The state of Mage in PvP

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Hey everyone,
I’m here both to rant and ask questions (or should I say find some reassurance)
I don’t see many mages in PvP atm and being newly 50 I’m wondering what everyone goes with in terms of spec ? I’ve dabbled in a few different specs and can’t really find the sweet spot.

Frost : Seems the most resilient thanks to ice block but the shield at 31 points feels quite superficial. Especially playing alliance against shamans and priests who can spam dispell quite easily.
It is more mana efficient especially when talented with the 15% reduction mana cost of frost spells but is really demanding in terms of hard casting.

Arcane : I will not talk about the OS arcane surge, mainly cause I don’t find it interesting except when running WSG to get the EFC but wanted to try an hybrid heal/damage.
Similar to frost, we need a lot of hard casting and it’s often frustrating not to find the window to do so and the lack of Ice Block is definitely being felt. AB is too long a cast, balefire takes quite some time to ramp up, and regen/mass regen don’t feel adapted to PvP. Chronostatic pres is awesome, but I find myself spamming it and only it. Might as well go frost for the cc and heal with it.

Fire : It is probably the most rewarding spec as you know you’ll die fast but you have the chance to bring someone with you to the grave. Main issue is mana. In the instances where I am not focused, i go oom in the middle of a fight for BS in AB and stand here like a moron.

There’s quite a lot of new spells with the runes coming but -probably because of meta OS - I don’t feel like I have the time/opportunity to use my tools. I enjoy playing with frostfire and brain freeze on boots (0/10/31) to boost it with ignite but even that makes me hard cast frostbolt rank one to fish for procs and I oftentime find myself dying before being able to do anything meaningful (shamans and hunters are particularly atrocious).
Even rogues can kill me in a few globals even though I respond to his cd with mines. A couple of mutilate crits while I step away after I nova’d him are enough to send me to my grave.

Going for one blink, displacement and another blinks costs me around 1k mana. Its 25% of my max mana !

Overall I’m a bit disappointed with the class, partly because I don’t have access to the latest gears yet, but I’m not sure the r7 gears will help much.
I feel like playing a different game than others, where I simply run from a dangerous situation into an other. I have to use all my mana and spells to survive, but then I don’t deal any damage. And if I choose to do damage, I’m often the one bitting the dust first.

For those who have been through the grind, is it worth it atm ? Is mage sufficiently fun and efficient to play ?

2

They are still strong just not outright broken now people have more snare removals and ways to deal damage to them. Mage certainly arn’t as scary as they were in era / vanilla but still strong in a good players hands and rewarding.

1 Like
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In a minute there will be shamans/sh priests/boomies and will tell you that mage is strong, just skill issue. This is pve game, they balance game to pve, go play cata or retail if you want pvp, here pvp is dead. No one that you have to cast 2-3 sec to do ~600 dmg while all other classes just do more dmg just pressing insta spell. Same shi… with mana, you are oom after 15 sec if play fire.

Shadow priests are weak in pve :smiley:

  • Shadowform now increases all shadow damage done by 25% (was 15%).
4

I’ve pvped quite a bit on my mage and this is what I can tell you.

Fire is really nice, huge dmg. Sorch spam and LB into pyroblasts is fun and decent dmg.
Problem is that players get 50% HP buff in PVP and now also 50% dmg reduction so you take twice as long to kill them, yet your mana costs on mage are same as ever. You will spend all your mana on two players, now one after dmg reduction, and then have to drink for 1 minute to get your mana back.

Big problem is shadow priest, who will put 2 instant dots on you and you are dead, feels awful. Shamans also have freedom now so you can’t slow them now and they will mow you down since you need to cast scorch and you will never get it off.

So from my experience you can only rely on instant spells, which frost and arcane are really weak at, fire has at least fast casting scorch and LB so you can go with that.

Also I was sure deep freeze would be busted, but it’s on global CD and seems like every class has a way to remove roots now so most of the time you can’t even stun after nova.

What Elementical said is correct. Blizz is balancing around PVE dps, so mages have decent PVE dps and they aren’t buffed, while hybrid classes with tons of utility were massively buffed on dps to keep up with pure dps classes, which is fine for PVE, but makes them busted in PVP

5

Across thousands of posts in phase 3 you don’t see people whining about how op mages are in pvp. Because we were the argubly the weakest pvp class. Noone is afraid of mages. Even healerless warriors would charge us anytime they saw us. Non-frost is a free kill when ambushed.

Post damage reduction however we have improved but the still have weakness of poor mana efficiency. When noone else is doing huge instant burst damage. Mage not doing damage make us less worse lol. Some other spec like Boomie suffered more from this nerf since all they had was damage (tho boomie can now change spec to the immortal bear.)
Mages can now use ccs, silence and slows without dying in 2 gcds.

Chronostatic preservation does good healing IF ignored. Mage healer crumples the hardest of all healers under pressure and you have really outplay your attackers since we have no instant heals and interupting chrono locks all mage schools.

Mage certainly arn’t as scary as they were in era / vanilla but still strong in a good players hands and rewarding

Every class is strong in the hands of good players. Stronger classes with more tools would be even better in the hands of good players.

6

Mages are just bad in SoD. The only thing they have going for them are blink, ice block and the overpowered chronostatic. Every other class does what they do, but better.