Mages, in World of Warcraft, are one of the most formidable classes - and at the same time, one of the most fragile. They can wield the power of fire, frost, or arcane energy to slay their foes in swathes, both when fighting monsters and other NPC opponents, and in player versus player (PvP) battlegrounds. However, as this WoW mage guide describes, their cloth armor and low health totals make them vulnerable if an enemy actually closes to melee range. This means you need to play mages as highly mobile combatants, using frost spells to slow opponents and Blink to keep faster foes at arm's length.
As this WoW mage guide describes, mages are a ranged combat class, who need to avoid close combat at all costs. They are very good at what they do, however, and have some of the highest damage output in the game, regardless of spec. Mages are brought on instance runs and raids for their damage potential, but also offer crowd control and free mana-restoring water for party members.
As any good WoW mage guide will tell you, conjuring water for group or raid members is a major utility role for mages in PvE situations. Crowd control in the form of Frost Nova, which freezes opponents to the ground for a brief period of time, is useful in some dungeons, and extremely useful in PvP, when it can immobilize a good part of an enemy team for several crucial seconds.
When you are power leveling your mage character, Frost is the most useful talent specialization, according to most WoW mage guides. This is due to the fact that many frost spells and talents have a crowd control element in them, either reducing the speed of a foe who has been struck by these spells, or freezing them in place outright. This feature also makes the frost mage the preferred spec for dealing with PvP situations, where keeping death knights, paladins, rogues, and other melee classes away is paramount.
Frost mages are the only spec of mage with a summonable pet - since Cataclysm, this water elemental has been the signature move of the spec, available from level 10 onwards.
Fire mages are the "run and gun" spec of the mage class, able to deal tremendous amounts of damage (considerably in excess of frost mages) but with very few panic buttons or crowd control moves to enhance their survival rate. A fire mage, this WoW mage guide notes, is able to select talents which give them stuns or slows, including Dragon Breath (a short range cone stun) and Blast Wave (an area of effect spell that slows opponents by 70% for three seconds).
They have a few talented stuns, allowing them to deal with NPC foes on a more equal footing, and a few mobility-enhancing abilities that can help keep them out of melee. However, this WoW mage guide notes they are more easily killed while leveling than frost mages, and, as mentioned, are very fragile in PvP.
The arcane talent spec is now at a midpoint between fire and frost for survivability and damage, but has many interesting tricks. For example, Improved Counterspell silences enemy casters as well, making this mages good "mage hunters". They are well suited to PvP and, when played properly, can provide a satisfactory damage output in instance or raiding situations, too.
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