If you take an hour to make food and water for your raid you fail at life.

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i love my mage. and, yes, i whole heartedly agree that everyone that rolls a mage should -at least- stick around until frost nova. a wonderful panic button and super glue spell.

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@Comely

Comments like that are not only rude and unproductive, but they also make you come across as ignorant and immature. Please go sit in a corner for about ten minutes, think about what you have done, and come back when you have something constructive to add to the conversation.

Back to the topic, summoning food and water is a time consuming chore, and it will be great to see it reduced/eliminated after patch 2.3.

-Arturis

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Mage is a lame class. Sure, you can do unbelievable dmg in the endgame, you are necessary for any group because of your buffs and the food/water.

But playing mage is boring!

Frostmage => Frostbolt, Frostnova, Frostbolt, Frostbolt. Iceblock. Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt. Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt.

*yawn*

Firemage is too simple, too. Collecting stats? Only spell dmg... boring...

Mages have good balanced builds where the main talents are skillable without any problems. Crowdcontrol is no challenge, sheep, frostnova, etc. Farming => you have your own breadmachine... You can even avoid fall damage...

*yawn*

The mage class is IMHO a richly rewarded class by blizzard. If you play mage, you can be certain that blizzard will give you good buffs and not so much nerfs (see the manareg/spirit-buff!)


When you ever played another class, mage is just too simple to play. Even playing a hunter is not so boring.


by the way, I have leveled several classes to 70 (hunter, warlock, rogue, druid, bloodknight) and have some classes between 60 and 70 (priest, mage). Mage is really the most boring class of all. Sorry, mages!

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@#4
*Yawn*@ Your post, your main must be a lawlock :)

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Zghuk - you really did show your ignorance in your post, It really does show that you've never bothered to look into what mages can actually do.

I notice you forgot about icelance in you little /yawn about icemages.

And you show your general ignorance of the end game if you think all mages have to care about is Spelldamage. Spell Hit, Spell Crit & Int are at least as important & depending on the fight a good deal of Stam might also not be a bad thing to have.

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The glory of a mage class comes not from grinding mobs to level. It comes from killing Elites that would normally take a group to kill. It is about surviving against all odds (everyone dead in heroics but you, sheep + kite FTW).

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I'm leveling a mage now but so far the process has been more painful than anything (at level 22)...too many deaths, too much drinking/eating between every other fight...i gotta give it to anybody that can bear it all the way to 70

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I've got a mage alt I made ages ago for fun, got him to level 53 or so, and the power got to my head quick. I pulled tricks with my fire mage I would never, ever attempt with my druid. I've soloed elites at least 3 or 4 levels above me. Really all I've been doing is soloing though, so I have almost no experience in a group setting. I pvp a lot though, so I have a somewhat decent understanding of what I can and can't handle in a battleground.

I love to heal as a druid, but when it comes to just messing around and two shotting mobs the same level as me, the mage is a whole lot of fun.

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I got my mage up to 54 and quit, I guess I dreaded higher level instances because I remember how frail they were when I had to keep them alive on my priest.

I had played a warlock as my main before that so I was really spoiled with that caster class.

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My main is a warlock but I did roll a mage and managed to get it to around level 12 in my off-time when I get bored of playing my main, and I must say, it's definitely more fun than I expected from another caster class. Frost nova is by far my favorite move, and I can't wait to learn blizzard and blink so I can do some massive aoe grinds and powerlevel it.

I do think my opinion in one thing is accurate though... for the most part frost mages aren't incredibly useful in pvp, but they are by far the fastest levelers... so I say spec frost to 70 then re-spec to fire. I am reminded of a joke I saw on the web... Some mages are frost... some mages are fire... and some mages are idiots (stating that the arcane talent line is crap, but I wouldn't know)

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I started a mage a few months back when I needed a character outside my main guild for relaxation. She has been frost all the way, and is now 51. Even though the down time is annoying at times, and when training a new food/water rank you can only conjure 2 until you level is also annoying, I am seeing a lot of the fun aspects. Finishing fights that I had no idea how I survived. Fights my feral druid might have pulled off, but who knows, and fights my warrior never would have pulled off.

Toughest part, transitioning from melee to kiting mobs and learning my limits. And, for the most part, dont give up until around level 20. That's when you start getting all the good stuff.

Portal Roulette FTW!! Stack several city portals on top of each other and see who wins/loses!

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@Arturis

Thank goodness we have polite productive folks like you to police this blog, offering informed mature advise such as "go sit in a corner blah blah". You present a sterling example to the poor misguided souls who might just want to voice the occasional opinion.

There. Think about *that* for a minute whydontcha.

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my main pre-BC was a gnome mage, and then my friends all moved horde side where I got a shammy and a lock to 70, and a bunch of other toons, but now I'm working a belf mage up, currently 42...mages are absolutely my favorite class...i always play caster classes and would much rather spam frostbolt and keep full health then stand right next to a mob and watch my health bar get eaten up.

i just picked up ice shield on my new mage and that's fantastic...i've leveled a priest up to 60 and you always miss having PW:S...and now at 40 a mage gets their own version of it.

Frost AOE'ing mobs is awesome. Once you try it, you'll never want to do anything else.

But how you write an article to talk about whether or not someone should play a mage and not mention teleporting (and blink for that matter) is totally beyond me. Just take a moment and think about how much time you spend travelling in WoW, especially during levelling, now imagine removing spending ages sitting at your computer waiting for zeppelins, boats, and long flights to end, when with just a click of the button you can be at any captial city instantly, which leaves you free to bind your hearthstone to whatever town you are questing at currently. I know in this new age of shattrath everyone can bind themselves there, but even that requires getting to the portals through what for many people is an extremely high lag area....really it can't be explained how awesome it is, and once you play a character that can get around so quickly it will pain you to play your other characters.

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I've had a belf mage sitting around for a long while, and I have to say, I've only recently really gotten into him. I think it was when I finally figured out AoE, which, c'mon, noone's better at it than a mage. It just clicked all of the sudden.

And I'm fire specced, so I love that feeling of being a human bomb, running between a bunch of enemies and laying waste with a good blast wave. S'good fun.

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It's almost laughable to say playing a Mage is "a challenge." Try playing a prot Warrior, a shaman healer or a melee DPS class that actually has to pay attention during boss and trash fights.

IMO people who roll Mages as their first toon have no appreciation for the presence of mind required by the other classes, which likely explains why so many Mages earn their reputation for completely ignoring threat and aggro mechanics.

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It's pretty funny seing all the shaman or warrior come in and comment about how the mage is easy to play or is not a challenge.

Guess what, we're talking about a game, none of the classes are particularly challenging to play. The challenge in this game is the coordination and team play required to succeed in end-game raiding or group pvp (i.e. arena).

Your elitism is pathetic, doubly so considering most of you don't understand how the mage class works, which is evident from your comments.

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My main is a priest, and I love playing the healing role. But doing the anything too much gets boring. Whenever I get bored, and I don't feel like learning to play a new class, I goof off with my mage. I can kill things so much easier than if I just switch to shadow priesting, and if I spec it right, I can kill many same level monsters at once.
I play my priest because sometimes it's challenging to heal a group, but I play my mage because sometimes it's more satisfying to solo with ease.

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@17
And your defensive immaturity over the issue is doubly as pathetic.

They're just making the point that it is easier to level a mage in PvE than it is a shammy or warrior. No need to get so worked up, after all, you said yourself: It's just a game :)

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Any class can be picked up and played with relative ease. The game is designed so the basics of each class are accessible and relatively easy to learn. Beyond the basics each class has a very different learning curve. Mages are relatively simple to take from noob to moderately competent, but becoming an advanced player is quite difficult. Having a mage, shaman, paladin, warrior, warlock, and rogue under my belt, I've often been surprised at what was easy and what was difficult.

Some of the advanced challenges of the class:
-Range: a mage needs to be able to visually judge the difference between 5y, 8y, 10y, 30y, and 40y, and do so while moving. Each of these ranges have different risks or opportunities. A good example of the difference between a competent mage and a truly good mage is that the latter can Arcane Explosion without being in melee range.

-Casting mechanics: Few players bother to learn about the underlying game mechanics that govern spellcasting. I'm not just talking about the spell hit table (though I've been amazed at how many people aren't aware that it exists). I'm talking about client buffering and the impact it has on spellcasts. For example, a 2.5 second cast will have an average of 0.25 seconds of buffering, meaning that you can start the next cast a quarter second before the first is finished. A 1.5 second cast may only have a 0.1 buffer. A cancelled 6 second cast may retain its 0.5s buffer. An instant resets the GCD *and* buffer timing. These are the sorts of mechanics that advanced players in fighting games learn to take advantage of (some games are even built around it). This kind of knowledge, while not indespensible for a mage, is very useful, much like a prot warrior doesn't absolutely NEED to know their threat conversion rates, but they SHOULD.

Mages, like most other classes, are easy to learn, difficult to really master.

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