Monday, September 27, 2010

Mage Cooldowns in 3.3.5

In this post, I will go over ever single Mage cooldown from skills to talents. I'm not going to go over any changes in Cataclysm. Nor will I go over consumables, racials, or most damaging spells with a cooldown. I will, however, tell how best to use the Cooldown and when to use it in a PvE scenario. The format for a Cooldown will be as follows:

Talent Tree

Skill
CD length. Cast time. Description with a good way to use the CD.


Arcane

Arcane Power
2 minute CD (1.4 minute with talents). Instant. This Cooldown is amazing! Every 1 minute and 24 seconds you can activate this ability and do an additional 20% extra damage to all mage spells at the cost of 20% increased spell mana cost.


Blink
15 second CD. Instant. Blink can be used to get out of stuns and snares that a boss might put on you. It's biggest feature is moving you 20 yards in front of you instantly. Best used when you are standing in fire and you need to move immediately. Be mindful where you will end up.

Counterspell
24 second CD. Instant. Counterspell is great when you need to interrupt a spell cast from a boss or caster mob. This is extremely useful when other classes (Rogues, Enhancement Shamans, Death Knights, Warriors, I'M CALLING YOU OUT ON THIS) refuse to interrupt the boss when they can do it more often than Mages.

Evocation
4 minute CD (2 minutes with talents). 8 second channel effect. Evocation is an amazing ability that restores a total of 60% of our total mana over the duration of the channel. This can be interrupted and knocked back by enemies, so be careful and make sure you can get the full 60% back. Best used when you are at 40% mana.

Invisibility
3 minute CD (2 minutes with talents). Instant, 3 second fade time. This is a major threat drop. If you are about to pull threat, its best to stop casting all damaging spells, hit Invisibility, and wait three seconds. After that point, you drop ALL threat that you had, and you will then have a total of zero threat on your target. Do be careful though. If you are hit with an attack the fade on invisibility will stop and you wont become invisible.

Mirror Image
3 minute CD. Instant. Mirror Image will create 3 additional copies of your mage that do minimal damage and cast Fireblast and Frostbolt. The main point of this spell is the massive threat drop. As soon as you cast this spell, you get a threat drop of 90 million. No joke either. If you have aggro, hit Mirror Images. For the next 30 seconds, you will not be attacked by a boss or mob. One the 30 seconds is up, you gain that 90 million threat right back. If you are soloing content, the Images will aggro the mob instead of you.

Presence of Mind (Talented)
2 Minute CD (1.4 minutes with talents). Instant. This is a fun little spell that makes the next Mage ability you cast that as a base cast time of under 10 seconds an instant cast. Basically anything besides Teleports, Portals, and and channeled will become instant cast. This is best used when you need to move just slightly and you need to get off another Arcane Blast.

Fire


Combustion (Talented)
2 minute CD. Instant. This is a nifty spell that increases your crit chance by 10% for every fire attack that you land on the target that is not a DoT of some kind. This first effect will last until you score a total of 3 critical strikes. The other part of this ability will give you 50% increased Fire crit damage bonus. This is a kinda interesting ability because while a critical strike from your Living Bomb dot will not use a charge, it is effected by the increasing crit percentage. However, the final blast from Living Bomb will use a charge if it crits.

Fire Ward
30 second CD. Instant. This is a good spell to use when you are under attack from bosses that use Fire damage as their main source of pain. It absorbs 1950 fire damage before modifications to your spell power. Both Fire Ward and Frost Ward share a CD.

Frost


Cold Snap (Talented)
8 minute CD (6 minutes with talents). Instant. This nifty spell will immediately make any Frost spell that is on CD come off of Cooldown and you can then use it right away. This is best used when you want to use Deep Freeze twice in a row on a boss fight.

Deep Freeze (Talented)
30 second CD. Instant. This spell will stun any opponent in place for 5 seconds. If the opponent is immune to stuns, (Bosses), then instead it will do a huge hunk of damage. The kicker of this spell is that you can only use it on enemies that are frozen. This is why you talent into Fingers of Frost to make spells like this act as if the target was frozen.

Frost Nova
25 second CD (20 seconds with talents). Instant. This handy spell is good when you rip aggro off of your tank and you run for your life. You hit Frost Nova and all targets are frozen in place for up to 8 seconds. If too much damage is taken, the enemies will break out of their frozen ground and attack the highest threat target. This is also good for AoE packs when a lot of mobs are just chaotically going to random casters standing in the back.


Frost Ward
30 second CD. Instant. This is exactly like Fire Ward except with frost damage. Both Fire Ward and Frost Ward share a CD.


Ice Barrier (Talented)
30 second CD (24 seconds with talents). Instant. This handy utility CD is best to prevent damage from coming your way. You help out your healers, and you don't die as fast. The other nice ability is that you don't suffer from normal spell pushback effects when Ice Barrier is up. The amount of damage that Ice Barrier absorbs scales with how much spell power you have.


Ice Block
5 minute CD (4 minutes with talents). Instant. This spell will save your life. Literally. When you hit Ice Block. You encase yourself into a block of ice and are immune to all types of damage. The downside is you are unable to move for the duration of 10 seconds. If you pull aggro, you can hit Ice Block really fast. This will cause the enemy to attack the next highest threat target available. After Ice Block expires, the enemy will begin to attack you again. What this is super useful for is clearing a nasty debuff away. Whenever you cast Ice Block, you can literally get rid of almost all types of debuffs that can be put on you. Fear, DoTs, and most magical debuffs will go away.


Icy Veins (Talented)
3 minute CD (2.4 minutes with talents). Instant. This handy spell is an amazing spell when you need to start casting like a mad man. This spell increases your spell casting speed by a total of 20% for 20 seconds. Icy Veins will make you feel very powerful when you start seeing your spells fly out of your finger tips one after another. The other benefit of this spell is that you will suffer no spell pushback when you are under the effects of Icy Veins.

Summon Water Elemental (Talented)
3 minute CD (2.4 minutes with talents). Instant. Summon Water Elemental is a temporary pet under your control. He will stand next to you and cast Water Bolts until he disappears after 45 seconds (60 seconds with talents). His second ability is a secondary Frost Nova that you control where its placed on the battle field. This CD isn't that interesting unless you glyph it on 3.3.5, which will make him a permanent pet to attack anything that you do. The downside of glyphing him is you no longer have that secondary Frost Nova. However, with the increase to your DPS that he gives you, its worth it to lose that Frost Nova

Thanks everyone for reading this! If this is well liked, I will do Mage Talents, Rotations, Gear, Stats and more!

9 comments:

  1. Nice post man can't wait for more
    always following you mate
    cya

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  2. good stuff man, really detailed

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  3. Was always more of a warlock guy.

    I've got a WoW blog too! It's more lore-based though.

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  4. Mage sounds like a awesome class, so many abilities.. gotta try this guy out =P
    cya mate

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  5. haha i gotta reccomend this blog to some friends

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  6. Great post!

    looking forward to reading the next one

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  7. Nice info on Mage cooldowns.

    What server do you play on man?

    ReplyDelete