No I am being deadly serious. I am really hating playing a DPS toon at the moment. I didn’t spend time getting all the corruptions or essences I need therefore I am behind in almost every way when it comes to being able to output numbers.
My mage, was originally fire, I spent a lot of time reading, being confused, gearing and trying to understand how best I should get her stats up. Only to have a discussion once night with Apophis in which he basically said it all was for nothing because the game is basically broken when it comes to old school thinking like mine. I want to be given a basic break down of these are the things you need, Stat A to this approx amount, Stat B to this amount then these particular essences (which don’t require stupid PVP or rep grinds to achieve on alts) and then this particular thing which doesn’t also require another grind in assaults, quests and dailies to be able to buy them.
I could wax lyrical about the amount of frustration I have with this game, but moving on and keeping on topic!!!! I got my fire mage geared with the right traits and some of the essences, but standing still on a test dummy the best I could expect was about 42k (according to raidbots quick sims), which I could actually do providing i didn’t move or make mistakes in my rotation.
So if i tried to ignore the fact mages in my guild are pulling 90k…I can sort of mentally not be upset by this. But when I get into a pvp battleground or a mythic and the absolute best I can churn out consistently is about 20k DPS (or less). It pisses me off something vicious.
After discussion with Apophis who runs a mage with worse gear than me, I decided to change to frost and try it out. I managed, by pure freaking luck, restoring an old item and praying to RNGjesus, to get the best frost traits needed on azerite gear.
Once again I managed to hit the 42k mark on a target dummy after another quick sim. in fact, I actually was over 50k for a little while but couldn’t sustain it for long enough for me to like, but I was happy with that.
Jumped into PVP and a mythic or two and both Aryssa and Apophis was beating me on DPS. I just couldn’t even get close. I just think my time is over. This was one of the reasons I stopped playing DPS and changed to tanking. Because I just feel so completely useless working all the factors out. I don’t have the best corruptions or essence for my mage, and I know that affects things, but surely not that much. I seriously cannot get it happening. Also, I know it isn’t just my mage, I couldn’t manage to get close to the DPS Queen Nelly could do in her Boomkin either, even when we were similarly geared – and with her help on dummies and opening rotations.
I am not, nor have I ever, wanted to be the top DPS on the charts, but I certainly do not want to be the same level as the tanks (or below them – thanks Twilight Dev!). People do not want to run with bad players like me, they see my DPS and automatically think my gear is bad, when in fact my mage is pretty close to my druid in ilevel (she is 460 something). It is just that I do not understand how to get the numbers to increase.
I have also considered PVP isn’t the right environment for standing still and casting etc – however – HOWEVER – Apophis can manage to push out 13million DPS consistently in PVP and I am lucky to hit 3M overall – usually it is less. 10million difference is pretty bad imho.
Once, long a go, I used to be able to do DPS. I used to understand the game and I could react fast enough to play well. Now I just feel like a T-rex trying to wipe their butt.

I just want to play a DPS toon I understand which is not a hunter 🙂 Having said all of the above after getting my fury warrior to 120 and getting his ilevel to 400 he is doing about the same DPS as my mage already at about 10k. I would love to get him into a dungeon and see what kind of numbers I get in an actual moving environment with things to avoid and interrupt.
Yeah I was starting to wonder if something with no cast time might be better. Or you could come join the healers. I’m not going to pretend I don’t care about meters, but like tanking it’s more about getting the job done than watching the bars.
Yeah I think it is why I like tanking, focus on using cooldowns based on timers and keep everyone safe. I did change my paladin to heals to try it out and I installed and set up Healbot. I just have been too chicken to suggest I actually go into a run and try and heal with actual people :p
It’s certainly frustrating when you don’t enjoy the class you love. I’m behind on several essences too. Glad you’re enjoying another class though.
I think a change is good, it allows time to step back and see what you do enjoy playing 🙂 Brings new excitement to the game.