WoW Mage Guide
Overview:
Mages are another of the ranged classes. They are casters that use a number of different spells for area of effect, direct damage, and utility. They are able to use magic to control both the arcane and the elements to do the most damage of any class. They can do a lot more than just cause damage though, so they can be very handy to have around. They work best when working from afar, and can be a great help in small groups and raiding. Crowd control is another of their strong suits, which is useful in both PvP and PvE play.
A mage can only wear cloth, so they are not very well protected without their magic. In order to use their magic they need to have sufficient mana. They don’t have healing power, so they are very dependent on their magic, which is very dependent on their mana. Mages can be of blood elf, draenei, gnome, human, troll, or undead races, and the can use wands, staves, swords, and daggers in order to cause damage.
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Special Abilities:
The special abilities of mages all revolve around spell casting. The exact spells that they are able to cast depend on which talent tree they decide to specialize in. All mages can turn others into small animals using a polymorph spell, they can open portals to any major city for themselves and their allies in order to greatly reduce any travel time, and they can summon food and water as well. Some of the more specialized spells include Counterspell, Remove Curse, and Spellsteal. They also have mirror image and invisibility spells that can confuse things a bit and help them out during battles.
Talents: Arcane, Fire and Frost
Arcane Mage
The arcane tree focuses a lot on damage and utility. This tree is mainly good for damaging single targets. It is not that great for leveling up or for solo playing. Some of the interesting talents that you should get are focus magic, presence of mind, arcane power, and arcane barrage, arcane instability, arcane flows, and missile barrage.
Fire Mage
The fire tree focuses on doing a lot of damage. It is a good specialization for those interested in power leveling and PvP. This is the one mage tree that doesn’t have a lot of utility spells included. It also doesn’t include much in the way of defensive skills. This means there aren’t a lot of survival spells, though the ones that they do have tend to be very effective. Combustion, critical mass, pyroblast, improved scorch, burnout and living bomb are some of the most useful talents in the fire tree.
Frost Mage
Like the arcane tree, the frost tree contains a combination of damage and utility spells. This is probably the most flexible of the options for mages since it works well for solo play, raids, and PvP and provides a good combination of offensive, defensive, and utility spells. Crowd control and snares are a couple of the main focuses in this this tree. Among the most useful spells to pick up in this tree are icy vein, summon water elemental, and winter’s chill, arctic winds, and frost channeling. This is generally considered the best mage leveling spec.
Leveling Tips
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The wonderful thing about mages is that their talent trees seem to be useful in and out of dungeons. Frost is arguably the best of these talent trees for leveling however. With Frost you will get a lot of talents that will save you from an untimely death. Most commonly known of these is the Ice Block spell.
While leveling your mage you will be looking for gear which contains both stamina and intellect. These two stats will help you level faster. As you get into higher end gear you will also want to start looking for the other spell increase stats. These would include spell critical, spell penetration, spell power, and spell hit. While you will need all of these as a mage you will need spell power the most.
Spell power will help to increase the amount of damage you do with each of your spells. The great thing about spell power is that you do not need to critically hit with your spells in order to gain this bonus. While having a high critical rating is also a good idea you should first be looking at your spell power.
As you level your mage you may consider switching specs. While all of the mage specs sound really good, they are not all equal. You can experiment with each of the specs but most likely you come back to Frost.
Because mages can only be a DPS class they have a hard time waiting for a dungeon. The great thing about mages is that they are easy to solo with if you know what you are doing. Many new players will find leveling a mage to be a bit more difficult than some of the more straight forward ‘hack and slash’ type characters. If you are having difficulty soloing easy quests you may want to change your Frost rotation and see if you can improve it.
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