Both scoundrel and rune mage are extremely overpowered as of the current version. Scoundrel can easily one-shot, and a skilled rune mage can spam spells with ease, decimating entire teams.
For scoundrel some simple damage nerfs could do the trick, but for rune mage, I have an idea. Rather than just simply drawing, you also get pages, and you have to trace on the page. This can help stop spam. I also noticed that there’s no reason to use lower level versions of spells, so what if spells have cool downs, with lower level spells being quicker to recharge. You could even make it so that one spell, arcane blast (or is the exploding one arcane blast) has no cool down, thus giving it a use.
The classes needed a DPS buff for PVE content, which they got in the last rebalancing. The downside is no changes had been made yet to account for that buff in PVP.
Instead of asking for class reworks that would be a pain for the Devs to do and penalize the people who put in tons of effort to be good at their classes.
You could just suggest the needed armour buff in PVP, which would solve the issue.
Spell spamming is still op. NGL, even pve. They can down high level enemies within seconds, it’s kinda clear that the devs made rune mage, not expecting anyone to be able to cast that fast. Plus I’d also make rune mage easier to play for beginners to the class.
The key word you said there was “skilled” runemages spend countless, endless hours practicing to be as good as they are. I have over a thousand hours ingame probably about 700 of which are runemage and I cannot do that in pvp I play paladin. I’ve not near enough skill to do that in pvp despite the fact that it is my main dps in pve and I hit decent numbers in that content. I also use plenty of the so called “useless” spells and they are full of worth to me. It is also not a beginner class and never will be, it says as much on the character creation screen. Despite all that I’ve seen plenty of other players do better than runemage in all content plenty of times, my parser is almost always running, and it takes less dedication in other class specializations to get those results.
It’s not OP. Except at the very top level of gameplay, Rangers and Scoundrels can keep up with mage damage. Even at the absolute top level, the best of the best, you’re looking at maybe 20k difference at most between mage and the others, and that’s absolutely justified by the sheer amount of time and effort it takes to do that. For the vast majority of players, you won’t see a difference in DPS between equally skilled Mage, Scoundrel, and Ranger. Spells being spammed are just more visually impressive and that’s what’s getting you.
If they changed the tolerance for spell detection, the game would mess up figuring out what spell you’re trying to cast, leading to inaccurate detection.
I can’t be the only ranger that can keep up with some of the best mages. Multiple players on other classes can keep up with mages as well. Mage is good where it is. It’s more reward for more work, just as with ranger and scoundrel.
First off, you probably should have worded the title of your post to be for PVP. How it reads is like you are complaining about PVE and all classes are fine in PVE albeit slightly stronger or weaker. In PVP there definitely needs to be a buff of armor or decrease of damage towards players to make fights not last 2 seconds but that should be solved not by a blanket nerf but specifically a nerf in PVP
Second, you mention making runemage have cooldowns and such which is awful for how mage is currently designed; the whole draw of mage is it’s uncapped potential and countless hours needed to master it. The devs would never dare nerfing mage anymore as it would cause a whole lot of the endgame playerbase to dip on the game just like what happened with the True Affliction and Triplicity nerfs driving away 99% of the oldgame mages.
The devs are focusing on buffs rather than nerfs and that is great, the solution in PVP is to reduce mage damage against players by say 10-30% for hits but things like affliction DoT stay the same and have armor in BG equivalent to +5 armor values for the class. For mage this means that more spells have to be hit which gives opponents enough time to at least attack. This does not solve telecast or anything like that but you have to realize that dodging that telecast or simply shooting them before they reach you will stop them dead in their tracks. There are counters to mage and its called a different angle of approach. An unaware mage is a dead mage in PVP
Scoundrel a similar nerf would suffice as you say to at least eliminating one shot potential that takes minimal skill (Ranger can still one shot but you need to be hit at range for it to kill making it a skill based shot on moving targets rather than just basically a 1 shot melee).
You’re right about the pvp part. Especially if you are playing warrior. “Oh, just don’t play warrior” they say. But I won’t, warrior is very fun to play as in pvp, even if the blocking becomes useless due to there being only 2 melee classes in the game.
