We’re working on tuning adjustments for two classes: Mage and Paladin
Mage AoE damage is generally trending a little higher than we’re comfortable with after the most recent update. We’re planning to make a few targeted adjustments to Mage AoE spells to bring them down to a more reasonable level. In addition to the AoE adjustments, Fire will be seeing some additional tuning, as Fire single-target damage is also trending higher than intended.
Mage
Fire
Damage of all abilities reduced by 5%.
Flamestrike damage reduced by 6%, and Flamestrike now deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets.
Flame Patch damage reduced by 6%, and Flame Patch now deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets.
Sun King’s Blessing now causes your next Pyroblast or Flamestrike to deal 260% increased damage (was 275%).
Frost
Frozen Orb damage reduced by 5%.
Blizzard damage reduced by 4%.
Comet Storm damage reduced by 5%.
Subzero damage to rooted and frozen targets reduced to 5/10%.
Arcane
Arcane Barrage damage increased by 3%.
Resonance increases the damage per target hit by Arcane Barrage by 10% (was 12%).
Arcane Explosion damage reduced by 6%.
Arcane Orb damage reduced by 8%.
Holy Paladin is overperforming in all content in Fractures of Time. We are targeting a global decrease of healing and damage as we are not looking to change preferred playstyles, but Tyr’s Deliverance will also be receiving additional adjustments as this talent in particular has been more effective than we would like.
Holy Paladins’ mana pools have been more plentiful than we would like in PvP. We’re targeting their base Mana regeneration to encourage player engagement with the variety of mana talents available.
Paladin
Holy
All healing decreased by 8%.
All damage decreased by 12%.
Tyr’s Deliverance healing decreased by 15%.
PvP
Holy Paladins now regenerate 55% less Mana in PvP combat (was 25%).
We intend to make the above changes with scheduled weekly maintenance, on Wednesday, July 19 in this region.
As a warrior I am quite biased in others not getting too much of a damage lead above me. I believe it is a good change. Though I hope the caping to 8 targets won’t hit the damage profile too hard and make it feel pointless.
Even if warrior got to suffer hardcaps and softcaps a plenty, I will not wish the same upon even my worst enemy. Cause they truly feel bad.
This is going to take a while to test out… it felt so awful to play mage before that I was determined to change my main with this new patch to Warlock. Then I read about the buffs and I was so happy!
I’m not properly geared (I just came back to the game) and it felt good to play the past couple of days - I didn’t feel OP, but I felt much more capable because of the changes.
But the CORE of what made mage bad before was the structure of talents and skills - so this change, despite being a clear nerf, might not actually be as impactful. It really just takes more testing.
I can understand nerfing fire. It’s bloody OP - but I’m really not quite sure why you’re nerfing frost and especially arcane. They seemed quite middle of the pack in both M+ and raids.
I’m starting to get a little bit weary of playing mage. We started out the expansion being weaker at level 70 than we were at level 60 and ~40% behind everybody else so you had to buff us on like 8 occasions before we caught up. Well… sort of.
And now you fixed it. And then you nerf it.
I mean it’s not an awfully big nerf, but… is frost so OP?
We don’t have a lot of data, but what we do have indicates frost is:
Okay in raiding.
God-awful in dungeons. Which makes it interesting that you decided to nerf the AoE damage.
If you click 90% you will see that mages perform better than expected with 3 specs at top 8 spots (and 3 at top 6 if you click only damage done to bosses) which is a lot better than what other classes have.
They butchered arcane for me, used to play aoe arcane mage using rune of power and arcane surge to severly boost the dmg of my arcane barrage, together with arcane bombardmeny and arcane harmony.
Now that rune of power is gone my build probably isen’t even viable anymore tbh, and I’m being forced to pick Nether Tempest, a spell that I personally hate with a burning passion, it’s so freaking boring, I just can’t bring myself to use it, arcane shoulden’t be a dot spec, get it out or make us able to pick between something else.
Other problems are - arcane missiles glows up like a christmas tree making you miss wether or not you have clearcasting (we’ve only had a CASTBAR for freaking 19 years, thanks for implimenting a non removable extra annoying castingbar ontop of a spell so I can’t see when it procs)
The new concentrated power adds an ekko on top of arcane explosion that feels so out of beat and aweful it’s almost giving me epilepsi in conjunction with all the other glowing things they added. How hard was it to just add 40% dmg on top or change it’s colour? Did they really have to make it feel aweful?
It’s complicated enough to be a Heroic raid boss on its own, and then you of course have to add the boss itself on top…
The class is so rigid and deliberate and difficult that you need a 15 second pre-pull timer, which is more than any other class, and the rotation transitions through 5 phases and there’s an additional 3 phases if you’re AoE’ing, and now the whole thing is lighting up like a christmas tree indeed, because it’s also incredibly visually noisy and there’s the new action bars.
Blizzard had an opportunity to clean this up and give mages the gameplay most of them want from what I can tell, which is the ability to at will stack up very large modifiers at the expense of tons of mana, and then they’ve got to manage that mana.
And they didn’t take it. They left it basically just as big of a mess as it was before.
Idk why people say it’s “OP” op in pvp ? op in pve? scenario: you do +20. MAges have 0 defensives and survivabilty. yeah they gave us the ice block buff where you take 70% less damage and heal for 80%. thats one abilty. Then they made the barrier buff so you can give it to all players with super high cooldown btw. how is that the best in the game. pls explain. why is pally not nerfed yet ?? insane survivabilty. does a lot of damage. can interrupt so many times. Where are the nerfs to that or they not good enough ?
If mages are so bad - how they are clearing +28-29 keys? I don’t see DK, hunter, lock or rogue doing so. Right after the patch hit - all of the sudden mages invaded top leaderboards of m+.
Mages do have very good defensives. The problem is that they’re all pre-emptive so you really need to know your stuff. Mages are not a reactive class, which makes them rather difficult to play well.
This is of course why, despite mages being completely viable, there really aren’t a whole of them. Even now, where they’re definitely S-tier, we don’t see anything like what we saw with ret paladins.