Very well written and totally enjoyed this guide. Lots of memories of matching race, professions, and spec-mechanics came up for me during this read. Thank you, Kelman! While Mage is not the only class I play, it is still one of my favorites. I even made sure to replace most of my SPriests with Arcane Mages. I can play Frost, and Fire is too slow for my patience, but I just prefer Arcane. And I kinda miss the old talent tree system. This might actually get me to play Classic. <3
Will you also make a balance druid guide? I know, unpopular spec.
It's called go frost... lol
I still can't decide on the classic wow class ;s I main a mage in retail but there are many cons against mages in classic as well as many pros.
Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, interesting gameplay
mages need a guide on how to spam frostbolt?I'm joking... or am I?
Yeah it's basically spam frostbolt and use cooldowns IE: trinkets etc.But check the consumables page. They played a huge role in vanilla. There's a LOT of them and many didn't share a cooldown. Many could be active at once.
how viable/unviable was an arcane mage? How good or bad were arcane missiles and arcane blast gameplay? What was the dps difference? any math here?
Arcane Blast was added in TBC iirc.
Guides like these always make me chuckle."As a mage you should never take damage unless it is unavoidable"...as opposed to other roles that look for opportunities to take extra damage?Decent guide but caveat emptor, you do very low dps OOM, and 0 while dead. Don't neglect the S's; Stamina, Spirit, and Survivability.
Tbh this focus a bit much on "dps-meter". There was tank-and-spank fights, but often threatreduction gave more room for dps. Threat was a bit diferent in vanilla. The tanks did less threat, and aoe threat was a challange to maintain. And from a healing perspective, alot of dps classes focusing purely on dps and never thinking about survival, was annoying. You can't dps when you are dead... In vanilla a healer had 7-8 heals in his/hers mana pool, so mana conserving was a high priority, so had mana for your tank and not for squishy mages/warlocks with trigger happy fingers.