Alright, I need advice in regards to my Mage.

First, here’s my Armory: Ernst Armory
Or at WoW-Heroes if it’s more helpful: Ernst @ Wow-Heroes

My problem: Simply put, my damage per second is not as high as it should be.

By the time I stopped running instances with my Death Knight, she was getting close to doing 3,000 dps on boss fights. She was usually first or second on the DPS lists, depending on which boss it was.

Now, my Mage is quite better geared than my DK was, and yet I can’t seem to do more than 2,300 dps on bosses, either in Heroics or in 10man raids.

I used to go as Frost, because my guildies appreciated the Replenishment from my Enduring Winter. Since 3.3, though, they (healers in particular) have been able to get their Mp5 higher, so I’ve been going Arcane.

As Arcane, my rotation usually is thus: Arcane Blast – Arcane Blast – Arcane Blast – Missile Barraged Arcane Missiles

If MB hasn’t procced by the third AB, I’ll cast AB once more. If MB procs that time, I hit AM. If it hasn’t procced by the fourth AB, then I hit Arcane Barrage so I can get back to my main rotation right away.

When I play frost, My rotation is basically to spam Frostbolt. When Brain Freeze procs, I throw a Fireball. If Fingers of Frost procs, and we’re fighting a boss, I hit Deep Freeze; otherwise I toss an Ice Lance.

I usually save my talents like Icy Veins, Arcane Power, Mirror Image, etc. until the bosses so that we can burn them down. I also have a trinket, Mark of the War Prisoner, that I pop as well.

Since reaching the Hit Cap, I was going to focus my gemming on Spell Power and Haste with Reckless Ametrine, but I’m thinking… should I instead focus my gems on Crit and Haste?

The bottom line is that I’m missing about 1,000 dps. I’m a frakkin mage for crying out loud, and it’s not like my gear is horrible. It’d say it’s pretty good for about a month at level 80. Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something in my rotation(s)?

I really need to figure this out; we want to try Lord Marrowgar again in Icecrown Citadel, and Lady Deathwhisper if we can. Our guild leader says all DPS should be doing at least 3k, but I’m not even close to being able to maintain that. Not even against target dummies.

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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.

Continued from Destiny (or) Back to the Dark Side

If you’ve noticed the character profile at the top of the sidebars over there, you’ll already know what my decision was.

Yes, I decided to reroll my Death Knight on the Alliance.

Despite being level 77, I didn’t really have much to show for my time and effort. My gear was whatever quest rewards I’d gotten along the way, I hadn’t gone out of my way to get any achievements, I had no PvP points (Marks, Honor, or Kills) that I’d be losing, and any social ties would still be there when I flipped to Alliance.

Now with just about anyone else, this is where the saga would end. They’d send anything that could be sold to their Auction House mule, and vendor the rest of their gear.  Once their cash was sent to their mule, they’d delete the character post-haste, and get right to making their new one.

But not me. Before I could click that “Create New Character” button, my long-dormant roleplay habits piped up.

When faced with the task of designing my new Death Knight, I suddenly (and rather inexplicably) had a strong desire to remake my Shadow Knight from Everquest; a Dark Elf named Drajha (pronounced DRA-zha). Even though I likely wasn’t going to roleplay her, I felt a kinship with her that I wanted to have again. There was just one little problem.

I already had a level 51 Hunter by the name of Drajha on the server.

So I deleted her.

The Hunter class had lost its luster for me a long time ago. My biggest problem was mana. I’d run out after two or three fights just from using Scorpid Sting and Arcane Shot. Aside from that, the class had grown rather boring. Granted, I could have put forth a little more effort to make things challenging, like pulling multiples or something, but I just wasn’t into the class.

I am a Death Knight.

I deleted 128 levels of work so I could make this new Death Knight. And of course, after I do this, I find out that they’re changing Hunters so they don’t use mana. And if I’d known that faction changes were going live so soon, I might not have deleted my Blood Elf.

Such is life, however. I’ve made these decisions, and I’m happy to live with them. Drajha, my new Death Knight, is better than my Blood Elf. I’m going to take her to 80 and beyond, and experience the end-game content for the first time with her.

Drajha was my main character in Everquest, and she’ll continue her legacy of being a strong, reliable, and powerful force.

As my paladin started into her 40s, my experience with the class began to grow strained. Quests were getting fewer and farther between, it seemed. The mobs were getting tougher, but my measly DPS seemed to stay the same. I could still tank 4 or 5 things at a time, but I was also starting to reminisce about how my Death Knight could tank 4 or 5 things and still dish out serious DPS. And he would end the fight at or near full health. My paladin usually had to cast Gift of the Naaru, a bunch of self heals, and maybe even Lay on Hands. I was starting to get fed up with it.

Then Patch 3.2 happened.

More specifically, the nerf to Exorcism happened.

This seemed to throw my whole Paladin play-style off. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on Exorcism’s instant cast. I was finding myself hitting the button to cast while I was running. Or moving just after I started casting it. It was the straw that broke the Paladin’s back.

I wanted my Death Knight back.

I didn’t really have a problem with that, except for a few issues:

1. I hadn’t played my DK in quite a while; I’d taken a multi-month hiatus from the game earlier this year, and had almost completely forgotten how to play a Death Knight.
2. He was on Horde side.

This second issue was the one that gave me pause. Sparing details, those that I socialize with in WoW were making a shift back to Alliance. So, I had a decision to make.

Should I delete my level 77 Blood Elf Death Knight so I could reroll on Alliance side?

I thought about this long and hard. I’m a bit of a packrat, you see, and have trouble deleting things. Even Soulbound weapons that I know I won’t use again; if it looked cool or it had been a trusty companion for many levels, I have a hard time sending it to that Great Pixel Bucket in the sky. Comparatively, the prospect of deleting a level 77 character was agony.

Granted, rerolling another Death Knight meant I’d only have to replay 22 (19 if you don’t count the starting area) levels, as opposed to all 77. Even still, that’s a lot of work tossed down the drain.

How will I solve this dilemma?

Stay tuned for rest of this tale!

This is a very condensed biography of Drev – kind of my “go-to” character for anything fantasy. He’s usually the first character I make, my main
character in stories, etc.

Drev has already seen centuries of battle and strife, and has called many places – even worlds – his home. His first life as a Human Wizard in the (Everquest) world of Norrath was cut short when his naive arrogance took him into a fortress overrun by sarnaks. He drifted in the abyssal void for many years, and by the time he was pulled back to the material plane, he’d been driven mad by the vast chaos swirling in the nether. He came back to Norrath in the body of a Tier’Dal, twisted and cold; savage even for a hate-filled Dark Elf. He quickly became an efficient, remorseless killer. One day, he simply disappeared.

Time lost all meaning in the void. It was an instant and an eternity. All he knew was black infinity; a darkness so deep, so vast, a mortal mind cannot hope to comprehend. Eventually the black became less black. He opened his eyes and found himself in a new world.

In Azeroth, Drev spent a stint in the shell of a Kaldorei rogue, then the void claimed him again. Spat back out in the body of a Sin’Dorei, he was guided along the path of the Hunter. And yet again, Death found him. This time, however, he was claimed before the void could consume him. He remembered pain – endless, all-consuming pain. When next he woke, he was on his feet before a massive, towering figure that exuded strength, power, and death. A deep, putrid voice thundered in Drev’s head, forcing him to his knees. The strength drained from him, leaving him gasping on the floor, but with a word of power, the Lich King infused his newest servant with the cold energy of immortality.

For the first time in his many lives, Drev had felt a higher calling. Always the loner, Drev had only ever served himself; he’d never earned a surname or even a title of any kind. Arthas had given him a focal point for his rage, hatred, and cynicism that had roiled and festered over the centuries. Whether it was the Lich King’s overpowering will or a buried sense of loyalty, Drev had finally discovered the desire to serve another, more powerful cause. That he was just fodder in Arthas’s Scourge army mattered not.

Upon learning of Arthas’s betrayal of his own Knights, Drev found himself empty once again. This time, however, the emptiness is darker, deeper, and more frightening than he’s ever felt. In past lives, the emptiness in Drev’s soul manifested as a mere indifference. Now the only thing that can bring him even a whisper of satisfaction is Death. Destruction. Chaos.