I made this post a while back on the WoW Mage forums, where I was responded to very passionately...Just....not intelligently: So I'm posting this on forums with a slightly higher level of intelligence, hoping to get some more intelligent feedback.

There is a reason Mages are crying.

Simply put, we lack in pvp and pve right now. Who would like to take a guess why.

I’ll tell you. It was the expansion.

Specifically, the buffs the other classes got; which, compared to mages, is extremely large.

I’ll leave out Warriors and Shaman here, because it is my firm belief that they need help. They did, however, get spiffy new abilities.

Rogue:
Cloak of Shadows
Shiv
Deadly Throw

Preist:
Shadow Fiend
Prayer of Mending
Mass Dispell
Shadow Word: Death

Warlocks:
Seed of Corruption
Incinerate
Fel Armor
Soul Shatter

Hunters (admittedly, less than the other 3 classes):
Steady Shot
Snake Trap

Druids (again, less than the top 3):
Cyclone
Maim
Lifebloom

Paladins:
Seal of Blood/Vengeance
Spiritual Attunement
Avenging Wrath


While Hunters, Druids and to a lesser extent Paladins are quite minimal, the other three classes have been changed drastically. Warlocks and Rogues, specifically, are extremely well off from these skills, while shadow preists were amazingly well buffed with the addition of Vampiric Touch (which technically wasn’t a TBC addition) and the scaling quality of their tree. Rogues got a nice change to garrote as well.

So that’s nice, what else happened to mages, specifically?

We got:

Molten Armor
Ice Lance
Arcane Blast
Invisibility
Spell Steal

Ice Lance was overpowered. Now it’s not. Sweet. Its just an additional 1.7kish damage after a frost nova. Kinda cool.

Arcane Blast is amazing in Pve and Pvp only if you’re not moving. That’ll get you killed really, really fast in pvp.

Molten armor is cool, I guess, but its effect overwrites and is overwritten by the other armors unique to the mage.

Invisibility has little to no use in most cases, as aggro tends to be less of an issue in fights (hi2u Void Reaver; I’ll get to you in a minute) and it is restricted in so many ways, its use in most cases is impractical at best, virtually nill at worst.

Spellsteal is a very, very, very nice way to steal buffs, like Innerfire, Elune’s Grace, Detect Lesser Invisibility, Rank 1 Amplify Magic, all those wonderfully useless buffs. Oh, and you go oom really, really fast. Oh, and because we have no passive damage, we’re doing zilch when stealing those buffs from you.

So our new spells is on par with the worst of the new spells with the classes in the game. Now what?

Here’s the crucial issue. Mages scale far, far, far, far FAR less than other caster DPS classes. The improved tax is one example, our lack of the sheer +X% talents, compared to the other classes is another. Shadow Preists get Vulnerability, Shadow Form, Darkness Misery and Shadow Power. Holy crap. Warlocks have so many ways to increase their contributions from gear, I’m not even going to try to list them all.

The scaling on talents from mages is far less. We have vulnerabilities, but very few base damage multipliers. Playing with fire (increased damage. Oh, and increased damage to you) Fire power and Imp Scorch.

So as gear gets better and better, Warlocks and Shadow Preists get better and better faster than Mages. This would be ok, except that the gear in TBC gets pretty nice, and a large portion of damage comes from this gear already. It will only get worse.

Now, I’ll break the rest of this really, really long post into 2 parts. PvP and PvE.

What Happened to PvP?

I’ll tell you what happened. Mages are the kings of burst damage, I really can’t dispute that. What I can dispute is that burst damage is still nice. 10k health is not that uncommon to fight against in the arena (I can get that, buffed, in my gear). You can’t burst that. You and another class can’t do that in the time it takes to get healed.

You have to be a little tricky.

Preists and Warlocks can dot multiple targets, they can debuff them. These are all really nice to have. Mages just do damage.

Sometimes, it feels like rolling a stone up a hill. Preists and Warlocks can harder, Mages can push decently well, but all they do is shove the rock as hard as possible, and then slowly the rock comes down, they get healed. Did I mention that Preists and Warlocks can flatten the hill so there are less heals, or they can dot up many targets so healers have to keep 3 different stones down? Mages can’t. We have a counterspell that works, and works well, but you have to counterspell early, or the heal will go off.

But that’s cool. I guess you could live with that.

Wanna know what you can’t live in the arena with? Survivability.

Our survivability is at an all time low. Seriously.

Before the expansion, all was good. It was kill, or be killed.

But now? And here’s the biggest Issue I want to bring up, so pay attention. THEY HAVE MORE HEALTH. You can’t seriously expect to burst that much health down. Mages get far less health on gear, at least, gear that’s good enough to help damage significantly.

Wanna know what else is cool? Mana Shield.

It’s so terrible now, its at the point where you will lose if you cast it.

Because of the increased health pool (the new mana gem and the new rank of AI didn’t help us get that much more mana, not to mention Evocate giving you 75% mana with a 49 spirit staff (enchanted)) we run out of mana much more easily.

Health is so much less valuable, in terms of Ilevel now. Yet the mana to health ratio is still a staggering 2:1. This has to be an oversight. In fact, I’m so confident that it is, and such a subtle one too, that all I have to do is mention it to a CM, they’ll mention it to the Developers and the Developers will say “oh, yeah that’s a good point. Let’s change that one variable”

But we still have burst damage. We always will.

…except that burst damage got nerfed the day it became harder to kill something really, really fast. Oh, and resilience > crits, which is most every scaling talent (we come back to that) we have. Increases chance to crit of whatever. Burst damage is over and done with.

Blink – If it can’t be fixed, change it. Break and immune to stuns/roots and a speed increase would be a good fix, the distance remains the same but there’s more control.

So mages need more survivability, other classes have it, mages have always been the bottom of surviving, but in a pvp world where surviving is very important…its useless.

PvE

If PvP was dark, PvE is worse.

Scaling talents.

Please, we need them. Gear is only going to get better.

Its kind of sad that a warlock, who specced destro to imitate a mage out DPSes a mage who specced fire. Its so bad, that again, I have enough faith in blizzard that it’ll be fixed.

I’ll cite Eoy’s Void Reaver as an example. http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=37697

Simply put, incinerate is huge. It’s faster than a fireball, and does more damage. Damage is damage per second. There’s nothing fireball has over it. This video is astounding, it shows clearly what a warlock can do. It’s a lot. Its more than the mages.

The fight itself is high in mobility, so a warlock with dots should out DPS mages, right?

Except that the warlock is destruction. So it plays like a mage (nuking, not dotting) And it out DPSes a mage.

So in PvE, a warlock out tanks (still terribly, but a warlock can take more punishment) out heals (drain life vs. Bandages) and out damages mages. There needs to be an imp scorch debuff, however. Ironic how that works, isn’t it? In Naxxramas, you’d bring 3 warlocks for a CoE, CoS and CoR. Now, you should only bring 1 mage, pigeonholed a certain spec, for the warlocks to actually do damage.
And yet, affliction out damages it. Oh crap.

But there is some hope, invisibility helps on that fight since the Voidy has a deaggro.

…Except that soulshatter works just as well, and doesn’t involve the fade time.

Wanna know how pathetic the fade time is? I pulled agro on a mob in heroic, oops, my bad. I invisibility so I can lose agro. The tank taunts, of course, but the mob for a second looks at me and does the attack animation.

I took no damage. All that happened is the animation with the tank targeted. Invisibilty fades from you /sigh

Not to mention the sheer aggressiveness of eating food and stuff. Not like you can break combat with invisibility to eat or drink anyway. Good thing we have life tap, oh wait. Well we have a mana gem that could theoretically be out performed by the level 60 variant. And a whopping 9 more int to our AI. In contrast, the Preist one is 25 more stamina than the level 60 Variant.

But, fortunately, Mages work out better in short boss fights, because we’re burst damage and crit oriented.

Well, name a short fight. Ok, good, you mentioned that guy. He’s hard not to notice, yelling at you in Hellfire Peninsula and all.

Name another.

Not to mention that IN short fights, our average damage is higher than other classes, but the standard deviation is a LOT higher. What’s standard deviation? In layman’s terms, its not entirely unlike the average variation from the average. Basically, an average only describes a number, it doesn’t completely predict it. So if a statistic has a wider standard deviation, its more likely to be much further away from the medium.

So in order for our damage to truly shine from crits, we need to get lucky. Pardon me while I sleep with Lady Luck to get her to like me so I can do like I’m intended to do and do more damage in a non-existant, instanced boss fight which needs to be short.

These are the problems with mages right now

Yeah, I didn’t proofread that either, that’s one titan of a 1600 word essay. So there are probably spelling mistakes. And it’s a long ass read. Here’s the break down

TBC Spells and new Talents:
Mages got the shaft
We scale a lot less.
Thanks for the talent tax

We’re the kings of burst damage!:
In a world where burst damage is worthless
In a world where no boss fights actually require significant burst beyond what can be done by a preist/warlock
Our burst damage is, by nature, unreliable and its entirely possible that we get out bursted if we get unlucky with crits. The inverse, out damaging is far less likely.

We’re bad at surviving:
In a world where surviving means everything

Stamina:
Mana Shield was broken by this mechanic- probably an oversight.

This took a while to write, so if you disagree and wish me dead, please say so- I’d enjoy the bump.

And if you need clarification, it’ll be much nicer to quote the confusing part and ask what’s up than to say ‘I don’t understand’ I want to re-edit that long ass post far, far less than you want to read it.

Blizzard should fix these class disparities fast. If you go by Utility provided and to a lesser extent survivability, Warlocks and Shadow Priests should not be at the top of the damage meters. But with the new changes to rogues next patch we can hopefully see them retaking the number one spot.

Hunters have been complaining about this for quite a while now...it seems Mages have finally realized it as well.

IMO...might be a bit of a class bias here but IMO the way DPS breakdown should be

Single Target Fights
Rogue -> Hunter -> Mage/DPS Warrior -> Warlock/Shadow Priest/DPS shaman/DPS paladin/DPS Druid

Fights requiring AOE
Mages -> Warlocks -> Rogues -> Hunters -> Rest of DPS.

Give me numbers.
Show me, numerically, why survivability has been decreased by comparing HP pools, dps/burst dps, and the variable CC options available to the mage class.
Give me solid numbers on the impact of dots vs dd in raiding and what specifically can be done to improve any imbalances you find.

The problem with mages is generally limited to a lot of rhetoric and dazzle that overshadow any solid concerns with, basically, whining. You're capable of strong rhetorical arguments- lets take it a step further and bring it out into the realm of reality.

You can be a force in the changes you want- if you're willing to do the dirty work to back up your claims. right now all I see is a lot of fluff and dazzle and complaining without any solutions or numbers.

Are you seriously saying that warlocks should only be doing hybrid dps damage? What exactly are we hybrids off? We don't tank and we dont heal, and unlike say City of Heroes or Guild Wars there are no real debuff and control classes in this game, which leaves us the only other kind of class in the game : primary dps.

Blizzard has clearly layed down what should be (but currently isn't) the fundamental difference between primary dps classes and the secondary ones: The primary classes have agro management abilities. Feign Death, Vanish, Invisibility, and Soul Shatter. The hybrid classes (feral druid, balance druid, shadow priest, elemental shaman, enhancement shaman, ret paladin) do not. If the threat generation and boss abilities were tuned better this reality would be much more obvious.

Mages scale much more linearly with gear, as warlocks only get 30 to 60% benefit from spell crit, and on top of that dots do not scale nearly as fast as nukes. Even as destruction dots are around 30% of our damage most of the time. I'm sure they will be caught up fairly soon just from gear really, as we get deeper into the BC raid dungeons (that is, once they are accessable and beatable)

I second the request for numbers. A list of general complaints and a handful of anecdotes does little to fuel a meaningful discussion.

http://wiki.shadowpriest.com/index.p...0.6_on_the_PTR

Generally, I'll just cite it for now. Arcane Blast scales magically, but its a HUGE mana drain (seeing as how I think its supposed to be the absolute uncontested king of fast, hard but unsustainable damage)

Of course: This is affliction that's king, I mentioned Destruction because its generally accepted as the "mage wannabe" spec. It plays very similarly to Mages, nuking for damage, and because there will be generally less DoTs on the boss because there is no UA, Siphon Life and Curses are generally used for Elements or Shadows.

I'm not even sure why you mentioned PVP in that. Rogues are pretty well agreed on as the worst class to bring to a high end 5v5. Even if you're getting railed on/pillar hopping/blinking for your life/not full DPSing for an entire match a mage's mere presence will take a lot out of any team with a warlock (COT). Druids are extremely unpopular in general. Mages have a solid argument over three other classes at least!

Maybe I'm just cranky that I'm being forced to watch Survivor, but this seems like little more than a whine thread. Even the title sucks. Boohoo, woe is me, mages suck, Bliz fix plz.