I mean I enjoy both classes but which one would be better against most other classes? In bfa, hunters used to hit like wet noodles against plate and I know that they got buffed a lot but arcane mage looks pretty sweet too and they got all kinds of interesting defensives. What class do you think wins the most “rock, paper, scissors”?
Arcane mage is really the underdog now. It doesn’t have much in the form of defence, and a lot of that has become useless. Ice Block, for example, used to be a lifesaver sometimes if someone came to help you before they ganked you. But now, warriors and priests can destroy it with 1 click, so yeah, useless now.
Alter time is so long, they can usually gank you long before it ends.
Temporal shield only prolongs your inevitable death for a little bit.
Blink only gets you a tiny amount forward, you’re still within some huntar’s range, so you die anyway.
You try poly or missiles, you’ll be locked, and you die.
Your barrier is almost always down from all the attacks and the long cooldown, so it can’t be relied upon.
The only things that can save your life in BGs, are goblin gliders, invisibility and other potions (but they have long cooldown).
Arcane mage is good, when they are weak and you can just burst on something and shoot a zillion missiles, but if it’s a huntar, it will just bubble, insta-heal to almost 100% and one-shot you.
Huntar, rogue, DK, sometimes even warlock, can always chase you down and murder you mercilessly, while you can’t do the same to them. You can basically never escape, because they took displacement away, so now mage has no mobility besides some tiny, useless blink.
Invisibility would be good, if you weren’t DoTted 99% of the time, rendering it also useless.
So from my experience as arcane mage, I recommend you get a hunter, if you want to survive longer than 1 or 2 seconds, actually move around, actually do damage, actually be able to play and defend yourself a bit.
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That’s 2 classes that can deal with it. If you don’t meet those, ice block is still great.
You can manually trigger the expiration of alter time by pushing the button again.
While not untrue, it’s still a powerful tool.
Within range, probably, though it’ll still make a life-or-death difference if you can abuse LoS. Also worth noting that most people pick Shimmer, and in a desperate situation it can be used to double-blink to create solid distance.
Once again Shimmer is super useful here. Unless faced with a ranged interrupt you can blink away while still casting, preventing an interrupt.
This is true. The barrier is pretty small.
Overall I don’t think arcane mage is an underdog at all considering its toolkit. It’s incredibly solid, and it has a huge bunch of defensives when compared to most other classes. Individually, most of them aren’t as strong as a a hunter turtle or paladin bubble, but the sheer amount of them that can be cycled through will let a skilled arcane mage get away for quite some time without dying.
EDIT:
Forgot the hunter part entirely.
Play a hunter if you enjoy playing Marksman, and only marksman.
Blizzard still hasn’t fixed pet survivability, and with the 4 second pet ress timer, you will be worthless, and I mean worthless in arenas as Survival or Beastmaster.
Nobody is going to let you get off a 4 second cast in an arena match, and even if you should somehow succeed, your pet still dies again in 2-3 globals. It can’t be stressed enough how bad SV/BM is in PvP until their pet gets fixed, if ever.
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