Hey everyone!
I’m a returning player and am wanting to play a mage. I don’t care so much about which spec is “best”, but more about which spec is easiest to grasp. Which has the easier rotation? Which is most forgiving? For context, I enjoy doing mythic plus and some raiding.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Frost is hit the glowing button. I found it pretty easy.
Fire is all front ended into combustion and if you mess it up your dps is shot.
Arcane is a 21 step process to start dpsing and again frontloaded
Frost is playing whack a mole with procs and you have like 5 spells or something, idk.
They’re all medium to hard difficulty (as far as WoW goes at least) …
I’m a Frost main, and although it is easy in my opinion, theres a lot to wrap your head around. There is a lot going on … so much to the point you cant fit everything, you’re going to miss procs somewhere at some point.
I have only played Arcane once, and it was to get transmog stuff for Kyrian back in SL. I have no idea if they are easy or hard. But they aren’t very popular in M+ and thats all I care about.
Fire is definitely hard. SKB makes for a pretty intricate rotation.
Roll frost. It’s very very fun, it’s not super easy like BM or Havoc, but it’s pretty easy to understand the concept and get started.
This entirely depends on how good you actually expect to be/play.
Frost has the most forgiving skill floor imo but, for leveling/solo play, arcane can be VERY lazy.
Avoid fire. It’s not solo friendly and even in group content, it largely depends on the group pulling/playing around it.
-me, shocked to find out at level 70 I can’t just spam arcane blast or arcane explosion until oom as fights last 5 seconds
-my wife telling me I “can’t just spam 30 casts of arcane blast on the normal dungeon boss” and that I’ll “have to actually learn a rotation one day”
Yeah pretty much. I leveled a mage for guild achivements in SL and I think I can count on 1 hand how many times I willingly pushed arcane barrage without doing it purely for the AOE burst against tabbed arcane blast enemies I wanted to finish off all at once (at least until I hit SL content and even leveling mobs actually started to take more than a few casts to die).
Which is why I ask the OP what they actually intend to do in the game with the mage. Frost is pretty easy to play even suckily…but if leveling and maybe world quests are your expected endgame…well I hope your finger is ready for callouses because you’re going to be mashing a single key quite a lot.
They’re all reasonably easy to play. It’s another thing to master them.
When levelling Frost is nice because of the excellent crowd control, and the damage curve is flatter and more predictable. You don’t have to build up power to get that big burst and then start all over again. Of all the specs it’s the most survivable.
I felt like learning frost was the most straightforward and the quickest, but fire is starting to make more sense and it has been scaling well. I don’t get arcane anymore, too many buttons, too much going on, not enough payoff. Even though I love the theme I no longer play arcane since BFA. Don’t be fooled by fire’s lack of buttons, you have to use them well (and also hard cast either pyroblast or flamestrike for sun king’s blessing into a mini combust window don’t forget). But fire gets easier with WAs, frost remains easy, I don’t understand arcane.
I honestly thought that Arcane mage was easiest. It’s pretty much Spam arcane bolt and get the 4 energy things under your mana bar to 4 and replenish it when you need. Like a purple machine gun. In pve just spamming that one move gets you plenty of Dps for no one to complain.
From what I know they are all pretty easy though. Frost I noticed seems to do the Less dmg but is a cc machine for pvp
I enjoy Frost, but Arcane can be fun if you want to be like Megaman and do the Charged Shot thing.
Welcome back btw!
Arcane is definitely the hardest. You only need to look at icyveins and YouTube to see it’s optimum rotation to understand. The thing about arcane is that it’s deceptive. It looks easy. But it isn’t. It’s easy to pickup and play. Sure. But to play it optimally is probably one of the hardest specs to play in the game.
Frost is by far the easiest, assuming you don’t mess up your talents. It mostly excels at aoe while doing mediocre single target (even with Glacial spike). It also heavily punishes movement encounters.
Fire is somewhere in-between. It’s far more mobile than frost or arcane but if you mess up a single dps window CD, you will do basically zero damage.
A final note on arcane. Arcane is very clearly designed to be the mage open world questing spec. So I use it for that and farming. But in instances, if you don’t like some marginal DoT gameplay, you will not like arcane in instances. 99% of your damage comes from Touch of the Magi. I personally do not like that and I’d talent out of it if I could. But considering it does 99% of our damage, that’s not really a realistic option.
I’d say frost is the easiest because it’s the most forgiving. You can’t mess up icy veins lol.
Use your procs and always shatter glacial spike if you can
Pretty simple
Well, I was going to say fire but after reading everything else here I’ve realized that maybe I just prefer the flow of it and became accustomed to it easier. So I’d say, try them out and see which one clicks for you.
Arcane is pretty nice for questing/running around zones though since you can pretty much explode normal enemies when you have your arcane charges stacked, from my experience. Outside of that, I’d say it is the most challenging to master just because you have to manage your mana. Frost has a lot of natural CC that’s good in all sorts of situations, but if you play around with the talent trees enough you can definitely get a decent amount of CC even if you’re playing fire or arcane.
Honestly,go play evoker.
Arcane.
I like to do mythic plus and go for aotc typically. End game open world content is part of it as well. Seems frost might be the way to go. I’m currently trying fire and really struggling with the combust window. Then once rhats over. My dps is gone lol
Definitely Frost.
Fire is second but does require you to manage your combustion well. But once you got that window down I think it’s the most fun of the three specs. Nothing in this game comes close to the feeling you get when spamming Pyroblast during your combustion window.
Your talents are going to affect the rotation somewhat but Frost is always a fun and simpler spec.
Spam Frostbolt, hit ice lance and flurry on proc, make sure to use glacial spike, comet storm, and ray of frost when winter’s chill is on the target. That’s about it.
It’s definitely not as easy or simplistic as you make it sound. Ignoring Arcane Surge, TotM, Mana Gem, Radiant Spark, the burn/mini burn rotations, etc.