in every way worse than actual melee class, especially tanks.

And an important thing to me: class fantasy is entirely gone.

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27

I think the problem is how class design didn’t scale with “Diablofication”.

If you load up Classic WoW and start playing, you’ll quickly end up realizing, 1on1 is normal, 1on2 is tactical fun, 1on3 is strategic difficulty with likely splat, and so on. You know, like pushback. If you face tank 2 mobs, you’ll never hard cast anything.

As a mage, the workaround was to sheep one, shield yourself a bit, and once mobs are melee, you’ll freeze them, run away and repeat.

… And then people figured out Blizzard farming, but that certainly wasn’t intended and certainly doesn’t work everywhere.

Same was true in dungeons, btw, and frost mages are extremely welcome in classic dungeons due to their help with survival. Damage is nice, too. (Frankly, frost was OP.)

Whenever an expansion was in its late stages, well geared people - like my protection paladin - could enjoy quick fights and we learned to fight packs. Eventually that become too much of a norm. And then a new expansion came and “where is my powah, I am weak, buff me”, and the cycle just kept going. These days I’m like Darth Vader, I look at a mob, swing a finger and it just collapses.

Big pulls really don’t work with class design where your single target, three (!) second hard cast removes 10-20% of your enemy (depending on crit), slows them by 50% and possibly freezes them. I agree with Uda in requiring a tank and a healer for more serious content as a mage (ranged mobs will hit you).

I’m sure a lot of people enjoy Classic exactly because of this difference (and others). Like how there is a massive healer surplus for dungeons.

The question - do you want WoW to be GW2, where every class has near identical options, mostly differing in fantasy (like in WoW, there are several wizard classes)?
Where playing solo means you’ll pick survival traits and Celestial gear?

As a prot pally you had leech, as mage shields and food, pick your poison?

I definitely agree that in this context, Frost is the solo mage build and it should be able to complete as much content as anyone else. (In old iterations, tanks - and healers - had little damage. I can totally hit mobs for 5 health as a prot warrior, and my resto druid takes 60 seconds to 1on1. That was balance.)

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28

Oh absolutely. I 100% agree with you on the “stale meta” department.

But there is only 1 way to solve that: Weekly tuning. And blizzard Devs apparently cant do their job.

It has nothing to do with AoE/ST rotations and what not. Because lets be honest here, ALL classes have AoE and ST rotations/talents. It’s just that they are not properly tuned. That’s Blizzard’s job.

Well it makes sense. Because people that raid are not interested on trash. And for the record, they DID try to make trash more valuable. With BoEs, with currencies. Stuff like that.

And people whined and whined. They did not want to spend 1 more minute than necessary to get to the next boss.

So YES. It’s the way it is.

But look. Let’s say you do add more trash in Raids. What would people do? Change talents to AoE talents, kill that trash… and then when they get to the boss they change back to ST talents.

DONE.

It would not. You put infinite scaling on a Raid you will just force an even more ST centric meta comp. As it happens already in M+ with AoE.

You dont realize how good that tank is. He can hold 10-20 mobs just because he is that good. Any other player would get 1-shot. I know. I have witnessed WAY too many tanks getting 1-shot in much lower keys than that.

Also. Ecodome 21+. 1 missed kick and someone dies. To pull that off you need a party of gigachads. A +21 cant be done just like that. I can guarantee you that.

She clearly stated in SOLO CONTENT. Not in M+ or anywhere else.

That’s a key difference. Because classes CANNOT be balanced around Solo Content. It’s impossible. The only way to do it would be to make us all Ret Paladins or something like that.

Which wont happen. EVER.

Outside SOLO content, this is the problem:

  • For healers to be viable in group content, you need to give them something to heal. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So. If you give healers OP CDs capable of topping up someone from 1% to 100% in 2 seconds. And you give DDs a TON of defensives to survive damage or avoid it entirely…

Then the ONLY way to make healers viable in that situation is to make damage really high, and really bursty.

If you want to change that… then you have to nerf healer CDs and DD defensives. That’s the only way.

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There’s also the option of making more ways of tackling the enemies viable and then you get to pick and change if you’d like some variety. I don’t want weekly tuning at all.

Well it’s not that we’re not interested, it’s that the trash just… doesn’t really do anything. We don’t really have to worry about it. You just pull it and run away and then kill it all when it comes around the corner, because it doesn’t do anything.

They also whine when there’s no trash, especially if it means no variety in boss rooms.

People do that alreaedy. I do that.

If you couldn’t switch specs in raids and the bosses weren’t as hard but the trash took a lot of time and there was a timer? Absolutely AoE.

Look, a raid is just a bigger dungeon. That’s all it is, literally, by definition. The only actual difference between them is the way in which you respawn in them and how much time you’ve got. In raids you get limited by the time people can attend, in M+ it’s the timer.

Of course I do, but he’s also doing a +21. I’ve seen tanks holding 20 mobs in my +14’s as well. As soon as the tanks realise how their class works and understand what mobs do not 1-shot random players, they can just pull however much they like. It really doesn’t matter.

Literally, the way it works, is the tank pulls according to making sure we don’t die. Whether the tank survives is not a concern at all. That’s broken.

That doesn’t matter. It’s the same class. In M+ the slows and roots have become a liability, elsewhere they’re a necessity. M+ players QQ the loudest, mages get gutted everywhere else.

Frost mages simply are simply no longer equipped to survive in solo content because we are clothies and become the way we survive is through control.

Nobody is asking for class balance. We’re just asking for the class to work at all. A frost mage that doesn’t revolve around a lot of roots and slows will most likely be completely incapable of doing higher level delves, even in good gear. This needs to be adressed.

This has nothing to do with the subject under discussion. Nobody is complaining about mage defensive CD’s being gutted.

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30

I mained mage from bfa to DF, but got frustrated with the queue times. Switched to tank and haven’t regretted it.

Mages are the main characters of wow, the companys called Blizzard after all, but there’s life after mage. Have fun.

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31

Dude I specced Improved Blizzard so many times and it never helped.

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32

For example? I either dont understand your angle, or you are not being specific enough.

We can all “imagine” things as we want. But one cannot escape the reality that there will ALWAYS be one “viable” option more “viable” than the rest.

And if blizzard dosent change anything in a 6 month season. THAT will be the “viable option” that stagnates.

Correct. And if you want to make the trash do something, you fundamentally change what Raiding IS. You would turn it into a 20 man M+ dungeon. And that’s not the point either.

Things are fine as they are. Raid == Bosses. M+ == trash packs. That’s the 101 basically.

But isent all your point to prevent people from having 1 “meta AoE talent”? Kinda defeats the purpose if you are gonna do that…

Im sorry but no. You are very, very wrong.

But dont trust me. Trust your own eyes. Get the Adventure Log. Look at the mechanics from ANY raid boss you want. Compare that with a dungeon. It’s night and day.
It CLEARLY shows what’s the priority in the design.

Look. You are looking at things from the wrong angle. You are literally ingoring the player from your calculations. He is KEY. The class is not enough to justify this. Lets put some numbers:

You said it: When the tank realizes that mobs dont 1-shot people… EXACTLY. When he realizes that, he wont do 9+ anymore. And he wont have 2000 rio, he will have 2500 rio and he will be doing 11+ instead.

That is how things are supposed to be. And that is PERFECT. It’s literally “bring the player and not the class”. But dont pretend like a 3700 rio tank all of a sudden shows up in a 9+, pulls the whole dungeon, dosent die but everyone else does. That dosent happen.

Maybe I did not explain myself correctly.

You cannot have all the utility tools in the game. That’s simply not fair. It’s fair to have some, but not others. That is how WOW is built. And it’s the same for everyone.

Now. The way wow works is that you compensate your lack of tools with some other player. For example? You are a Priest with no kick? Great. Party up with a Warrior that does.

So. WOW has to balance out all that. Mages had TOO MUCH stuff. They had it all. Tankyness. Damage. Kick. AoE Shields… you name it… something had to give. And it did.

HOEVER. In SOLO content you are alone. You DONT have a “party member” to compensate for your flaws. THEREFOR, any spec you choose to play in Solo content WILL, by how wow is made, be unbalanced. He will not have the tools necessary to overcome all the challenges.

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Sure thing mate. Except tanks do have it all - damage, tankiness, sustain, utility - You name it. And it seems Blizz is ok with that, no need to remove anything there.

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Well my angle is that every dungeon being solved by AoE pulling and then AoE-stunning everything to death has been the M+ meta for as long as I can remember. The last time it wasn’t was like… Legion?

In fact it’s gotten so much meta that it’s warping the class design for the rest of the game around it and destroying my favourite spec in the process.

Maybe it’s time to take a step back and think if there are alternatives to such a strategy? Maybe M+ should be changed or ST abilities made stronger? Or, gods forbid, make it very dangerous for tanks to hold so many mobs so it just kills you? Then people might CC 2 mobs from one pack, 2 from another, pull the remaining 5, run past the other ones and ignore them, etc.

Oh no not the meta slavery…

Viable != best

Unless you’re literally Method. Which you’re not, and neither am I.

Who do people care about this?

Raiding is fundamentally a group of more than 5 players in a large dungeon with bosses. The raids weren’t even called raids originally, it was a “raid dungeon” and the group size was a “raid”, with a raid being a group of parties.

This fact isn’t core to “what raids are”. It’s core to one fo the things they’ve done with raids, but if you want to make a raid all about insane trash there’s nothing wrong with that.

Yep. I don’t care if he’s literally Bruce Wayne, he shouldn’t be able to do that.

We’re not asking for that. I completely agree with that.

We’re asking for frost spells to freeze people. That’s it. I didn’t ask for heals, I didn’t ask for tanking, I didn’t ask for plate armour, I didn’t do any of that. I just asked for frost spells to freeze people, and now here you are saying I want everything in the entire game.

You’ve got to address what I’m saying.

Yes, but I’m just asking for frost spells to freeze enemies so I can do some kiting. I’m not asking to be the God of delves.

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35

I have the same feeling about maining a rogue. The class just doesn’t have the tools for heroic world content. Leveling one in Legion Remix was pure misery. The future looks bleak for mage and rogue outside of PVP.

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36

Exactly, this is the balance I’m advocating for.

Tank engages enemies, mitigates/heals damage received, kills mobs, moves on.

I engage enemies from afar, avoid melee damage by kiting, prevent ranged damage with barrier, kill mobs, move on.

This isn’t balanced currently as tanks are able to easily pull way more mobs and are never at the risk of dying, while I have to constantly be concentrated on what I do.

But even that poor balance goes down the drain in Midnight as my control abilities are being limited, and I’m not even allowed to use what’s left of it because companion design forces me into melee.

37

You did not get it. In Group content? NO. Tanks dont have it all.

Can they solo a dungeon? No they cant. Can they solo a Raid? No they cannot.

So. In GROUP content, they do NOT have it all. They NEED DPS and healers to complete the content.

The fact that they are “OP” in solo content is just a coincidence. Deal with it.

38

You are right, I don’t get You.

Could mages solo a dungeon? A raid? No.

So why they had to be nerfed with their abilities relevant for solo content, but tanks are ok as they are? I don’t get You.

Edit:

Besides, I don’t know why do You try to divert this thread to M+ or raids. This is about balance in the THIRD ENDGAME PILLAR, not the other two.

39

M+ is the “high-octane” game mode of WoW. It’s the game mode where you have to do a “controlled YOLO” and complete a dungeon.

Split second decisions. The “gogogo” mentality… ect…

So the short answer to your suggestions is NO. Anything that “slows down” M+ is something I disagree deeply with. You got Delves and Raids for that already.

And no. Big-Bad huge monsters with a lot of HP, to make ST abilities USEFULL… No thanks… It hurts the tempo of the dungeon. You have to stop and kill this 1 dude. NOPE. Got enough of that with 3 bosses.

NO. That is NOT the meta.

Remember. Arcane mage was meta this season. WHY? Why him?

And then. You know WHO does the most AoE at the moment? Rets. And they are not meta.

Basically. You got it ALL WRONG. There is no such thing as “meta specs”. There are only meta COMPS. And in that comp, there are some individuals that deal with blanket AoE (DK in this case) and others that deal with bosses and “big-bad” mobs with more ST focused abilities (such as Arcane or BM).

So dont over-simplify something of which you have no idea.

So what is it? ALL specs are viable. In low keys anything goes. You can play 5 paladins if you want.

And in high keys, all you have to do is find the right classes to synergize with.

Its difficult to even play high keys with put networking. Even if you play meta specs.

I don’t care what you call it. Or how many players there are.

You can define it however you want. But in a raid there are single bosses and ST is generally the way yo go. That is in deep contrast to M+.

You are not wrong. There has been BOSSES with a ton of adds where you use primerelly AoE skills.

But you see the problem? You make trash more important and then it becomes a boss on its own.

Well you should care. There are people with different skill level. What are you gonna do about it?

What you should care is that those people stay in their difficulty tier.

PvP and M+ with perma slow has something to say. Plus cheesing adds with perma slow.

Blizzard had to remove some things from mages. Cause they had everything.

And they chose to remove the perma slow instead of the double blink. Or CDs.

And it happened to hurt solo play. But… whatever they chose to remove… it would STILL hurt solo play. Because its inevitable.

40

Because Uda is one of the ppl thinking ppl playing only “trivial content” (anything that’s not very high keys and mythic raids) don’t deserve to voice their opinion and demand stuff, so they just talk about something else.