[Mage] The PVP Thread - Page 41

kamekazai · 08/20/08, 12:03 PM

Hello long time reader though first post.

My mage currently fights with 17/44 arc/fire spec. It is an interesting build with a unique playstyle. I have been away from the game since march so let me know if any of this is outdated or wrong.

Basic Gameplay:

The build I use revolves completely around scorch, I have no points in imp or emp fireball. The basic idea is to scorch spam while possible then when mobility is needed to throw fireblasts and occassional scorches. This keeps you highly mobile and still doing decent damage. When things get close or when burst is needed the fireblast, blastwave, dragons breath, scorch, fireblast combo is these, you'll be surprised how fast this is dished out.

Pros:
-Imp CS for locking out casters and healers a little better
-Less dps loss from having to fight and be mobile, good against melee
-less dps loss do to spell push back since scorch is such a fast cast and most other spells are instant
-Can go into mana conserve mode by chain casting scorch which with the debuff favors you in long fights.
-When debuff is stacked can through out chain instants for nice burst damage.
-Less dps lose due to stoping to cc and cs

Cons:
-No out of the gate or distance burst damage
-Overall lower dps, not sure on the math behind how much less haven't worked it out
-Must be careful with target selection as inital dmg can be healed through.
-Not as much survival talents as Ice

Basically this builds major strength is the ability to be reactive to events around you without the lose of dps of long casting main nukes. Normally in 2v2 and 3v3, depending on team make up, I would cc one enemy while scorching another then after building up a debuff and before I am unable to keep cc'ing I will throw down with instants to burn them down. Mana gem then rinse repeat.

Hunters:
I noticed this was you guys major headache class. I usually blink in close, FN, fireblast, BW, DB then throw arcane blast and fireblast till dead. just stay in melee as long as you can, raptor strike hurts alot less then their distance moves. Will burn alot of mana but just try to keep the mana gem handy.

solbergb · 08/20/08, 4:31 PM

I do something similar but keep in mind my arena rating is abysmal (although I do ok vs equally bad frost mages).

Mine is 0/44/17 or some variant, going with icy veins, permafrost, arctic reach and faster frost bolts instead of whatever you're getting out of arcane. Like you, my offense is mainly scorch/impact with mobile fighting done with fire blast, the two fire AOEs, and in a pinch arcane explosion and ice lance. I'll toss in a 1 second frost bolt as a snare vs melee. For defense I rely heavily on impact/molten shields, blinking out of stuns, trinketing out of other effects etc. Icy veins is used for pushback resistance on polymorph, mostly. Like you I pay for the PVP talents by throwing out the fireball talents. Using scorch as main nuke instead of fireball, with the rest of the fire DPS stuff taken (as my build does) and with my gear level, it translates to about a 14% DPS loss over a scorch/fireball rotation in PVE, or a percent or two less against a straight fireball rotation (with fireball talents). It doesn't lose any DPS against untalented fireballs.

In PVP, fireballs just take too long, or if you are being ignored, they give away your position. I'm not a fan.

This is a playstyle that some of the Wrath changes may help. It works very well on battlegrounds (scorch doesn't give away your location, and the AOEs have more scope). I enjoy it more than PVPing frost, but there is probably any number of good reasons why you don't really see it in the level of arena play where the mage players are competent.

I fight hunters with this spec the same way any other mage fights hunters. You blink into their face and you stay next to them, and if their pet gets involved, go with the AOE burst stuff. The pet dies as a side effect and the hunter is limited to his much weaker melee stuff against you. I don't see that frost has any real advantage against hunters (at my skill level. I'm sure a competent arena frost mage can do clever things with kiting and WE to mess up the hunter/pet dynamics that are well beyond my skill)

kamekazai · 08/20/08, 9:00 PM

Originally Posted by solbergb

I do something similar but keep in mind my arena rating is abysmal (although I do ok vs equally bad frost mages).

Mine is 0/44/17 or some variant, going with icy veins, permafrost, arctic reach and faster frost bolts instead of whatever you're getting out of arcane. Like you, my offense is mainly scorch/impact with mobile fighting done with fire blast, the two fire AOEs, and in a pinch arcane explosion and ice lance. I'll toss in a 1 second frost bolt as a snare vs melee. For defense I rely heavily on impact/molten shields, blinking out of stuns, trinketing out of other effects etc. Icy veins is used for pushback resistance on polymorph, mostly. Like you I pay for the PVP talents by throwing out the fireball talents. Using scorch as main nuke instead of fireball, with the rest of the fire DPS stuff taken (as my build does) and with my gear level, it translates to about a 14% DPS loss over a scorch/fireball rotation in PVE, or a percent or two less against a straight fireball rotation (with fireball talents). It doesn't lose any DPS against untalented fireballs.

In PVP, fireballs just take too long, or if you are being ignored, they give away your position. I'm not a fan.

This is a playstyle that some of the Wrath changes may help. It works very well on battlegrounds (scorch doesn't give away your location, and the AOEs have more scope). I enjoy it more than PVPing frost, but there is probably any number of good reasons why you don't really see it in the level of arena play where the mage players are competent.

I fight hunters with this spec the same way any other mage fights hunters. You blink into their face and you stay next to them, and if their pet gets involved, go with the AOE burst stuff. The pet dies as a side effect and the hunter is limited to his much weaker melee stuff against you. I don't see that frost has any real advantage against hunters (at my skill level. I'm sure a competent arena frost mage can do clever things with kiting and WE to mess up the hunter/pet dynamics that are well beyond my skill)

Nice to see a similar strat. For me the main interests from arcane are the imp cs, arcane impact and clearcasting. I do like the potential from putting those 17 points into frost though, will look into it.

I will also agree that this play style may have no use at higher level arena but I find it much much more interesting that frost or pom/pyro.

The key is learning to predict and react to you opponents and no just dps'ing away.

solbergb · 08/21/08, 6:01 PM

While I would like imp counterspell and arcane impact, I just have trouble with spending the first 10 points in arcane on a PVP spec that isn't pretty deep into arcane. (10% more mana doesn't make that big a difference in most of my matches, I don't need threat reduction, the only "hit" stuff use arcane for is arcane explosion and it hits ok untalented and 10 points of penetration which I will use occasionally is expensive for 10 talent points). In frost, while I'm not delighted with the lower tier talents under icy veins, I do at least use them.

Taja · 08/21/08, 7:11 PM

Sounds like a fun spec but hardly good. Fact is that Water elemental is just insanely overpowered (or mages are just gimp without it) and the only thing you might give it up for is pom/pyro. A fire spec can work but I think it still varies greatly on who you play with. For 2v2 hardly anything in the arcane tree is wasted, clearcasting, imp missiles, arcane fortitude, magic attunement are all usefull talents.

kamekazai · 08/22/08, 8:23 AM

Originally Posted by Taja

Sounds like a fun spec but hardly good. Fact is that Water elemental is just insanely overpowered (or mages are just gimp without it) and the only thing you might give it up for is pom/pyro. A fire spec can work but I think it still varies greatly on who you play with. For 2v2 hardly anything in the arcane tree is wasted, clearcasting, imp missiles, arcane fortitude, magic attunement are all usefull talents.

I will be the first to admit it is not nearly the best spec possible but it plays well for my uses. Give me a moment to explain.

I didn't really play very competitively in the arena as its just my personal preference that BG's are more fun. As such since I recently reactivated my account I mostly have been bg'ing it. In BG's I would argue that this spec is better imho. I found the lack of trailing from fireballs and frostbolts to be a huge benefit when distance nuking. I also found ice's reliance on the WE for significant damage to be a downfall. In arena's you always have it but in BG's the fights are long and thus it is on CD, and hands down I find I do much much more damage when a frost mage doesn't have the elemental. I like that my blastwave, Dragons breath burst damage is on a nice short cd as well.

To each there own but I have noticed those things making a difference. In the arean though things are a different story.

zesarzero · 08/22/08, 11:19 AM

hi to all i just got my alt to 70 and hes a mage and i want him to pvp but i want a litle of pve as well and i was wondering:¿ if i reach the hit cap i can do some pve?? and if i get the hit cap would this be bad cause then i'd lose some spelldmg and some haste ...thanks for ur help cause my main is a tank i dont know anything about mages

Nostrum · 08/24/08, 8:18 PM

Pve 16% hit, pvp 3% hit. So, yeh you'll lose a load of item budget, the pvp gear is pretty obvious same as most classes.

It's good to see a lot of fire and arc/fire mages around these day's. I always hated frost pvp with no reliable spell pushback protection and reliance on nova/freeze to do any decent damage, the fire specs always felt more fluid since day 1.

solbergb · 08/25/08, 1:28 PM

Most people have at least two "suits". A "hit suit" and a "Trade hit for spell damage and/or stam/resil" suit. You only need the "hit suit" on boss monsters. For solo, trash and 5 mans, 5% hit is enough. For PVP, usually 3% is enough but some talents make enemies harder to hit, so using 5% for anything that is "not a boss" works pretty well.

I've settled on three basic suits, although I sometimes mix and match items from various suits for specific fights (eg, might mix in more stam/resil stuff if I am threat capped on the tank or the fight has a lot of raidwide damage and I have enough "hit" for the fight).

Hit suit - 164 hit (fire mage), as much DPS as I can get assuming that hit and stam/resil based only on whatever pieces make up the suit. (stam 6k unbuffed for KZ, 7k for T5, 8k for T6 seems to be about how other mages seem to gear when I do inspects and they don't have a lot of PVP gear in their set)

Resilience suit - ~260 resil, 10k health, but at a fairly significant hit to spell damage (100 less than the hit suit, 200 less than the DPS suit. Used when I have a lot of healing support and expect to get focused - mostly for 5 man arena these days or doing dumb things like trying to solo 3-5 man group quests or "tanking" for lowbies on level 60-65 content.

DPS suit: Same stam as the hit suit, more resilience and pretty much a 1-1 swap of spell damage for spell hit compared to the hit suit.

I also swap in and out trinkets and rocket boots Xtreme light for specific situations. (eg, in KZ vs Big Bad Wolf I swap in rocket boots in case I get chased by the wolf and I'm slow on the draw for kiting it)

If you have tailoring, the hit and DPS suits are fairly easy, but you need something else for PVP as they are very low on stam and have zero resilience.

These concepts were pretty much the same when I was using fresh 70 blues/greens as it is now with my mix of S2-4/Badge gear. I just used the reputation blues for the resilience suit and the best gear I could find for hit/dps suits, whatever it might be.

Guaire · 02/03/09, 10:29 PM

Hey, I don't think this thread has been updated much for WotLK, but i figured I'd post here before trying to start a new one.

I rerolled mage during TBC, hitting 70 with about a month left before wrath came out, so I didn's have much arena experience on my mage at 70 (although things seem very different right now).
Arcane is pretty strong right now, but I prefer to play frost, so thats what I'd like to ask about.
Specifically, what build would you play for 2v2 (mage/rogue or mage/dk) and 3v3 (mage/rogue/rShaman)? I have chosen a 20/0/51 build, picking up permafrost in favor of arctic winds 5/5.

Here is my question: What stats to focus on when gearing, enchanting, gemming, etc.

Stamina and resilience are a must, so i make sure to pick up a goodly chunk of those.
I get enough crit from frost effects and debuffs that I don't really worry too much about crit rating, I take it when it comes along but i don't look for it.
Other than that, should I get straight SP, or should I stack a little bit of haste? As of right now, without any haste buffs (icy veins, berserking, etc), I can cast deepfreeze, and have time to get only 1 FB+IL, or 3 IL before it wears out. How much haste would I need to make that FB+IL+IL, or ILx4? Also, given the choice, would you rather do 1 frostbolt or two icelances? Frostbolt gets you additional procs like FoF or Fireball!, but icelance keeps you mobile and helps avoided getting interupted.

edit* typo, and to comply w/ forum rules

Vallren · 02/04/09, 8:23 PM

I honestly find resilience very lack luster compared to Stamina. Maybe it's just me but resilience just doesn't seem that attractive a pvp stat as it used to. Stamina on the other hand is like candy. It's much easier to have HP to survive burst than to mitigate it to a survivable level, granted I 2 with a healer so it might be different for you roflburst teams.

solbergb · 02/05/09, 1:58 PM

The rule of thumb I was given is that if you have a healer behind you, resilience tends to be superior to stam after a certain minimum stam, as it damps out crit spikes, and if you don't have a lhealer piling on more stam is superior.

With most pvp gear you get a healthy amount of both, so it's not much of a discussion beyond gemming strategies (which for me would either end up as spellpower or stam, depending on the purpose of the piece, most of the time, not resilience vs stam)

A more interesting discussion in the current environment is whether to chuck the pvp gear and just use top tier PVE stuff, as there is a significant dps difference between them trading off against say 3-4k of stamina and 400ish resilience.

As it is currently easier for me to get PVE gear at the moment and my crafted/no-arena-rep pvp options are very limited I've been mostly taking the burst approach. Once I get enough EV's for the hateful set though I may experiment.

I do know that at the end of Burning Crusade post 3.0 patch, at level 70 it was absolutely worth it to put on my pvp suit vs my pve suit (both of which were of similar quality) because even in battlegrounds, total damage dealt was as much a function of how long I stayed alive than my damage throughput and I won quite a few battles by outlasting the opposition.

So far, with entry level pvp/pve gear though, at least in battlegrounds damage > defense. Perspectives with epic gear in both categories would be welcome.

Microwavegerbil · 02/09/09, 4:52 PM

Since this post hasn't been updated much since Wrath, figured I could ask some questions to get some discussion going on Mage pvp.

How much spell penetration is everyone going for? Spell pen to cloak is a fairly obvious choice, but after that how much should you really go for? I know I've had key counterspells resisted a number of times in my matches so far, and as I get my 2s rating higher I need to make sure my spells are not getting resisted.

Taja · 02/10/09, 5:34 AM

So far I haven't been using alot. But my plan is to get another wand/oh with spell penetration to switch out against various teams. And once I got (close to) full deadly I'll use my 2 blue gems for meta on spell penetration instead of stam/damage.

About your counterspell resists: remember you need 5% hit nowadays to be capped. Add the fact that some classes, belfs for example have -2% chance to be hit by spells. This combined with the fact that pvp gear has 0 hit on it its hard to get there.

Marcel · 02/12/09, 10:13 AM

I'm wondering about haste. How much do you go for as frost? Whats usefull and whats overdoing it? Also, for spell penetration, Taja do you have a certain number in mind? I'm just hitting 80 on a mage with no experience at all so far so there is alot to think about. No real access to Naxx ect either.