I recently made a 120 mage. While I’m having fun in mythic keys, the solo quest experience is so bad for me. It feels slow and weak.
Here’s what I’m doing. I saw a mob. I stand away and cast a pyro. Then it runs towards me. If I have a hot streak I do a combo. If I don’t, I just cast fireball till I proc. It feels really slow to even kill a single mob. Every other classes I played (hunter, rogue, warrior, DH, paladin, Druid) kills faster.
And I need to kite or sheep if I accidentally pulled 2 mobs. Or I will eat after the fight. Feels really bad in terms of solo experience.
What am I doing wrong?
1 Like
Fire is incredibly gear dependent. Not to say it can’t be done, but it won’t “feel good” without proper gearing. On top of that Fire damage is quite reliant on your combustion/ignite.
Minute Mage:
3x Blaster Master
Mix of Wildfire, Heart of Darkness, Firemind
Mechagon Wrists
On Use Trinket (Badge/Balefire/Manifesto)
Extra Double on Use Trinket—Font
Worldvein Major, Lucid Dreams, Vision of Perfection Minors
RoP + Kindling
Stack Masterful Corruptions
Regular Fire:
3x Blaster Master
Mix of Wildfire, Heart of Darkness, Firemind
Mechagon Wrists
On Use Trinket (Badge/Balefire/Manifesto)
Extra Double on Use Trinket—Font
Lucid Dreams Major, Recommend Conflict and Strife, Focused Azerite Beam, Breath of the Dying Minors
RoP + Meteor
Stack Masterful Corruptions
The issue with Fire, which isn’t so much an issue at higher gear levels, for solo questing/World Content is that using Combustion to kill weak mobs is a waste. To put it simply, things die too quick. Always use RoP on CD (save one for Meteor if going regular Fire). Make sure you are scorch executing.
I actually recommend having an Arcane set. Arcane is incredibly efficient at lower gear levels for World Content/Questing.
With Explosive Echo and Arcane Pressure Traits + Reverberate and Charged Up + Resonance Talents it makes AoE very easy with a nice Execute. Quick Thinking Trait will provide nice heals every time you hit Arcane Explosion.
Equipoise and Arcane Pummeling (or Heart of Darkness) + Rule of Threes, Touch of the Magi, and Overpowered makes Single Target nuking a breeze.
I suggest Incanter’s Flow for all open world content with Arcane. Worldvein for a Major Ess.
3 Likes
This is a great post. Frost also fares well with the Quick Thinking trait because of the many instants it has in its rotation. Pretty much everything in Frost’s rotation except Ice Lance will slow your target. However, Arcane is generally more mobile than Frost due to Chrono Shift. Frost’s talent alternative in this tier basically allows it to apply a stronger snare but doesn’t increase its movespeed.
Arcane can also Greater Invi to quickly bypass annoying mobs or drop threat to collect quest items. If you have warmode on, Arcane gets another Invi (for groups) which serves a similar purpose.
Where Frost provides more ease of execution over Arcane is that you need not worry about your mana at all (literally, ever) and it’s more Spellsteal friendly, since the mana cost of this spell is very high. Arcane requires juggling two resources but Frost is pretty much just a proc based spec.
Overall, I’ve always said this: mages are by far one of the worst solo PvE classes. You’re paper and when you’re in greens or geared similarly to the mobs of the area you have to go very slowly. Kiting isn’t always an option either.
mages are the worst soloers if u cant snare
melees usually have it easy , since they have some kind of self heal or survival cds
others ranged have , pet or heals (or both )
For soloing as fire or frost the azerite defensive traits I’d suggest are Cauterizing Blink followed by Impassive Visage and Resounding Protection. The amount Quick Thinking heals for depends on the spec. It works well for arcane’s AoE rotation, but it is underwhelming compared to the alternatives, in my opinion, for fire and frost.
It gets better as your item level goes up and you obtain the equipment necessary to improve your DPS.
I don’t raid or do mythic+, but my mage is still able to solo quite a few of the 8M+ HP, level 122 elites in the Nzoth invasion zones. It is not as easy as some classes, but at times that is what makes it fun.
If you’re going to quest as fire, run the Minute Mage build. The extra combustions help alot.
Also realize that the same talents that are used for m+ or raids are not always going to be the best for open world activities. Firestarter can be helpful to get that initial crit and get your heating up proc.
I would definitely quest as frost or arcane though, especially at lower item levels. Fire just isn’t great at dealing with a lot of low-health mobs, just as Hotgarbage stated.
If I’m doing open world quests as fire, I usually just use my pvp set up with breath of the dying major. Even with lowish gear, I wouldn’t even bother with bracers or lucid unless you’re fighting a mob with a lot of hp.
Echoing arcane for open world at the very least. Once you’re at four arcane charges you basically two shot mobs, they’re dead before the can reach you.
1 Like