Talk:Mage PvP guide

WotLK Strategies
Well, its ALL out-of-date. Everywhere about mages. Anyone knows why? I found out that many locks succumb to the following strategy... But still need to emprove, a lot. USE THIS INFORMATION AS TIPS, NOT AS TACTICS.

Warlock, half strategy and no pet
Ensure to have Mana Gem&Food (This article is more about Destro) Start to spellsteal all his spells, if he re-casts others, spellsteal, again. Then Mirror Image; if you're frost, before summoning images, summon your water elemental. Try to keep him into a deep freeze if you're. Around 70%-60% use your first mana gem. Remember that if the warlock is defeating you, simply go invisible and restore somewhere far, using your food/evocation(the buff of detect invisibility shouldn't be on, as you already spell-stealed everything). Usually locks tat are not in affly favourite a Voidwalker, in this case, if he uses sacrifice, you should be able to spell steal the buff easly, as he does not have other ones. If he's with voidwalker, at any times he casts a destro spell, counterspell. This is much against a destro lock. If he uses Fel Hunter, probably a Affliction lock, don't wait him to cast any spells to counterspell. If he casts fear as starting counterspell. Look that the warlock will regain a lot of health, so you wil need to damage seriously. I think a Arcane mage/Fire mage should be able to do a such high damage, if you're frost you'll need to make lot of damage too, maybe keeping hi into Deep Freeze. Nothing here is sure

Rogue, less than half
When in stealth find him, with Arcane Explosion. Tying to damage him first is essential. Once he is out of stealth, slow/freeze/ him. Don't go Ice Block if you don't have a water elemental out and some yards far from you, in this case he wont be able to first aid without vanish (also the pet may block vanish) and, also, he will choose between waiting for iceblock or attacking your far water elemental. If he attacks your pet, use evocation (empowered with Glyph, certanly). Sometimes Mirror Image can localize the rogue when he vanishes (if they were casting when he does this action).

Rogues
I'm not going to mention the NPOV here (every 6th hit will not be for 2k damage), but I will present some tips:
 * Not every Rogue uses a dagger (just look at what weapons are equipped, even though it's sometimes hard to tell with daggers-that-do-not-look-like-daggers). In short, non-dagger Rogues do not do much burst damage, but have no positional requirements and will land a lot of high-damage white hits. Eviscerate is the only non-positional ability that all types of Rogues will use, but it will rarely crit. Rogues who do not use daggers generally spec combat which entails the following:
 * Improved kick: 3 second silence
 * Combat Potency: 20% chance to return energy on offhand attacks
 * Ice Armour will absorb most, if not all, of an Ambush, Backstab or Mutilate. A Rogue will almost always Cheap Shot (to coerce you into using Blink) or a Garrote (to silence)
 * At level 70, Rogues will have one of high HP, high AP or high crit. It is very hard to maximize all three. High AP makes for higher crit and hit damage, which is usually what dagger Rogues want, so expect them to have lower health.
 * Full Fire-specced Mages are painfully predictable. With Cloak of Shadows in the game, do not Dragon's Breath, Fire Blast and then Blast Wave within the span of 3 seconds - a wise Rogue will resist all three, plus the slowing effects.
 * The Burning Crusade introduces some new abilities:
 * Deadly Throw: A fixed amount of ranged damage. Requires combo points. With the level 70 PvP gloves, it becomes a ranged kick. It also slows for 5 seconds (you may not be able to get that sheep off after blinking).
 * Cloak of Shadows: This removes all slowing effects, snares and Dots, plus any frost/fire stacking debuffs. It cannot be used while sheeped.
 * Garrote: This now has a 3 second silence.

Potente 19:33, 27 February 2007 (EST)


 * Also, Cloak of Shadows can be activated without breaking stealth. This means a Rogue can approach you (in stealth) despite spamming arcane/frost novas


 * This page is going to need an update next patch due to the pvp trinket changes. All classes will be able to trinket out of frost nova, slow, frostbite, sheep. Any cc we have. --Chicknfood 15:23, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Hunters
Removed the following text:
 * Note that if a hunter has this talent it precludes their having Scatter Shot, since Scatter Shot is the 21-point talent in the Marksmanship tree, while Bestial Wrath is the 31-point talent in the Beast Mastery tree. Instead the hunter will use a 3-second, pet-induced stun. Luckily for us, we can Blink out of it.

Hunters can now have Intimidation, Bestial Wrath and Scatter Shot in the same build with the expanded talent trees. The Beast Within precludes having scatter shot, so if anyone thinks that's relevant, they're free to rewrite the above.

Wolfgang 16:01, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

This guide needs to be rewritten to reflect the removal of the 'dead zone'. (And I must say, Mages who relied heavily on 'get into the dead/melee zone' tactics have largely become far less annoying for Hunters, now. However, I'm sure there are new tactics which should replace them in this guide. Anyone?) Najwalaylah (talk) 18:27, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

The most dangerous thing with hunters is that they can drain your mana with a string meanwhile they jumping away from you gaining the advantage that they have bigger range for they weapon than you have for your casts. Before invisibility use ice block to remove the hunter's mark or they will see you. Upon invisibility you must move or the pet (which runs to your last known position) may find you and the game is over for you.

The whole article needs to be rewritten
It seems that large parts of this article were written prior to the release of the Burning Crusade (BC) expansion. There have been numerous PvP-related changes to all of the classes since its release and this article needs attention from a PvP professional.

General tips
After 3.x the biggest change for mages was that the invisibility now more then merely fun. You can/should talent it for to make it instant (however don't stand in consecration/dnd/fan of knifes in the meantime). It also got longer duration so you have the big advantage to be like a ranged rogue. Ice block is not just a cool visual effect which marks your position for every melee around (not to mention the priests who will immediately cast mass dispell). You should be able to use it simple for removing the dots/fear as you can cancel it asap. Be a sneaky person as much as you can. You wear practically nothing at all (you may talent for a bit more armor but that won't save you from any caster) so you must move all the time, even if ti means you have to abandon your nice pyroblast. Mirror image is not fun for your enemy. It is not as useful as the shamy totems, though. The general failure with mirror image is having an ice armor, casting non frostbolt spells and then standing and pretending you are the mirror image and not the original. Also some movement patterns makes you recognizable. You must impress your enemies with burst damage so the faint-hearted ones got confused and start thinking about escape (da fools). After a long cast you can use the instant cast (frost mages: use fireblast, thats a good spell). This help them realize that they will die so they became desperate which should make you switch to the 'let's play' scheme. Remove dumpen magic and cast amplify magic before evocation if you have time.

Rogues

 * This section fails to mention that rogues always have their weapons poisoned. And that's usually Crippling Poison (your movement speed slowed by 70%) and Mind-Numbing Poison (casting time reduced by 60%). With crippling poison it's almost impossible to run out of rogue's melee range (5 yd) while he is frost nova'd; with mind-numbing poison you can hardly cast any spells except for instants.
 * With introduction of arena pvp gear, rogues will have both high hp and ap. Deadly throw which acts as a ranged kick will prevent you from blinking away and casting your favorite poly/pyro combo, or basically anything with non-zero casting time.
 * Ice Block is good to use to remove all poisons and wait for rogue's Cloak of Shadows to wear off; however it also puts you into a disadvantage: rogue will regenerate his energy to full, position himself to stand behind you so that he can backstab once Ice Block expires, and maybe even bandage if he feels like it.
 * Subtlety rogues have Shadowstep ability which can be used in-combat (since patch 2.3) every 30 seconds which is almost as often as you can blink. The usual response opener->blink can get a shadowstep->kidney shot and a mage stunned/incapacitated for the next 15 seconds.
 * And also nowadays when blind ability doesnt require reagents, rogue will use it if he needs to bandage himself, or maybe just for any other reason.

Warriors

 * In TBC warriors get new ability Spell Reflect which has only 10 seconds cooldown and requires 15 rage points and shield equipped. Skilled warrior is able to pop it up while your pyroblast/fireball/frostbolt is already flying to him, thus avoiding frostbolt's snare effects and dealing massive damage to you. Not-so-skilled warrior will put that ability prematurily, however it means you need to wait 5 seconds before attacking the warrior again, and in this fight the time plays against you.
 * The biggest problem with warriors is their huge hp pool. To cut through 14k-18k hit point (or 40k in case of raid buffed tanks) using only instant-cast spells is quite challenging (proper word here is: impossible). You are in danger to run out of mana before the warrior runs out of health.
 * Keeping distance is quite difficult. You should stay no further than 8 yards to avoid intercept and no closer than 5 yards to avoid being cut into tiny pieces. And since patch 2.3 where minimum range on all ranged weapons has been reduced to 5 yards (which is already the melee range), the warrior becomes quite harmful at any distance.
 * Tanks now excellent in PvP. They can use intercept and charge in any stance and even in combat. They also can intervene to a friendly target (I don't think it works in duels). They can use a stun (cone) and can have an aoe slow (piercing howl).

Priests
(For some reason I rarely have an opportunity to fight priests). However wanted to mention that Fortitude buff gives slightly over 1k health, not merely ``few hundreds''

Fibby 23:06, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with all you said Fibby. PvP is getting harder and harder for mages if you ask me.

I honestly think its impossible for a mage to win a 1 on 1 fight with a rogue who isn't a moron. Any of their openers are effective against us (gorrote is a nasty dot that leaves us silenced as well as bleeding to death, ambush takes a huge chunk of health before we can react, and cheap shot gives them 2 combo points to deadly throw us with after we waste our blink getting out of the stun), cloak of shadows gives them near immunity to us while they still attack at full dps (notice that our ice block leaves us unable to do anything, let alone full dps), crippling poison keeps us unable to get range on them (as does deadly throw once they've gotten points from, say, a cheap shot), kick/deadly throw (with the special gloves that most rogues seem to have) locks out a school if it isnt instant cast, blind gives them a chance to bandage if by some miracle we are winning a fight (or they just want to stealth for another garrote), gouge/cheap shot are more ways to keep us from casting while they backstab us to death, and sprint neutralizes any snares they dont feel like cloak of shadowing out of. 80% of rogues who pvp seem subtlety specced, so that has us contending with shadowstep (adequtely explained by Fibby, it makes ranging impossible even if we arent snared (which is rare)) and cheat death, wich gives the rogue an extra 5 secs to murder us when they should already be dead.

Fighting hunters and warriors in 1v1 are almost as pointless for a mage due to their wide variety of tricks they can throw at us to murder us. I hope things get better in WotLK, im getting sick and tired of being killed in PvP due to class imbalences. In the mean time, just travel with allies and pray no one comes after you. Thats what i do, it works alright.DenimForce 19:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Please note that changes came with 3.x were intended to address these probelms. In this particular case mages didn't get OP (unlike paladins after they so called 'nerf'). Mages are no hopeless any more (unless rogue pops up behind u).

Shaman
The plural of Shaman is: Shaman. There neither is nor are any such thing as "Shamans".

Najwalaylah (talk) 19:01, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Paladins
Stop the QQ and kill paladins. They easy now. If you got range stunned (releptance) blink out or you get down in no time. Timing CS is essential as paladins have a tendency to use lay on hands/bubble (but they usually wait for the last seconds to maximize the hp benefit and the mana they got from healing). STEAL every buff while you cowardly run from them. If you see a red circle under them feet you must react like Pavlov's dog: steal it immediately so you can slow/snare them. Wings you can steal gives you +20% dmg which usually means the end of the paly. Note that this will cost you enormous amount of mana.

Druids
Druids are pain now (v3.2). Usually people complaining about killing resto druids (trees) but you can/must steal the HoT-s and that will give them problems. If they as stupid as to cast a timed healing spell CS it. You can snare the stupid druids only however you can make them switch too many times to get them low on mana (they can get it back with inervate). Bears (especially 40k hp tanks with raid buff) are not designed to be killed by a mage. When they done a feral charge, you blink, get invisible and get the hell out of there. You can't snare them, you can't polymorph them you can CS but they may switch to another form. Chickens (some call them 'boomkin' for an unknown reason). They will crit on you and can use moonfire spam but they proven to have no way of handling invisibility/CS.

Mages
just a question: did anyone ever tried to steal an evocation?