What is a Mage?

[gunner_recall]

Is the ability to wield magic a natural talent (of course you have to work at that talent for it to be useful)? Or is it something someone can develop regardless of existing inclinations to magic, like getting better at having neater handwriting?

I don't know if it's ever explicitly stated but it seems to me that magic is partially based on talent and partially based on knowledge and will.

For instance, the orcs. Originally shaman but they learned how to be warlocks. So, you can learn magic but if you have no talent for it then you'll never be any kind of good at it.

[Deleted]

...So, you can learn magic but if you have no talent for it then you'll never be any kind of good at it.

Is that not every profession/skill in the (real) world. Mages are just the one who have a high talent and power and all they need is to learn to direct and control this power.

[Deleted]

He's saying other classes are stupid (little intellect) and can bypass their stupidity by going to the dark arts. It's silly I know. But it explains real player mages mentality well sometimes.

[Obelisk Kai]

Is it to trite to say that hopefully we will be told by Blizzard what a Mage is tomorrow night?

[Dragon ANX]

As a Fire mage, Agree with:

Fire

I think when people think about Magi, a lot of them think of fireball. It's, in my opinion, one of the most defining spells for the class, and really wizards in fantasy as a whole. Even Jaina, who's almost undoubtedly a frost Mage, has shown the ability to cast fireball. So, when they say that fire Mages use fire and combustive flames, I definitely see that represented in the class.

However, let's go back to the original overview of the specs, taken from Blizzard's Mage page. Do fire spells feel quick and aggressive? Because, to me, giving the spec that description gives me the image of a fire Mage running around the field of battle, launching fireballs and causing massive explosions. This would convey that, of all the specs, this would be the most mobile. And so, in that regard, I feel as if fire is the spec that falls the farthest from what it was intended to be.

That being said, and I'm not trying to start a conversation about it, fire is also in the worst place compared to the other three specs, in my own opinion, and as such would be the one most likely to receive a revamp. So, I would hope that Blizzard takes that into consideration when they're deciding what to do with each spec.

Thank you.

A mage shouldn't be focused on 100% arcane or 100% fire or 100% frost in my opinion, more choices! When I made my mage and played it the class felt like a trinity, I enjoyed it a lot.
It was like,
fire part as a destructive and unstable offense that puts anything near him in flames making him unable to touch without being burned alive or make them explode.
frost part would be freezing people to keep them off of him, and shatters the ice damaging them.
arcane part as a raw power source which builds up energy and then to shoot off at enemies, but also for non damage stuff like teleporting, or entering another dimension.

Now it's just like, "hey you cant choose if you want to shoot fire, blast energy, or freeze them, if you want blast energy on them then that's it"

If fire is meant to be quick aggressive damage, I don't feel like the current spec fits that at all. It has both the slowest main nuke and a lot of its damage comes from an OVER TIME burn, and there's nothing quick about that. Combustion caps it off as a damage cooldown that's entirely about a longer-duration burn and neither upfront or explosive. Almost half of the damage of both Flamestrike and Meteor is dealt over time. Pyroblast, while instant with the proc, is something you typically have to wait for before being able to use it, and a lot of its potential damage is still dealt over time. Living Bomb's payoff comes after a timer which, despite being thematically appropriate for a bomb since a fuse has to burn out first, doesn't do anything to go against the rest of fire's abilities. The only real upfront abilities the spec has are Blast Wave and a glyphed Dragon's Breath (which I can't imagine surviving into Legion).

As far as specializations go, it should be --

Arcane - 1st in single target DPS, 3rd in multi-target DPS, Low Mobility, High Utility, Medium Survivability, Medium Crowd Control

Fire - 1st in multi-target DPS, 2nd in single target DPS, High Mobility, Low Utility, Low Survivability, High Crowd Control

Frost - 3rd in single target DPS, 2nd in multi-target DPS, Medium Mobility, Medium Utility, High Survivability, High Crowd Control

Arcane = The Ancient mage with lot of magic runes and magic symbols and with a elegant magic style.
Frost = The calm mage that controls the flow(slows, snares and stuns) of the battle and has high survivability tools.
Fire = The real glass cannon mage, sacrifice everything for damage.
Basically this for me.
The one point that a disagree actually is with Krekal because i do think that we should be more focused on our school, so we can learn the "ULTIMATE" types of magics of that school, i think that everyone agree that a real mage would have no time to become a master on all possibles schools of magic, of course he would know some useful spells from others school, but not high level ones.