A Guide to Mages comment thread

[Bolty]

I've gathered that in the past, mages were some sort of godlike killing machines, necessitating beatings with the nerf stick.  Having never played CB, I never experienced that period, and for all the time I've been playing the mage has been anything but a killing machine.
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Hmm, how to put it. Imagine the current mage you play now, except that in phase 2...

1) You could turn invisible while not in combat and thus could walk through entire dungeons right to the end. Only a tiny handful of specially-placed monsters in the whole game could see invisibility.
2) Frost Nova's cooldown was 10 seconds. Yep, only 2 seconds higher than its spell effect duration.
3) Pyroblast could easily do 1500-2000 damage a hit at high levels.
4) All overall damage was higher.
5) Enemies almost never resisted your spells, because monster resistance wasn't in yet.
6) No reagents required.
7) Few long-term cooldowns existed on any spells and you could spam them all you like.
8) You could drink in combat.
9) You always regen'ed mana because there was no 5-second-wait-after-casting effect.
10) Channeling spells couldn't be interrupted or have their time bar drained.

Those are just off the top of my head, as soon as I hit "Add Reply" I'll think of more. But you get the idea - mages were GODS when they first got talents, and they've been beaten with the stick hard ever since.

-Bolty