Ahh, World of Warcraft...
Someitme you hate it, sometimes you love it, and quite frankly, I'm starting to lean more towards hate.
I play a gnomish mage at level 38, seen to be 39, and I'm quite dissatisfied with the sorry state of affairs that mages are in today.
We're supposed to be the primary ranged damage dealers in the game (that not said that we should deal more damage than the melee chars, necessarily), but almost any other class can out-damage us, provided they have some gear on.
Also, when we reach level 60, there is no way for us to increase our damage output.
A warrior can on a new weapon or piece or armor and get stat bonuses which transfer nicely to his ability to do damage.
The only thing we can get is more health and mana. Ok, so there are some items that help a mage along, but it's single digit percentages over a full set of equipment.
That's just ridiculus.
If you read the mage forums over at wow-europe.com, you'll see many gripe threads, and even a so called "blue" thread, started by a blizzard official, asking us to list our biggest gripes, so that they could make a condensed top10 list of all the things that are wrong, and maybe fix some of them in the path to come.
I just downloaded 1.8, and the only named fix they have is that arcane missiles now properly display if it's in range or not.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pure bullshit.
What about our ability to make water properly. What about the fact that we don't stand an icecubes chance in hell of fighting any melee char in the game. What about the fact that our mana costs are so ridiculously high that we have to sit down and drink after killing 3 mobs.
Believe me, dear friends, the list goes on...
So you're thinking "re-roll then, play another class, or don't play all together and stop whining about this wonderful game that blizzard has given us".
True, I suppose you'd find problems like this with every class, however, I find that I have an aversion to playing melee chars, and none of the casters have enough spells to provide as varied gameplay as the mage.
The mage char, for me, is the best char, but that still doesn't mean it's flawless, quite the opposite.
Maybe I should just go back to diablo2. The damage output was high, you didn't have to spend 30 minutes running from point A to point B just to hand in some stupid quest, and you could use potions as you saw damn well fit.
I'm going to quite now, before this really turns into a rant, but feel free to visit the (in)official forums and read more about this subject.
Stay tuned!
--Markus out