I was thinking of leveling my mage for fun when I can play again this summer, cuz I wanted a caster alt, but I don’t really want to play my lock
Is it even worth it or is it really as bad as everyone says?
How tough is the learning curve on mage too?
(In case yall didn’t see my comment below I am a filthy pvper, and don’t plan on doing PVE)
SS frost is GOOD. However every other spec and hero spec for mage is not good.
I would say more like medium doodoo but yeah, it’s not pretty. 
It depends on what you wanna do, but you’d have a way better time as a Warlock as of right now, especially if you wanna do keys.
I’m a filthy pvper
Then I have literally no idea, but I imagine staying alive in PvP is just as big of a problem as it is right now in PvE for Mage.
Depends on the content. If you’re considering M+, then be warned that as things currently stand, you won’t be able to do content above a +12 or so.
You are basically trying three times as hard to avoid death, as well as your healer keeping their focus on you more than your other teammates. Added to this, you still won’t be top of damage, with usually getting second or third, depending on ilvl.
Frost mage is currently one of the strongest dampener specs in the game (they survive extremely well).
I’m guessing Overpowered Barriers is doing a lot of the heavy lifting then.
This is not true. You absolutely can do keys above a 12.
Just play frost for now everything else is pretty meh
Let me rephrase that, you can technically, but as you can see from my explanation below that comment, I explain why it is so much more difficult.
Mage has the highest death rates, and I can say from experience attempting higher keys that it is simply from lack of survivability. Whether it is rot damage or being targeted by certain dots and abilities, our defensives just cannot keep up and so the healers try to focus us twice as hard.
Mages have also been reporting how difficult it is for them to be accepted into higher keys, and the reason for this is that there simply isn’t any reason to risk having one. Last checked, only 0.3% of higher keys consisted of mages.
I think it really comes down to ilevel scaling when people say that. Early in the season, doing Cosmos on heroic with 30 people was rough — constant pulsing damage everywhere.
back then 12–13+ is when I first started noticing real survivability issues, heroic geared, it was clear other classes had better defensive options.
Then bonus rolls hit, we got fully mythic‑geared, and things smoothed out for a bit. But now at 17, I’m really feeling the strain again.
Come on Goth Paladin. You know this post is just going to draw out all negative Nancy’s. Let’s keep trolling to a minimum.
Your post was way to vague to be of any value. You need to include things like how you plan to play the mage.
But to generically answer the post, covering all aspects I’ve done this xpac on the mage - no, mage is not big poop, and is worth leveling. It has some issues, like all classes, but it’s still fun.
The learning curve isn’t that bad. The pruning helped that a bit. Mage has always had some small nuances to it that made it one of the harder classes to pick up and play and some of that still exists but not nearly as much.
Frost mage is in a fantastic spot to about +15 +16 or so. Any halfway decent healer can keep a competent mage alive. That said, its more important now than ever to use your defensives effectively. Prior to Midnight, mages could just faceroll and stand in stupid and it would be fine. Now that our toolkit has been decimated, you have to anticipate damage spikes and work to mitigate them to give your healer time to get you back up. Im interested to see today’s changes to arcane and fire as well as the hero changes to see if that makes the other specs more interesting, but as it currently stands, frost i the only viable spec. Which comes at a great joy to me since I’ve played frost for 20 years.
As a healer trying to push +14-16 soon, I would not invite a mage ever to my group. I would take any other lust bringer than mage. Why bother choosing a weak class that isn’t impressive damage wise either, when I could do DK that is unkillable + shaman for totems/skyfury, or aug for lust even.
Edit: to summarize, why make my job harder by inviting squishy classes.
All true — but c’mon, think of the wizbang factor. Just look at this thread alone, we are clearly the most stylish class and we will give you that int buff. People are gonna be checking your logs nonstop trying to figure out how you pulled off that much style and think of the parse from all the extra damage.
Do me a solid and put no mages in your note so I can block your M+ listing and not waste my time queueing for yours.
What you said is essentially the mentality right now, and it can’t be argued. Other classes do what Mage can do, but better, and with less risk of dying or needing to be babysat. The data doesn’t lie.
If enough people posted “No {specific class}” Blizzard might actually notice. But yeah, then the rest of us can block you and not have to worry about that kind of toxicity going forward.