TBC Mage Questions

Classes Mage
1

Hey guys! So I never got to play TBC and don’t know many mages or people that did.

What I was wondering is how good are the individual mage specs throughout the expansion?

I’m about to level tailoring and am trying to decide whether to get the frost set or fire set as, from what I can tell, they’re BIS going into phase 2. Any help and suggestions or ideas about mages throughout the expansion would be amazing!

Thanks dudes!

2

It’s been years but I remember going frost in TK because A’lar is immune to fire. SSC the first boss is immune to frost so went fire. Hyjal arcane was good for arcane blasts which helped against the mobs but boy did Arcane drain mana hard and regen in BC was sooo much slower than now. Kara I think I was frost. Gruuls and Mag I forget but I think fire for those. BT was either fire or frost. IIRC fire was the go to and same for Sunwell. I did clear all the raids at a competitive pace so even Sunwell cleared and ended up as our guild finished US 230 or around there.

I didn’t really pvp so not sure the spec of choice. Wish I could be more exact but since BC was so long ago, I just remember certain specs I used for the raids etc.

3

Fire as of now is the best pve spec with arcane taking over it in t6 or earlier. Frost has its uses mainly in pvp and when things are immune to fire.

4

No idea about TBC Classic.

But back in the day of original TBC years ago, I recall:

  • Fire was best in T4,
  • Once you got 2T5 Arcane was best for the rest of T5.
  • Once you got to Black Temple and had a substantial amount of BT gear, Fire overtook Arcane.
  • In Sunwell T6.5 Fire was best (though all mage specs were really bad there).
5

I realize that this post is 20 days old, but this simply isn’t true. Right now Arcane is the top dps spec, beating out Fire, Locks, and Hunters; with that said it is pretty dependent on Fight Length + Raid Support. However, it still competes with Fire when lacking raid support.

Arcane will remain above Fire in T5 how much so will be dependent on again fight length and raid support, but the Tier Set is an extremely powerful set for Arcane.

6

Based on my recollection from TBC back in the day:

Arcane ruled in Tier 5, because of 1 thing: The 2T5 set bonus. That bonus was the best tier set bonus mages ever received in the entire history of the game. The damage bonus multiplied with AB stacks, while the increased mana cost did not. Result was basically 20% increased damage for around 1% increased mana cost.

The problem with arcane is that this didn’t scale. It dominated all of T5. But once players geared up in Black Temple, fire pulled ahead on world first progression. By the time you got to Sunwell with T 6.5, arcane mages were non-existent in the top100 progression guilds. The few mages present were all fire spec.

Note however, that Sunwell was an awful time for mages of every spec. For that raid they were the worst class in the game.

In Sunwell, it was actually a larger dps gain for a guild to bring a 5th warlock than a single mage. The result was progression guilds typically either slotted 0 or 1 mages. They replaced their other mages with shadow priests and warlocks.

Mages who got sat due to this referred to it as “getting Sunwelled”.