Mage buff??

[acevarrock]

I'm finding mages retardedly weak right now. Everyother class keeps getting buffed while the mage gets debuffed. They've become one of the worst classes in the game and maybe the worst defensively. So my question is, does anyone know if there's going to be a buff for the mage soon or what the deal is? Thanks.

[tagkc]

I'm not having any problems. Spec'ed 41 in frost and I'm consistantly one of the top 3 both in raids and in bg's in damage done. I can farm just fine too. Not seeing the problem. Maybe it's how your spec'ed or what equipment your using.

[acevarrock]

- I die too much (crappy armor and soloing all the time)
- No place to get armor (levels 10-15)
- Very, very few damage spells at low levels

Those are my main problems right now with my mage.

[eggo]

Group with others. Learn to drink/eat. You also have to be smart as to which mobs to pull. When I'm going to AOE a group, I usually have a healing potion rdy. But it's true, mage hp is nothing compared to the other classes. As for equipment, in a few more levels you'll be able to run either Wailing Caverns or Deadmines depending on faction.

[hypebeasted]

mages have great survavability later on. maybe its just because your low level. but Polymorph, Frost Nova, Blink, Ice Barrier, Mana Shield, Ice Block. Just keep at it, Mages didn't get debuffed.

[Morollan]

Mages didn't get debuffed. Of course, there's still the massive nerfing in The Burning Crusade yet to come.

[SkipsH]

Mage? Weak? Dont quite follow...I played my first mage up to level 20 without dying once...well except deliberatley to save myself some run time...honestly I must say that mage is my favourite class, I dont think Im that good but damn, as long as you think ahead and stay alert its so much damned fun! Maybe if you are finding them weak you should try another class? I mean frost nova is the absolute bomb at level 15 to get rid of mobs that are chasing you. At 20 you get blink which just helps again...I accidently took my level 47 mage to EPL and managed to get up to the Ghostlands entrance without dying somehow. I dont even have ice block or coldsnap.

I love my mage! AoE pewpew!

[brandondash]

Of course, there's still the massive nerfing in The Burning Crusade yet to come.
Do tell. I'm reading the beta boards and I haven't seen any major nerfs coming down the pipeline. The closest thing I've been able to find is that warlocks now have higher dps in raids occasionally.

brandon-

[Morollan]

Do tell. I'm reading the beta boards and I haven't seen any major nerfs coming down the pipeline. The closest thing I've been able to find is that warlocks now have higher dps in raids occasionally.

brandon- Well, we have nerfs to Elemental Precision, Burning Soul, Counterspell and all AOE spells if used on more than 10 targets. We have new talents that are boring and unimaginative, spells that are of either no use whatsoever (Invisibility) or that pale in comparison to those received by other classes (cc Molten Armour and Fel Armour) and 41 point talents that are roughly the same as a rank 1 frostbolt (Slow), Cone of Cold (Dragonbreath) or a watered down warlock (Water Elemental). There is little to excite me as a mage in the expansion and I seriously doubt I'll bother playing her. Why should I, when I have a warlock?

[Magikhat]

Learn to play your class and get better gear.

[Loriel]

I'm finding mages retardedly weak right now. Everyother class keeps getting buffed while the mage gets debuffed. They've become one of the worst classes in the game and maybe the worst defensively. So my question is, does anyone know if there's going to be a buff for the mage soon or what the deal is? Thanks.TBH this sounds a bit like mindless trolling to me. All classes are weak while leveling up, at least compared to how they'll end up at 60. Just ask anybody who's ever leveled a Priest to 20 and learn from how they coped with that mind-numbing process.

IMO it makes very little sense to talk about how other classes are buffed while Mages keep getting nerfed - from the perspective of a lvl 15.. This argument only makes sense at 60, with all your endgame abilities and talents in place - and possibly also some thoughts on endgame itemization. I'm not putting you down for not being 60, it's just that it makes very little sense to complain about them until that point.

Mages are imo perfectly fine, and a Mage of any spec is capable of leveling to 60 - alone if need be. Some specs will be more efficient than others, but that's true of all classes. Learn what you're capable of, be careful on the pulls and don't be afraid to leg it if it all gets too hot. Mages are certainly the most fragile class of them all, so they require a certain play style to be viable. To compensate for this, we get a number of escape tools - including Blink, Frost Nova and Polymorph. If you play your Mage (too) aggressively, i.e. tanking like a Battle Mage, then ofc you'll suffer - the Mage class is not intended to be played in this manner.

As for equipment, not much is needed until lvl 20 or so - at which time you can pick up some nice items from Wailing Caverns (Horde) and/or Deadmines (Alliance). You could pick up some cheap greens at the AH or from the occasional quest reward, and you shouldn't expect to buy gear from vendors.

And to Morollan:
From what I've learned about the new abilities and talents in BC (as well as my experience in the BC Beta), I don't think Mages are nerfed at all. Quite possibly we haven't received buffs like the Warlocks have, but I still think we are more than fine, and perfectly capable of dishing out some serious dps - including killer AoE.

Learn to play your class and get better gear.Heh, this is basically the short version of what I said :rolleyes:

[Drpep]

Cant seem to think of anytime i thought my mage was a week class. Hvae played fire ice and now arcane, all are powerful. Level up is all i can say.

[Morollan]

And to Morollan:
From what I've learned about the new abilities and talents in BC (as well as my experience in the BC Beta), I don't think Mages are nerfed at all. Quite possibly we haven't received buffs like the Warlocks have, but I still think we are more than fine, and perfectly capable of dishing out some serious dps - including killer AoE. As I haven't been involved in beta testing I will refrain from further comment other than to say that I cannot see how all the things I mentioned, combined with the massive stamina boosts on equipment in the expansion (ie all mobs and players having more health and therefore being harder to kill) can possibly mean anything other than a nerf for mages.

[brandondash]

Well, we have nerfs to Elemental Precision, Burning Soul, Counterspell and all AOE spells if used on more than 10 targets. We have new talents that are boring and unimaginative, spells that are of either no use whatsoever (Invisibility) or that pale in comparison to those received by other classes (cc Molten Armour and Fel Armour) and 41 point talents that are roughly the same as a rank 1 frostbolt (Slow), Cone of Cold (Dragonbreath) or a watered down warlock (Water Elemental). There is little to excite me as a mage in the expansion and I seriously doubt I'll bother playing her. Why should I, when I have a warlock?
You must have been away from the live game. All the changes you list were in as of patch 2.0 in early december. As usual, mages ended up much better off than they thought. You should try playing your mage again rather than guessing at how good he is. You may be nicely surprised. :)

brandon-

p.s. One thing I'll admit though is that the nerf to counterspell is every bit as bad as you imagine.

[Loriel]

Well, we have nerfs to Elemental Precision, Burning Soul, Counterspell and all AOE spells if used on more than 10 targets. We have new talents that are boring and unimaginative, spells that are of either no use whatsoever (Invisibility) or that pale in comparison to those received by other classes (cc Molten Armour and Fel Armour) and 41 point talents that are roughly the same as a rank 1 frostbolt (Slow), Cone of Cold (Dragonbreath) or a watered down warlock (Water Elemental). There is little to excite me as a mage in the expansion and I seriously doubt I'll bother playing her. Why should I, when I have a warlock?Well, I see these as balance changes and not specifically nerfs. Blizzard were a bit too eager with the aggro reduction talents in a previous patch, so this is simply undoing that. I can see how putting Counterspell on the GCD is annoying if you PvP a lot, but I fail to see how it breaks the class in PvP (as some people claim it does). Invisibility is an aggro reducer, so as such it is not exactly "of no use whatsoever". And as for new abilities, I'm pretty excited about Ice Lance and Arcane Blast - they fit well within my notion of what a Mage is. These abilities are possibly not as complicated nor as interlinked as some Warlock abilities are, but then Mages are not supposed to be Warlocks.

I will agree, though, that some of the new 41-point talents are less exciting than others, in particular the 3 new Warlock talents (Unstable Affliction, Summon Felguard and Shadowfury). Warlocks have tons of cool abilities, whereas Mages are a lot more 1-dimensional by comparison. That doesn't prevent them from being very fun to play.

Beyond just the abilities and talents, I think you're simply talking about a matter of class preference. If Warlock is more your bag and you like their abilities better, then by all means go ahead. Just because you prefer Warlocks (or any other class) over the Mage doesn't mean that they are nerfed. Mages are (and will remain) what they were designed to be - high-dps burst nukers, with some serious hardcore AoE.

Anyway, that's just my $0.02. I play both Warlock and Mage, but the Mage is my chosen main for BC, and I can't wait to bring her to Outland and level her to 70. As such I tend to become a bit defensive when people claim they are nerfed, which I patently think they are not :)

[Morollan]

You must have been away from the live game. All the changes you list were in as of patch 2.0 in early december. As usual, mages ended up much better off than they thought. You should try playing your mage again rather than guessing at how good he is. You may be nicely surprised. :)

brandon-

p.s. One thing I'll admit though is that the nerf to counterspell is every bit as bad as you imagine. I have played her after the patch and I do not agree that I ended up better than I thought. If I kept the same (elemental) build I had before the patch then I was worse off due to the nerfs to counterspell and burning soul. I tried a deep frost build but water elemental is a joke AFAIK and I struggled to even find useful talents to spend the necessary points in frost to get from Ice Block to Water Elemental. So I respec'd back to elemental but went 20/31 instead of 31/20 and I'm still worse off than I was before for the same reasons I mentioned above. As for arcane, well I would need to collect a lot of new gear before I experiment with that as most of my gear is plus fire or plus frost (or both).

Can you seriously tell me one good thing that happened for mages in that patch?

[det]

- I die too much (crappy armor and soloing all the time)
- No place to get armor (levels 10-15)
- Very, very few damage spells at low levels

Those are my main problems right now with my mage.

Hm..maybe mage is just not your class....seriously no class should die often if at all before lv 20 ^^.

I mean..everybody tells me how fast levelling over-powerhouses hunters are...but it is just not "my" class.

My mage is now 56. Loved frost, respecced to fire, hated it, now frost again. He is not as smooths ailing / enjoyable as my warlock or shadowpriest, and I can't see how a mage could beat a warlock in a duel...well..I can't see how I playing a mage could beat a warlock..yet it seems to happen ^^



And to Morollan:
From what I've learned about the new abilities and talents in BC (as well as my experience in the BC Beta), I don't think Mages are nerfed at all. Quite possibly we haven't received buffs like the Warlocks have, but I still think we are more than fine, and perfectly capable of dishing out some serious dps - including killer AoE.

I second that...my warlock is full epics now, so naturally he is a crazy killing machine compared to my mage. Yet with the waterelemental summoned, 4 enemies of equal level die in the time it is out (45 secs). I couldn't do that when I levelled my warlock. (not AoE grinding)

[rgirty]

I have played her after the patch and I do not agree that I ended up better than I thought. If I kept the same (elemental) build I had before the patch then I was worse off due to the nerfs to counterspell and burning soul. I tried a deep frost build but water elemental is a joke AFAIK and I struggled to even find useful talents to spend the necessary points in frost to get from Ice Block to Water Elemental. So I respec'd back to elemental but went 20/31 instead of 31/20 and I'm still worse off than I was before for the same reasons I mentioned above. As for arcane, well I would need to collect a lot of new gear before I experiment with that as most of my gear is plus fire or plus frost (or both).

Can you seriously tell me one good thing that happened for mages in that patch?

I love the new talents, I play my wife's fire mage sometimes and she's spec 1/47/3 with the 3 being elemental precision. I put full points in empowered fireball, playing with fire all the deep tree talents + dragon's breath. I can't see why you think mages got the nerf other than counterspell.

Fireball+fireblast+dragons breath= average 4K damage for me. In pvp 90% of the time it's GG if I get those spells off. In PvE I found the same result. Mana is very efficient and can pump out a lot of dps.

[Cerberus]

Well, comparing mages to other classes (excluding warriors) the patch hasn't brought much new. The water elemental is the big kicker along with reintroducing the 3 minute mage they worked so hard to get rid of. The "arcane mage" didn't happen (support from fire or frost makes it a 3 minute mage) and they nerfed rolling ignites. Nerfing rolling ignites was in place imho however.

Haven't tried fire after the patch, but frost has 20% less time on CDs, a water elemental, 2 filler talents and badly nerfed frost channeling and elemental precision. Add global to any useful combo (including anything with iceblock), no clearcasting at 60 and you're pretty much there.
I have to admit I like the elemental and reduced CDs, but the globals really hurt. I guess I could go on about this for a few pages, but my main point here was to give a quick overview.

A few things on the other options:
Deep arcane/fire or Deep arcane/frost aka 3 minute mage. We all know how this specc works:

"Pyromax' pyroblast crits you for 4,2k fire damage"
"You die"

Why did they do this? Nobody knows. PvE utility? Doubt it.. Produces a lot of whinethreads in the official forums and makes a lot of mages hide for 3 minutes at the graveyard in WSG.

Getting some points in each tree ("elemental") works pretty well for PvP, but has this specc changed in any way since prepatch? No change, same old except for the global on CS.

This far, things like mage armor, ice armor and arcane intellect also scale horribly in TBC.

I won't bother listing all the other classes for comparison, but simply having a look at the trees should be enough. Some of the major buffs that came were completely out of place and I have a very hard time trying to justify them with current PvE or PvP issues. I'm just praying this will work out by the time we hit 70..

edit: ups, missed the part about being 15. Still a bit early to think about how strong a class is me thinks.

[Xmcdaniel]

- I die too much (crappy armor and soloing all the time)
- No place to get armor (levels 10-15)
- Very, very few damage spells at low levels

Those are my main problems right now with my mage.

Frost nova and run SIDEWAYS (not backwards) and you should hardly ever get hit. I don't think I've been hit by a single pull AI mob since I was in my lvl 20's (I'm 45 now). If you learn to play the class mages are the most fun class to play and you can get A LOT out of your abilities...keep up and keep learning.