Mages cannot cast infinitely fast.
Perfect casts are already a way to improve damage per spell at the cost of speed (depending on your shortcuts). There is already a tradeoff and many mages focus on perfect casts.
Why not focus on improving the mechanics and capabilities of ranger instead of on making mage a mechanically worse and less rewarding class?
Where is the cap? Minimize the hand movement for drawinng and your basicly just hammering the release button. Hell even I can fire frost two with one wrist flick (consistently no) . Im honistly not seeing much differens from arrows per sec.
I mean, the game used to have a unintentional damage cap for mages, with the tick damage resetting if you hit it too fast, but right now Iām not seeing a cap at all.
When discussing ranger and scoundrel, also keep ultimates in mind. From what Iāve seen, the ranger ult is quite useful and adds a significant amount of damage, while the scoundrel ult adds much less damage and usually ends up sending bullets into the tank.
Fencing is just swinging a sword around in the right place. Racing is just minimizing the distance you travel and pushing the gas pedal. Bowling is just throwing the ball straight at the pins.
If itās this easy, why does mage have the largest damage distribution?
I can get a strike in bowling, but Iām not a good bowler. I canāt get 12 strikes in a row, nor can I get strikes in every game. Iāve already talked about some physical limitations that block mages above, and there are human limits too.
I agree make ranger better , leave mage alone.
The only reason I play VR and Orbus is due to the high skill based mage, I already feel salty with alot of reborn changes , a change to mage mechanics may be the last nail. It requires practice , if I take a few days off I need to sit in town and get back into my cast rotation. I can only Mage for 2-3 hours before my wrist dies and I need to swap class or logoff. Shortcuts are different mage to mage . We basically have face to face schooling we go thru to be anywhere near good, and you can tell who taught who based on how they cast . Mages have a pedigree . The top 1% of the mage class is what we all look up to and strive to improve ourselves to be. Seeing Our gods bleed is not what we need.
You are still talking about a limit but any bottleneck that existed has bin removed, and any precent that a mage can cast faster is directly a percent damage uppgrade.
I donāt know man. Would suck to nerf mages, but right now they are more or less a necessity for shard runs, just for there utilitys, and I wouldnāt be surprised if a full mage group will be required for speed runs, seeing as there top dps is way above anyone else.
I stopped playing ranger as I couldnāt see itās potential when not enough changed in reborn.
The only possible fix I can see that would give it mage potential would be to remove the max arrows per sec on rapidity, or continuously upping the damage the farther you are from your target. None of these would be verry fun.
Iām just getting the feeling that if I want to continue playing at a high level, I have to switch to mage.
I donāt know if people actually play the scoundrel suggesting thisā¦ unlike curves I donāt see any skill in that sorry. Which card is available is a pure matter of luck, yea with lots fiddling you can āsaveā one on your belt (this should have an indicator! it still takes time to find the spot to stick it!) for later, but 90% of the time, specially on trash, you got the max output by using everything except perhaps ice, cheat and, if youāre lucky enough to get a vine during trash, a spread card which you burn on it to do the - really rare - AoE.
You can not have ANY ārotationā with random cards popping in a low frequency and one single save slot, you be lucky or not and thatās mostly it.
To make cards a thing they need to pop up not in a random order every x seconds but be all available, all the time, to decide on the right combo in the right second. Right now the availability does not match the one of for example mage with countless skills on hand or ranger who got at least 2 different arrows available or musky with 4 options. You loose too much time going for certain combos, waiting for cards is not an option, often enough mages nuked the trash already before your combo is prepared.
Other than that, as for making curves harder etc., I canāt play ranger or warrior for a longer time due to physical strength and Scoundrel already gives me armpain as well after running alot of dungeons in a row. Curves ARE hard, I can not do them other than using full armswings and donāt always get 5s, in small rooms only 3s. Orbus is a videogame, most people playing it are not necessarily fond of workout, same time. I think the typical, supposedly larger playerbase is catered by some of the new classes, scoundrel, paladin, even shaman is not very physically taxing, so that not every un-sportive woman or weaker person has to be a musky or is locked out of tankingā¦ this is a really good change imo.
The randomness still forced upon you getting all type of cards every 6 of 7 cards. And you can reset your card with red effect so clearly it us not as random as it seems. And getting the optimal card rotation is a skill in itself. I suspect that no-one is currently having the optimal rotation even though they think they do. That is why I recomended it. Speeding up getting the next card and increasing card damage of specific actions like blue buffing will def add to the skill of the class. Still not enough though but it should be more important then it is now.
If mage damage was capped in any of the ways that have been suggested here the class would not be any less skill based at all. It would just change the rate at which damage went up with skill. Right now this is a linear increase for mages. If you can double your cast speed you double your damage. Again and again with no limit. The damage increase you get with any other class is no where near that great, not even close. Of coarse mages think this is just fine and dandy because they get to be overpowered, but it is not a fair system to the rest of the community. This also makes proper class balancing and designing difficult content impossible for the devs. As it stands now the best set up for a shard group is 3 mages, if not 4. When designing the hard mode for the raid how do they decide how hard the dps checks should be? Do they balance it around having 2 OP mages in the party? So if you donāt have any OP mages itās near impossible but if you can bring 4 the content is trivialized? This is why class balance is extremely important in MMOs. If you look at WoW for example they have always worked hard for constant class balancing. If one dps class was even 10% ahead of another this was a huge deal and nerfs would be incoming shortly. This keeps all classes viable and useful.
Iāve seen too many people get hurt in this game from mage, warrior, and ranger. Aside from the damage the other reason they capped rangers arrows is so people wouldnāt hurt themselves. There should be a cap on mages as well. I think the mages spells being perfectly drawn would be a better focus than speed so people have less injuries. I would tighten up the spells and increase the damage of perfect casts a bit more than it is now for prefect casts.There would need to be a global cd of spells like ice lance has. Now the skill component will come from timing, drawing the spell perfectly, and keeping up your rotation. This would also make the playing field the same for all mages not just giving the advantage to mages with the best latency, ping, and computer. This would also help to reduce injuries.
Just my thoughts: the perceived problem is that the DPS numbers are the be all end all. I personally hate dps parsers (and I frequently hate when folks post numbers about them). Its cool to see and know, but when the focus of game play shifts in a role playing game to watching a damage meter youāve actually changed the game for me. I donāt play RPGs for that reasonā¦
Having said that:
Balance isnāt just about DPS. HP/AC and survivability are other ways of balancing classes. Iād rather see mages be made of paper (dead people do zero dps btw) then see their abilities altered.
Encounters need to be robustly designed enough to reward good class play. If everything were just tank and spank then DPS would be the only thing that matters. As encounters get more complex and players, based on class abilities, have things to do other than just spam their cycle of DPS keys then the utility of having good players in each class becomes greater. Without changing a single ability the top DPS parser should change from encounter to encounter. Rangers ought to be able shine on some encounters, Mages on othersā¦solve the problem by designing fun robust content that makes folks interested in more than just how much DPS they did at the end in comparison to someone else.
This is another issue with most endgame content. Against some mobs, you see a slight difference, but for the most part, they both die super fast.
As it stands now the best set up for a shard group is 3 mages, if not 4.
This just isnāt true.
However, the damage drops off dramatically as more mages join the party (far fewer afflictions per mage, both for single target and trash packs). There are no diminishing returns to adding extra rangers, scoundrels, or shamans to a party (aside from overlapping weakness debuffs, which is the same for mage).
This is considering the numbers before any kind of ranger buff, too. Furthermore, we are talking about 1% of mages who are out damaging the ranger potential as it is now. Most shard groups donāt have this issue at all, and those that do donāt have enough mages with enough damage at a time. You already do more damage than 99% of mages. Rangers and scoundrels also have the mobility to hold aggro on things like casters and gunners and to do damage while strafing, dodging shots. Having a variety of classes in a party also gives more defense debuffs to the enemy.
I wouldnāt want to take more than 2 mages on a shard, especially after the base ranger buff weāre all expecting from the patch tomorrow.
The damage increase you get with any other class is no where near that great, not even close. Of coarse mages think this is just fine and dandy because they get to be overpowered, but it is not a fair system to the rest of the community.
We donāt want to be overpowered; we want to keep the mechanics and skill/damage relationship in place that make mage great.
Noticeable dps improvement from skill improvement is what makes mage good and rewarding to play. Ranger should have a similarly wide distribution to make the class more rewarding, rather than limiting mages to make them equally unrewarding.
I donāt know cam. Itās the only class without a actual limit. Every other class has a timer for there next hit to be possible, and that used to be the case with mage as well.
Now that got removed.
So ur saying losing affliction will
Make a 10-20k per second difference?
They canāt really just up everyone else because beginner mage needs to be playable, so you canāt just raise the damage.
What they need is a max on dps. There has to be a damage reduction at some point, making a hard cap. The game is planned around a mage casting 1 spell per sec, mages getting in 3 per second is breaking it if that means Ć3 damage.
At some point there has to be a reduction that lets you up your damage slightly with more work, but not this bad so it leave everyone else in the dust.
Originally according to Riley 1 spell per second was impossible, so it balanced even lower than that
Lack of a hard cooldown based cap isnāt lack of a limit.
Something like that or close to that, yes. On single targets, at least, where rangers are not that far behind even before any buff. On trash groups, the DPS loss is more significant because mages often spend the first half of a fight dotting up everything individually, so more of their DPS is from affliction.
The only reason they canāt just up everyone is because mage has a wider skill/damage distribution. Instead of making mage mechanically worse, improve ranger.
Then mage got nerfed hard (true affliction) and ranger got buffed going into reborn. Now itās balanced differently and Iām sure Riley is aware that 1 spell per second is possible for most relatively good mages. Nobody is casting anything close to 3 spells per second, especially in dungeons.
just remove shortcuts and have the runes actually mean something and youāll be a skill based class that canāt cast 4/second for sure 
Probably the whole perception of mage being OP is you can cheeze the drawing system and everything about the class has been about finding ways to do the highest lvl/dp spells in a flick, most faster than anybody could ever draw a rank 1 spell.
If the difficulty of the runes mattered, and you had to situationally choose what to cast, things could be balanced around that. I donāt think you can balance a āoh crap, I just have to draw a circle! random discovery of workaroundsā