Mages are seldom seen in OPR, arena or even dungeons because the class is truly broken. When groups are put together, mages are such a joke that they are not taken except for one dungeon. My own clan suggested that if I wanted to do dungeons, I needed to switch to something other than mage as they just do not have the damage output needed.
I have played mage in every game for the last 15 years including NW at launch, and I am left scratching my head as to what these devs were thinking with the current state of the class.
As a mage, I expect to be fragile trading high damage for squishiness, but the issue is, mages have horrendous damage output now which results in them not being viable in just about anything. Even wearing light armor for the extra damage, the damage just isn’t there.
Now add to the crappy damage output a ton of broken perks and the class is now a joke which is why you seldom see someone playing mage in pve or pvp.
In addition to some of the ongoing unfixed bugs you mentioned, add in healing tomb.
Healing tomb can instantly be destroyed by other players, and I have video after video of healing tomb not healing at all when used in OPR, not cleansing debuffs even when spec’d to do so, and when it does manage to heal, it heals 2-3 seconds after exiting ice tomb which is not very helpful in an active OPR where engagement typically takes place right after tomb ends. Either fix tomb so it lasts the 10 seconds (unless player deactivates) or change the description. The heal should be consistent and the heal should come the second that ice tomb breaks, not 2-3 seconds later as a heal does not help after a player is dead. If you do put the points into tomb for the cleanse and manage to get it to cleanse (sporadic), you typically will not get the heal, just the cleanse and worse yet, sometimes you get neither.
When a game attempts to force all those that love playing magic down the same melee sheep road, you will lose a significant chunk of that player base. When you enter an OPR and 90% of the players are all holding a great sword and the other 10% are hiding doing crazy damage with musket, than OPR is just not working. I take that back, OPR is working for the great sword users just fine.
When you have a class that is almost nonexistent in OPR and consistently bypassed in the majority of dungeons, the class should be ‘fixed’.
I have done over 50 OPRs as a mage since fresh start and have changed my build repeatedly in an attempt to make it work with no success. Rather than sitting back continuing to hope that a dev will answer anything mage related on this forum, I would like to simply challenge every dev reading this to create a mage and SOLO queue into 10 OPRs and let us know how that worked for you right here in this thread.
Oh, and make sure to take the broken healing tomb with points in the cleanse, use a runegem in your weapon with that punishing storm and make sure you have the 300 int when using ultimate chill. If you are brave enough to play a mage the way mages should be played (glass cannon light armor), let us know how well you feel that ‘damage’ compensates for your squishiness. The term glass canon cannot even be used with this class anymore, fodder is a much more accurate term for mage right now.
