This guy gets it. Useful things are useful.

Wizards usually have big foreheads which means they also got big hats

Not saying it’s bad to do that stuff as a wizard, but thanks for the sarcasm. I’m saying there’s no need to take a wizard in the group just because they can do those things since you can already cover that utility with way more useful classes. Unfortunately wizards were just structured in a way that didn’t work well for the way people played the game (which was different from how the devs thought they’d play it).

No, the unfortunate thing is that people perpetuate this kind of thinking which keeps some classes out of groups. This game is EASY. There's a walkthrough for everything. The most fun I've had in this game has been when playing janky group compositions, and yes, that requires some level of competence using your class to the best of its ability. But go ahead and min-max. Wizards don't need fixing.

The problem is mostly the people playing wizard wrong, I am sure like me you've seen plenty of wizard nuke a mob to death dumping their whole manapool, tanking it from start to finish then med for 5minutes while burning 50% of the cleric manapool, that's not useful no one wants to group with you after seeing that.

But wizards are great pullers, they can root park mobs, burst the nasty mobs the group is having trouble on, the occasional evac, porting people to a less populated area that kind of things. If they all played like that it would be much easier for them to find a group.

I mean I don’t see groups turning down a wizard if they have an open spot and no one else is around. I see people turning down a wizard if there is another DPS class available. There’s no reason to take a wizard over any other dps class because wizard dps can’t compare and wizards don’t bring anything beneficial that you can’t get from another class.

What? So we're just picking lvl 49 spells to make our point? Wizard spells get more and more mana efficient for a wiz post 50. Mage's strongest point in the game is 39-49

Let's try actually making a comparison of end game:

Wizards highest nuke=4.0 dpm
Mage's highest nuke=3.1 dpm

This is before taking into effect that most mages are going to be specialized in Conjuration and most Wizards Evocations so the mana efficiency even goes more lopsided towards the wizard than the above numbers. In general things also tend to have higher fire resistances than cold resistances.

What a sketchy way to try to prove your point...

things that need to be done in order to make wizards even remotely viable (other than being port/tl bots):
-reduce mana cost on all wizard spells by 50%
-reduce cast time on most spells
-reduce or remove reagent requirements on self rune spells
-line of instant cast damage spells that trigger gcd so that they'd be used as a finisher, or in groups you could cast+insta and then sit and be considered useful

the class itself is just designed poorly. that's what you get from a 1990s mmo. devs could make this server an amazing experience, but instead they're cucked by nostalgia and in turn we all get to snowball our fake enjoyment back and forth forever

Not just here

Even WoW Classic Season of Mastery servers going on right now that have harder raid bosses with new mechanics, increased quest exp, removal of the “world buff meta” and a host of other changes does not have class balancing, to a LOT of players’ dismay

That leaves ret paladin, boomkin druid, feral druid, resto druid (yup that’s the entire druid class), elemental shaman, enhancement shaman, survival hunter as 100% gimp. And when I say gimp, I mean to where even casual guilds will not let you run that spec in raids. Also if you want to play that spec, few guilds will even let you join because they are so terrible

Anyway, class balancing on private servers for both games would be interesting

Personally I'd love to see some Blue custom content that addresses this stuff more subtly.

If there was (say) a new custom drop that Wizards could get to let them deal better sustained damage (either by being a JBB-like clickie, or a focus effect, or whatever) it could still fit the goal of this place, while improving class viability.

Mages, Paladins, and other unpopular classes could similarly get a playability boost with just one or two new items ... if they were the right items.