Everyone said mage is not good for over 4 months on beta and nothing happened. What happened with all the feedbacks from beta?
Frost - literally zero dps. It has mediocre aoe. Blizzard and frozen orb does lower damage on 5 target+ than spamming ice lance.
Fire - nobody likes sunkings blessing playstyle and the reliance on combustion to do actual damage. The spec does healer level damage without combustion up. What is this?
Pyroclasm would be great but it procs way too often to hardcast 4 second pyroblasts. It needs to reduce pyroblast cast time by half in order to justify hardcasting it once every 10 seconds. Same as destruction warlocks chaos bolt is reduced too.
Arcane - It is interesting but it has got too many things going on. We need to line up 5 abilities and timed perfectly to do good damage while other classes like hunter or warlock press 1 ability and top aoe on every monster pack. I donât know how these can get supervised this badly or why mage is designed this way.
It is saddening because mage once was fun. Bring back MoP Fire. Frost is ok in terms of playstyle but the numbers are nowhere near other classes.
20 Likes
The dmg output on Frost is indeed pretty meh.
Iâve not tried the other specs, but I have a feeling that weâll see a buff incoming to the mage class in the near future.
But right now, even though I deal far less dmg that my tank, Iâm still enjoying myself.
Honestly, all 3 mage specs kind of need a complete rework at this point.
Especially frost & fire keep running into the same issues over and over, because every single time the MDI players do the exact same thing.
Combo stacking for Combustion & spreading ignite for absurd AoE keep being abused for fire by the MDI.
Eternal Icy Veins or stacking as many ice lance modifiers as humanly possible keep being abused for frost by the MDI.
But instead of actually adressing the core causes of these issues all they do is some slight numbers tweaks and call it a day. Hell, they frequently double down on whatâs causing these issues, and bring it along into the next expansion.
Youâd think at a certain point theyâd learn.
3 Likes
We will see what happens at Wednesday and troughout the Entire Season, currently it just feels like itâs a Melee Meta, most ranged specs feel underwhelming compared to most Melee specs.
1 Like
I tried playing Fire but Iâve never been able to stand its ridiculous playstyle of stupidly high burst, then sub-healer levels of damage the rest of the time.
Frost is great for open world content, provided the mobs are susceptible to slows and roots, apart from that itâs not worth using for anything else.
Arcane Iâve found to be pretty powerful in M0s, even though Iâm not playing a recommended build.
3 Likes
Pretty much yes.
Sadly fire is flawed. The whole spec is gimped because of the combustion. It only works if you have a premade high end group who pulls 1/4 of the dungeon in one go. They need to seriously change it. Give back the dotcombustion and make a whole new fire CD. Fire should be about critting but combustion makes crit ultimately the worst stat which means outside of combustion you wonât crit at all since you donât stack crit.
I can already tell you what. Same that I just said. Fire will probably be good in high keys with premades.
Frost is probably dead for m+ again for 10-15+ keys because its aoe damage is less than half what other classes can pull right now and it will only be worse with more gear since frost has the worst stat scaling in the game.
Arcane does great damage but only becuase it is overtuned. The playstyle is way too convoluded. It is not a braindead aoe spec like most of the other characters. If you donât line up cds and press them perfectly you wonât do good damage.
Unfortunately no drastical changes is expected. They wonât rework the spec 2 weeks into the expansion or mid expansion so this is what we will have for the entire expansion.
They could buff things like meteor/living bomb/hyperthermia which are all dead talents. Maybe change combustionâs mastery scaling or someting. Like give 100% of crit as mastery instead of 50%. Somehow they need to make crit the best stat since the whole spec is depended on crits. Frost has decent playstyle but damage is lacking. If they want people to stay on mages they need to buff frost but not the singletarget or cleave damage. Buff blizzard and frozen orb to do actual good aoe. Like triple blizzardâs damage for example because currently it does like 5% of overall damage in a whole dungeon run. It is supposed to be an aoe ability but its purpose is only to reduce frozen orbâs cooldown. Even frozen orb is not great since the last beta nerf. The way you aoe as frost is pop frozen orb instant blizzard and spam icelances. Ice lances outdps the 2 aoe abilities in aoe situation with more than 5-6 mobs while lance only hits 2 which is RIDICULOUS.
3 Likes
Mage forum has got so much dumber lately
Nerf Frost.
Itâs your own faulth for playing a braindead Lance spam build 
Here come the kids adding nothing to the discussion.
1 Like
Weird way to introduce yourself 
Fire mages should have something like Blade Flurry that Outlaw rogues have to compensate for the low damage outside Combustion. Ignite damage should be 100% more outside Combustion. Another option is to make SKB proc more often with longer casting Combustion pyro-triggering uptime. Also, the radius of the rune of power should be increased or the ability should be reworked because there are too many encounters where you need to move constantly and thus the buff is lost.
We had that with phoenix flames in sbadowlands. Wasnât fun. Rune of power area is large, the visual is too small. They need to make flamestrike and its talents stronger than ignite cleave or make ignite cleave slower or hit less targets. Then they can balance it.
The only way to achieve that is to just no longer have ignite spread.
As long as ignite can be spread, a single target rotation will be doing comparable damage to a full AoE rotation.
On the bright side, no longer having ignite spread might also give them the breathing room they need to fix the ânormalâ rotation. So it has potential.
Shame itâs probably not going to happen.
There is a simple solution to all mage problems:
Stop playing the class.
If 90% of players currently playing mage quit the game or re-roll a class, Blizzard is FORCED to change the class. But people will just continue playing regardless and give Blizzard the freedom to fix problems when THEY want, aka, next expansion.
So, STOP playing Mage. I am simply playing Wotlk until they fix mage on retail. No big deal.
Im just glad that I still have Portal spells so I can have a well-deserved after-raid spot.
1 Like
Frost is doing really really bad in m+ right now i mean itâs not impossible to top dps meter but even tanks are doing higher damage easier. you have to play perfect to do good dps and sometimes even that is not enough with procs etc. RoP is the worst idea of a cooldown for ââmageââ and people(especially the ones who donât playe it) think frost is tanky but no itâs not. double ice block or barrier doesnât make it tanky there isnât enough passive dr like locks and itâs still a cloth dps.
iâm sure many will disagree and think itâs my bad but no , the class is not in a good position atm.
3 Likes
Played it today as frost mage. What a trash spec it has become lol. The damage is so low, that even tanks are starting to compete against frost. What a joke lol
Meanwhile all 3 rogue specs are back to back to back topping the Heroic statistics in WCL.
For all the faults of frost at the moment, survivability is not one of them (Prevent dmg with alter time, 20% flat dmg reduction from mirror image, barrier, ice block immunity, 2 stealths to break combat and some very nice CC and double shimmer which can be used to very good effect), but DPS performance.
They do fine in M+ if youâre not going to be pushing 20+, and can somewhat rival other classes to a certain extent - except when it comes to bosses. On bosses we struggle hard. It also comes down to how the tank pulls a lot. If the tank pulls fairly decent packs and keeps going, our very sustainable AoE damage will end up working quite well with icy veins up pretty much constantly. It may sometimes look like other people pull ahead of us on an insane burst, but keep in mind our over-all damage is very consistent.
But the issue remains, why bring a frost mage, when you could bring an arcane mage - or plenty of other stronger specs. It does without a doubt need a buff, and sadly didnât get any this time around with the recent patch notes.
After reading the forums here, I realise 99% off the mages play Frost.
Why? Whatâs so fun about spamming Ice Lance 
I am happy it does less dmg then Arcane (still rooting for Fire buffs though)