So You Wanna Raid...

[Alrin]

So, are we really only for doing the 'Here's your water, Sir or Ma'am' role, and to maybe toss a few portals up every so often?

I've seen boss fights fail because we didn't have enough healers, or warlocks, or tanks/offtanks, but I don't think I've seen a situation where a boss couldn't be done because there wasn't enough mages. I know we don't usually want for mages, but honestly, would we be missed? If there wasn't enough of us, I think you could quite easily swap us in with hunters or get a few warriors to take a dps role.

Mages - imo - is one of those classes that rarely are spotted as key-roles in MC unless... there are none. The Lucifron fight would be increasingly difficult as all the druids would suddenly be on decursing duty. There would be no detect magic up on Shazzrah or Sulfuron or the Majordomo mobs. No sheeping and a substantial loss of dps during every other fight.

As for comparing our dps to other classes, yup it sucks right now.
Mages have no real clear way to get a significant boost to dps like melee/ranged classes have by just upgrading their weapon to a much more powerful version.
Sure, we have +damage gear but that needs to be applied to alot of our equipment slots overall to have a noticeable effect. Lets just hope that blizzard fixes its itemization and gives mages/casters an easier time boosting their dps.

Oh and playing a mage in ZG is... a blast. Pure and simple.

Here's a trick we found out when fighting those axethrowers that spin in place and does ranged knockbacks:
Have a mage chain-cast polymorph on them while fighting.
If they go into spin mode, polymorph will put them in sheep and the next melee attack (obviously a split-second later) will return them to their default state, ie NO spinning. It's wonderful. Just remember, sheep doesnt start regenning stats until its been untouched in sheep state for a couple of seconds. :)