Mage DPS: It’s The Journey, Not The Destination

Ever since I’ve been a fan of the fantasy genre, I’ve been drawn to the wizard/sorcerer/mage character type. The idea of hurling balls of burning fire at my enemies, tearing open holes in the space-time continuum to travel hundreds of leagues in a matter of a few steps, or repelling everything from rain to falling arrows with an unnoticeable shield of magic has always been attractive to me.

When I was first exposed to MMORPGs with the game Everquest, my first character was a wizard. To make a long story short, Everquest kind of soured me on playing magic-based classes in games. I fell back to melee classes – Shadowknights and Rogues in Everquest, Rogues and Deathknights in World of Warcraft.

WoW is different than EQ when it comes to magic-based classes, however. (Actually, it’s different in a lot of aspects, but for the sake of this post….) I won’t get into the nitty gritty of why they’re different, but let’s suffice it to say that being able to solo (as a Mage in WoW) has been a huge factor in my reignited interest in these magic masters.

Einz, whose Armory you can check out in the sidebar, is an old character. He was my second character to make it to a decent level, and has been put on the back burner several times. I created him long before Burning Crusade was released; on the Silver Hand server in fact, under the name Ernst. When we moved to Sisters of Elune because of population issues on SH, he came with.

For his first 60 levels or so, Einz was an Arcane mage. I relied heavily on Arcane Missiles and (the now defunct) Improved Arcane Missiles, which made the spell uninterruptable by damage. It served me well for quite a long time.

While in Hellfire Peninsula, I toyed with an AoE Frost spec, but the experience per hour I was getting was not worth the heightened risk. In fact, I wasn’t getting any more experience per hour than I was blasting things one at a time. So I went back to Arcane. This was about where I got caught up in the Death Knight craze.

For the most part, my other characters went untouched while I played my Death Knight. I’d considered getting back into my Mage, but after months of disuse, the talents had been changed, and the idea of relearning the class made it unappealing. Back to the Death Knight.

After a couple raids in which we had a serious lack of ranged DPS, I decided to level my Mage for raiding and instances. But there was a problem. The last few times I’d tried playing Einz, each fight would suck up at least half of my health and mana. That was no way to go through Outlands and Northrend. So a friend and I did some research, and found the Frost tree.

Not discovering the Frost tree as a solo spec until 63 is kind of like having rhinoceros in your studio apartment for three years, then suddenly saying “Hey, how long’s that rhino been here?”

Oh, the power. My mage went from “How am I supposed to solo like this?” to “Holy crap, how is this not OP!”

Just by spamming Frostbolt I could kill creatures before they even touched me. And even if they did, for various reasons, I could throw up Ice Barrier and get off that last Frostbolt without being interrupted. Finish them off with a Fire Blast or an Ice Lance, and I’m ready for the next sucker with health and mana bars close to full. Of course, these results will vary greatly if there are adds, I’m jumped, or we’re in close quarters, but Ice Barrier is a great help in those situations.

For a while I was using a rather sloppy Frost build. I was doing close to 800 dps. Just the other night, though, I finally got around to fine-tuning my spec. I went with a raiding build that used Torment the Weak as well as some other talents in the Frost tree. After this respec, my dps jumped up at least 100 points. I’m now doing over 900 dps on average, with peaks and valleys ranging from 500 all the way up to 2,000.

As you can see in my Armory, I’m wearing mostly quest gear. The only exceptions being the heirloom shoulders and robe. I’m level 75, and yet I’ve seen level 80 “DPS” characters only doing 900 dps in Heroic dungeons.

There’s a lot of potential for my mage when he hits 80, but of course I’m not going to get my hopes up. I’m not going to expect 3k dps the first time I run a Heroic. Hopefully it won’t be completely lousy, but the important thing is that I’m able to improve with time. That is the whole point, after all, isn’t it? And part of that continual improvement will be finding the best talent build.