Problem is both with itemization of mage weapons, and the mage spells themselves. They do way too little base damage atm.

Quote Originally Posted by Req View Post
Anything that matters really, the AM boost with the last patch was a nice step in the right direction but there is still the fact that it can only be casted twice a battle if you have chainspell, and the second cast would be significantly weaker without profundity stacked onto it. Any lancer worth a damn can do doomspike 2 or 3 times to a group of mobs and double the damage output of a mage for a group of enemies, and while I don't have marauder at 50 yet I would assume that under steadfast they could also deal out some pretty insane damage. At the moment it just feels like both mage classes are glorified debuffers and healers.

Long story short. Having a bunch of mages use their strongest attacks on anything that aren't exp mobs is pretty ineffective. And this is coming from someone who takes 2903852306 mages into the strongholds and clears them mostly from AoE nukes.
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Steadfast is only for tanking, it doesn't help damage output anymore really. Storms path > All other MRD AE WS's and doesn't require it.

Here is the data from parser when we killed Flamefist from entering Stronghold to death->

MRD 96,000
MRD 88,000
MRD 44,000
THM 32,000
LNC 29,000

As you can see even THM nuking nonstop still doesn't even come close to what MRD is capable of, but it does beat LNC against groups of mobs. (Oh the only reason I ran the parser that day was to show our LNC buddy that he should go MRD instead for stronghold clears)

I'd probably cry though if we had a nuking CNJ... don't think they'd even be close to the THM. Again just SE needs to make mages stronger for viable DD. If BLM is like this when jobs release we will see Zero of them.