Why are mages not more popular?

[Bummey]

Originally Posted by Kubaton [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Magi = are never played to their full potential. It requires a lot of work pet controlling and belling casting to lower resists - most people are super lazy and or too scared to belly cast. Pet position increases damage. Especially with the rogue pet.

Magi = Epic bottle neck still exists on P99 - sickly overpriced quest items. Live corrected the biggest problem by moving the Earth Staff to a "a forsaken revenant (male)" spawn in PoH that would have % chance of staff. This happened before the release of Velious.

Actually controlling your pet is beyond most magicians. You know a good magician when they correctly position their pet on every fight, during enrage, and for pushing casters. Rarely see that.

Find us some fucking evidence of this. Help fix this horrible, horrible bottleneck. Not that it'll matter, as 'Fixed, pending update' is no guarantee we'll see it. (appreciate all the work of the devs and admins, etc. some fixes should be added asap instead of bundled with the next patch)

[Sage Truthbearer]

Mages are super underrated in group settings. I have a 50s Mage and I don't think any KC groups realize how much sustained damage my focused water pet does, and yes I do position him every fight.

[Nexii]

Mage are severely underrated even on endgame boss encounters. Your epic pet will be 45-60 DPS, which is less than a rogue but still respectable. Somewhere around an average geared ranger/monk/warrior. Depends some on the boss.

The thing is though they are worth about 1 cleric each on top of their DPS by making mod rods. They're very efficient at ~180 mage mana to give 150 to a cleric. Yes while you need X clerics to CH fast enough for a given encounter, time to OOM is what ultimately matters.

[bomaroast]

Positioning pets is a tanks duty.

[Bummey]

Originally Posted by Fifield [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

2-3 mages can make or break an engage like Tunare or AoW. We finish tunare with 70-80% mana on our clerics because while we are prepping for tunare. Mages are dropping hundreds of rods.

Same with AoW, i've finished an AoW fight with 60% mana because of beautiful mages.

Mages are vital to success on p99 for some encounters, dont count them out!

You're not wrong. Same goes for necros. Their mana abilities (rods, twitch) are absolutely vital to raid performance and longevity. And it's boring as sin. That's exactly why they're not more popular. It's a thankless and tedious job. All the tools at your disposal and you're relegated to the role of glorified vending machine.

Don't get me wrong. I love this game. We wouldn't be here if we didn't, right? But Verant kinda fucked casters when it comes to raiding roles and duties.

[Bummey]

classic eq raiding was poorly designed in many respects

[Nagoya]

do you think they were really designed, and not just happy accidents?

[jolanar]

Mages and wizards share too much design space for both/either of them to be that powerful. You could combine them into one class and remove a couple of key spells like root/snare spells and you'd be good to go honestly.

[BarnabusCollins]

need mages for coth for raids.