Class Guide: Mage

[Alkhara Majere]

A mage is a caster that specializes in burst damage and area of effect spells. Their primary role in a group at lower levels is damage dealing and the crowd control of mobs by temporarily turning them into a sheep (or other harmless animal) with polymorph thereby preventing the target from participating in combat for an amount of time. At higher levels, the mage's role expands into a utility role, as many encounters in the game are difficult to finish without Counterspell, Detect Magic and Remove Curse. magi can also conjure food and drink to help everyone recover faster from battle. They can also teleport to major cities and open portals for party members.

The Mage is a mana-based class. In player vs player combat, the mage is a kiting class like the hunter. They deal ranged damage while using escape skills to avoid taking damage during combat. Their primary stats are Intellect, Stamina, Spell Damage and Spirit (the order of importance varies with the player's role).


Races
The Mage class can be played by the following races:

• Gnomes
• Humans
• Draenei

• Undead
• Trolls
• Blood Elves

Weapons and armor
Magi can only wear cloth armor. They begin with the ability to use staves and wands but they can learn dagger and one-handed swords from weapon masters. Wands go in the ranged slot and have the autoshoot ability.

Spells
Mages have a wide variety of spells. Boasting an impressive repertoire of ranged spells, they have utility and teleport abilities to compensate for their lack of stamina and defense. Broadly speaking, their spells can be categorised as follows:

• Damage spells
  • Direct Damage
  • Area of Effect Damage
• Defensive spells
  • Snare and root type effects (ice based)
  • Crowd Control
  • Damage Absorption/Avoidance
  • Curse Removal
  • Summon Mana Gems, for personal use only
• Utility spells
  • Intellect Buff
  • Conjure food and drink
• Teleport spells
  • Self
  • Others

See Mage Spells page for further details.




Talents


Mage Talents are split into 3 categories which mirror their 3 main spell types:

• Arcane
• Fire
• Frost

Talent builders can be found at Official Blizzard site, WoWhead, Panda Hideout, WoW Vault, ThottBot, Merciless.


See the Mage Talents page for further details.

Notable Talents

• Improved Arcane Missiles is useful at lower levels, providing an uninterruptible high DPS spell you can use in melee range.
• Arcane Concentration gives you a chance to enter a Clearcasting state, improving your mana efficiency by about 10%. When you proc Clearcasting, take the opportunity to cast a mana expensive spell.
• Pyroblast is the highest single target damage spell available, but one of the longest casts.
• Iceshards, Frostbite and Shatter are the holy trinity of Shatter/critical hit Frost mage build, giving you a 50% bonus to crit a frozen target. They can now all be maxed with only 20 points in Frost. Also, Shatter now affects all your spells, not just Frost spells, giving additional flexibility to Shatter builds.
• Ice Block is a very situational ability with a number of uses. See main article for details: Ice Block.
• The tier 7 Frost talent Ice Barrier is much more powerful than Mana Shield because it absorbs all damage, not just physical damage, the 2.0.6 PTR patch notes claim mana shield will now absorb magical damage as well. In Patch 1.11 its cooldown was reduced to 30 seconds, making it much more useful. Its functionality and efficiency are similar to a self-cast Power Word: Shield.
• Formerly a Talent, Evocation is now available to all mages at level 20.

Endgame expectations

In a group or raid environment, magi are usually tasked with ranged DPS, AoE, crowd control and handing out provisions.

With the introduction of patch 1.11, magi enjoyed a high degree of flexibility in the end game. Previous to patch 1.11, it was expected that most magi would spend 5 talent point in Improved Arcane Explosion, which made it instant-cast. Post-patch, Arcane Explosion is instant-cast for all magi, which frees up a large amount of talent points to experiment with other specialized talents. Evocation, which was previously part of the Arcane talent tree, was also given to all magi free of talent investment and with a lower cooldown. New changes to all three trees also made investing points into both the Fire and the Frost trees highly viable.

As far as damage, frost sees heavy use in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair as many enemies there are resistant or immune to fire damage. Curse of the Elements can lessen the problem of fire resistance for fire-spec'ed magi in Molten Core, though immune bosses like Ragnaros and Nefarian still present a major hurdle. However, Naxxramas includes frost-resistant enemies and DPS intensive fights, making fire more lucrative for magi who plan to raid there. Regardless of the location, a handful of fire magi are a great asset to any raid. They typically output higher damage in burn-out fights, behind the the two minute line, and the Improved Scorch talent allows a mage to stack fire vulnerability on a mob up to an additional 15%, which aids in the DPS of fire-based spells from other classes, such as Immolate for Warlocks.

PvP-wise, magi are considered "glass cannons" - a design philosophy which gives mages generous burst damage at the cost of, generally, low health. Aided by talents such as Presence of Mind and Arcane Power, they are one of the classes with the most potential for dealing out the greatest amount of damage in the shortest amount of time. In group PvP, magi will stay back and focus on crowd control with Polymorph and pick off targets from range. Depending on the Battleground and the situation, magi typically AoE to prevent node captures or nuke flag carriers as fast as possible.

The endgame mage also acts as a utility class, providing drink, food, buffs and portals. When it comes to providing drink and food, magi are by some considered equal to "vending machines" due to their unique ability to create refreshments out of thin air and provide them with no cost except mana and time. However, many magi feel that this is not their primary role and therefore refuse to give away merchandise free to people he or she doesn’t know. Mages seems to be a balanced class.

See also

See Starting a Mage for some advice when starting out
See the Category:Mages for further information on the Mage class
See Mage Tactics for advanced information on playing as a Mage


Many thanks to Wowwiki.

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[wicked_joe]

why didnt you just link the site with all the guides would of been much easier

[Elt-]

why do ppl do mage guides! im a mage and they suck hard! they are just walking portals and water vendors, dont ever do a mage! biggest mistake i ever made...

[UncleTuca]

Mages seems to be a balanced class.

i lol'ed irl

[taylor]

Elt thats ridiculous, i have an imba mage and alot of my friends play many other classes, they have all agreed that the mage is one of the funnest classes to play, and whats better is they are fast killers, can aoe grind and are pretty much essential to most groups. dude u really have no idea, so what if u have to give water to friends/party members, its a big bonus if someone pays u to make em food/water and u can make it for yourself. dude get real! MAGES FTW!!!!!