Mages
- Thread starter Graplin
- Start date
Being a vending machineGraplin said:
Summon: peridots
Summon: searfire
Summon: mod rod
Item summoning
Doesn't matter
Best vending machines in the game
Vending machine, or on occasion, as needed, summoning items.
Not really, unless a vending machine is needed.
:dance:
Aside from being vending machines, in groups mages are pretty good DPS, can provide some benefits with their summoned items, and are great in AOE groups. They are the second best nukers in the game, have some handy pets (although they tend to be reduced to just DPS in any reasonably balanced group).
Here's the catch, though... unless it's an AOE group, if I want DPS, I generally prefer a rogue, wizard, ranger, or sometimes bst or monk. I find that their DPS tends to be at least more consistent, if not better (I haven't parsed mages to compare).
Mages are also decent at soloing, although not on the necro, bard, or druid level.
Kirin Folken
Dalayan Elder
2nd best Nukers?
From everything I have heard Druids are the 2nd best nukers with mages a 3rd.
Mages are fun to play however even if they are not best at anything other then summoning.
From everything I have heard Druids are the 2nd best nukers with mages a 3rd.
Mages are fun to play however even if they are not best at anything other then summoning.
vistachiri
Dalayan Master
If you're looking towards endgame raiding I would say go with either a box combo with a mage or just play something else altogether. You generally will not see more than one in a raid, and all guilds that I'm aware of raiding already have one. Wizards, and druids generally tend to have multiple copies on a raid, so you're safer with one of those.
Speaking from alot of experience in this area your main attractant to groups at the high end is generally taken care of by bots, or bumming summons off of mages, so I wouldn't expect to get groups off of that. Your best bet to getting a group at any level is to simply make alot of friends. Rogues, rangers and wizards all never pretty much stop doing dps (melee, melee+bow, and 5m nukes) so you lose out alot on that.
The differences in pets seems like it might be really great, and it is soloing at earlier levels, there are some basic assumptions you should hold however.
1) You will probably never use the earthpet in a group. Ever.
2) You will use it heavily up til the point where you get earthsplit at lvl 61.
3) Air or waterpet will be used 90% of the time. Firepet has the lowest hps, and 90% of the time you can expect none of the healers to pay attention to your pet. Unless of course its someone you work with really frequently, and even in that scenario, they tend to forget alot. So it becomes a pain in the ass. Once you get the recall aa and max it your pet will die much much less. It is mad crazy handy.
As far as aa's go, you'd want to acquire the crit aa's, host of the elements, frenzied burnout, elemental barrier (if you are raiding muchly), elemental mastery, and enhancement, lr5, up5, hastenened mending and mend companion, and recall minion for starters. Mages top out on aa's very far in, so expect a tremendous amount of grinding to max. As far as the elemental form aa's go, earth is pretty much pointless if you ever intend to get dragon/giant bp clicky, fire is good early on b/c it helps you max your int more easily and quickly. Air is the form of choice for raiding, providing a buttload of resists at each rank. Water is the other alternate in addition to fire. Handy soloing b/c of the hp regen, and an acceptable alternative to fireform.
Rain Rain Rain. You will do this alot. I wouldn't pay attention to your single target nukes at all for the most part. Just learn to gauge distance and you should be okish for mezzed mobs etc. The only time you should use single target nukes is really if theres and unacceptable amount of distance between your target and a mezzed mob, or if your target is very mr. Then I would suggest a firenuke, probably scars of sigil (55 iirc). Also if you are a mage, you will love that spell much. It never goes out of style. Given a choice between the archaic and relic nuke both up, or sigil up along with one of them, I'll always choose sigil.
And yes, back before the nuke changes, druids were 2nd best, after they were still 2nd best, after rollback, they are still 2nd best, unless magenukes have been modded again.
They are very fun to play, but expect to get pretty frustrated down the line.
Speaking from alot of experience in this area your main attractant to groups at the high end is generally taken care of by bots, or bumming summons off of mages, so I wouldn't expect to get groups off of that. Your best bet to getting a group at any level is to simply make alot of friends. Rogues, rangers and wizards all never pretty much stop doing dps (melee, melee+bow, and 5m nukes) so you lose out alot on that.
The differences in pets seems like it might be really great, and it is soloing at earlier levels, there are some basic assumptions you should hold however.
1) You will probably never use the earthpet in a group. Ever.
2) You will use it heavily up til the point where you get earthsplit at lvl 61.
3) Air or waterpet will be used 90% of the time. Firepet has the lowest hps, and 90% of the time you can expect none of the healers to pay attention to your pet. Unless of course its someone you work with really frequently, and even in that scenario, they tend to forget alot. So it becomes a pain in the ass. Once you get the recall aa and max it your pet will die much much less. It is mad crazy handy.
As far as aa's go, you'd want to acquire the crit aa's, host of the elements, frenzied burnout, elemental barrier (if you are raiding muchly), elemental mastery, and enhancement, lr5, up5, hastenened mending and mend companion, and recall minion for starters. Mages top out on aa's very far in, so expect a tremendous amount of grinding to max. As far as the elemental form aa's go, earth is pretty much pointless if you ever intend to get dragon/giant bp clicky, fire is good early on b/c it helps you max your int more easily and quickly. Air is the form of choice for raiding, providing a buttload of resists at each rank. Water is the other alternate in addition to fire. Handy soloing b/c of the hp regen, and an acceptable alternative to fireform.
Rain Rain Rain. You will do this alot. I wouldn't pay attention to your single target nukes at all for the most part. Just learn to gauge distance and you should be okish for mezzed mobs etc. The only time you should use single target nukes is really if theres and unacceptable amount of distance between your target and a mezzed mob, or if your target is very mr. Then I would suggest a firenuke, probably scars of sigil (55 iirc). Also if you are a mage, you will love that spell much. It never goes out of style. Given a choice between the archaic and relic nuke both up, or sigil up along with one of them, I'll always choose sigil.
And yes, back before the nuke changes, druids were 2nd best, after they were still 2nd best, after rollback, they are still 2nd best, unless magenukes have been modded again.
They are very fun to play, but expect to get pretty frustrated down the line.
vistachiri
Dalayan Master
lol pretty much.
Oh and I forgot monster summoning, you'll use that quite a bit too. Just pretty much keep one of your slots always open for your highest one, possibly your 2nd highest as well.
Oh and I forgot monster summoning, you'll use that quite a bit too. Just pretty much keep one of your slots always open for your highest one, possibly your 2nd highest as well.
Kirin Folken
Dalayan Elder
vistachiri said:
Going to asume your talking about endgame raiding. We currnetly have 3 mages in our guild... then again I never see more then 2 of them online at any given time
Monster summonings give a mage a odd way of CC. Pet can offtank 1 target and then sick 2 MS on other targets, I have seen mages do some pretty intersting CC jobs.
Mages I think are a bit of a Jack of all trades int caster. They dont seem to spike anywhere but have a decent value in multple places.
vistachiri
Dalayan Master
Kirin Folken said:Going to asume your talking about endgame raiding. We currnetly have 3 mages in our guild... then again I never see more then 2 of them online at any given time
Monster summonings give a mage a odd way of CC. Pet can offtank 1 target and then sick 2 MS on other targets, I have seen mages do some pretty intersting CC jobs.
Mages I think are a bit of a Jack of all trades int caster. They dont seem to spike anywhere but have a decent value in multple places.
Pretty much, and even then, if you have a wizard option, you'll see another of them rather than another mage 99% of the time. Something can definitely be said for the old pet army empire tactics when we had 3 mages quite often, but extra wizards are still preferable in most situations, and get moreso the higher you move up. (DPS+ latecomer utility w/respect to ports). Petarmies are more useful in terms of the comedic value they provide.
You can kind of cc, sorta. It's hard to explain, but in certain areas you can figure out how to do some pretty rofl stuff. Mages can be a kickass chainpuller if conditions are right and you have a pally or a bunch of people that are on their game as to grabbing aggro (provided you have the right aa).
You can offtank a bit with the monster summon mobs, not for long though, its more of an emergency countermeasure coupled with popping host of the elements, frenzied burnout on reg pet and monster summonings 2 & 3 you can usually rootburn one fast, then help mainpet, before the others all go down. Depends heavily on where you are. Problem is you can't heal the ms pets, even with a reg healer iirc.
Kirin Folken
Dalayan Elder
vistachiri said:
Mages CC is more like control Chaos
The Pet swarm makes me think of a group I got the other day...
2 Mages, 2 Necros, 1 Shaman, 1 Beastlord
Doing a VE map... the highlight.... when on the final wave we got 6 Skeletons and everyone with out sayinga work hit there panic buttons.
5 Wolfs pets + 10 Mage Pets + 5 Necro pets + Bst pet and the beastlord himself suddenly throw themselves into the fight LOL.
Followed by Monster summonings x4