The Warcraft Formula

Editor: This article offers up some good general advice on building the best mage you can. But the ‘best’ depends on many factors, and changes as the World of Warcraft evolves. To get the most current mage advice, updated whenever something significant changes, you want the Warcraft Formula.

Get the Warcraft Formula

Class Strengths and Weaknesses

Mages do amazing damage, and have some of the best crowd control in the game. They are also the easiest class to die. Essentially, Mages are glass cannons.

With their direct spells, Mages are able to unleash a great amount of damage in a small amount of time and they have the useful AOE (area of effect) spells that retard and harm all enemies within range.

Mages are very good at crowd control. They can polymorph enemies into sheep, and other critters, leaving the victim to wander around helplessly. They can slow enemies in a blizzard of frost. The Mages crowd control works well in both PVP and PVE gameplay.

In groups (instances and raids) Mages are expected to do high damage, give out Intellect buffs to all casters, set a nice table (the Table of Refreshment that a Mage conjures provides food that restores both health and mana), and polymorph key targets.

Suggested Professions

Tailoring with Enchanting is a good choice for a Mage (if you have lots of gold to level these expensive professions). You are able to make fabulous armor that will not be exceled until you get raid gear.

An excellent choice for various buff is Alchemy which will either compensate for you deficienies (more life, damage absorption) or improve your strengths (more spell damage).

Noticably, unless you can turn them into mega gold getting professions, leatherworking and blacksmithing have not much to offer.

Mage Talent Build

Starting with level 10, and from then on at every level, you get a talent point to spend. Tailoring your WoW character is provided by way of talent trees. You have three talent trees to choose from, each tree has a differing focus of abilities. Be sure to spend your talent point each time you level.

It is crucial to carefully plan what talent trees to spend you talent points on. You can pay gold to get talent points refunded. A few suggestions for the best mage builds are made for your class in World of Warcraft Mastery guides.

For the very latest Mage advice, get the Warcraft Formula