How to Mage: Heroic Edition

The mage class is supposed to be a fairly simple class. It's so...basic. You sling spells at things, they blow up and die. Simple.

Well, okay, sometimes you turn things into a penguin. Which you should in heroics, because things hit hard, and tanks get nervous. You might find the setfocus-polymorph macro useful, because it will enable you to keep the sheep target as your focus for easy resheeping. Something like this:

#showtooltip
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus]Polymorph
/stopmacro [nogroup]

You may have noticed that FFB is really slow. That's too bad, because there's nothing you can really do about that except to stack haste. Now, haste usually comes at the expense of crit, unless you are lucky enough to find a piece with both on it. They're fairly rare, right now. But don't destroy your crit rating that much, because with the FFB fire spec, it procs Hot Streak, which is a very, very nice dps boost. It's even better if you can proc it consistently. Anything from 25-30% crit on fire spells is a pretty good number to aim for, and considering that FFB hits like a truck (it has a crit modifier of 315%, properly talented), most people are saying that crit and haste are equally important for a mage to stack.

Keep your Living Bomb up. Keep your scorches up. Don't neglect your scorch because there will be a lot of situations where FFB is too damn slow to cast before something dies. You don't want to waste that cast, so cast a scorch/fireblast combo instead. It's fast, it's deadly, and it might proc a nice Pyroblast for you to hurl at the next dps target instead. Use with caution, however, as it's a bit of a threat jump.

Use Scorch/Fireblast/Pryoblast on heavy mobility fights, or something will probably smack you down while you're standing there charging your FFB. It's not optimal but it's better than being dead.

You have two spells which can be used to protect yourself or your healer. Dragon's Breath is a daze, Blast Wave is a knockback. Adds eating the healer? Blast Wave them off, the Frost Nova them in place.

Juggle your cooldowns for sustained high dps. You have three or four, depending on your spec -- Combustion for when you want those Hot Streak procs, Mirror Image for some nice extra firepower (also very nice for when the mob throws around random group damage, which sometimes goes to the image instead of a player), Icy Veins for some added quickness, and maybe a trinket or so. Are you going to be AOEing? As in channeling Blizzard? Pop your spell-damage trinket first.

Yes, that hunter next to you is OP. Yes, he's going to be nerfed soon. Watch out, mages. The nerf bat may be coming for you next. But that's ok, because we don't play our mages only when they are OP. We play our mages because we like them, and we are damned good at what we do.