Mage Issues
Posted: Thu May 16, 2013 11:44 pm
Here is my take on the massive mage nerf that has made playing a mage nearly impossible and completely under powered compared to other classes. If you do not have a high level mage please do not make assumptions about the class, as I have done hours and hours of testing with this class pre and post update pre and post patch, have a character of each class, and do not care for uneducated opinions.
First of all, to everyone who believed mage class was overpowered before the nerf you must understand a few things. To get that massive damage you must first have maxed ice / fire attunement, which has a 3 minute cooldown period and is a buff. If killed attunement is lost and takes a very very long time to recast especially in a boss fight. Attunement was where most of our skill damage was coming from. We essentially only have 2 skills that we can effectively cast for dmg with the amount of skill points we have. Second, as a mage all we have are skills to do damage, so of course we should have high damaging spells. All other classes at my level (127) can do around 350-500 dmg per hit and with haste gear, this damage is done quickly; not to mention the added dmg from skills from said classes. Mages have some of the worst armor in the game, at level 127 I can barely run through blue eyes without dying with my 30/30 nerfed energy shield which costs 990 energy and protects against around 4 hits off an enemy as even exp enemies 30 levels below me do around 250 dmg per hit. Energy consumption is terrible for mage forcing us to max out skills like energy boost and have several lux items. Thirdly, all the high damage spells ie ice shards, ice blast, attunements, firestorm etc have insane cooldown times meaning we could only do short bursts of high damage, then play the waiting game. This is the misconception I've viewed on these forums - mages can "spam" skills. They cannot. Lastly, 50% of my spells get evaded. Even using gear with +ice/fire magic I get evaded constantly meaning I am doing a total of 0 damage. I get out dps'd by every class now, even hybrid druids. EVEN DRUIDS... Mages are the weakest class in the game for one reason in my mind, they are supposed to output good damage and provide a little support. As of now mages are only useful as a support role. I feel like we are treated like second class citizens because as soon as we are made to be exactly the kind of class we should be all the other 'classes' complain until we are brought down beneath them again. I have even seen people gloating about how mages are back where they belong, lower than the rest, since they got the devs to nerf us.
The fact that this nerf hadn't had extensive testing surprises and outrages me, as I spent many hours and gold/plat making my build and testing the different builds that would suit my style of play. If something does not get done to remedy this situation I can only ask for my money back as time is non refundable.
Before you change the game based on opinions of players who do not even use the class they're complaining about, do the testing yourself, I don't mean test a spell on one mob, I mean play for a couple weeks. Try leveling at our levels, try everything, every build. It's disturbing that the devs were influenced so much by the opinion of the community, which from what I've seen, aren't testing themselves, just speculating from what they see.
First of all, to everyone who believed mage class was overpowered before the nerf you must understand a few things. To get that massive damage you must first have maxed ice / fire attunement, which has a 3 minute cooldown period and is a buff. If killed attunement is lost and takes a very very long time to recast especially in a boss fight. Attunement was where most of our skill damage was coming from. We essentially only have 2 skills that we can effectively cast for dmg with the amount of skill points we have. Second, as a mage all we have are skills to do damage, so of course we should have high damaging spells. All other classes at my level (127) can do around 350-500 dmg per hit and with haste gear, this damage is done quickly; not to mention the added dmg from skills from said classes. Mages have some of the worst armor in the game, at level 127 I can barely run through blue eyes without dying with my 30/30 nerfed energy shield which costs 990 energy and protects against around 4 hits off an enemy as even exp enemies 30 levels below me do around 250 dmg per hit. Energy consumption is terrible for mage forcing us to max out skills like energy boost and have several lux items. Thirdly, all the high damage spells ie ice shards, ice blast, attunements, firestorm etc have insane cooldown times meaning we could only do short bursts of high damage, then play the waiting game. This is the misconception I've viewed on these forums - mages can "spam" skills. They cannot. Lastly, 50% of my spells get evaded. Even using gear with +ice/fire magic I get evaded constantly meaning I am doing a total of 0 damage. I get out dps'd by every class now, even hybrid druids. EVEN DRUIDS... Mages are the weakest class in the game for one reason in my mind, they are supposed to output good damage and provide a little support. As of now mages are only useful as a support role. I feel like we are treated like second class citizens because as soon as we are made to be exactly the kind of class we should be all the other 'classes' complain until we are brought down beneath them again. I have even seen people gloating about how mages are back where they belong, lower than the rest, since they got the devs to nerf us.
The fact that this nerf hadn't had extensive testing surprises and outrages me, as I spent many hours and gold/plat making my build and testing the different builds that would suit my style of play. If something does not get done to remedy this situation I can only ask for my money back as time is non refundable.
Before you change the game based on opinions of players who do not even use the class they're complaining about, do the testing yourself, I don't mean test a spell on one mob, I mean play for a couple weeks. Try leveling at our levels, try everything, every build. It's disturbing that the devs were influenced so much by the opinion of the community, which from what I've seen, aren't testing themselves, just speculating from what they see.