A Guide to Mages comment thread

[Skandranon]

To echo those that have gone before, well done. Very informative and believe it or not, concise--being a Mage isn't that simple a thing, and you've managed to cover a lot of ground in comparatively few words.

Thanks for reading.

I'm very often in a situation where the Priest or a tank is surrounded by mobs, in which case AoE is very nice.

Difficult to determine what you mean by "very nice" in such a situation. Damaging multiple targets is nice, but my comments on AoE spells aren't solely about the damage. The problem is massive breakouts. Now, when paired with a priest, that's not a problem. A mage and a priest falls under the category of suboptimal groups - don't mean to cast any aspersions on you, but mage plus priest isn't exactly Batman and Robin. In that case, your Ice Armour makes you the best choice to take hits, so breakouts are just fine.

In larger group situations, however, I've rarely found a group willing to help arrange threat levels so I can drop an AoE spell without getting at least two mobs' attention. Basiners, perhaps, are much more likely to do that, but even the most well-intentioned groupmates can't guarantee that any given AoE spell won't trigger any breakouts.

Blizzard covers a wider area, and the slowing effects are very very useful.

Applying a snare to a wide area is definitely useful. That said, the slowing effect is a result of Improved Blizzard, not a quality of the spell itself. My spell description sections don't address talents, which is a bit of a troublesome format that I'm more or less forced to in order to have something to say in the talents section. I certainly agree that a fully-ranked Improved Blizzard, especially one enhanced by Winter's Chill (which should really be named Even Better Improved Blizzard, given its minimal effect on other spells) is extremely powerful in the right situations.

Second, I'll echo the idea that playing on a PvP server changes some things.
[right][snapback]64336[/snapback][/right]

I haven't extensive experience on PvP servers, so I'll just take your word for it. My own experiences in PvP have all been very short, so I can certainly believe that instant spells are much more important.