It’s been a long time, friends.
I don’t even remember what it was like to play my mage (granted I didn’t get past level 30.)
Would love some insight on this. I’m between a few different classes (and main a mage in BFA)
Quality of life for mage is great. Good utility with food and portals, top or near top dps for most of classic, great in pvp (as long as you don’t get caught by melee, then you’re toast). Polymorph had no diminishing returns, so you could just keep chain ccing people indefinitely.
Mages are arguably the best casters in vanilla wow. In terms of damage in raids, they are near the top. Utility in 5-man dungeon groups and in the LBRS and UBRS groups is pretty good too (polymorph is a quick cast and lasts a long time). I plan on rolling a mage in classic and don’t expect to have difficult finding a dps spot in dungeons or raids. Some say that mages will be overpopulated, but this concern only speaks to their strengths overall.
For leveling, mages can make their own food and water, which saves some money. They also can AoE farm to level, which may or may not be viable depending on the server populations. Single-target leveling speed is pretty good. Leveling frost provides a number of CC improvements that can help you survive if you pull 3-4 mobs on accident.
I can’t speak much for mage pvp, but there are plenty of viable specs in Classic for pvp.
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Yeah, I had a 60 mage alt in Classic. Life was pretty good. As mentioned food/water, portals, decent in PVE and good in PvP. Also keep in mind frost aoe farming was easy money…
Going to say overall, Classic is the best period for Mage.
All of their class utility is very in demand. CC, Portals, Food/Water, Damage etc.
In PVP they are strong and don’t require the best gear in the game to do well and have fun.
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Yup yup. Classic features a whole host of cloth items with odd stats that can facilitate a variety of PvP specs as well. Stack resistances and stamina? Flarecore set, random blues from Scholo and Strat can help you with that. Fire and Frost specs also play differently and help to keep the class fresh.
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POM pyro mage will always have a special place in my memory for pvp. Deleting people was super fun.
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A walking vending machine / taxi service.
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This is one place where I don’t think Mage quality of life was always the best. Fire is interesting to play, but Frost is really just spamming frost bolt. That’s it (basically).
I agree that spamming Frostbolt gets boring in raids, but in PvP there’s also rooting, slowing, auto-attack speed reduction, silencing, and complex kiting decisions that frost mages get to manage. In raids, it really is just spamming Frostbolt until ZG and AQ, but PvP is slightly different. I’d argue that frost mages in PvP are a little more fun than spamming frostbolt. Deep frost-specced mages also use fire blast to break up the monotony (that’s sarcasm, but the kiting makes it fun for me.
Can’t speak to raiding, but strongly agree about utility and value of Frost Mage in BGs. You can run flag, control mid, aid your own flag carrier in his escape, kill and slow flag runners. You die fast when too close to the action, but you are also the tip of the spear. Your presence, even if you are not well geared, can be very valuable to team goals and you will use virtually all your spells. And dieing in battleground is not necessarily a negative - it allows you to almost instantly go from offense to defense.
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I see people claim this a lot, and it’s not true.
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Yeah, diminishing returns was added at some point in Vanilla, so it will be there with 1.12.
But, as I recall, even when it instantly breaks it could still be an effective interrupt if your CS is on cooldown. Just keep rank 1 on your keybinds to not waste mana.
Something I “think” I remember about my mage from vanilla was that, as a fire mage, the level right before a fire bolt upgrade always felt particularly grindy and painful to level. One memory that sticks in my head was grinding kobolds in Arathi at 35 and having to drink A LOT. Then hitting 36, getting a fresh rank of fire bolt and steamrolling them.
Or hunters :d
The ranking of spells was so interesting. When you get a new rank you’d feel so much more powerful, then obviously as you level along it would get relatively weaker and weaker until you get a new rank.
This was real evident with conjuring water and food. It would be very useful when you get a new rank, but then levels later you have far more health and mana, but they’re still healing the same amount, so you had to drink a lot longer. So it was better to just buy more up-to-date food and water until you get a new rank. It would save time anyway. Take the demo for example. The food and water they started you with (and I think could buy from innkeepers) was WAY better than the conjure the mages had. Of course at max level it’s a different story.
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Being a mage is a license to print money selling conjured water/food and ports, being able to grab engi for the tp and then setting hearth to a far out place, being able to dungeon farm or just aoe grind in the world and unlike a warlock you wont need soul bags taking up bank and bag slots.
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Going to echo that making your own food and water is great. Buying food/drinks should never break the bank, but not having to worry about running out in a dungeon or out questing is a nice QoL feature.
Same with teleporting. The world feels so much bigger in vanilla when you have to run everywhere until 40. Sure, you have to buy the reagents, but the time saved from running/flight pointing/taking a boat across zones is very worth it. Can even make cash selling portals for people, like a ye olde Uber. Won’t make you rich, but you’ll cover the cost of your reagents no problem.
Also, don’t forget about slow fall. Can be useful for short cuts or PvP shenanigans. Just be sure to save all your Light Feathers.
In terms of QoL features, Mage is really up there. It doesn’t have a travel form/speed boost, but Blink is a little handy for getting around before having a mount.
Mage have one of the fastest ways to lvl in vanilla. AoE frost mage grinding. you see so much world loot, including rares and epics, tons of green gear, silver, and on top of it all a bunch of xp.
The feeling of killing a mob of 8-16 at once in classic as a mage is exhilarating.
Mages are great in all content. Polymorph and blink are two of the best spells in the game. You get to teleport to three major cities for the price of training and a portal stone. Everybody else has to walk, and the only class that comes close to having our teleporting skill is druids with Teleport: Moonglade, which is a static location.
And yeah, you pretty much lose 40% of your HP when you eat a crit, but you also have a million ways to keep people off of you. In raiding, you spam one spell, but you always deal good damage and still have tons of control and AoE when the time comes.
The worst thing about being a mage is “pls gib water” “food plz” “give food” “hey, give me food and water” “bruh, food” “give me food”. It never stops. It just never stops. Ever.