Mage
Overview
So you wanna be a Mage huh? Awesome. I'm Old Man Franks, and I been playin' one for a long time. I'll see what I can do to help you out.
TO DO
- Add in links to Specs, Glyphs, various abilites to WoWHead
- Add in more tips and Tricks
- See if the formatting can be made better.
Specs, Stats, & Rotations
Here's the great thing about being a mage: Options! You're a pure DPSer, so you have three different specs with which to cause PAAAAAAAAAAAIN! We'll cover each of the three below, including best choice in spec, glyphs, and how to prioritize stats, as well as fun stuff to do.
Arcane
Arcane's got hard hitting spells, lots of utility, and it's the least proc-dependent of our specs. It's been said that if you want the most control over your DPS, Arcane is the spec for you.
On the other hand, it's probably one of the more boring specs to play, and the mana management game you have to play can be tricky.
Building Your Arcane Mage
First off, here[1] is the base spec you want. There is some room to move points around here depending on your play style. Your main options are: instant invisibility/reduced damage taken via 3 points in Prismatic Cloak [2] or a movement speed boost with Improved Blink. You can take a point out of Burning Soul [3] if you need one. Some raiding mages remove Nether Vortex [4] and Slow [5] with the assumption that their targets will already be slowed by tanks, but this is a matter of debate (adds may not necessarily be slowed). The slow just needs to be applied by someone to activate Torment the Weak [6].
Glphys
For Prime Glyphs, you'll want Arcane Blast [7], Arcane Missiles [8], and Mage Armor [9]
For Major Glyphs, it's pretty much your choice, but these are all nice: Invisibility [10], Evocation [11], Arcane Power [12], and Blink [13]
Arcane Mages use Mage Armor [14] at all times. You'll be burning through a lot of mana, and you'll need this armor to keep in the fight.
Stats
Like all Mage specs, Intellect is your best stat. If you have a piece that gives you more Int than what you have, you should equip it. Reforging and Gemming can take care of any loss to your other stats you might incur.
Hit Rating up to 17% should be your next priority. Some mages are happy being slighly under this.
Mastery is the best of our three secondary stats for Arcane. Get this as much as possible.
Haste is next.
Crit is the weakest stat for Arcane Mages.
I should not need to say this but avoid bloody Spirit at all costs. If you get a Spirit piece that is just a massive upgrade, use it, but reforge that Spirit away, quickly. Look for replacement options and get them as soon as you can.
Rotation
Your rotation is split into three phases: Burn, Recharge, and Manage. We do this to take the most advantage of our Mastery, Mana Adept
Burn Phase
This is the phase in which you will cause a lot of serious damage in a very short time.
Make a macro to activate your Mirror Images, Arcane Power, any "use" Trinkets you may have, and use your Mana Gem all at the same time:
#showtooltip Arcane Power
/use 13
/use 14
/use Mana Gem
/cast Arcane Power
/cast Mirror Image
(If you're an engineer, add /use 10 for synapse springs)
At the start of the Burn Phase, you will activate this Macro, and then begin spamming the ever-loving crap out of Arcane Blast. Do nothing but this unless you have to move. Ignore any procs of Arcane Missiles.
Continue doing this until your Mana reaches 40%. At this point switch to the Recharge Phase.
OMF, When Should I trigger the Burn Phase?
That is entirely dependent on the fight itself. You can initiate it anytime you are at full mana (or close to it), and you have all your cooldowns and Evocation ready. If the boss has a period in which they take extra damage, such as Hagara Stormbinder after her shields are broken, that is an excellent time to go to the Burn Phase. If not, I recommend doing it as early in the fight as possible, so your cooldowns will have time to reset and you can initiate multiple Burn Phases in a single fight.
Recharge Phase
The recharge Phase is simple. You need to get your mana back to full. All you have to do is pop Evocation. Do not move if at all possible. You need to get your mana back to 100%, and you can't use the Mana Gem for this purpose.
Once this is done, move on to the Manage Phase
Manage Phase
This phase is the tricky one. It requires you to keep your Mana around an optimal level of around 85-90%. Your mana will regen at a fairly decent rate, thanks to Mage Armor, but you have to manage your Arcane Blast stacks, because those will eat your mana for lunch. Tasty tasty lunch.
You want to keep your mana as high as you can during this phase, because our Mastery, Mana Adept [15], gives you bonus damage based on how much mana you have at the moment.
So the idea is to Stack Arcane Blast as much as your mana pool can handle, and then clear the stacks with either Arcane Missiles if they're active, and Arcane Barrage if they aren't.
You'll also want to fire off Flame Orb [16] whenever it's off cooldown as well.
If you have a decent level of gear, you can generally pull off a rotation of 4 Arcane Blasts, then Arcane Missiles or Arcane Barrage. If that rotation continually puts you below the optimal mana percentage, drop the number of Arcane Blasts by one. Arcane Missiles does more damage, so prioritize that as your stack clearing spell.
Continue with this phase until all of your cooldowns and Evocation are up and available. At that point, switch back to the Burn Phase. Again, you may want to delay the Burn Phase to a point when the target takes extra damage, depending on the boss you're fighting.
AOE
If you've gotta AOE some junk down, Arcane Explosion is really your only option. Unfortunately that often means you have to be in the middle of whatever it is you're trying to kill. If the mobs are also doing AOE damage, that can go badly for you. A good example of this is the Magmaw fight. Just use Blizzard in cases like that.
Otherwise, Blink into the fray, and spam Arcane Explosion to your merry heart's content!
Utility Provided By Arcane
Focus Magic is the big one. This is a buff you cast on other Classes that gives them 3% more chance to crit, and when they crit, you get that same buff for 10 seconds. Give this bad boy to a class that crits often and has speedy casts. Elemental Shaman are probably your best bet, but Balance Druids, Holy Paladins, and other Mages are good targets too.
With Prismatic Cloak, your Invisibility has zero Fade Time, essentially making it as useful as Feign Death or Vanish. Perfect for saving a wipe and Mass Rezzing everyone.
Your Nether Vortex talent applies Slow with every cast of your most damaging spell. Perfect for handling adds!
You can control your burst to kill adds or help push a phase transition very quickly (think Sons of Flame on Ragnaros).
The arcane mage raid buff, Arcane Tactics [17], is also highly desired.
Fire
Fire fire fire! Do you like burning things? I like burning things. Let's burn things, shall we?
Fire's a good combination of hard hitting spells and powerful DoTs, plus it has easily the best AOE of any of our specs.
On the downside, it's HIGHLY proc dependant, and is the least predictable in terms of damage. You could theoretically go through streaks of seeing zero Hot Streak Procs, and your damage will suffer for it. The recent buffs to fire in 4.3 tend to make up for these concerns, however.
Building Your Fire Mage
First off, here's the spec you want. [18] Some mages prefer Arcane Concentration [19] over Pyromaniac [20] if they want to focus on single target fights. Some crazy mages don't take Cauterize [21].
For Prime Glyphs, you'll want Fireball, Pyroblast, and Molten Armor (links to these Forthcoming)
Take your pick on the Majors and Minors
Fire Mages use Molten Armor at all times, except possibly in a situation where you need to do Blast Wave + Flame Strike spam in which case you would switch to Mage Armor until you went back to your main target.
Stats
Like all Mage specs, Intellect is your best stat. If you have a piece that gives you more Int than what you have, you should equip it. Reforging and Gemming can take care of any loss to your other stats you might incur.
Hit Rating up to 17% should be your next priority.
Crit is our best secondary stat, followied VERY closely by Haste. Mastery is easily the weakest. There is a soft "haste cap" you can reach that will add an additional tick to Living Bomb, but the additional Crit will give you more Hot Streaks in the long run.
I should not need to say this but avoid bloody Spirit at all costs. If you get a Spirit piece that is just a massive upgrade, use it, but reforge that Spirit away, quickly. Look for replacement options and get them as soon as you can.
Rotation
Fire's rotation is more of a Priority system.
In practice, this looks like the following. First, cast Living Bomb, and then get Critical Mass up with a Scorch cast. Activate Flame Orb. Begin spamming Fireball, refresh Living Bomb after it detonates, and fire off Pyroblasts whenever Hot Streak procs. When you have all three of your DoTs up, fire off Combustion. Pyroblast will refresh Critical Mass, but if it falls off, use another Scorch. Flame Orb should be used whenever it comes off cooldown.
The most difficult thing to manage is when the best time to use Combustion is. You want all three of your DoT's (Living Bomb, Ignite, and Pyroblast) up and with as much duration as possible. You also want an Ignite that was triggered by a hard hitting spell like Fireball or especially Pyroblast, to maximize the Combustion damage. I recommend the CombustionHelper mod, as it makes tracking Fire DoTs easy.
On the Move
Fire is an incredible spec for mobile fights, because nearly all of our rotation can be cast on the move. All you have to do is replace Fireball with Scorch, since it can be cast while moving thanks to the Firestarter talent
AOE
AOE for us is crazy. Put Living Bomb on three targets, Use Blast Wave on cooldown, and otherwise put Flamestrikes down like crazy. They're instant cast with the Improved Flamestrike talent, so set the world on Fire!
If you're focusing on a single target at a time, don't forget you can also use Fire Blast when Impact procs to spread your DoTs to nearby targets.
Utility Provided By Fire
Cauterize will allow you to survive one death every minute, but it requires healers to heal you through the debuff that will otherwise kill you. You can also clear that debuff with Ice block.
Critical Mass will increase all spell critical strike changes against the target by 5%. Keep that up and your fellow casters will be happy!
Firestarter + Improved Scorch = Crazy out-of-mana mage running around still casting spells!
Frost
Do you feel that chill up your spine? Do you want to harness that power against your foes, freezing them in their tracks? Do you just want to look awesome having a big blue water elemental next to you? Do you want to have truly epic Deep Freeze crits on raid bosses? Spec Frost!
It's a generally accepted fact among most WoW players that Frost does less damage than our other two specs. Blizzard has more or less acknowledged this, stating that due to PvP concerns, Frost must trade in some of it's damage potential for the amount of control it offers.
How true this is depends on your own mileage, and a truly good Frost player can put out some amazing meter-topping DPS. Just be aware that you may catch flak from other players for speccing frost. Put them on your ignore list and kick butt however you want.
Building Your Frost Mage
First off, here's the spec you want. (LINK HERE - FORTHCOMING)
For Prime Glyphs, you'll want Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, and Deep Freeze. (links to these Forthcoming). Molten Armor is a 4th viable option to get yourself more crit for all your spells, though you'll have to trade in the Frostbolt glyph and the additional crit it gives for that spell alone.
Take your pick on the Majors and Minors, though I do recommend Ice Barrier.
Frost Mages should use Molten Armor as much as possible, but require more judicious mana management than Fire does. If you go out of mana and neither your Mana Gem or Evocation are available, switch to Mage Armor for a brief time.
Stats
Like all Mage specs, Intellect is your best stat. If you have a piece that gives you more Int than what you have, you should equip it. Reforging and Gemming can take care of any loss to your other stats you might incur.
Hit Rating up to 17% should be your next priority.
Frost Secondary stats are roughly the same as Fire. Frost has a soft "Crit Cap" of 33% when fully raid buffed and with raid debuffs taken into account that should be reached as much as possible. This will ensure that your Deep Freezes and Ice Lances always crit when Fingers of Frost is active.
Haste and Mastery are next in the list, though their relative values are very close to each other.
I should not need to say this but avoid bloody Spirit at all costs. If you get a Spirit piece that is just a massive upgrade, use it, but reforge that Spirit away, quickly. Look for replacement options and get them as soon as you can.
Rotation
Like Fire, Frost rotation is more of a Priority system.
You want to use Frostfire Orb whenever it's on cooldown. Spam Frostbolt, and when Fingers of Frost procs, use Deep Freeze if it's available, Frostfire Bolt if Brain Freeze is also up, or Ice Lance if neither of those two options is available. Use your Water Elemental's Freeze ability every time it's up to manually trigger two Fingers of Frost charges.
When Brain Freeze procs, try to save it to use in conjunction with Fingers of Frost. Only use it without it if it will expire before a FoF procs.
Macro Icy Veins, a "Use" trinket if you have one, and Mirror Images together, and use them whenever they're available, especially starting the fight.
During initial burns, you will likely have used both Icy Veins and Freeze to trigger Fingers of Frost and used one of the charges for a Deep Freeze. Once all of those abilities are on cooldown, activate Cold Snap to instantly have a second chance to use them again. Fire off Icy Veins again as soon as it wears off.
AOE
Blizzard is your bread and butter here. Cone of Cold can also be helpful if targets are too close to you.
Utility Provided By Frost
Most raid bosses are immune to all of the snare effects, but they can be helpful on trash or adds, depending on the fights in question.
Frost provides Replenishment thanks to the Enduring Winter talent.
The Reactive Barrier talent greatly aids Frost survivability, something healers will thank you for.