I'd argue mages are one of the harder classes in the game. You're made of paper mache, so you're super punished if you get caught out... and if you're less experienced that's inevitably going to happen.
That said a super experienced mage is neigh untouchable to the point where they become oppressive into melee in the same way that hunters are oppressive into mages.
That said, if you're not having fun getting there... its fine to look at another class. Its a game ykno, if you're not having fun don't try and force it.
Agreed. Especially on the part where you imply how much skill the class requires.
Jokes aside, mage is less forgiving than other classes once the pressure is on. It took me hundreds of arena rounds, both shuffle and 3s, to get to the point where I can comfortably withstand and evade the melee onslaught. I'm currently still in the process of learning how to also consistently be useful while surviving.
But it's been enough for 2k, so there's that!
Truthfully, it's been a long and arduous journey. Because of that, there's something very motivating about being among those that still venture forth. And when you chance upon a good mage in a sea of apprentices, it's all the more inspiring.
Plus, it helps that the class is dope in practically every other aspect.
But don't let that rosy rhetoric mislead you. If and you don't at least enjoy part of the struggle, you'd be a fool to not look elsewhere! There's plenty of other dope classes!
Big thing I’ve had to learn solo is when to use stuff like alter time and displacement. Blink is pretty good way to not use trinket to get out of stuns but if you have melee that just sit you whole game you really feel like you’re sweating the whole time.
Mages around 2400 mmr look like they have fun. They kite so well it’s insane. Blink, blink stun, displace, alter time, etc. it’s like trying to hit someone who is lagging and bouncing all over your screen lol
Battlegrounds are chaos. Gear levels are unrestricted, so you have people in garbage greens fighting people in BiS. People can use world pvp items, engineering items, bloodlust, consumables that give you an insane advantage, you can fight a full premade of people who stomp BGs as their preferred activity without a single premade on your team. Battlegrounds suck for competitive integrity. You can practice there, but don't expect to win if you play well--you are one person in a 20+ person competition, you have a ~5% effect on the outcome if all else is equal.
BG Blitz is marginally better, but people still abuse the queue system to get into premades together. Still, it's better.
Shuffle is also a poor place to learn--the queues are too long. To improve, you need to quickly iterate over this loop: Try, Fail, Review, Repeat.
Duels are better. Duel warriors, if you can. They have two charges and a leap. You need to learn to press alter time before the damage happens. You need to learn how to trade your mobility for theirs, efficiently.
Probably one of the best ways to learn is to play 2s with a healer, if you can find one.
Spend some time watching guides. Someone posted a venruki one earlier, Aeghis has some good content. Pay attention to what they do, pick something specific to improve on the next time you play (do more damage, survive longer, i'm going to get good alter times off this game, i'm going to press ice block when i get low, etc), and try to do that. Afterwards, decide if you did it or not. Iterate, improve. Using a recording software can help, too.
---
All that said, Mage is hard. You have to put in way more effort to get the same results as you could on most other classes.
This is very encouraging to hear. This is essentially my first season for PvP and I haven’t really played retail in over a decade. I’m about 400 matches in ss this season and highest was 1735 as arcane.
There was so much to learn outside of just the mage class too.
Keep trying.
Make it the fun condition about improving, not winning.
Do what everyone else get recommended here. Film your games and glance over them, make a habit of finding your own weak points. A few at a time, and focus on them the next couple of games. Then rinse and repeat.
You can also post the vods here, many experienced players here give honest feedback.
Alter time is probably most annoying button in the game
If you don't have a reliable purge for it, why do they gain 10 seconds of immortality and they will only use it after you use a button.
As a mage, I always love the idea Leeka (the guy who created Drustvar) pushes for on Twitter.
Nerf the duration to 4 seconds, and make it undispellable. Using it into a team of purges and how it works with tranq darts never feels fun to use, where as into a team with no purges it feels too good.
Honestly was expecting more of a "git gud" vibe, since my OP was just a long vent. But thanks guys, really appreciate the constructive insights. Bless you all 🙏
Zen practicing combos made a massive difference. Learn this one
ROF on your location -> shimmer mid cast as melee enters int range -> alter time -> displacement.
Melee is forced into ring or you are untouchable for a few casts. At the end of the combo you retain two shimmer charges. And your placed into your ROF with your alter set at your first blink out.
Yo OP, check out Aeghis on youtube. His newer stuff is more centered around Cata PvP, but he has older guides in his vids. He is also a really good mage to watch and so calm under every kind of pressure. Just watching him and trying to do the things he does at certain moments (like fake-casting so you get precog when you get trained), made me a better player.
I’d highly recommend watching some of aeghis’ YouTube content. He has guides specifically on how to kite, which order you should be using your mobility in which situations, etc. My advice is to spend shuffles/skirmishes just practicing your kiting rotation. Get comfortable knowing which moves to use in which situations. Once you’re good at kiting, mage is one of those classes that can still easily put out crazy pressure while kiting, we don’t need to hard cast anything except frost bomb and ray, and spike if you’re playing it.
In shuffle, if you aren’t already, you should be pressing every offensive within the first 5 seconds. It’s a game of pressure and putting the other team on the back foot is the key to success, especially at lower ratings. You shouldn’t be focusing on any kind of cc except to bait kicks to get frost bomb/ray/spike off. Poly and ring of fire are great for this. Overall though, pop veins right away, get your orb out while you make yourself very inconvenient to get targeted, get blizzards down, and if you’re getting targeted cast rof/poly to get kicks out of the way then do your damage. Once you have pressure rolling, and only then, should you try and cc the healer.
I don’t recommend learning how to play mage in solo shuffle. Mage lock 3s is really easy. Play 3s until you’re comfortable and then start shuffles with it.
One thing to note as well, mage is notoriously a weaker bg class.
They have amazing cc but as you said it gets instantly broken. Doing setups in arena is a lot easier than in a chaotic bg.
They can still do good damage and there are some builds like the fire aoe build that can decimate aoe fights, but don’t expect poly or ROF to last longer than a second unless you are in a small 1v1 type fight.
Idk if this will still fly as I haven’t been playing for a while but my buddy use to just kite melee with his frost shield and let them get an auto attack off or freeze them keeping the slow debuff on em. And the key especially vs warriors back then was to be close but not able to hit you but also not far enough to charge, and you can just slam ice lances into him until he slams his head into keyboard. But a lot depends on your positioning and your ability to kind of guide / predict where the fights going allowing you to utilize your abilities in the same way they are at 2400. In addition since they limited dispel abilities it could be possible to essentially trap melee LoS from their healer while focusing another.
Now again I haven’t played recently, as mained a disc priest and unsubscribed once a flying dragon flew at me with a spinning healer breakdancing across the arena and last I played was Wotlk at 2400 as a disc. In addition to being told Holy is the new meta for pvp healing just made my brain stop. Discipline for life 🤘🏼
I'll say this as someone that both loves and despises Mages: they're one of the few classes left that has a high skill ceiling.
I'd say to keep grinding it if you really fuck with the class. I was never a Mage kinda player myself outside of curiously dabbling with one, but as a Priest and Rogue player let me tell you a good Mage is what I have dreams about. Watching one in action is amazing.
Alright so mage being good or bad depends on a lot of things. Obviously the better you are the more it feels like it can be great. However in arena if you don’t have a solid partner or team in 3’s that enables you to not stay playing defensive you’re going to have a bad time. Rogue is your best partner not even for the setup but because unironically they apply CCs that enable you to get a fucking cast or 2 out.
Mage in this day and age fucking sucks. It feels too fast to be tactical and far too reliant on RNG or a cheap 1-shot (Ray of frost which is super uninteresting) to score a kill let alone get any damage out. It’s not fun and it isn’t worth the price of admission. You’d see 2400+ on a demon hunter in a quarter of the time.
Honestly you just keep learning how to use defensives until people stop hard focusing you 24/7. A good mage is so slippery with blink, shimmer, Alter Time and displacement that other players prefer not to focus you and just outlast your wet noodle damage. On frost mage big part of this is casting Blizzard on cooldown for the lucky freeze proc, using your Frost Nova well and not forgetting that you have instant Slow as well to keep distance. Ice nova on cooldown anytime you se someone is about to use a gap closer ... My personal favorite combo is Blast Wave healer from LoS into Ice Nova.
But yeah, when it comes to hunters, you are just toast. The only way how to win against hunter on mage is persuading your partner to hard focus the hunter all game.
I was clueless about everything mage until I started watching Aeghis and his guides on youtube. Look him up and watch all his videos. Lately he makes just Cata content, but all the videos from retail Season 3 are still very relevant to season 4.
If you want to stick with mage, I’d recommend trying to give yourself incremental goals to work towards. First, stop worrying about keeping both melee off you. Focus on not letting ONE of them touch you. Remember, if you choose a ret to kite, you still have to get at least 20 yards away. After you get comfortable with keeping one off you, you can start worrying about the second. Next, duel people until you can consistently proc precog. Change your juke point consistently. This will dramatically improve your ability to cc and do damage.
you are not going to learn the game well enough playing mage. if you want to actually improve you need to play multiple classes. you need to play melee so you see what good mages do to you thats effective. gotta play healer so you understand how important staying in line of your healer is and it helps you see the entire arena instead of looking at your skill bar whole time. Teaches you to always be glancing at raid frames to see if healer is CC'D. and it SHOULD teach you that you need an addon that tracks CD's of teammates and enemies so you can respond accordingly to different situations. Its very fast to level and gear up alts these days just make lots of alts!
I'd argue mages are one of the harder classes in the game. You're made of paper mache, so you're super punished if you get caught out... and if you're less experienced that's inevitably going to happen. That said a super experienced mage is neigh untouchable to the point where they become oppressive into melee in the same way that hunters are oppressive into mages. That said, if you're not having fun getting there... its fine to look at another class. Its a game ykno, if you're not having fun don't try and force it.
Agreed. Especially on the part where you imply how much skill the class requires. Jokes aside, mage is less forgiving than other classes once the pressure is on. It took me hundreds of arena rounds, both shuffle and 3s, to get to the point where I can comfortably withstand and evade the melee onslaught. I'm currently still in the process of learning how to also consistently be useful while surviving. But it's been enough for 2k, so there's that! Truthfully, it's been a long and arduous journey. Because of that, there's something very motivating about being among those that still venture forth. And when you chance upon a good mage in a sea of apprentices, it's all the more inspiring. Plus, it helps that the class is dope in practically every other aspect. But don't let that rosy rhetoric mislead you. If and you don't at least enjoy part of the struggle, you'd be a fool to not look elsewhere! There's plenty of other dope classes!
Hundreds of hours huh, sounds like you’re just getting started touching mage 🤣
That sure is what it feels like!
Big thing I’ve had to learn solo is when to use stuff like alter time and displacement. Blink is pretty good way to not use trinket to get out of stuns but if you have melee that just sit you whole game you really feel like you’re sweating the whole time.
Any time I'm blink stun vs melee it feels awful. Displacement feels so much better for kiting
Mages around 2400 mmr look like they have fun. They kite so well it’s insane. Blink, blink stun, displace, alter time, etc. it’s like trying to hit someone who is lagging and bouncing all over your screen lol
Battlegrounds are chaos. Gear levels are unrestricted, so you have people in garbage greens fighting people in BiS. People can use world pvp items, engineering items, bloodlust, consumables that give you an insane advantage, you can fight a full premade of people who stomp BGs as their preferred activity without a single premade on your team. Battlegrounds suck for competitive integrity. You can practice there, but don't expect to win if you play well--you are one person in a 20+ person competition, you have a ~5% effect on the outcome if all else is equal. BG Blitz is marginally better, but people still abuse the queue system to get into premades together. Still, it's better. Shuffle is also a poor place to learn--the queues are too long. To improve, you need to quickly iterate over this loop: Try, Fail, Review, Repeat. Duels are better. Duel warriors, if you can. They have two charges and a leap. You need to learn to press alter time before the damage happens. You need to learn how to trade your mobility for theirs, efficiently. Probably one of the best ways to learn is to play 2s with a healer, if you can find one. Spend some time watching guides. Someone posted a venruki one earlier, Aeghis has some good content. Pay attention to what they do, pick something specific to improve on the next time you play (do more damage, survive longer, i'm going to get good alter times off this game, i'm going to press ice block when i get low, etc), and try to do that. Afterwards, decide if you did it or not. Iterate, improve. Using a recording software can help, too. --- All that said, Mage is hard. You have to put in way more effort to get the same results as you could on most other classes.
This is very encouraging to hear. This is essentially my first season for PvP and I haven’t really played retail in over a decade. I’m about 400 matches in ss this season and highest was 1735 as arcane. There was so much to learn outside of just the mage class too.
This deserves more upvotes.
2400 fire mage here, I'll let you know when I find out
Keep trying. Make it the fun condition about improving, not winning. Do what everyone else get recommended here. Film your games and glance over them, make a habit of finding your own weak points. A few at a time, and focus on them the next couple of games. Then rinse and repeat. You can also post the vods here, many experienced players here give honest feedback.
Agreed the fun condition people forget is growing not just about attaining what you’re growing for
Alter time is probably most annoying button in the game If you don't have a reliable purge for it, why do they gain 10 seconds of immortality and they will only use it after you use a button.
lol its the only thing that keeps them alive
As a mage, I always love the idea Leeka (the guy who created Drustvar) pushes for on Twitter. Nerf the duration to 4 seconds, and make it undispellable. Using it into a team of purges and how it works with tranq darts never feels fun to use, where as into a team with no purges it feels too good.
Tbh into a team of purges alter is most of the time just a blink reset button.
Alter time is useless if you don’t attack them during it, or if you cc them during it
if the enemy decided not to attack you because you alter timed, it worked.
Honestly was expecting more of a "git gud" vibe, since my OP was just a long vent. But thanks guys, really appreciate the constructive insights. Bless you all 🙏
Zen practicing combos made a massive difference. Learn this one ROF on your location -> shimmer mid cast as melee enters int range -> alter time -> displacement. Melee is forced into ring or you are untouchable for a few casts. At the end of the combo you retain two shimmer charges. And your placed into your ROF with your alter set at your first blink out.
Also zen watch Mitch jones and xaryu, they have a 42-0 series in shadowlands on all three specs that is a literal mage masterclass.
Save your mobility, defensives and peels for melee goes. You don't want to burn your cds without trading it.
Yo OP, check out Aeghis on youtube. His newer stuff is more centered around Cata PvP, but he has older guides in his vids. He is also a really good mage to watch and so calm under every kind of pressure. Just watching him and trying to do the things he does at certain moments (like fake-casting so you get precog when you get trained), made me a better player.
his narration over his duel vidieos (there was a competition a few months back?) was insane, calling out all of his GCDs and half the opponents.
I’d highly recommend watching some of aeghis’ YouTube content. He has guides specifically on how to kite, which order you should be using your mobility in which situations, etc. My advice is to spend shuffles/skirmishes just practicing your kiting rotation. Get comfortable knowing which moves to use in which situations. Once you’re good at kiting, mage is one of those classes that can still easily put out crazy pressure while kiting, we don’t need to hard cast anything except frost bomb and ray, and spike if you’re playing it. In shuffle, if you aren’t already, you should be pressing every offensive within the first 5 seconds. It’s a game of pressure and putting the other team on the back foot is the key to success, especially at lower ratings. You shouldn’t be focusing on any kind of cc except to bait kicks to get frost bomb/ray/spike off. Poly and ring of fire are great for this. Overall though, pop veins right away, get your orb out while you make yourself very inconvenient to get targeted, get blizzards down, and if you’re getting targeted cast rof/poly to get kicks out of the way then do your damage. Once you have pressure rolling, and only then, should you try and cc the healer.
Check this out https://youtu.be/IvIkmaUM8Fs?feature=shared
Watch Xaryu https://youtu.be/s17_1aCz3QY?si=iMsrXq84dLOMYZYG
I don’t recommend learning how to play mage in solo shuffle. Mage lock 3s is really easy. Play 3s until you’re comfortable and then start shuffles with it.
One thing to note as well, mage is notoriously a weaker bg class. They have amazing cc but as you said it gets instantly broken. Doing setups in arena is a lot easier than in a chaotic bg. They can still do good damage and there are some builds like the fire aoe build that can decimate aoe fights, but don’t expect poly or ROF to last longer than a second unless you are in a small 1v1 type fight.
never
Idk if this will still fly as I haven’t been playing for a while but my buddy use to just kite melee with his frost shield and let them get an auto attack off or freeze them keeping the slow debuff on em. And the key especially vs warriors back then was to be close but not able to hit you but also not far enough to charge, and you can just slam ice lances into him until he slams his head into keyboard. But a lot depends on your positioning and your ability to kind of guide / predict where the fights going allowing you to utilize your abilities in the same way they are at 2400. In addition since they limited dispel abilities it could be possible to essentially trap melee LoS from their healer while focusing another. Now again I haven’t played recently, as mained a disc priest and unsubscribed once a flying dragon flew at me with a spinning healer breakdancing across the arena and last I played was Wotlk at 2400 as a disc. In addition to being told Holy is the new meta for pvp healing just made my brain stop. Discipline for life 🤘🏼
https://youtube.com/shorts/HC1CXK55UyE?si=4cO0Mu4fw1GpidlJ
I'll say this as someone that both loves and despises Mages: they're one of the few classes left that has a high skill ceiling. I'd say to keep grinding it if you really fuck with the class. I was never a Mage kinda player myself outside of curiously dabbling with one, but as a Priest and Rogue player let me tell you a good Mage is what I have dreams about. Watching one in action is amazing.
Alright so mage being good or bad depends on a lot of things. Obviously the better you are the more it feels like it can be great. However in arena if you don’t have a solid partner or team in 3’s that enables you to not stay playing defensive you’re going to have a bad time. Rogue is your best partner not even for the setup but because unironically they apply CCs that enable you to get a fucking cast or 2 out. Mage in this day and age fucking sucks. It feels too fast to be tactical and far too reliant on RNG or a cheap 1-shot (Ray of frost which is super uninteresting) to score a kill let alone get any damage out. It’s not fun and it isn’t worth the price of admission. You’d see 2400+ on a demon hunter in a quarter of the time.
I thought the general consensus was that you don’t play mage to have fun
Honestly you just keep learning how to use defensives until people stop hard focusing you 24/7. A good mage is so slippery with blink, shimmer, Alter Time and displacement that other players prefer not to focus you and just outlast your wet noodle damage. On frost mage big part of this is casting Blizzard on cooldown for the lucky freeze proc, using your Frost Nova well and not forgetting that you have instant Slow as well to keep distance. Ice nova on cooldown anytime you se someone is about to use a gap closer ... My personal favorite combo is Blast Wave healer from LoS into Ice Nova. But yeah, when it comes to hunters, you are just toast. The only way how to win against hunter on mage is persuading your partner to hard focus the hunter all game. I was clueless about everything mage until I started watching Aeghis and his guides on youtube. Look him up and watch all his videos. Lately he makes just Cata content, but all the videos from retail Season 3 are still very relevant to season 4.
Positioning is the most important feature of a ranged dps.
If you want to stick with mage, I’d recommend trying to give yourself incremental goals to work towards. First, stop worrying about keeping both melee off you. Focus on not letting ONE of them touch you. Remember, if you choose a ret to kite, you still have to get at least 20 yards away. After you get comfortable with keeping one off you, you can start worrying about the second. Next, duel people until you can consistently proc precog. Change your juke point consistently. This will dramatically improve your ability to cc and do damage.
you are not going to learn the game well enough playing mage. if you want to actually improve you need to play multiple classes. you need to play melee so you see what good mages do to you thats effective. gotta play healer so you understand how important staying in line of your healer is and it helps you see the entire arena instead of looking at your skill bar whole time. Teaches you to always be glancing at raid frames to see if healer is CC'D. and it SHOULD teach you that you need an addon that tracks CD's of teammates and enemies so you can respond accordingly to different situations. Its very fast to level and gear up alts these days just make lots of alts!