So exactly how bad is MotM for Mages?

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Arclyte, May 21, 2020.

  1. Arclyte Augur

    I've seen tons of posts talking about how terrible mages are in early raids, but specifically how bad are they? How bad is the pet damage vs raid targets? I know fire resistant bosses are really bad for mages too.

    I've narrowed down my class choice to either mage or wizard. I like them both and plan to raid, but would like a clear picture as to how bad mages really are in raids.
  2. TLPman Augur

  3. TLPman Augur

    roll a monk ez
  4. Mrjon3s Augur

    All the aggro your pet generates goes to you. Mages don't have a way to clear aggro. So as soon as the tank dies or you over nuke your dead.
  5. theRTG New Member

    i played a raid mage main on mangler. i had a fine experience up front, but it got progressively worse. some classic raids i was top dps (excluding charm pets and plane of sky), and never outside top 3 (with blowout parses especially for vox). our top geared monk wasn't a superstar player, but he was constantly upset about not being over me. kunark became less fun raiding generally. the pet commentary above pertaining to threat is accurate, especially with epic. dps meter performance dropped in kunark compared to classic. i quit after our first VP raid since i stopped caring, but felt pretty useless in VP. my guy had all the things.

    the solo/small group experience was always banging though. my guy romped stuff. the better the tank the harder i could romp, and my static SK was top tier. i often three manned content with a buddy's cleric/enc combo and we basically did whatever we wanted with charm/coh hyjinx (not as antagonists, just pve). that's been changed now though.

    at the end of the day MOTM does suck. mage is still crazy OP in classic if you're playing it right and becomes less fun with every expansion from there. lotta people here crap all over mages like they don't produce on raids, but they do.
  6. WaitingforMoreEQ WaitingforTBC

    MOTM is basically irrelevant for Mages
  7. Foaming I Drank Bleach IRL Once

    It isn't super terrible, but it does mean you're limited by threat. Use water pet, be a bit more careful with nuking, and you shouldn't have a problem. It does limit the max Mage/Necro pets to 10 iirc, but no one should be stacking a raid that much, anyways.
  8. HoodenShuklak Augur

    Mages and wizards are both solid casters but the real difference to me is the fact that wizards can manage their aggro with concussion, so it really raises the skill cap. You can compensate for less aggro and have options rather than simply nuke less. Mages on agnarr seemed to be limited by their aggro until deep into pop when tanks started getting better threat generation.

    But wizards... they should be casting there entirety of a fight unless it's so long they need med breaks, like a very long emp ssra perhaps.
  9. Ishbu Augur

    Its about as bad as it gets. Mages have no way to manage aggro so the pet can easily kill you if not managed. On top of that your nukes dont have a negative modifier for the early expansions so there are several raid targets that become very hard to damage at all through the resists.

    Oh and Naggy you literally cant land a spell on him, immune to it all in classic.
  10. sumnayin2 Augur

    Just learn how to control your aggro. Luckily, most raid bosses between Classic - Velious are so hard for a Mage to cast spells on that you don't need to. Basically, you're either dancing your pet to let it heal or getting resisted, unless you spam nukes you'll never pull aggro in the first 9 months.
  11. Ultrazen Augur

    Mages are great in the group game, and frustrating trying to raid. Wizards are.....a trap for suckers. Wiz DPS is actually fairly horrible if you parse it vs say...a monk. The big single hit numbers are the bait. On short fights, where the wiz burns all their mana, they can pull big numbers, but in the real game, and over time in a group, they sort of suck.
    The problems with wiz in classic:

    1. You will cast 6 nukes and be out of mana and med for 15 minutes. Most of those nukes will be either partially or entirely resisted.
    2. 95% of your "play" is sitting down and chatting. If that's your thing, you've found your class.

    At least mage have a pet to manage, which not only helps their overall DPS long term in a group, it's something to do. If you can play a wiz through classic and not fall asleep all the time, more power to you.

    Wizard was my very first main at release, I was the 2nd wiz to 50 on our server, and I've played them a ton since trying to make them work every which way. There are expansions where wizards are a viable class, and decent long term DPS, the first couple of expansions are easily the worst for the class.

    /shrug. Different people like different things, if you offered me a pony that shoots lasers, I wouldn't play a wiz in classic.
  12. merkmerk73 Journeyman

    ^
    Wizard was indeed horrible once you got past the 32k hp mobs

    The whole kit was a bunch of inefficient nukes, mana regen was not a thing, rain spells were nerfed and had weird resist checks.

    Remember the Al'Kabor line of spells? They kept making new ones every xpac, and nobody ever used them because they were complete trash - maybe in beta they used to hit unlimited targets? Idk.

    Early EQ was a very weird thing. They didn't really have solid design principles and class balancing like modern MMOs do. In some ways that is part of the charm - things like Spirit of the Wolf just wouldn't exist in a modern MMO - they'd just make it baseline speed for everyone.
  13. Blastoff Augur

    You know wizard is overall the most dominant class on raid parses from kunark-luclin right? And can top ct/inny/naggy/vox no problem. Literally if you go to an open world race for AoW it'll be slots 1-however many good wizards there are then everyone else. Luclin is a joke once wiz can crit, no one comes anywhere near them.
  14. Zansobar Augur

    You must be excluding charm pets in your calculations?
  15. Ebine Augur

    I didn't have to bad of a time on my mage. The enchanter pet on the other hand is awful. In hate with mage I didn't die usually. With enc pet in hate it wasn't if I was going to die it was when
  16. Arclyte Augur

  17. error Augur


    On really long fights you can pace yourself to not gain threat without sacrificing damage since you'll eventually just run out of mana anyways, but most bosses aren't really endurance fights especially once you get to Luclin and beyond. In general, it's pretty bad as the class has no way of dumping threat, probably intentionally designed that way since 20-30% of their damage came from pets which originally generated no threat for the mage. I'm also about 99% certain the the Spell Casting Subtlety AA does not apply to pet threat generation, so if you're really min/maxing then using a pet when your damage is threat-capped might even be a dps loss...

    Almost worse than the pet's threat going to the mage is that the AA pet's threat also goes to the mage. It kind of changes the role of Servant of Ro and Frenzied Burnout from burn AAs to increase dps to mana conservation AAs as you'll probably be taking a break from casting while those are up unless you really want to play chicken with the invisible aggro meter.
  18. Hoteke New Member

    Fully agree, it's in the end what in part the beauty of this game imo.
  19. Azzudien Augur


    Its been a long time since I played and coming back for Aradune, but if memory serves me Naggy, Vox and all dragons in early expansions are belly casters? They are not immune, you just need to stand directly under them to land a spell. That may have changed but that is how I remember doing dragons as a druid eons ago. Get feared, run back under belly cast nuke, get feared again rinse repeat
  20. Zansobar Augur

    Mages don't have cold nukes and Naggy is either immune to fire or almost immune so if a mage can't land his magic nuke he won't be landing anything. Wizards can use cold nukes and land ok-ish.