In terms of survivability and damage
In terms of survivability and damage
Im pretty sure it has always been a Frost Mage. Granted I have never played ranged classes, I'm too much of a melee fan.
If you're talking solo AoE farming for shit, I just find my demo lock (with DA glyph and Soul Link/Harvest Life talents) to be completely unkillable when wading into packs of shit that I wouldn't even think of doing the same with my mage or priest, and all 3 of them are alts that are geared in crafted blues plus the random epic, like Klaxxi ring and Sha boot.
Your mileage may vary.
Frost Mage with Glyph of Ice Lance is quite awesome I find. Makes level 90 dailies a piece of cake
Destruction lock w/ GoaS/Soul Link,
FnB Immolate, Rain of Fire and FnB Incin spam is retarded. You also get unlimited Ember Taps because of ember regen from all the immolates + RoF. Once everything gets to execute range, tab target shadowburn spam.
Destro lock could be pretty good, Affliction lock has the soul swap thing, Boomys can just DoT all the mobs up with Moonfire and insect swarm, Frost mages... IDK
Sylvanas Windrunner is not hot... Change my mind.
What kind of AoE farming though? Old raids? In that case I'd go with Elemental Shaman, no DoTs to bother with, just pull a group and spam chain lightning.
frost mage's AoE Burst is insane. 2 frostbombs (with nova/freeze) alone do about 300k dmg.
Assuming that you reach (or pass) the new AoE-Cap you do 6 million dmg.
With a reasonable amount of haste you need ~12 seconds to do so.
500k dps with 3 globald cooldowns used in 12 seconds.
the best part ist that you still can add your frozen orb every 45 seconds which will increasly damage even further.
Both Warlocks and Mages do incredibly well when it comes to obliterating AoE packs by themselves. Pick whichever you want.
Warlock by far.
Warlock is awesome. Spam aoe, get infinite embers (as destro), be invincible, tag shit instantly so no CR-zoned jerk can steal it.
For my spots where there are a LOT of mobs and they respawn almost immediately it's super effective. Farmed on huntard before that but it was meh, people were stealing mobs from me all the time because i needed to round them up with my mount first.
As a Frost Mage, Warlocks are better.
We can put out pretty much damage on a pack, but then our abilities are on cool down. We also have very little ways to heal ourself while moving.
If you took 10 packs, a Warlock could kill all 10 packs at once and keep moving with no downtime. A mage would kill one pack, then wait for Frost Orb and FB cooldown, kill another pack and so on.
Frost mages used to be way better then they are now at AOE.
In fact, I would argue many classes are now better than we are at AOE farming. Watching a Brewmaster or Bear Druid gather up 20 mobs and destroy them while still remaining at 100 percent HP is far superior to anything a Frost mage can do.
We used to be able to kite, blizzard everything to death. You can't do that anymore.
Icelance with Glyph only hits 2 targets and one at 50 percent of your dmg. It's barely an AOE.
Frostbomb is also, but it's range is awful. If you have a casters in the pack, either the melee or ranged won't get hit by it. It also does less damage the more mobs you have.
Frost also has no other ways to damage an area of enemies outside of Frost Orb, which goes on cooldown. Fire can also not spread it's dots to a huge pack any longer.
Last edited by Titan; 2013-03-21 at 03:59 AM.