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Patch 1.12.1
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Class Guides March 7, 2017

Vanilla WoW Mage Guide

Table of Contents

Talents

For 5-man instances and 20-man raids, my preferred spec is the max dps Fire build: Fire Combustion: 17-31-3 There are certain mobs that are resistant to Fire in the blackrock mountain instances, but just use frost spells against those mobs. Enjoy playing Fire while it lasts, because the moment you start to venture into Molten Core, you won’t be playing Fire anymore for a very very long time. For Molten Core and Blackwing Lair the only sensible option is frost. There are 2 frost-options. The Winter’s Chill-stacking spec, and the Arcane Power-frost spec. Winter’s Chill: 18-0-33 Arcane Power-frost: 31-0-20 Winter’s Chill adds 10% crit chance to all Frost spells from all mages in the raid. It is a must that there is atleast 1 mage in your guild who joins the raids with these talents. It is a common procedure that the newcomers in the guild gets asked to spec Winter’s Chill while the better geared mages use the Arcane Power variant, however having some of the most experienced mages use Improved Blizzard is probably the best way to progress through the Suppresion Room in Blackwing Lair, and should not be left in the hands of the newcomers neccesarily. Having all mages spec into Winters-chill Spec (or some variant) can also be useful when your guild is trying new content where there is raid-damage involved. Having Ice Barrier and Ice Block will take some stress of the healers. The longer the raid survives, even if you’re not getting the kill, the more up-time you have on the encounter to learn and adapt to the mechanics. For Ahn’Qiraj Temple and Naxxramas you will be using Fire Combustion in most of the raids. For some fights, frost talents really help out, but if your guild has started naxxramas, you hopefully don’t have much use for tips on what to spec anymore, so let’s just skip that.

Consumables

Depending on which raids you are doing, some of these consumables may be considered over-extending a little bit. However here’s a somewhat full list of the consumables that i bring to AQ40 and Naxxramas raids: Standard consumables: Extra for specific encounters:
  • Demonic Rune – for long fights these are better than mana gems

Stat Priorities

We have 3 aims for collecting our stats, listed from most important to least important. Increase the damage of our spells, as to increase our dps
  • Increased Spell Damage
  • Chance to Critical Hit with Spells
  • Chance to Hit with Spells
  • Spell Penetration (not worth collecting for Pve)
Increase our mana pool and regeneration, as to increase our dmg till oom.
  • Intellect
  • Spirit
  • Mana every 5 seconds
Increase our survivability, as to allow us to continue to deal damage
  • Stamina
  • Resistances
I strongly recommend downloading the addon Theorycraft. This will expand the ingame tooltip of your spells and give detailed information about the items you’re wearing and their effect on your spells. Increased Spell Damage An item that increases Damage done by Spells and Effects by 21 will not add 21 damage to all spells you cast. You have to look up the Spell-coefficient for our spells to see how much of your spelldamage will benefit the various spells. The theorycraft addon will actually show this while in-game, but for the sake of examples here are a few: 81.4% Frostbolt 100% Fireball 42.8% Fireblast 42.8% Scorch 14.3% Arcane Explosion So with the example of 21 spell damage increase, you only see the full 21 damage on fireballs. Every arcane explosion will do 3 more damage to each target affected (which adds up ofcourse since it may affect many targets at once). Chance to Hit As a caster you will -always- have 1% chance to miss with your spells. But also the level difference between you and your target adds further chances to miss. Assuming you’re level 60: Target level 60 = 4% chance to miss. 3% chance to Hit is needed for cap. (pvp) Target level 61 = 5% chance to miss. 4% chance to Hit is needed for cap. Target level 62 = 6% chance to miss. 5% chance to Hit is needed for cap. Target level 63 = 17% chance to miss. 16% chance to Hit is needed for cap. (pve) Raid bosses are level 63, so our aim is to end up with 16% chance to Hit. You will gain 6% chance to Hit from talents, so the last 10% must come from gear. Chance to Crit One misconception about Chance to Crit, is that 1% more chance to Crit means out of 100 casts, an additional one of them will crit. But that’s not exactly how it works. Everytime you add one more 1% chance to Crit, you have to factor in your resist-chance into the calculation to see what it actually ends up changing. If you have 10% chance to resist on a boss, then you will have 90% chance to hit it, in other words. So if your crit chance is 20%, then only 90% of those will land on the target, and so the final amount of Criticals would be: 20 * 0,9 = 18 spells out of 100 casts will be a Critical hit. I’ve made this Calculator to compare your items and see how much more valuable +Chance to Hit really is. Everytime you get another 1% Chance to Hit, you reduce the amount of Resists you do on a boss, and you also increase your Critical hit chance, because you enable another spell to potentially become a Critical hit. Spellcaster Damage Calculator Spell Penetration Decreases the Magical Resistance of your target A simple rule of thumb is that each 10 spell penetration adds 2.5% DPS increase on average, assuming the mob has any resistance in the first place since it isn’t possible to reduce enemy resistance to below 0. In Raids it is usually the case that if resistance to a particular school is very common, then Mages will simply respec to get rid of the problem, rather than try to look for items that reduces enemy resistance. This is why we don’t use Fire talents in Molten Core. Resistance is very common in PvP due to the various class-buffs as well as Tier 1 and Tier 2 set having a lot of resistance on it. The reason for the spell penetration is obviously to avoid having your counterspells and polymorphs be resisted by the alliance, which usually ends up with you having to corpserun. For the sake of understanding the math behind resistances, here is a spreadsheet: Note: some spells like polymorph, counterspell and others will either do their full effect or none at all. For those spells, their chance to resist is the “average dps lost” percentage. Intellect For every 59.5 intellect you have, you gain 1% chance to crit. For every 1 intellect you have, you gain 15 maximum mana. The critical-factor of Intellect is so small that it is negligable, and this is why it is a secondary stat, mainly it only increasing our aim of damage till oom, as more mana allows for more casts. Don’t put too much focus on Intellect. Get whatever intellect you can from your best possible spelldamage items and that will be fine. Compensate with Major Mana Potions and Demonic Runes if you tend to get out of mana too quick. If you use the Spellcaster Damage Calculator i linked earlier, you can add the Intellect into the calculations to see the benefit in damage from the intellect. Spirit and Mana every 5 seconds Well, these stats are absolute garbage in my oppinion. I’d say that 1 mana/5 seconds is equal to 1 spelldamage. Others may disagree, but fact is that there are just not many fights out there which lasts so long that you end up going out of mana. Stamina This does not increase your dps nor our damage till oom, but the downside is reaching 0 health reduces your damage to absolute zero. But that being said, in most raiding situations if you’re taking damage it means you’re standing at a wrong spot. Whatever stamina that you end up with after prioritizing solely on spelldamage items, is what you’re going to end up with. Don’t worry about it. Don’t pull aggro and don’t stand at a bad spot, and you’ll be fine. Again I suggest that you watch the Faxmonkey video posted earlier in this topic. It shows excellently what playstyle you need in order to survive hard fights.

Enchants

Helm: Arcanum of Focus gotten from doing the Libram of Focus quest. If you got Spellweaver’s Turban or something better, then definately go for the Zul’Gurub Enchant: Presence of Sight Shoulder: Zandalar Signet of Mojo – requires Exalted Reputation with Zul’Gurub Cloak: Subtlety* Chest: Greater Stats – semi-rare enchant. Alternatively you can use Major Health to compensate for the low amount of hp from bloodvine gear Wrist: Mana Regeneration or Superior Stamina Gloves: Frost Power* or Fire Power* Legs: Arcanum of Focus gotten from doing the Libram of Focus quest. If you got the Bloodvine Leggings or better then definately go for the Zul’Gurub Enchant: Presence of Sight Boots: Minor Speed is my preferred choice, others may go with Greater Stamina or Spirit Weapon: Spell Power* * = Rare-enchant. Drops from bosses in Molten Core or Ahn’Qiraj.

Pre-Raid Gear

Since the two first 40-man raids will be done with Frost talents, we’ll have the Pre-raid gear items fit that pattern. Without donations, rep-farming or drops from the summonable bosses which can only be done as part of the T0.5 quest-chains, this is what your pre-raid BiS list would look like: Helm: Spellweaver’s Turban – Upper Blackrock Spire Neck: Diana’s Pearl Necklace – Strat Living Shoulder: Boreal Mantle – Blackrock Depths Cloak: Crystalline Threaded Cape – auction House Chest: Bloodvine Vest – crafted by tailor Wrist: Sublime Wristguards – Dire Maul North Gloves: Hands of Power – Lower Blackrock Spire Belt: Ban’thok Sash – Blackrock Depths Legs: Bloodvine Leggings – crafted by tailor Boots: Bloodvine Boots – crafted by tailor Ring: Don Mauricio’s Band of Domination – Scholomance Ring: Freezing Band – Auction House Trinket: Briarwood Reed – Upper Blackrock Spire Trinket: Eye of the Beast – quest reward as part of the Onyxia-attunement Quest (horde) – or through a quest started by killing the last boss in Lower Blackrock Spire (alliance). Weapon: Rod of the Ogre Magi – Dire Maul North Wand: Bonecreeper Stylus – Scholomance

Player versus Player

Mage is probably the most well rounded in pvp because the talents you’ve got affect your play-style and their differences are quite big. If you came to this part of the guide to get tips on good builds for battlegrounds. These are two of my favorites: Improved Counterspell + Ice Barrier 17/0/34   http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#obxVbobZZVVGhsbtho + Ice Barrier absorbs both physical and magic damage, making warlocks actually killable without a 3 minutes cd. + Ice Block and Cold Snap adds an arsenal of escape-ways, which really help out if you’re running with 2.5k health. Or if you are overgeared and like being a ranged tank. + Shatter, which opens up for “Frost Nova -> Frostbolt -> Cone of Cold” which can be a great burst even with average gear. + Improved Blizzard is a great talent, make sure to only take 2 ranks of it so it doesn’t block cone of cold from getting applied. + Unless you spec Arcane Power, this is probably the best spec to defeat Shadowpriests, Warlocks and Hunters, which are the 3 main counters to Mages. – Paladins with Blessing of Freedom can make it very hard to finish off a flagcarrier by yourself, as you have to set up a burst which requires Frost Nova. Shamans can purge (remove) your Ice Barrier away and frostbolt won’t be useful because of earth shocks (interrupt) short cooldown. – Your primary damage spell has a 2.5 seconds cast-time, and you will be very vulnerable to spell pushbacks while ice barrier is not up. Presence of Mind + Fire Power 21/30/0   http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#obhVrofoZxTGzr0ux + PoM + Pyro is great Burst and don’t take any build-up. + Blastwave is like a mixture of Cone of Cold, Fire Blast and Frost Nova. Is more forgiving than Cone of Cold because you may miss with Cone of Cold even if the target seems to be standing right in front of you, which does not happen with Blastwave. It’s also an additional instant-cast to your burst rotation which makes a big difference. + Scorch does not fly through the air to reach the target, you may be able to do some damage before the enemy spots your location. + Scorch only has a 1.5 sec cast-time. You also have talents to reduce spell-pushbacks, which makes a huge difference. – Lack of Survivability. Most of the times if you kill that Shadowpriest or Warlock with your cooldowns, you still die to the DoTs afterwards. Hunters eat you alive unless you have very good gear.