Is mage really that boring in PvE?

[Impsie]

Yeah, pretty much one button spam. You Scorch to build stacks as Fire, but that barely affects your one button rotation of Fireball. What makes Fire fun is the massive Ignites you build and roll.

Also there is no Mage tier set that you use all 8 pieces of.

play WoD mage

WoD (non-fire) mage is almost as simple as Vanilla. Fire takes some effort but its mostly just paying attention. Frost is spam Frostbolt for procs, cast procs. Arcane is AB til 60%, dump charges, evocate, repeat. Nothing interesting and you barely press more than 3 buttons ever.

[mozibake]

Fire rotation:
Scorch x 5
Fireball x 9
Scorch x 1
Fireball x 9
Scorch x 1
...

Frost rotation:
Frostbolt x ∞

Arcane rotation:
Why are you playing arcane lol

[Datruth]

Why are you playing arcane lol

Cause it's the best dps spec dog?

[TomDeBaere]

Why are you playing arcane lol

Cause it's the best dps spec dog?

He means in Vanilla, unless you think spamming Arcane Missiles is the best :p. Arcane in Vanilla was only there to complement on Fire and Frost. You would only really use Arcane Missiles in PVP because you'd have many hits from the same spell.

[Ana]

Some people are under the impression that AP/frost 31/20 is an arcane build.
It is not. You never shoot arcane spells with it.

[Youfie]

Some people are under the impression that AP/frost 31/20 is an arcane build.
It is not. You never shoot arcane spells with it.

Well >50% of your points are in Arcane, so in a sense, it's still a Arcane spec, isn't it?

[Datruth]

Being a certain spec doesn't limit you to that specs spells, obviously. 31>20 So it's primarily an arcane spec.

But who gives a shit though, regardless of how you wanna label it, it's the same thing.

[Syphonize]

Going pure Arcane Missiles can be pretty fun for a change. It's not that much worse than Frost anyway and is especially good on Vael, for example.

[Ana]

The only thing arcane missiles aren't worse at is base damage. Then you have 1.0 scaling for a 5 sec cast vs 0.87 scaling for a 2.5 sec cast... also zero benefit from winter's chill. Also no +6% damage from talents. Also no double damage crits. etc etc
Vael, Chrom when arcane and wyrmguards when arcane are basically the only sensible applications, Vael being quirky (if many mages get clever and start abusing missiles you'll soon find yourself doing 5-sec channels for zero damage).

[Syphonize]

Vael being quirky (if many mages get clever and start abusing missiles you'll soon find yourself doing 5-sec channels for zero damage).

Incorrect. Arcane Missiles was fixed to not take a debuff slot any longer, invisible or otherwise.

You also get hit capped easier, saving 4% hit necessary from your gear. The scaling is also 1.2, not 1.0 (meaning it is 24% scaling per second, compared to ~36% from Frost). There are also a number of applications with a lot of quirky pieces of gear that end up working fairly well, but I'm not going to spell each and everything out.

It's worse than Frost, but not that much worse. It's too bad most people will never try it.