Hateplaying my mage in classic

Classes Mage
1

This is the first time i play a mage. I rolled it on the classic server because everyone said it was a good class. I played warrior in vanilla and loved it. Mage, however, is boring as all hell. I keep waiting for that magical moment when i fall in love with this class. But im 47 now and have to force myself to log in.

Do things get better? Is it just me?

2

Nope, you’ll generally spam 1 button until TBC. Welcome to Classic.

5 Likes
3

Fire mage’s are fun in my opinion. Don’t know why everyone rolls frost.

1 Like
4

Probably because they’re all gearing up for Molten Core. Good luck trying to run Molten Core as a fire mage.

7 Likes
5

It took you 47 levels to figure that out?

3 Likes
6

Fire mage’s are a lot of fun, you’re 100% right. The thing is for the first 2 raid tiers Fire doesn’t pull its weight because all of the mobs and bosses are fire resistant. You’re in essence forced to play Frost, and one mage in every raid group has to play Winter’s Chill-Frost. Once AQ/ZG/Naxx drops then you can play fire… For PvP I would recommend an Elemental Mage build where you spec into both Fire and Frost.

7

Thanks guys. Yeah, i uave to play this toon because i told my guild ill be a mage. At this point considering making either shaman or warlock. I prefer to not be resource starved. So when im out of mana i can still do something

8

Wasn’t there a youtube video years ago about 1 tank and 39 arcane mages vs Ragnaros? That’d be fun :smiley:

9

Only one I can find is a Rag kill with 33 mages and from the looks of the video, they were all frost.

edit: To be fair, they may have been AP/frost mages for the burst.

10

u fell for the classic hype lol

no big deal homie but still pretty funny tbh

2 Likes
11

If you want to push yourself on mage, you can watch Faxmoney’s Stupid Mage Tricks series. It’s a frost mage soloing elites, pack farming, etc. Basically shows you what a frost mage can do if the enemy can be kited.

But yeah, mage is pretty bland at least spell visual and rotation wise in classic.

12

Ok I must be mistaken, I thought I’d heard that but memory is a tricky thing. What are we talking about again?

13

Are you hard forced to go mage? Seems like you’re basically forcing yourself to play it because you said you would, but are now doubting yourself. If you don’t enjoy mace, I’d highly recommend just re-roll to something you do enjoy, else logging in and playing will continue to feel like a chore.

1 Like
14

all you do is frost bolt in raids thats not fun?

15

Dude, just reroll Warrior and give him all your Mage’s gold.

16

I mean warrior is basically auto attack till 40.

I played Druid till 48 and it was pretty meh too.

Rerolled mage and pulling 10 mobs at a time is pretty fun.

17

Melee is the only classes worth playing PERIOD imo. The rate at which casters go OOM is not fun, it’s not immersive, it’s just silly.

The game opens up and really becomes fun when you don’t have to drink after every pull, or stand there and wand things to death. lol

18

I guess I am the exception, playing with fire and enjoying it! But I am tempted to go down the Arcane tree. Is it a viable spec? I am thinking there has to be a way to avoid all the drinking after every pull or wanding things to death.

I did not get a chance to play vanilla, so I am clueless. Any help is appreciated.

19

Arcane isn’t actually a spec in Vanilla.

The arcane tree is merely the support tree you use to buff your fire or frost spells.

That said, deep arcane mages did exist in Vanilla and they were a lot of fun to play. These were known as “3-minute mages”.

A “3-minute mage” had at least 31 points in arcane, with the rest in fire or frost. Every 3 minutes, you would activate Arcane Power, combined with an activated trinket and Presence of Mind (usually combined with Pyroblast). This setup delivered incredible long-range burst damage and virtually unmatched DPS … but only for 15 seconds every 3 minutes (the cooldown on arcane power.

The remaining 2 minutes and 45 seconds you were basically just an inferior fire or frost mage.

Average sustained dps output for a 3-minute mage was worse than a deep frost or deep fire mage. But the addition of the burst cooldowns tended to make the spec more effective in PVP than a pure raid spec.

The reason why true arcane mages did not exist during Vanilla was that in Vanilla there were only 2 arcane damage spells: Arcane Missiles (AM) and Arcane Explosion (AE).

  • Arcane Missiles had horrible mana efficiency, range and DPS output compared to frostbolt or fireball. It was a slow 5-second stationary channel. And you spent all the mana for it up front.
  • Taking any damage at all while channeling AM cost you at least one tick of AM missiles due to spell pushback. And if you got interrupted or had to move you could lose all the mana without delivering any damage.
  • In PVP if you got interrupted while channeling AM you lost access to Blink, one of the key defensive spells.
  • AM was usuitable as a sole primary nuke. As such, in Vanilla it was relegated to niche duty for attacking runners in pvp. Some mages also used it on clearcasting procs, though many did not.,
  • AE was fine as an AOE spell, but it takes more than an AOE spell to make a spec viable.

If you feel like a change and want to try something different in Classic, I highly recommend giving deep Arcane a try. Just don’t plan on using AM as your main single-target nuke and you’ll be fine.