Mage pvp what classes are hard for a mage and how to counterFollow

hmm.. hard fights for mages.
All except warriors. Also a very skilled gnome warrior on engeneering will kill you before you get a chance to move.

warlock : ways to counter fear : ice block / pvp trinket. if you're a fire mage you've got very low chances of defeating a lock. any decent lock can kill you without you even hitting him once.

shaman : purges you then ice shocks you. you move at half speed, have no shields / barriers. if you try to cast something they will cast earth shock. interrupts spell and can't cast anything from that school of magic for 2 seconds. way to counter it.. burst them with instant casts. sheep if you can because they have no way of breaking out of it.

druids : feral druids are immune to sheep, can shapeshift out of frostnova / chill / daze, can charge, can stealth.. way to counter: if you're an ice-mage chill / freeze them till they run oom. if you're a fire-mage burst them. don't run away because it's useless since they can't be chilled.

paladins : they can make themselves immune to all damage and heal themselves to full life. way to counter: improved counterspell when they are like 20-25% and save a fireblast to finish them fast.

rogues : at level 70 a decent sub rogue is impossible to beat by anything but a deep frost mage. they can be immune to all spells for 5 seconds and that pretty much sais it all. ice block when this happens.

hunters : mm hunters with a good pet can kill you before you get a chance to move. i am fairly decent in PvP and i've found a hunter that can beat me so bad that it made me ashamed to be a mage. they can shoot pretty much non-stop so you can't really cast anything between the arrows and the pet.
bm hunters can become immune to any form of crowd control for 10 (?) seconds. only way to counter this is by doing ice block if you're an ice mage or pom + ap + trinket + pyro if you're arcane / fire. then blink away from the pet and try to burst down the hunter.

priests : if it's a shadowpriest cs his shadow tree and then burst him (if you have control over your character that is)
holy priests can only be killed if you can do burst damage. try to cs his heal. if he's smart he'll do only flash heals to make you *try* and counterspell it. if you miss it, you're screwed.

Interesting how our only means of escape from these mage-killers (ice block) has been nerfed. Somewhere a mage must have killed a warlock. No other explanation for these recent nerfs :P

wow thats terrible. it sounds like mage is bye far the worst class for me as im in love with pvp..........i say im not gonna go through the game like that im gonna roll to my warlock. ty for advice though it was helpful.

no. that's why higher ranks of frost nova are a waste of money.



scatter shot > mages. the "dead zone" is just the soft pillow hunters hump at night when the developers threaten to nerf their overpowered asses. a hunter who doesn't know what wing clip does isn't a dumb hunter at all. because that would be redundant. oh. and let's not forget traps. the fact is that the dead zone is anything BUT a dead zone... for the hunter anyway. let's see if we can even make a list! freeze trap, chill trap, scatter shot, concussive shot, wing clip, silence shot, feign death (because it interrupts your cast), wyvern sting. is that everything? hm. even if it's not, it's still an absurd number of interruption effects for anyone to tote around let alone a class that can three shot mages with all instant abilities. i ask you. why the hell would anyone even bother using the "dead zone" excuse?

it's not like hunters can't equip a melee weapon, and it's not like they can't move their asses.

let's ask a question. since hunter's arrows interrupt casters' spells, why is there no effect in the game to stop hunters' arrows? aside from the horrendous arcane talent Slow, there really isn't one. unless you get an impact proc. and that's not dependable. furthermore, you couldn't keep a hunter out of action as long as he can you. ever seen a hunter kite a warrior with nothing but instant casts? spoiler! even with charge and intercept the warrior never gets a chance to hit the hunter. let's see. how many of those above effects have diminishing returns?

interesting.

Edited, Apr 15th 2007 4:23am by FractalSynapse

I play as a deep fire gnome mage, and i was doing a fair bit of pvp at 59 for the pvp mount. I found that as long as i pretty much stuck to instant casts, i could pretty easily take out most classes. One of the last things people expect is a mage to run straight at them and thats what i did, fire blast, blast wave dragons breath, and most were usually almost dead. I was hardly what you would call "Twinked" , but 1v1 i could take out anybody in the battleground. Druids and shamans are definately some of the toughest, with a holy specced priest, theyre dead before they know what hit them.

well-geared fury warriors will rape you, but not if you hit them first. i really question the wisdom of giving warriors intercept + 15k hp...

ah, thanks - I knew about frost nova, but was thinking of randomly spamming rank 1 arcane explosion as a method of rogue detection/deterrance, albeit a very visible one. At higher levels, I imagine the mana cost for this would be negligible.

For the rest ... hmm ... where should I start?



The dead zone is very real, just mages aren't the best to exploit it. If a rogue or warrior gets in there and slows (hamstring/crippling poison > wing clip), the hunter with their relatively weak melee is pretty much screwed. Traps are the only attack in the game that you can manually dodge, and have a long enough cooldown not to be useful more than once in an engagement (unless you let the Hunter kite you or are relatively a lot weaker).

Wing Clip is a ***** for mages, but frostbolt is a ***** for hunters. Yes, wing clip is instant, but if you're skilled enough to stay out of their melee range, it's useless - and rank 1 frostbolt goes pretty fast. Again, on a skill level, it's much easier for the hunter to outrange/melee you than for you to stay in the dead zone, but you did say that there were no good hunters, right?
At least at 29 (and I admit it may change a lot later on), spamming my instant spells and moving unpredictably within their dead zone (freezing them as frost nova comes up) wins unless they have a bunch of +stam gear.

Again, scatter shot upsets all of this, and I humbly agree with you assessment there. You also have a point on the inability to slow hunter range pew-pewing. Caster wands really aren't comparable in damage. Anything outside of a non-cc'd hunter's deadzone 1v1 is going to be hurt. If it's any consolation, in team play, a hunter standing still to attack you is open bait for any class that can get inside its deadzone and cc/kill it.

off-topic aside:
Because I don't have any high-levels yet, I lurk on a bunch of the class forums, and one consistent pattern I've seen is complaints which group mutually exclusive skills. A mm hunter may 3-shot a glass cannon mage (or vice versa if they mage gets the jump), or a survival hunter may cc and melee kill you up close. Each spec has ups and downs, but nobody has them all - much like people who want all mages nerfed more because of the one time they got killed by a 3-minute instant pyroblast mage, and another time where a whole group got slowed to a crawl and damaged by aoe frost aggravation. Anecdotal evidence doesn't show the bigger picture. Knowing the skill trees/mutually exclusive abilities of the other classes can be very beneficial, especially if you're fighting a specific opponent more than once.

why is that different from what mages do? why do you think people kill mages first? because mages are easier to kill: fewer hp, less dodge, less armor and fewer escape tactics.

the "dead zone" consists of the tiny ring between melee range and bow range. that's ~3 yards, isn't it? you couldn't even cast scorch in the amount of time it would take even a slowed hunter to shift his position.



yeah, that changes. i saw a warrior with 25k hp in AV today. kinda ruins my fondly-held notion that most pvp warriors are plate rogues. hm. i wonder: if you were a well geared mage and crit that warrior with your best nuke, how much of his health bar do you think you could take off before he wore you down? i know it's very possible, but so far i haven't seen more than one or two mages in BGs with more than 8k hp.

so, even against other cloth, you aren't gonna kill anyone with instant spells alone unless you can sit around and wait for cooldowns for minutes at a time.



i said there weren't any smart hunters and that's the problem: it takes no skill to be a pain in the *** hunter.

I can't speak intelligently to the fire spec 3minute mage crowd, I've never dabbled. I'm deep frost and have no trouble PvP. All things being =, nothing will give you much grief. Pound for pound, with CS & coldsnap handy and your elemental out, you're a glass wrecking ball; you can lay down the pain, but you can't take much. Always have stack of potions and keep your ice barrier and mana shield up as much as possible. Get real good with blink, it's for more than running away ;) I like to charge head on with ice barrier on, blink past the pet, nova so they're both caught, and stand a couple steps away and nukenukenuke. If it's a lock and he fears, CS. If it's a druid and he shifts out of the first nova, use elemental's nova or coldsnap and nova again. I'm BE, so I like to arcance torrent the casters. Melees are tricky if they're good and they get inside your safety zone, you gotta think quick. Nova, blink away, get elemental out if he ain't already, lay down a frostbolt (work in and insta cast or 3 if you can), and get ready to nova again (yours or elemental's) when they get close. I've got a rogue, a hunter, a shady priest and a lock, but I like frost mage for pvp.

I dunno about druids. I'm not that scared of them.

Feral druids seem to be like warriors, except they can shapeshift and try to heal, but that's why we have counterspell. Plus a lot of druids are really clumsy with this and you get a lot of shots off at them shapeshifting around.

My guildy is a balance / resto druid and I can destory him in duels. He does the moonkin thing, and I can get his health down really fast, so he goes for a heal, which I could again conceivably counter spell and then just kill him. Otherwise, he heals, I use my ice barriers as a form of getting extra mana. Water elemental is out and bashing him, if I'm in a bad state, I could ice block, but usually don't have to since it tends to give him the chance to really heal. And basically, the druid runs out of mana faster than I do with its shapeshifting and all. Then its dead.

I 100% agree with Aqueminai's post. Lvl 66 not just deep, but ALL frost and I dont have too much trouble with any class. I go stam then int which is a little unorthodox for a mage but the survivabilty of the frost tree combined with a really good amount of hp helps very much with pvp. Hunters dont give me much trouble at all. Just run at em head first with shield up and fn then proceed to use every instant that you have with elemental blasting away as well. Ice lance is a huge factor as it can be cast so rapidly. So I'm not 70 yet but as of now when I come up against the allies in outlands I hold my own just fine 1v1 near my lvl.

Have to agree with Fractal. Hunter is fairly EZ-Mode to play but very difficult to master. Good Hunters that know how to work the class should completely wreck you. A vast majority of them suck something fierce though.

U must be garbage if u cant beat every class as a mage im a lvl 60 dranei frost spec'd mage and i can kill any class hands down the hardest being bm hunters if but u just got to use ur elemental and ice block its *key* get in dead zone try to lock the pet down as well as the hunter himself and fire the frost bolt from the deadzone look me up if ur 60 or around the level and whisper me im in altar of storms server whisper MikeHoncho if u think u can beat my 60 frosty :)

This is what works for me and I ONLY play for the pvp content (I hate grinding and questing with a passion). Locks are freaking scary- fel hunter will eat you, you WILL get feared, and you WILL be dot'ed. The thing to rember about a lock is it has very low hp starting the fight. Locks are one of the only two classes I would ever recommend spamming anything.

Duel starts, -be spamming poly morph before the time hits 1. This stops you from being feared right off the bat. Fel hunter will eat it but still gives you enough time to either bbq his *** or chill his ***. Now comes the hard parts. The Fel Hunter will devour your mage buffs (don't bother recasting) and will silence you. This is where you will be feared. You can IB or Trink. If you IB a good lock will time it and fear you as soon as it fades so spam icebarrier. You run around for a bit in barrier but don't get frazzled, when fear fades blink to him and (for me) FN/shatter, fire blast, two (2) AE, if he casts a fear counterspell (also stops him from dotting) if he deathcoils (which he may because he just lost over half his hp) don't fret, it was a move of desperation. Get out of the three (3) sec run and coldsnap, FN/shatter, two (2) AE, mana gem, IB, Blink, Fire blast, AE, /bow.

Hunters are tricky too. What works best for me is to poly pet right off the bat (poly then ice barrier) Blink to behind and FN/shatter. (be very mana wary as you can be oom and dead faster than he is ool and dead : P) Toss on a FB, poly pet again (even if it isn't up yet) cold snap (feels kinda weird to do it when IB isn't on CD but it works) FN/shatter FB Arc Three (3) times, mana gem, Ice barrier, poly pet again (DR sucks but this will be the last time.) Blink to inside (watch for traps, because the DR on poly could give out and you die frozen) CoC, IL, FB, AE and that should do it. Vary your strat as needed but that takes down 90% of the hunters I fight. (boar and warp charges aside : P)

Priests imo are the hardest for a mage to fight. Being feared, Hella DPS'ed then watching as they shield and pop up to full really sucks. The trick? Wait.
Wait wait wait. Like fighting a npc shammy when you miss your counter on their heal. wait. IB is your friend. Cold snap is your friend. Grind them down to low hp, and save the CS (counter spell) for that one spell that will make or break em' then release the fury of a mage. You can toss out so much dmg in mere seconds.

I don't have a problem with pally fights cept you have to kill em twice (big deal)

No warrior or rogue has ever beatten me sans one (I was 39 they were 45 and I still won 2/3 of the rounds : P)
The trick for these three classes is do not underestimate them...Rogue does his CoS? You have IB. Warrior charges, blink. Pally bubbles, IB. Common sense things will get you through alot.

As for smart hunters? What? All they do is hit a macro to fight you. Get more skill and you will kill hunters. Wow is not a very skill intensive game but you can make it so. Practice to the point where you know what the hunter is going to do and beat him to it.

I was fighting a horde frost mage the other day, same level, both deep frost and I beat him with only taking one IL. Know your opponent and you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.