WoW musings

Frost mage report - A big thumbs up.

Last night I got the opportunity to try my new mages frost spec.

I spent a good half hour reworking macros so that I could save focus for my mages sheep abilities. When my paladin targets a mob I can press either f2 for mage 1 or f3 for mage 2 to set that target as their focus.  Then when I press f8 both mages will sheep that target. More importantly they can still pump dps out on the paladins main target and then resheep.  This will be fantastic for instances - and for tough multi mob pulls.

So after I did the initial reworking I hearthed back to shattrath and flew over to honour hold. A friend had brought his 59 shaman through the portal and I joined forces with him to gear him up and my paladin.

I really, really like Frost. It seems more mana efficient than fire.  I still see biggish numbers and have more time to take mobs down before they reach me.  My paladin barely had to hit a mob (and my enhancement shaman friend felt a bit surplus to requirements).

We did have a nasty moment when Tagar spinebreaker jumped us (Well one of the spinebreaker ones - not the dead one   )   I still wasn’t fully familiar with my keybindings so was hunting for abilities a bit.  We took him down, but my two mages died.

However my mages more than redeemed themselves when we were jumped by a 60 Elite Felguard. This time I new the keys - two water elementals summoned and the mages went to town with the dps.  No deaths, barely any health taken off us.

That was pretty much the story of the night.  Lots of dead mobs, very few deaths for us, and I definitely prefer Frost to fire.

Add comment October 10th, 2008

Respecced my multiboxing mages from fire to frost.

After respeccing my druid to Balance, and how much I enjoyed the new playstyle i decided that I would respec my mages and give frost a try.

One of the downsides of multiboxing is that you can get in a rut, where you use the tiniest subset of a classes abilities, and that was pretty much how it was with my fire build.  In fairness that is more the fault of my multibox setup than speccing as fire, but I figured whilst I’m ringing the changes I may as well try a new build.

Firstly the mages are going to be in a group with my paladin tank rather than the druid.

Secondly i was using focus for my target assisting (this will mean nothing to non-multiboxers) but basically the lead character is the focus and the mages cast their damage spells on the focuses target.

This works wonderfully - until you go in an instance and want to sheep two targets, maintain dps on another and resheep the same two targets again.

So my mages have quite a few changes to their macro setup in the near future, but it will all be worth it.

Oh - and while I’m on about difficulties with multiboxing, AOE spells that require the targetting circle are a real pain.  You either can’t use them or you have to click in the other two instances of wow to place them.

There used to be a workaround called a minimap ping - but I never used it and blizzard removed it. Still a small price to pay considering all the fun multiboxing has brought me.

I’ll post a picture of my mages (with their trusty Paladin) soon.  I’ll also post back on whether I like frost or not after i’ve actually tried it.

Add comment October 8th, 2008