12-21-2004, 07:39 PM
a) Making your mage
There are only a few choices you need to make as your character progresses, in keeping with Blizzardâs minimalist style. The only ones with mechanical significance are race, choice of equipment, choice of profession, and talents. Talents get their own little section, so Iâll deal with the other three here.
i) Attributes and Equipment:
You canât control your stats the way you could in D2, but that doesnât mean thereâs no room for an attributes section. Bonuses in WoW consist mainly of additions to one of the main attributes: Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intellect and Spirit. You can optimize your gear in several different ways. Strength and Agility are clearly right out, as neither provides substantial benefits for the mage. Strength is virtually useless, while Agilityâs only real significance is a slightly increased dodge chance. The other three are more interesting.
Stamina: Each point of stamina gives you 10 max hit points. It doesnât seem to figure into any other calculation or statistic.
Intellect: Each point of intellect gives you 15 mana. Furthermore, more intellect increases your critical strike chance with spells.
Spirit: Each point of spirit increases the rate at which you regenerate health (when out of combat) and mana (when you havenât cast a spell in five seconds).
Of these three, Intellect seems the most important, and that initial reaction would be mostly right; Intellect determines the size of your mana pool, and that relates directly to how much magic you can sling in each encounter. That said, building directly for Intellect isnât necessarily the wisest move: yes, more mana is good, and a (very slightly) better critical strike chance is also good, but a heavy intellect focus may cost you in other stats. The choices are likely to be something like +4 int, +4 spi/sta vs. +5 or +6 int, and that kind of trade isnât worth it.
So, next to Intellect â spirit or stamina? A great deal of the caster gear in this game assumes spirit â the Ley Staff for human and troll mages being just one example â and, certainly, mana regeneration is important. The question is whether itâs important enough to bother pushing spirit, and the answer is generally no.
Spirit reduces downtime, but as long as youâre patient â and youâre going to have to be, so if youâre not, go play something other than a mage â you can drink back everything you need. Mages can conjure food and water, so it doesnât even cost money like it costs other classes. In combat, health doesnât regenerate and mana regenerates only after five seconds of not casting anything. Itâs rare that youâll get into a situation where the enemy mob can be killed by one spell that you donât have the mana for, forcing you to wait to regenerate enough to get that last spell.
On the other hand, stamina is always relevant. Your battles are going to be one-on-one blasting matches, where at least some of itâs going to be done at point-blank range. Itâs in your best interests not to melt as soon as something gets to that range, and without stamina equipment, your deaths are more likely to result from a lack of health than a lack of mana. (Yes, all deaths eventually result from lack of health, but Iâm sure you know what I mean.) This is especially true if youâre soloing difficult dungeons or elite non-instance quests. Iâve bulked up on stamina, maintaining a stamina bonus usually ranging from 120% to 180% of my base stamina score. Having soloed Nekârosh, MorâLadim, and Colonel Kurzen, among other elite quests, I can credit my stamina focus for each of them.
This isnât to say that you should ignore spirit entirely. One useful talent relies on having at least a workable level of spirit, and seriously long battles such as Archaedas in Uldaman may actually require you to stop casting and just regenerate. Two int/spirit items will generally satisfy this requirement. Three at most.
ii) Race selection
This section comes second because I wanted to talk about stats first, given that stats are one of the few ways the races vary. Each has special abilities, but tiny ones. Four races can be mages: trolls, undead, humans and gnomes.
Trolls start with the lowest intellect, 19, of all starting mages. They start with 21 stamina and 23 spirit. The two abilities of theirs that matter are Berserking and Regeneration. Berserking lets you speed casting time by 25%, but you can only activate it when wounded, which is down to 20% or so of max life. Somewhat useful for finishing things up, but if youâre wounded the enemy is likely to be next to you, and you wonât be using spells dependent on casting time. If you are, youâre probably better off running instead of berserking and hoping to eke out a win. Regeneration is a great deal better, allowing 10% of your health regen to occur during combat. It doesnât seem huge until you get Polymorph, but then troll mages become the only mages naturally capable of keeping a target disabled while regenerating health and mana back to full.
The Undead start with the highest spirit, 27, of all mages. Their intellect is 21, second-lowest and stamina is also 21. All four abilities are useful to mages, in greater or lesser degree. Underwater breathing is handy for those times youâll need to submerge, and 10 shadow resistance canât hurt. Cannibalize is a little superfluous for mages, but you can eat a corpse if you donât feel like conjuring food. And Will of the Forsaken, which makes you temporarily immune to fear, sleep, and charm, is situationally useful but itâs nice to have.
Humans have the second-highest intellect, 23. They have 23 spirit and 20 stamina. None of these stats are the highest, but none are the lowest either. Four abilities are relevant to mages, though one is only peripheral. Sword specialization is the peripheral one â mages can learn swords, but you probably wonât want to be actually hitting anything with them, even with a whole levelâs bonus attack rating. Diplomacy is a handy thing; nothing special, but it helps you get to those faction discounts quicker, and makes two particularly awful quests in Desolace easier. The Human Spirit provides a 5% bonus to spirit, which makes all your spirit gear count for that much more (and leaving room for more stamina gear). Perception is valuable against stealthed enemies â usually, youâll only detect them up close, sacrificing most of your range advantage. When Perception is activated, you can see stealthed enemies from further away. Situational, but useful, like Will of the Forsaken.
Gnomes start with the highest intellect, 27, of all mages. The tradeoff is the lowest stamina, 19, and the lowest spirit, 22. Gnome abilities are well-suited to mages; all four can possibly be useful. The least useful is Technologist, giving a +15 bonus to engineering â since you may not necessarily want engineering. Arcane resistance canât be a bad thing, though enemiesâ use of Arcane is few and far between. The gems are Expansive Mind, offering a 5% intellect bonus, and Escape Artist, letting you break out of roots and snares. Quite a few creatures use nets or frost novas to stop you from getting away, so of the situational abilities this one will probably see the most use.
Any race makes a good mage. Gnomes have a lot of advantages, but other racesâ abilities have their moments as well. For beginners, however, Iâd advise a gnome, just because Escape Artist is a great way to save yourself from some mistakes, and because the intellect bonus is the best passive among all of them.
iii) Professions and Secondary Skills
Each character in WoW can only learn two professions at any one time, so picking the two for your mage is a fairly important decision. Each has some pros and cons.
Herbalism â this skill allows you to gather herbs for Alchemy.
Mining â this skill allows you to gather minerals for Blacksmithing and Engineering.
Skinning â this skill allows you to gather leather for Leatherworking.
Which gatherer skill, if any, that you choose will generally be influenced by your choice of production skill. There are five.
Alchemy â creates potions. Mana and health potions are very useful to mages for obvious reasons, but alchemy can create a number of stat-boosting potions as well. A late change in beta means that potion effects canât stack with some of your skills, but aside from that, you can create a number of handy effects with this skill. Poison curing, water breathing, invisibility â all will be useful.
Blacksmithing â creates metal arms and armour. Not all that useful for you. Blacksmithing creates Mail or Plate items, none of which you can use. You may be able to get a dagger or sword out of it, but not one with bonuses that help you.
Enchanting â allows you to enhance equipment with small bonuses. The upside is that it requires no gathering skill, since you get materials from disenchanting magic items. The downside is that it costs quite a lot of money and is difficult to raise, since you get materials from disenchanting magic items. A skill that creates magic items can be useful to alleviate this problem, but only Tailoring really counts as others would need a gathering profession too. The important part of enchanting is that it lets you add little stamina bonuses to your items that improve your survivability. As for trading, itâs difficult to sell enchantments. The only one thatâs really popular is Beastslayer for the red glow.
Engineering â creates engineered items like dynamite, shrink rays, battle chickens, etc. The dynamite wonât be of much use, but the goggles created by engineering are some of the best available early headgear, and some of the other trinkets it creates can be useful, or at least fun.
Leatherworking â creates leather armour. You wonât ever be able to use it, either. It doesnât even have Blacksmithingâs bonus of giving you barely-useful weaponry. That said, like all tradeskills, if you feel you can make a good profit selling leather items, go for it.
Tailoring â allows you to create cloth armour. Tailoring seems to be a profession custom-made for mages, but itâs hardly a required profession. In general, you can make weak cloth armour with Tailoring â there are exceptions, but most of the time what you can make will be inferior to what drops. That said, there are very useful patterns, such as the Robe of Power, which you can only get if you tailor it for yourself. You can also create bags with tailoring, always in demand. Tailoring also requires no gathering skill, as the required cloth drops off enemies.
A number of mages go Tailor/Enchanter. While thatâs a good set of choices, it tends to cost you a great deal of money. If that doesnât matter to you, it offers plenty of benefits. If you want tailoring without the money loss, Tailor/Skinner helps, as there will be tailoring recipes that require leather. Herbalism/Alchemy is also extraordinarily useful. Mining/Engineering is mostly a gnome choice, but gnomish shrink rays and remote controls are just as useful to mages as to any other class. Barring the choice of feeder characters, who take two gathering skills to send raw materials to other characters or sell them on the auction house, Iâd limit my profession choices to one of the above pairs.
There are three secondary skills: Cooking, Fishing and First Aid. Everyone can have all of these skills. The most important to a mage by far is Cooking â with enough advancement in cooking, you can create food that bestows large stamina and spirit bonuses for 15 minutes. These âwell fedâ bonuses have helped me through soloing quite a few areas â donât underestimate them. As for fishing, itâs mostly helpful to raise cooking, but you can fish up some decent items if your fishing is high enough, and youâll need it for Alchemy. First Aid is not as important since you get free food, but you can bandage yourself in combat (i.e. when somethingâs polymorphed and you can do so without interruption).
There are only a few choices you need to make as your character progresses, in keeping with Blizzardâs minimalist style. The only ones with mechanical significance are race, choice of equipment, choice of profession, and talents. Talents get their own little section, so Iâll deal with the other three here.
i) Attributes and Equipment:
You canât control your stats the way you could in D2, but that doesnât mean thereâs no room for an attributes section. Bonuses in WoW consist mainly of additions to one of the main attributes: Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intellect and Spirit. You can optimize your gear in several different ways. Strength and Agility are clearly right out, as neither provides substantial benefits for the mage. Strength is virtually useless, while Agilityâs only real significance is a slightly increased dodge chance. The other three are more interesting.
Stamina: Each point of stamina gives you 10 max hit points. It doesnât seem to figure into any other calculation or statistic.
Intellect: Each point of intellect gives you 15 mana. Furthermore, more intellect increases your critical strike chance with spells.
Spirit: Each point of spirit increases the rate at which you regenerate health (when out of combat) and mana (when you havenât cast a spell in five seconds).
Of these three, Intellect seems the most important, and that initial reaction would be mostly right; Intellect determines the size of your mana pool, and that relates directly to how much magic you can sling in each encounter. That said, building directly for Intellect isnât necessarily the wisest move: yes, more mana is good, and a (very slightly) better critical strike chance is also good, but a heavy intellect focus may cost you in other stats. The choices are likely to be something like +4 int, +4 spi/sta vs. +5 or +6 int, and that kind of trade isnât worth it.
So, next to Intellect â spirit or stamina? A great deal of the caster gear in this game assumes spirit â the Ley Staff for human and troll mages being just one example â and, certainly, mana regeneration is important. The question is whether itâs important enough to bother pushing spirit, and the answer is generally no.
Spirit reduces downtime, but as long as youâre patient â and youâre going to have to be, so if youâre not, go play something other than a mage â you can drink back everything you need. Mages can conjure food and water, so it doesnât even cost money like it costs other classes. In combat, health doesnât regenerate and mana regenerates only after five seconds of not casting anything. Itâs rare that youâll get into a situation where the enemy mob can be killed by one spell that you donât have the mana for, forcing you to wait to regenerate enough to get that last spell.
On the other hand, stamina is always relevant. Your battles are going to be one-on-one blasting matches, where at least some of itâs going to be done at point-blank range. Itâs in your best interests not to melt as soon as something gets to that range, and without stamina equipment, your deaths are more likely to result from a lack of health than a lack of mana. (Yes, all deaths eventually result from lack of health, but Iâm sure you know what I mean.) This is especially true if youâre soloing difficult dungeons or elite non-instance quests. Iâve bulked up on stamina, maintaining a stamina bonus usually ranging from 120% to 180% of my base stamina score. Having soloed Nekârosh, MorâLadim, and Colonel Kurzen, among other elite quests, I can credit my stamina focus for each of them.
This isnât to say that you should ignore spirit entirely. One useful talent relies on having at least a workable level of spirit, and seriously long battles such as Archaedas in Uldaman may actually require you to stop casting and just regenerate. Two int/spirit items will generally satisfy this requirement. Three at most.
ii) Race selection
This section comes second because I wanted to talk about stats first, given that stats are one of the few ways the races vary. Each has special abilities, but tiny ones. Four races can be mages: trolls, undead, humans and gnomes.
Trolls start with the lowest intellect, 19, of all starting mages. They start with 21 stamina and 23 spirit. The two abilities of theirs that matter are Berserking and Regeneration. Berserking lets you speed casting time by 25%, but you can only activate it when wounded, which is down to 20% or so of max life. Somewhat useful for finishing things up, but if youâre wounded the enemy is likely to be next to you, and you wonât be using spells dependent on casting time. If you are, youâre probably better off running instead of berserking and hoping to eke out a win. Regeneration is a great deal better, allowing 10% of your health regen to occur during combat. It doesnât seem huge until you get Polymorph, but then troll mages become the only mages naturally capable of keeping a target disabled while regenerating health and mana back to full.
The Undead start with the highest spirit, 27, of all mages. Their intellect is 21, second-lowest and stamina is also 21. All four abilities are useful to mages, in greater or lesser degree. Underwater breathing is handy for those times youâll need to submerge, and 10 shadow resistance canât hurt. Cannibalize is a little superfluous for mages, but you can eat a corpse if you donât feel like conjuring food. And Will of the Forsaken, which makes you temporarily immune to fear, sleep, and charm, is situationally useful but itâs nice to have.
Humans have the second-highest intellect, 23. They have 23 spirit and 20 stamina. None of these stats are the highest, but none are the lowest either. Four abilities are relevant to mages, though one is only peripheral. Sword specialization is the peripheral one â mages can learn swords, but you probably wonât want to be actually hitting anything with them, even with a whole levelâs bonus attack rating. Diplomacy is a handy thing; nothing special, but it helps you get to those faction discounts quicker, and makes two particularly awful quests in Desolace easier. The Human Spirit provides a 5% bonus to spirit, which makes all your spirit gear count for that much more (and leaving room for more stamina gear). Perception is valuable against stealthed enemies â usually, youâll only detect them up close, sacrificing most of your range advantage. When Perception is activated, you can see stealthed enemies from further away. Situational, but useful, like Will of the Forsaken.
Gnomes start with the highest intellect, 27, of all mages. The tradeoff is the lowest stamina, 19, and the lowest spirit, 22. Gnome abilities are well-suited to mages; all four can possibly be useful. The least useful is Technologist, giving a +15 bonus to engineering â since you may not necessarily want engineering. Arcane resistance canât be a bad thing, though enemiesâ use of Arcane is few and far between. The gems are Expansive Mind, offering a 5% intellect bonus, and Escape Artist, letting you break out of roots and snares. Quite a few creatures use nets or frost novas to stop you from getting away, so of the situational abilities this one will probably see the most use.
Any race makes a good mage. Gnomes have a lot of advantages, but other racesâ abilities have their moments as well. For beginners, however, Iâd advise a gnome, just because Escape Artist is a great way to save yourself from some mistakes, and because the intellect bonus is the best passive among all of them.
iii) Professions and Secondary Skills
Each character in WoW can only learn two professions at any one time, so picking the two for your mage is a fairly important decision. Each has some pros and cons.
Herbalism â this skill allows you to gather herbs for Alchemy.
Mining â this skill allows you to gather minerals for Blacksmithing and Engineering.
Skinning â this skill allows you to gather leather for Leatherworking.
Which gatherer skill, if any, that you choose will generally be influenced by your choice of production skill. There are five.
Alchemy â creates potions. Mana and health potions are very useful to mages for obvious reasons, but alchemy can create a number of stat-boosting potions as well. A late change in beta means that potion effects canât stack with some of your skills, but aside from that, you can create a number of handy effects with this skill. Poison curing, water breathing, invisibility â all will be useful.
Blacksmithing â creates metal arms and armour. Not all that useful for you. Blacksmithing creates Mail or Plate items, none of which you can use. You may be able to get a dagger or sword out of it, but not one with bonuses that help you.
Enchanting â allows you to enhance equipment with small bonuses. The upside is that it requires no gathering skill, since you get materials from disenchanting magic items. The downside is that it costs quite a lot of money and is difficult to raise, since you get materials from disenchanting magic items. A skill that creates magic items can be useful to alleviate this problem, but only Tailoring really counts as others would need a gathering profession too. The important part of enchanting is that it lets you add little stamina bonuses to your items that improve your survivability. As for trading, itâs difficult to sell enchantments. The only one thatâs really popular is Beastslayer for the red glow.
Engineering â creates engineered items like dynamite, shrink rays, battle chickens, etc. The dynamite wonât be of much use, but the goggles created by engineering are some of the best available early headgear, and some of the other trinkets it creates can be useful, or at least fun.
Leatherworking â creates leather armour. You wonât ever be able to use it, either. It doesnât even have Blacksmithingâs bonus of giving you barely-useful weaponry. That said, like all tradeskills, if you feel you can make a good profit selling leather items, go for it.
Tailoring â allows you to create cloth armour. Tailoring seems to be a profession custom-made for mages, but itâs hardly a required profession. In general, you can make weak cloth armour with Tailoring â there are exceptions, but most of the time what you can make will be inferior to what drops. That said, there are very useful patterns, such as the Robe of Power, which you can only get if you tailor it for yourself. You can also create bags with tailoring, always in demand. Tailoring also requires no gathering skill, as the required cloth drops off enemies.
A number of mages go Tailor/Enchanter. While thatâs a good set of choices, it tends to cost you a great deal of money. If that doesnât matter to you, it offers plenty of benefits. If you want tailoring without the money loss, Tailor/Skinner helps, as there will be tailoring recipes that require leather. Herbalism/Alchemy is also extraordinarily useful. Mining/Engineering is mostly a gnome choice, but gnomish shrink rays and remote controls are just as useful to mages as to any other class. Barring the choice of feeder characters, who take two gathering skills to send raw materials to other characters or sell them on the auction house, Iâd limit my profession choices to one of the above pairs.
There are three secondary skills: Cooking, Fishing and First Aid. Everyone can have all of these skills. The most important to a mage by far is Cooking â with enough advancement in cooking, you can create food that bestows large stamina and spirit bonuses for 15 minutes. These âwell fedâ bonuses have helped me through soloing quite a few areas â donât underestimate them. As for fishing, itâs mostly helpful to raise cooking, but you can fish up some decent items if your fishing is high enough, and youâll need it for Alchemy. First Aid is not as important since you get free food, but you can bandage yourself in combat (i.e. when somethingâs polymorphed and you can do so without interruption).