First things first, I’m not asking for one-shot potential or for mages to be able to burst anyone down within seconds. I’m asking for engaging and rewarding game play where your risky plays actually pay off.
The current play style is so unbelievably boring that it boggles my mind that this was the intended change. Sit in the back line, drop aoes, run away, drop aoes, repeat. Super lame. Before the patch, you were able to get on point, dish out significant damage and take out specific targets, and if you played everything perfectly you could get out.
With the 30-40% dps nerf (and cc nerf) that’s gone out, you can pretty much kiss this play style goodbye. It makes way more sense for you to just sit back and pump out consistent damage rather than doing anything crazy.
You aren’t rewarded at all for engaging in the thick of it… going for outplays on point makes you a bad mage.
So instead of asking for changes to be reverted, why not just force us to adopt a riskier play style in return for our original damage or better? Make spells do more damage when you’re actually close to the spell that’s being dropped. Thematically it makes sense as you’re the source of the spells power, game play wise it’s 1000% more engaging for the user to have to take risks every once in a while, and for opponents you’re going to have to single out mages on point out rather than just face rolling, chain cc’ing and LMB’ing to win.
Only exception I’d make is fireball. That should do more damage the farther away you are rather than it doing more up close because, again, we’re making skillful play more rewarding than unskillful play.