Mages?

[Jubber]

I am 4 boxing a priest/3x mage team and was just interested in how people who have leveled mages did it. I am not sure if I want to stay frost or go fire. Currently at 69/68 and have been leveling frost on my mages. I like it for it's mana efficiency. Just wondering if people preferred to go fire for full on firepower or if they also enjoyed the mana efficiency of frost. My team leveled as arcane up until 63. At that point running around and grabbing a ton of mobs and mowing them down with 3x Arcane Explosions and 1x holy nova was good enough to destroy lots of packs..

In these later levels thats not really a good option in terms of mana usage and alot of mobs have a ton more HP than they did at those earlier levels. What do you guys think? Stick with a frost spec or go with fire.

[an0mali]

I'd suggest sticking with frost. Especially at your level with three mages, you could cast two frostbolts and a single mob is dead. If you were fire, maybe you could kill a mob with 3x pyros, but the cast is slow and you aren't speeding up the grind much at all. Plus, you get a lot more benefit for Aoe'ing with frost. With your team, it sounds like itd be fun to shield one mage (PW:S and Ice Barrier), gather up the mobs and bring them to two mages with blizzards ready to go and a holy nova. That would take care of mobs with more health than your AE+HN combo could handle quickly, plus probably be more effecient. So, I'd suggest stick with frost. I don't think you'd gain anything going fire over frost. =D

[Jubber]

Yeah, I've tried to stay away from the ground targeted AOE's at the moment. I currently use keyclone and the mouse broadcasting feels a little sluggish to me. How about Living bomb? Does that work well with gathering mobs and blowing them up with. Also you are correct. 2 rounds of frostbolts is usually enough to kill any mob. Would a single round of fireballs be enough to take down a mob. Also I was interested in the Improved scorch talent. maybe have 1 of my fire mages glyphed and the other 2 non glyphed so a round of scorches would give the full 5 stacks.

Just looking for options and experiences. I like my current setup but was looking at trying something different ya know.

[genocyde]

I leveled 65-80 with 3x mage, priest, druid and I was arcane the whole way and never even considered another option. I am now farming heroics with this team and my 3 mages are still arcane and not looking back.

70-80 I only used 2 buttons on my mages:

/castrandom [target=focustarget] arcane barrage, fire blast

Which pretty much Gibs any non elite target just by mashing this button til your out of combat :P The best part of this macro is all instant on the run damage. No stop and cast slowdown
Thats also one of the few buttons I use in BG's. I easily rack up 1600-2000 honor per BG (honor on the right side of BG scoreboard) just using this button and playing smart.

&

/use 13
/use 14
/cast arcane power
/cast presence of mind
/cast arcane blast

This of course was recently nerfed to not work as it used to. PoM+Arcane Power now have a shared cooldown that in all honesty just works weird.

Now at 80 I added a boss killing general DPS macro:

/castsequence [target=focustarget,nochanneling] arcane blast, arcane blast, arcane blast, arcane missiles

I manually use Presence of Mind for a 4th Arcane Blast right before Arcane Missiles goes off in my castsequence macro whenever PoM is up and use Arcane power in a "things must explode" macro with my trinkets and any other appropriate cooldowns.

1 of 3 mages has slow at the very start of his cast sequence and then ABx3, AM, ABx3, AM I *think*. I'm not at home so I can't check right now,
either way it works to keep slow up almost 100% of the time without refreshing it too often and losing to much DPS. This way all of my mages then benefit from torment the weak and 12% increased dmg.

I stayed Arcane mainly because of the amazing damage it does in 5 mans (I have seen a solo played arcane mage break 6K on the mammoth boss in Heroic Gundrak but he is much better geared than I am and had Heroism which I do not in my team.
Also I don't like the on proc instants in fire/frost. The fire tree's instant pyroblast and frost tree's instant fireball are both great DPS adders solo but boxed I find them to hard to utilize as accidentally casting either of them do to a missed proc is a huge hit against your DPS. Arcane's proc damage is missile barrage and you do not lose much to cast a normal arcane missiles if you miss the proc.

[Catamer]

I thought arcane was the top of the DPS charts these days.
maybe one ice and two arcane.... or one of each type and compare.

I would leave at least one ice to slow the targets down. the others for all out dps.

[genocyde]

I would leave at least one ice to slow the targets down. the others for all out dps.

Arcane's "Slow" is awesome for slowing anything and can often be used on bosses where frost can not.

[an0mali]

I dont have much experience with living bomb to comment on, but since it doesnt explode until after 12 seconds, that would seem like a poor choice to AoE with since you could kill an AoE pack within that time just spamming AE. I tried fire for a little while with my dual mages while leveling and while it was really fun to watch a Northrend mob die instantly when both mage's pyro crit, but it just wasn't any faster overall than frost. Also, for scorch, nothing is going to live long enough to make much use of it. You could probably cast 3 scorches with your 3 fire mages and the mob would be dead by the end of the third round anyways (ofc that would be a very mana effeceint way to grind mobs ) If you are just questing with your group, you really wont gain anything from fire's bigger hits while you lose some survivability and ohsh!t buttons. Fire can be quite fun with big numbers and it wouldn't hurt to try it out, but I don't think you'd find you gained anything by going fire over frost.

[Malekyth]

My second team's DPS is three frost mages. I had no trouble through TBC.

I respecced them from Fire because I couldn't find a good way to manage Living Bomb, whereas I knew I'd be using water elementals for every boss fight and for every "oh shit" moment that suddenly required lots of DPS. This is totally subjective, but to me, Fire just wasn't as much fun as Frost. I like doing more Things for less damage per Thing, than doing a few Things that do massive damage each. I also prefer Fury warriors to Arms, fyi, kinda the same thing. Fast frostbolts with water elementals filling in the gaps between casts feels totally mighty and spectacular, and I wouldn't trade it for any number of Pyro crits.

I haven't touched Arcane, but from some of the responses in this thread, I probably will.

[an0mali]

Since they brought up arcane above, I'll add that I leveled frost, though now that I'm 80, both mages are arcane spec'd. I've been finishing up quests in Icecrown for gold and AB+Abarr+Wand(for the last 250-500 health) in my mediocre gear flattens mobs quite quickly. Plus, with the short short CD of Evocation, mana effeceincy is no longer an issue. I did, however, stay away from missile barrage because it provides no benefit to a boxer unless it procs on all your mages. Arcane is great for PvP, good for dungeons/raids, and decent enough in solo questing (I'd still prefer frost solo).

[genocyde]

I did, however, stay away from missile barrage because it provides no benefit to a boxer unless it procs on all your mages.

I have to disagree here. Unless your simply casting all your skills individually missile barrage will always be worth it.

I use a [nochanneling] cast sequence on my 3 mages so even if only one procs missile barrage they all continue there sequence at max potential and keep right on going.
Arcane missiles by itself is still good dps and the only way I am willing to consume my Arcane Blast buff when it's fully stacked.

Im curious whether you have reasoning behind this statement that I haven't thought of. (I did refuse to spec missile barrage for a long time cause it De-Syncs my cast sequence... but that's just preference to see all your spells cast at the same time and you do lose dps from not taking missile barrage.)
Enlighten me! :P