So You Wanna Raid...

[q4m]

I hope this doesn't sound like one of those 'give mages their dmg role back' whines you see on the official forums, but I am growing disheartened playing a mage.

It used to be that we compensated for our over-squishiness by being able to unleashed fiery and frozen wrath onto ugly beasties from all over. OK, rogues were outdamaging us, but then hey, they had to get up real close and personal to do it. I could live with that.

Then the advent of the SM/Ruin (and the MD/Ruin, possibly) warlock made us look less than ideal, at least from a DD point of view.

And now we have hunters and warriors with suped-up weapons who appear to be able to dole out the hurt without even breaking out a sweat, and without having to sit down and have a swig of juice every other encounter.

Sure, we still have AOE, but then the opportunities to use it are few and far between in raids, and it doesn't exactly lend itself to being useful when it matters - i.e. boss fights.

So, are we really only for doing the 'Here's your water, Sir or Ma'am' role, and to maybe toss a few portals up every so often?

I've seen boss fights fail because we didn't have enough healers, or warlocks, or tanks/offtanks, but I don't think I've seen a situation where a boss couldn't be done because there wasn't enough mages. I know we don't usually want for mages, but honestly, would we be missed? If there wasn't enough of us, I think you could quite easily swap us in with hunters or get a few warriors to take a dps role.

In short, Kateley is not feeling that she's making a difference by being there for a raid. It seems that she's only there to make up the numbers, and if it there was a toss-up for a 20th or 40th slot, it is quite likely you could find another class better to fill the slot than a squishy mage who's not really chucking all that much damage out anyway.

So, no love for the mage in present-day raiding, or are we being taken for granted because there's usually no shortage of us?
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Wildfire,
I personally think mages are very valuable to raids. I play a warlock and I can tell you that I can do high damage, but it's "spikey". The damage my mage (also 60) does is quite a bit more consistent. This might be a gear thing though, I'm not sure. So, mages put out consistent, high damage and let's not forget remove curse, which is huge.

q