Are you pleased with Mage in raids right now?

[Amsden]

No because I refuse to play fire anymore. Frost is damn near useless because blizzard are idiots. So I benched my mage for the first time in nearly a decade for my Druid. It makes me feel sick to my very core maining druid.

[Packmule]

No, frost mage had significant nerfs before the expansion, now their atleast doing 10% less then any other class, wouldnt have hurt to get a buff and made ebonbolt baseline. But well. Let fire reign for 10 years is blizzards philosophy, and their almost there i guess.

[Schmeebs]

Yes but it does not tell us anything about how well fire scales with secondarys compared to other classes that also have synergies like that.

The thought that fire scales better into expansions because of more secondarys compared to other classes has to die, it's not true since the legion rework.

Yeah, fire tends to scale incredibly with all of the secondaries, so DRs really doesnt nerf fire that much.

Even the worst secondary for fire (crit) is still good.

[TheLucky1]

Yeah, fire tends to scale incredibly with all of the secondaries, so DRs really doesnt nerf fire that much.

Even the worst secondary for fire (crit) is still good.

I would love to hear your sources/evidence for that, what brought fire into the heights at the mid/end was usually some oversight or borrowed power BS toys, not so much the secondary scaling.

In fact, secondary (lategame)scaling for specs hasn't been a big factor in nearly a decade, last time you could arguably talk about it was wotlk.

It's more a game of who wins the borrowed power lottery, just look at the end of BfA that put SO MUCH into combustion it became nearly arcane wod levels.

It's not perfect but my evidence would be stat weights in sims, fire mage is not exceptional there compared to most other dd's.

[Amaterasu65]

Ive been enjoying getting 96-99s and still 1-2k behind people

This sadly. Its ST deffo needs a buff.

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Yeah, fire tends to scale incredibly with all of the secondaries, so DRs really doesnt nerf fire that much.

Even the worst secondary for fire (crit) is still good.

For me crit is a needed stat because of FI.

[pr0fite]

Yeah, fire tends to scale incredibly with all of the secondaries, so DRs really doesnt nerf fire that much.

Even the worst secondary for fire (crit) is still good.

That is just false since the Legion rework, like many other folks already said.

I think all Mage Specs are undertuned right now, Frost and Arcane being the Specs with the most need for Buffs, Fire only needs a slight Bump to play with the Big Boys, still the deeper we go into the Expansion the better Fire will be, Borrowed Power once again looks incredibly Powerful (42% Bonus Fire Damage in Combustion on Max Rank)(10s Extra Cooldown Reduction as Night Fae on Max rank, giving us 20s total CDR on all Mage abilities and will end up with sub 1min Combustions)

Gameplay wise i think end of BfA Fire was smoother (Lucid + Bracers). Phoenix Flames right now feels Clunky af, mainly because of Travel Time and not critting 100% of the time anymore.........and Ignite Spread on it aswell. I was hoping we get Legion PF back and make Living bomb our Ignite spreading ability.

[Video Games]

That is just false since the Legion rework, like many other folks already said.

I think all Mage Specs are undertuned right now, Frost and Arcane being the Specs with the most need for Buffs, Fire only needs a slight Bump to play with the Big Boys, still the deeper we go into the Expansion the better Fire will be, Borrowed Power once again looks incredibly Powerful (42% Bonus Fire Damage in Combustion on Max Rank)(10s Extra Cooldown Reduction as Night Fae on Max rank, giving us 20s total CDR on all Mage abilities and will end up with sub 1min Combustions)

Gameplay wise i think end of BfA Fire was smoother (Lucid + Bracers). Phoenix Flames right now feels Clunky af, mainly because of Travel Time and not critting 100% of the time anymore.........and Ignite Spread on it aswell. I was hoping we get Legion PF back and make Living bomb our Ignite spreading ability.

I dont mind the travel time on pf because it feels good when it hits, but i feel like i have to press it 20 times before it actually casts and sometimes it just doesnt. I think it needs a gcd reduction or something. And yeah in nyalotha it was smoother but it was really boring. I like it better now. I guess its just the extra button that i have to think about now (plus no more font thank god)

[Wheeler]

Not at all.

Mage needs a ground up rework. All 3 specs. They should look COMPLETELY different than they do right now. Combustion is something they should have reworked after Ny'alotha. But they clearly didn't have a vision for what to do with it, so they just nuked ignite and left it as-is. Shouldn't surprise anyone that the class feels a solid 10% behind most others right now, it was being propped up by a trinity of rental powers and double on-use that Blizzard never even saw coming. As for SL Fire? Phoenix flames feels just as bad as I remember it feeling in Legion. The delay in it feels atrocious. I can't overstate this enough.

Frost was simply overnerfed in the beta no matter how you slice it. They didn't like IL spam, and while I understand - They should maybe take a look at why the class is so reliant on it, rather than just try to "tune" Ice Lance to do more appropriate damage (and I use the term "tune" very loosely here, because they decimated the ability, and thereby, the entire specs damage profile - You simply should in no content right now be playing Frost unless you like Blue Spell instead of Red Spell.

Arcane has needed a complete rework for going on 5+ years now. It always sims high, but it's simply not versatile enough in the current WoW raiding environment where every boss has 200 abilities and you're spending most of the fight moving around like a chicken with your head cut off. It asks too much of the player (Look at timers - Can I plant feet for the next 30 seconds? No? When can I? When did X mage plant feet in their logs? lemme look) and doesn't let them organically adapt to fights. Feels especially bad when you're comparing it to the fire mages and MM hunters running around during execute doing DPS.

Mage isn't dead. It's not Windwalker pre-ascension dead. It's not Demo lock dead at all. But it's definitely in the worst state it's been overall in about a decade. They need to decide which of the two specs are getting a buff (Hint - should be Fire/Frost), and deploy buffs immediately. 10% to fire puts it in the top 5-6, but nowhere near UH DK/Moonkin. 20% to frost prolly puts it in the top 10 just barely. Think about that.

[Xires]

Looking at the logs, it seems mages are a fair bit behind other classes. Do you think it's going to improve in the next tier?

Nope! Frost is dead last. Arcane and Fire are kind of middle of the road and situational. Fire is doing the best of the 3 because they buffed it while nerfing the shit out of Frost during the pre-patch. And that is after months of being told "frost is KANG!!!". They nerfed it to be miles the worst DPS spec. If you aren't pulling 80-90th percentile on your fights then you'll find that you're in a lot of trouble. And the fact that you have to pull 90%+ to keep up with other classes with players that are around 40-60% shows that Frost is waaaaaaaay undertuned now that Blizzard nerfed the shit out of it.

Arcane is kind of in the same boat...but a little better off then Frost. Fire is the best of the 3 but is still undertuned. Mage is a PURE DPS class. And to have all 3 specs be undertuned and medicore at best...shows we need buffs and badly.

[Vaidenn]

No. I want to play frost but it is under performing. I don't want to have to switch to fire.

[D3athsting]

I read somewhere that using GS is a dps loss compared to no talent in that row! Maybe it was only in the pre patch but its quite hilarious...
Not to mention other trash talents that only serve the purpose of filling a talent slot in the grid and nobody with a healthy brain would use:

Ray of frost
Focus Magic
From the ashes

[TimAhKin]

Can't say I raided much in Shadowlands, but mage looks pretty weak in raids and it's only used for the 5% buff. It's good to have but not really mandatory.

[Charge me Doctor]

It's fun to play, but damage is uncompetitive compared to other classes

[Azerox]

They are oke, can't always be top.
Could boost frost mage a bit more imo.

[MrPaladinGuy]

You get a mechanic during combustion and your dps is GONE, i mean, totally GONE

The solution is simple, play Hunter !

[TimAhKin]

I played fire since vanilla and I like that fire is best spec. Wished legendary items were more creative and powerful.

[D3athsting]

I played fire since vanilla and I like that fire is best spec. Wished legendary items were more creative and powerful.

Beside firestorm all are rehashed version on legiondaries or artifact traits

[Your Mommy]

Beside firestorm all are rehashed version on legiondaries or artifact traits

Which is sad.

[Segus1992]

Nah, that's just due to the compounding nature of secondary stats.

If we assume 100 haste points == 10% haste:

Old World:
Getting more point value of a stat(the number you see on gear) is always worth x% of the secondary stat, no matter how much you get.
30% haste -> 39% haste would require 90 haste points, as you would expect.
The relative value of the secondary stat(compared to other secondary stats) goes down, as the stats compound off each other.


New World:
The more point value you have(changing at specific thresholds, 30% is the first), the less X% of that stat you get. Assuming 100 haste == 10% haste, once you hit 30% haste, every point above that is worth 10% less, ie to get from 30 -> 39% haste, it would take ~100 haste, instead of the 90 haste you would expect, due to the soft cap.
The relative value of the secondary stat still goes down like normal, as the stats compound off each other.
Also, there's a hard cap of 126% haste from gear.

Big ol' detailed explanation here -> https://www.wowhead.com/guides/dimin...ld-of-warcraft

This really doesn't affect anyone too much though, except it slightly punishes heavy stacking of the same stat. Mostly it affects the ridiculous situations we had with Corruption late BfA.

It doesn't really do much to ensure ilvl is king, it just means that someone who follows that gearing rule won't be as much behind someone who focuses their best stat (but only slightly less than before).

[mrgreenthump]

Am somewhat satisfied with it. Aren't the bottom dps at least(when playing fire). Gotten used to 1 spec being decent and other 2 being trash by now, cause it has happened every expansion really. I do expect them to tune some classes down a bit and that would make Fire one of the best again. Frost however, dunno, it sims incredibly well with Mythic gear(comparing to 184 gear), but nobody is playing it, so don't know it's true power yet.

Arcane however, well.. It's never going to work, they likely won't let it's ST damage to be so high it would remedy the shortcomings of it's versatility in raiding.