Compared to my lock, shadow priest and hunters that I have played it has felt the weakest in terms of quality of upgrades.
And my shadow priest has had enough hate thrown at it over the years (coupled with the fact that for 3 expansions I was forced to heal progression on it didnt help).
In terms of gimpage its to do with the QoL gameplay, rather than a L2P problem, if you dont know someone its not the sort of throw away insult that should be done.
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Didnt feel like that, fire felt very flat waiting for crits, arcane has felt very unplayable due to mana and dps issues lower end gear, and frost was the only viable spec and it was fairly boring.
Whilst top end game the specs do tend to be levelled out better as mage does scale well, at lower end its annoying that you get 1 spec to play if you want any chance to be taken seriously. I dont like being forced to cookie cutter and that is what it has felt since about patch 4, at least back in TBC I could use frost or fire and they were equally viable to kill illidan.
Personally I am not worried about the damage, i raided when all 3 mage specs were in the bottom 5 dps specs and then back to the top of the charts, its more the QoL that has been spoken about repeatedly on these forums, and from what I have read it doesnt feel it.
I am prepared to wait until WoD launches and I have done the raid a few times before i properly make my mind up, as beta & ptr are 1 thing, live environment is a different kettle of fish.
I'm pretty sure that's because the Flames of Azzinoth were fire-immune? Arcane was a joke spec unless you funneled Innervates into it and posted screenshots on the forums. Frost wasn't competitive, it was just the Molten Core syndrome that it was the only option besides Fire. TBC isn't a terribly good example either considering Mages like to recall with venom that none of their specs were "viable" in Sunwell relative to the other class/caster options.
Except back then if you were anything other than Fire you were doing it wrong (unless you were facing immunities). There has never been a choice at the edge of progression for any class really. The mage has the advantage that the specs scale differently. Onc you cap out Frost you go Fire. If you are good enough with Arcane (mana issues at the correct gear level are a skill/not understanding the spec issue) then you go Arc once you cap out Fire.
Frost favors Haste/Mastery, Fire favors Crit/Mastery, and Arc favors Mastery/Crit. The class is probably the best rounded class in the game with just enough ease of access, depth, and high skill caps for each spec.
37 + (3*7) + (3*7)W/L/T/Death count: Wolf: 0/1/0/1 | Mafia: 1/6/0/7 | TPR: 0/4/1/5SK: 0/1/0/1 | VT: 2/5/2/7 | Cult: 1/0/0/1
Mage will always be relevant when it comes to DPS abilities, just it feels bland to play one(Fire mostly). And there aren't really many changes coming for us. Almost nothing changes, Arcane the most, but that is expected as there hasn't been an expansion where Arcane is untouched yet in a way or another. We get a few new skills, nothing amazing though and again for Fire PoV mostly boring(at least on single target).
It's just really hard to get excited about being a Mage nowdays, if you want to raid and do DPS then Mage is great, just not sure if you will have your maximum fun on a Mage.
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I'm really hoping that with Water Jet finally being added Frost will be more viable for longer again in WoD like it was at the start of MoP with freeze forcing FoF procs.
It's nice to say "you can just switch specs" but the reality is that if I spend half a tier collecting crit / haste gear for Fire, and all the sudden now Frost is dominant, switching to Frost entails a DPS hit due to poorly itemized gear. It's not just "hurrdurr go play another spec."
i play arcane since ulduar and i rather not change speccs
I WILL FIND WAYS TO MAKE ARCANE OP!
Just be nice to have a choice... that is all. I enjoy fire and frost quite a lot and have tended to suffer Arcane until the state it is in currently. Just be nice to have the freedom to say i want to play a goblin fire mage and stick to that, kind of like in a RPG, but i forget we don't technically play an MMORPG anymore.
That goes for PvP too, although i enjoy frost PvP it would kind of cool if Arcane was viable for a change. One of the cases for the stat squish was the easier balancing of damage in respective classes. Seems like nothing will change and we will be forced to play specs we don't enjoy in classes we do for many years to come.
I can't tell if you're being serious or not. Just because my class has 3 DPS specs doesn't mean a single one of them is allowed to be garbage. That's the old Vanilla/BC mentality of "well, I have at least 1 spec that isn't crippled". If Blizzard wants to have 34 specs in the game, you bet your ass that they need to be balancing all 34 of them.
I can understand one of them being a bit better in DPS (like live, all 3 specs have never been closer together than Siege), but not mechanically broken and left in the dust.
Still wondering why I play this game.
I'm a Rogue and I also made a spreadsheet for the Order Hall that is updated for BfA.
He's actually not, with being forced to play one spec for most of the expansions. However, they've gotten a lot better with it in MoP and it's never been better between the three. WoD's looking good too, but Fire is virtually shit until you get the T17 2P/4P, and fixing core issues with tier bonuses (and talents for that matter) is really stupid.
Still wondering why I play this game.
I'm a Rogue and I also made a spreadsheet for the Order Hall that is updated for BfA.