Personally I found that before RR75 it's very rare anyone will take you to a warband, I get groups maybe like 50% of the time past RR75 so far. I've had the best success with Rift spec and Blue Horror, not actually using Rift ofcourse because it's useless (atleast in pugs), hovering outside of the main clump Lash spamming with a Glean Magic/Infernal Wave thrown in every now and again whilst trying to CC healer stack. Against anyone good they will simply just assist train you first at which point you can't really do much besides kite and blow up your own pet (seeing as it's going to die anyway) to stun them. If they don't attack then you'll do a lot of damage but it will just be mostly fluff damage that doesn't translate to kills. It's hard to get into guilds that do actual warbands because most only want 1 Magus in their warbands, if at all, playing Havoc solo never gets old so I still enjoy it though, but I'm leveling something else to play cities with atm.
Here are the biggest problems with Magus:
- Rift itself is largely useless because you'll either have Choppas doing Choppa things, Black Orcs doing Black Orc things, or you have to have a group that entirely aware of the fact that a Magus exists and intentionally not use their abilities so that it's presence can be somewhat justified, or you can simply take the much easier route and just not invite them whilst continuing to do Choppa/Black Orc things. Even if you get the ideal circumstance in which to use Rift you'll often find that it simply just pulls in tanks instead of anything actually useful so at that point I've found it's mostly ends up being used as a CC ability on healers if you somehow are able to make it past the frontline unscathed (which you won't against anyone not Pepega) but at that point you're better off just having a Choppa. For an ability at the top of the tree and one of the only reasons to take a Magus it's quite underwhelming. Even in Forts for a Magus to pull anyone he needs line of sight which means that healers can also get line of sight to resurrect them, so at most it functions as a morale reset for a couple of players every 30 seconds in exactly THE best place to use it in the entire game.
- Magus Damage Profile. Outside of single target Magus has no real burst to speak of, Changing and Daemonology specs deal sustained AOE damage which simply just ends up being fluff that is automatically cleaned up by Warrior Priests pressing literally any button on their keyboard, even their M2 is damage over time. Their DoTs are instantly dispelled with entire group wide dispels every few seconds. Without any sort of burst they are unable to create killing blows despite topping damage regularly. Functions great in a funnel but for anywhere else in the game it's useless and Magus lose all their damage moving around which you'll do a lot of in a city, especially on attack.
- Damage and utility tied to a pet that explodes the moment you look at it. The pet is a ridiculous 40% of your damage and it isn't even just that. It also functions as utility ability in that the Pink Horror provides a mandatory elemental resistance debuff that has a significant impact on your Havoc spells as well as 20% range, the Flamer gives more DoT damage/movement, and the Blue Horror gives cleave radius/disrupt. So much of a Magus' power is tied up in it's pet that it's completely neutered when unable to utilize it, even with a Loner tactic you'd still lose all that utility/survivability. In a city your pet ends up essentially functioning as an ability you spam on cooldown to get a 5 second 10% damage buff before it dies to a single aoe fluff spell. Daemonology especially needs the pet in order to not be useless however that means you have to drag this sack of **** into melee where it evaporates at which point you're a clothie in melee, guess what happens next.
- Melee meta. Melee trains just **** on Magus completely the moment they spot that disk they will hold W towards you and as soon as they're ontop of you half your damage becomes deleted from your pet dieing immediately on cooldown. By simply attacking the Magus, not even killing them, they effectively neutralize the Magus' ability to contribute anything meaningful. If this were a ranged meta Magus would fair significantly better because they're able to have extremely high dodge/disrupt with Blue Horror.
- No reason to stack them and having more than 1 Magus in your group is detrimental. You'd want 1 to spirit resistance debuff for Sorcs, that's it. The only other utility they provide is an AP pump that is once again tied to an instantly dying pet, and Daemonic Withering which just isn't good enough to justify a spot for them.
Some potential improvements could be:
- Make the pet live: Don't care how it's done, make it immune to AOE, let group heals heal it, or make Daemonic Pact give 500 toughness to the demon or something, or make Infernal Flesh not a laughable amount of wounds for a pet for entire tactic slot.
- Unearthly Shriek: Make the taunts reduce the damage of the target, make the Magus deal more damage and not just the pet to taunted targets.
- Merge Warped Flesh (25% chance on receiving damage to gain an absorb shield) and Backlash (25% thorns chance). Something Magus can take to deal with being the primary assist target 100% of the time.
- Chaotic Attunement: Just make it baseline, there is no choice involved because everyone has to take it.
- Warpfire: Don't really need to explain this one. It's a level 40 stationary channeled ability and it does less damage than any instant cast ability in your arsenal.
- Seed of Chaos: Make it provide dispel protection or make it explode for 5 times to amount of damage if dispelled. It does so little damage it's never used.
- Make Daemonic Armor a Daemonology ability and thus affected by Daemonology mastery levels.
- Withered Soul: Make it reset the cooldown if an enemy dies afflicted by it.
- Rolling Winds: Should deal 400 damage a tick instead of 300 given it's a damage over time morale that can be avoided if the player moves out of the group and can be deleted if the target dies.
At the end of the day you can't improve the Magus too much without then having to buff Engineers and proceeding to break the game so I doubt anything substantial is ever going to come of the class but maybe it's just enough to make them not useless in warbands.