Originally Posted by
Niwes
it depends imo. as someone said, blizz always in all xpacs give the last 5% more dmg most of the time to locks and especially mages. look at all logs of the last 10 years. but that wether says something about the fun of the class (this is purely subjective) nor if YOU can handle it.
mages are not thaaaat easy. you must be able to stationary blink around, dont often move (rune could be horrible) and deal A LOT with movement problems, because you a) have to cast a lot b) you can be killed very fast c) you often have spells where you have to plan accordingly. consider an arcane mage setting his crystal at the wrong moment on the wrong position. hillarious dmg loss. every ele will out dps you. another example is the Legion rune. 50% (!!!) more dmg for 10 seconds, but stay around em. you have to "pool" and burst all out in that moment. so have to know the fight real good and plan accordingly. wasting that 10s bc of needed movement away from the rune, and you suck. a lot. thats not like pressing all your ele elementals cd / asc and go to town.
what i wanna say is: mages need a good knowledge of the fight and a good planing to when do what where. some other casters are more forgivable. so, you not automatically outdps everybody. when a player could play a little bit easier ele on a higher niveau than a more complex mage that have more power, the ele can end with more dmg. as i said it depends. you should be able to also play the class on top. and often thats easier with an ele than with a mage. so dont wonder yourself when your mages performs more worse than your ele.
but IF you can handle a mage on the same high niveau, most of the time mages always outperformed eles and most other classes. so, it depends on how well you could play a mage.
and the fun of ele vs fun of mages is purely subjective. if you have fun with it and you can handle it, play mage. and same goes for ele. so, as always, it depends. its up to you.
all around tuning wise i see the typically single target problem with eles. but the same goes for x classes. feral i.e. has literally NO aoe. but from a beta point of view i dont see the problems here. there are a lot of classes performing same or lower as ele. i would call ele aoe 85%, ST 35%, overall a 75-80% classs. so no real worries here.