Playing a mage in World of Warcraft

My Draenei mage in the BC beta is level 12 now, and I am beginning to like the class. I never played a mage above level 10. I once played a troll mage to level 10, but didn't really like the class at that time. But that was much earlier, when I did know a lot less about the game, and my main was a warrior. Since then I leveled 2 priests to 60, and soloing a priest is not totally unlike soloing a mage, at least at the very low levels.

The secret of playing a very low-level priest or mage is using a wand as early as possible, which is level 5. The level 5 wand that an enchanter can make is very powerful compared to a caster melee weapon, like a staff. And in the early levels you often don't have enough mana and spells to kill a mob without using a weapon. Of course that is more true for a priest than for a mage. But even a mage can get into situations where he runs out of mana, or he wants to conserve mana. A wand at these low levels has a damage output comparable to typical damage spells, doesn't use any mana, and can't be interrupted.

But the more spells I get with my mage, the less I use the wand, while my priests used their wands up to level 60. Mages have better crowd control, in the form of the polymorph spell, and the frost nova freezing the enemy to the ground. And they are missing the power word shield which makes using the wand as a priest such a good option.

I start the combat from maximum distance with a frost bolt. Fireball has a slightly higher range, if I use the fireball first, the mob runs towards me at full speed for some time, before I can get the frostbolt off. So I prefer frostbolt first, fireball next. By now the mob is close enough for the instant cast fire blast. When the mob reaches me, I have several options. If he is already nearly dead, I finish him off with the wand. If he still a good amount of life, now is the time to freeze him with a frost nova, and step back out of his melee range. Then I can kill him from a distance with a big fireball, or some other spell.

I tried arcane missiles, a channeled spell that shoots 3 arcane missiles over 3 seconds. But I would have thought that it would shoot one missile per second. But to me it seems that first nothing happens for 2 seconds, and then in 1 second I get all 3 missiles shortly one after another. I also don't see any channeling bar to tell me where I am with this spell, which makes it a bit confusing. Not sure if this is working as intended, or a beta bug, or just lag. The fireball rank 3 I got at level 12 seems to be both faster and more mana efficient. I put my first talent points into making the fireball even faster, I was under the impression that "fire mage" was a good option for soloing.

I also got Dampen Magic at level 12. Hmmm, I might be tempted to use that one against spellcasting enemies. In a group this spell isn't that good, because it also reduces the power of healing spells cast on me, but I don't think it affects healing potions.

The ability to make food and water is useful, but not really earth-shattering. Annoyingly you only get the spell to make a particular level of water 5 levels after you could buy and use that water, so at level 10 I got the spell to make level 5 water. In the pre-BC World of Warcraft mages at level 60 could do a quest to get a spell to make conjured crystal water, which is better than the best available vendor-sold water, morning glory dew. But the expansion introduces much better high-level water, far superior to the conjured crystal water. Maybe the time where mages are commonly being referred to as "water boys" are over? People were assuming the mage talent tree looks like this:


We will have to see how the level 70 water spell looks in comparison to the level 65 vendor-sold water.

I'm looking forward to getting my first real area of effect damage spell at level 14. Technically frost nova is AoE as well, but you can't spam it, it has a long cooldown. But with the arcane explosion I get at level 14, I can experiment with killing large numbers of lower level mobs with AoE. Sounds like fun.