mardi 31 mai 2011

WoW Mage Guide - Damage and Utility through Spells

By William Pestle


Mages, in World of Warcraft, somewhat resemble the famous description of World War I battleships - eggshells armed with hammers. They can slow their opponents with bitter blasts of ice and frost, scorch them with potent fire spells, or blow them to pieces with a shower of arcane bolts. Their nearly unarmored condition, however, means that it requires an elusive play style to use them effectively - as any WoW mage guide will tell you, you must avoid close combat at all costs.

Mages are incapable of tanking due to their inability to survive melee for more than a second or two, and can only heal themselves using Evocation - and then only when they have a specific glyph for that purpose (useful for all mage specs). Their role in the game is as a pure damage dealer, although they do offer quite a bit of utility in the form of crowd controls and conjured food and drink as well.

As any good WoW mage guide will tell you, conjuring water for group or raid members is a major utility role for mages in PvE situations. Crowd control in the form of Frost Nova, which freezes opponents to the ground for a brief period of time, is useful in some dungeons, and extremely useful in PvP, when it can immobilize a good part of an enemy team for several crucial seconds.

Frost is the talent specialization that most WoW mage guides recommend both for leveling and for PvP. Although it does somewhat less damage than the other two specs, "less" is relative in this case. Frost has the highest survivability in both situations because mages specced into this talent tree have many different ways to slow or completely immobilize their enemies. This allows them to keep melee foes at a distance better than the other specs, enhancing their ability to stay alive.

Since the release of Cataclysm, the signature moves of this spec include the ability to summon a water elemental that fires water bolts, which helps to offset the spec's slightly lower damage.

Fire mages are enjoyable for those who want to deal a lot of damage while moving swiftly over the field of conflict. If you read many WoW mage guides, you will know that this is the specialization that deals the most damage of any of the three talent specs of mages. It lacks heavy duty survival spells like frost has, however, meaning that leveling as fire is likely to be fraught with more deaths.

They have a few talented stuns, allowing them to deal with NPC foes on a more equal footing, and a few mobility-enhancing abilities that can help keep them out of melee. However, this WoW mage guide notes they are more easily killed while leveling than frost mages, and, as mentioned, are very fragile in PvP.

Arcane mages were formerly the weakest tree of the class, but now reside somewhere between fire and frost. Arcane offers more damage than frost, but less than fire, and more survivability than fire, but less than frost. The talent spec is useful in both PvE and PvP, and has enough tricks and interesting spells to make it the Swiss army knife of mage specs.




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