Wasnt there also some sort of exploit with keys just after the patch hit they had to fix?
Dont get me wrong looking forward to getting into any 20+ content, just could not before because literaly mage dps sucked so much bawls compared to every other char you could take to 20+ on a pug that no one would take you outside friend / your own key.
I would rather do 400k overall than have better survivabilty.
Now nerf glacial spike scaling in PvP and ray of frost damage as well for mage frost .
Also full moon for boomies.
Game was decent until you decided to ruin it with your mid season patch . So hard to test things in PvP before releasing it ? We pay like Pve players do so we deserve the same respect .
Small indie company
Then die everytime unavoidable aoe happens and never be able to do dps due to death rates, interesting
its almost like bliz have no clue what they’re doing.
The problem is not combustion. Far from it. The problem is that the baseline spells - that is Fireball, Fireblast, and Pyroblast deal absolutely no damage - which means there’s tons of talents that buff them by around 300%.
Making an effect that buffs a spell by 300% is a pretty clear indication that the spell might not be doing enough damage baseline.
I’m so sorry you had to experience mages being a little better than the 4th least popular class in arena. Hope it gets better soon. 
2v2: 2.35%
3v3: 4.18%
RBG: 2.3%
Solo: 4.57%
Sounds OP to me as well! I mean this is exactly like that time where rets were literally 30% of the arena in 3v3, which effectively means every team has one as a 33% representation is one in every team. Exactly.
I mean fire was literally one of the best dps classes even before the fix?
I was on the edge about quitting mage when they changed combustion, I liked the old version. Then the crystal in WoD made me leave my mage for the remaining duration of WoD. Then I came back to try mage out again in Legion, only to find out about the legendary bracers. Then I abandoned it until BFA. Played mage a bit in BFA but lol, it just felt bad. Then tried playing mage some in SL and I just couldn’t. Tried playing mage in season 1 and was just like “Screw rune of power” and stopped playing it. Tried playing mage now in this patch and I just see SKB and think “NOPE, NOT TOUCHING MAGE”.
Give me TBC/wotlk fire mage and I maybe would consider playing it again. What mage has become is so far removed from what I liked about mages when I started playing the class.
frost damage nerf? really? to the 5 mages playing frost ?XD
Having removed our Elemental, which was a MASSIVE nerf to mages playing alone in the world,[*] you now want to nerf Frost Mages more. Really? /smh
[*] Yes, I know it was irrelevant to spreadsheet-driven instance play. Freeze was worth more than Lonely Winter in practical world scenarios.
Very far removed.
Mages are supposed to be about mana, casting, being very squishy, and enabling all that to be fine with absolutely colossal hits and the control to get them off without dying.
On the PvP side:
That doesn’t work anymore. Even if mages were made like that, it can’t work. There are too many counterplays to everything - by the time you’re finished trading and can finally start actually casting everybody’s at full HP and you start all over with the trading again. So what do they do? Instants. A lot of instants. Like, A LOT of instants.
On the PvE side it’s just full of annoying elements where your class constantly feels as if it’s fighting itself. I don’t know how else to describe it. Also, tons of mechanics simply have no counter that a mage can possibly do. All bosses are completely immune to all forms of crowd control and regularly pulses AoE that a mage, as they were originally designed, would simply die to. Like it just doesn’t work.
However, I will say that Frost in 10.1.5 in M+ is the most fun I’ve had on mage for at least 5 years. It plays about as well as it can given the classes and the capabilities it’s up against. Because, exactly, they got rid of that pesky Rune. Nobody liked it for any of the time it was in the game and it was here for a decade. Ridiculous. EDIT: actually, there was one guy above. He liked it for arcane. I guess the man’s one of the masochists that arcane is trying to appeal to, which is absolutely fine. Just keep that gameplay at a safe distance from me.
Uh no, it was not.
Data says yes. 
Data you cherry picked from somewhere and showing a tiny percentage perhaps. Data from mage population in general, nope.
They didnt buff us.
They reworked us, theres a large difference here lol, the increase in performance is higher then they wanted therefore toning it down lol.
So mages doing 2.0 - 2.2million dps on pulls is not miled ahead? Okey.
If you choose to ignore it that’s on you.
Uh huh… but missing a few more specs. Holy pala, Vengence, Guardian and ofc Augmentation.
Or you know… buff the others or something. Now that you went and broke the m+ladder.
I am not sure if that is indeed the case.
I recall mages being pretty popular in high end keys even before the rework. The issues they had were not their damage, but to the extent you had to go with them in order to achieve it. Fire in particular had a lot of maintenance buffs to track, and if you were bad at keeping them up, especially during combustion, then your damage went out the window.
Not to mention that mages, both Fire and Frost, rely a lot on specific pull patterns in order to maximize their abilities. This does not fit well with pugs so obviously you will not find that many other mages in groups, and a lot of people get the impression that mages are bad, simply because you need the tank to pull around your CD, or to just not pull your targets out of Blizzard.
I am not sure how well they are doing right now, but I have a feeling that the current power an augmentation evoker brings to the table also helps them scale off way better than some other classes do. Hopefully this is not the case why they are nerfing them, as I feel a class should not be nerfed because it scales off too well with a combination of another spec. That will only create more dependancy on said spec to perform optimally.
We already have that with PI, so I do not think we need even more.
Fire was and is ridiculous. Not in PvP though, but in PvE yeah.
Bit sad that frost and especially arcane should take the fall for that though… 
The frost nerf isn’t too bad though. It’ll be fine. I’m just confused they chose to nerf AoE instead of ST.