I never played WoW in it’s vanilla days. How good, or bad, were the mages of that time. Anyone with past experience playing a classic mage, how were they? I wanna know what I’m getting myself into rolling a mage for classic.
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Classic mage:
Specs:
- Deep Frost - the raid spec for the first three raids: Molten Core (MC), Blackwing Lair (BWL), and Onyxia (Ony). Also decent for PVP and solo questing/grinding. Efficient and good for kiting even if damage was lower than fire.
- Deep Fire - the raid spec for all raids after BWL as it had higher dps output than frost spec. Fire wasn’t usable for the first 3 raids since half the mobs and bosses were immune to fire and the other half were heavily resistant. Decent spec for pvp.
- Arcane - arcane was not a spec during Vanilla. Rather it was the support tree you used to buff your fire or frost spec. Just about every mage was arcane combined with either frost or fire. Mages with 31 points into arcane for arcane power were known as “3-minute mages”. It was a fun simple spec that was mostly good for PVP. Godlike for 15 seconds of every 3 minutes but very mediocre the rest of the time.
- Elementalist - one rare type of spec had little to no arcane talents and instead had a combination of fire and frost. These were known as “elementalist” mages. Elementalist mages were widely considered not to be viable. They were less effective in both PVP and PVE than any of the other specs. In WOTLK, Blizzard tried to make Elementalist spec viable by giving mages Frostfire Bolt. Some players on this forum think they are going to do great with elementalist, but the reality is the spec was so inferior they would simply do a lot better with one of the more common specs.
PVE questing/grinding - 3 ways to do it:
- Single-target - stand at max range and blast away with fireball or frostbolt. Together with fireblast, and maybe nova or cone of cold if targets get too close.
- Ranged AOE method - Gather up a group of mobs, nova them, run to a distance and Blizzard them, recasting Blizzard as they get close. Use cone of cold when they get really close
- Melee AOE method - Gather up a group of mobs. Use nova and Cone of Cold to slow them and Arcane Explosion to kill them. Goal is to stay at 5-10 yards from the pack, so you can hit them with AE, but they can’t melee you back. You’ll take damage, but it’s quite fun.
PVP
- Mage was very fun in vanilla PVP. We truly were “glass cannons” capable of dishing out extreme damage, but unable to take hits.
- Mages were much more about raw damage. They weren’t the CC’bots they are today.
Other tips:
- Plan your pulls carefully. Mages aren’t very good at handling extra aggro.
- Sit and drink mage food and water at EVERY opportunity. In a dungeon or raid, you should have both hotkeyed and be sitting and consuming the instant a trash pack dies. Even just a few seconds of drinking helps a lot.
- Expect to spend a LOT of your gametime sitting and consuming mage food and water. Sometimes you’ll need to do so after each mob kill. On average I think about 2/3 of your total gametime as a mage will be spent doing this. This downtime makes mages a great class to play if you are trying to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome since you spend twice as much time watching your toon eat and drink as you do actually engaged in combat.
- Mages in Vanilla have zero self-heals. Potions, bandages and your out-of-combat mage food are it.
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Awesome breakdown.
I played Mage back in Vanilla and loved the class fantasy.
Can’t wait to go back. Frost all the way 
The only thing I wish we had was the water elemental.
They were really good in raids and dungeons. Crit was a huge stat to stack and spirit was useful. You actually ran out of mana on long fights. Spirit helped the regen.
Vurtne
Look him up. Those classic old YouTube videos are still up of him destroying people who outgear him. Not just mele classes, casters as well.
1v1, 1v2, 1v3, and even 1v4! Crazy talented
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You’ll be needed a lot for Portals ($$) and Crystal Water, which required a special quest to be completed within Dire Maul.
Then once you get Crystal Water and going into Raid, you’ll want a lot of spare bag space and time to conjure it beforehand, because every caster and Hunter (lol) will want water from you
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My recollection was spirit did almost nothing for mages back in Vanilla.
The problem with spirit was the 5-Second Rule. This meant that spirit only kicked in if you stopped casting for 5-seconds or more.
The cardinal rule for DPS casters since Vanilla is “Always be Casting”. If you ever stopped casting for 5-seconds or more you were playing the game wrong and would do much worse than someone who followed that rule.
The best a mage could do is get 15% of their out-of-combat mana regen to work while casting with 3/3 Arcane Meditation. That wasn’t a lot and didn’t ever make it worthwhile to stack spirit gear.
Instead, the goal for mage gearing was to get just enough high intellect pieces so that mana would last a full boss fight (including use of mana gem, mana pots and evocation). Once you had that amount, any extra was irrelevant. instead concentrate on getting pieces with DPS stats.
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I remember trying to roll on a ring with spirit on it and, even though it was an upgrade for me, being told it was most definitely a healer ring. Mages didn’t use much spirit back then. Robe of the Archmage, which I still have sitting in my bank, was a huge deal because of the mana gem usage.
Mana gems! You could use all the different colors, start with the highest Mana and work your way down.
The simplest way to describe Classic mage is “glass cannons.” We die very easily and have very little defensive abilities, but we can dish out a wallop of damage very quickly.
Unfortunately Vanilla was really the peak of the mage class imo. So if you want to experience all that the mage class could be roll one and have fun.
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Are you crazy frostfire bolt came with wotlk I stopped reading there
You are correct. Frostfire Bolt was added in WOTLK and not TBC.
That said, the reason why they added Frostfire Bolt is correct. It was added specifically as an attempt to try to make “elementalist” spec viable.
Mages were almost gods in vanilla (esp frost). They were almost required in groups because of snares, free water and polymorph. But you got to DPS. You could do dungeons without them but they were generally good at making things easier.
And they were great in raids too. Mages had great sustain in terms of mana. You had mage armor and the talent for additonal mana regen. + mana gems. You’re actually supposed to conjure one of every rank and use each one as the shared cd goes away
Basically of the DPS classes you had the easiest time finding groups. And we could actually do really high damage then.
Yeah it was awesome slow and dot I miss it, way better than flurry 
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Ranks of spells were fun, but honestly the toolkit is very gutted at the same time.
Raiding in really bad. Your rotation is either pressing frostbolt for 10 minutes or fireball and pressing combustion during the burst phase. That’s literally it.
PvP is very rock<paper<scissors.
I’ll dabble in it but I’m also not going in with Rose colored goggles.
I hope what they take from this for 9.0 is more class identity, better talent trees, and more RPG aspects.
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I didn’t raid much. I did know that we had good performance in raids. Most of what made mage interesting to play was the utility in dungeons (polymorph, interrupts, saving the healer with a frost nova when the tank failed to hold agro).
Be sure to open up with a PoM+Pyro on a dungeon boss sometime and see what happens 
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You also occasionally pressed scorch 
Mages were the bomb. Every 5 man group pretty much the first DPS you’d go for is a mage (tons of utility and great damage). In raids you’d easily have 6+ mages. Pvp they were amazing too. Great for farming gold as well. Can’t go wrong with mage in classic.
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Just wait until AQ and Naxx - rolling ignites made the raid take one warlock to be a debuff bot and then stacked mages.
Honestly though, while Classic was a great time I think dungeons and raids now are light years ahead of where they were back then. Extremely simple mechanics, one- or two-spell rotations, wanding because the tank wasn’t generating enough threat - all of these things are going to lead to some very boring raid experiences.
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