02-01-2006, 09:12 PM
All this does is illustrate what I prefer to call "the pathology of mage burst damage".
I use the word "pathology" because it's the only one that fits. Mage burst damage is "unwell". It's not too high, or too low, because it's both simultaneously. It's absolutely ridiculous that a mage with all his cooldowns up can flatten someone in one hit. It's equally ridiculous that a mage with no cooldowns up kills the slowest of any class in the game save Discipline Priests.
Any fix to this needs to fix both sides. Mages should stop being able to one-shot targets: it's not fun and not balanced. Equally speaking, rogues and warriors should stop being able to two-shot mages unless something's done about the fact that cooldown-less mages need to thirteen or fourteen-shot EVERYBODY. If you're up in a mage's face, all he has is fireblast (600 damage every 8 seconds) cone of cold (300ish every 10 seconds, 500 if he has Imp CoC) and Improved Arcane Explosion (280ish damage every 1.5 seconds). In practice, this means frontloading 900 damage with FB/CoC and pinging for 280 damage every 1.5 seconds after. If you have only 3k health (and who PvPs with that little health except for other mages?) it's twelve seconds to kill you. Twelve seconds is forever in PvP. Against a fully geared MS warrior with Ashkandi, I need up to thirty-five seconds to kill him assuming he heals not at all, and if he presses the MS key twice in those thirty-five seconds I die.
By all means, mage one-shotting needs to be fixed. But if it is fixed, then all the rest of the things that are wrong with the mage need to be fixed too.
I use the word "pathology" because it's the only one that fits. Mage burst damage is "unwell". It's not too high, or too low, because it's both simultaneously. It's absolutely ridiculous that a mage with all his cooldowns up can flatten someone in one hit. It's equally ridiculous that a mage with no cooldowns up kills the slowest of any class in the game save Discipline Priests.
Any fix to this needs to fix both sides. Mages should stop being able to one-shot targets: it's not fun and not balanced. Equally speaking, rogues and warriors should stop being able to two-shot mages unless something's done about the fact that cooldown-less mages need to thirteen or fourteen-shot EVERYBODY. If you're up in a mage's face, all he has is fireblast (600 damage every 8 seconds) cone of cold (300ish every 10 seconds, 500 if he has Imp CoC) and Improved Arcane Explosion (280ish damage every 1.5 seconds). In practice, this means frontloading 900 damage with FB/CoC and pinging for 280 damage every 1.5 seconds after. If you have only 3k health (and who PvPs with that little health except for other mages?) it's twelve seconds to kill you. Twelve seconds is forever in PvP. Against a fully geared MS warrior with Ashkandi, I need up to thirty-five seconds to kill him assuming he heals not at all, and if he presses the MS key twice in those thirty-five seconds I die.
By all means, mage one-shotting needs to be fixed. But if it is fixed, then all the rest of the things that are wrong with the mage need to be fixed too.