DISCLAIMER: been playing only for a few days, take what I say as my first impressions.

Playing as a Mage has been quite fun up to now- Nightmare Act4 - and I like how you have to time your spells, pay attention to your cooldowns, mob's res and weaknesses, and you can do some good chains, exp vs mobs that have fire weakness... but when a chromatic champ appears it takes forever to kill - and if it has also healing abilities it's horribly slow:(

Mage has some very nice offensive spells - earthquake, armageddon, psionic blast - the elemental pets are nice to have and offer both attack and survevability, and you have a great difensive ability - to take a mob out of combat !

Downsides are that you can only wear cloth ( without suffering penalties ), your health is kinda low and seems like you need a lot of mana - that's why I took high elf as race, mana isn't a problem and never was so far...

Can't really say how it fares compared to the other classes, since I haven't played with them long enough...
Anybody else has been playing with this class? What do you think?

I played Mage up to Hell before the server went live. My main issue is I didn't ever really feel a need for a different pet than the fire pet. It does enough damage and has enough life that I don't ever really feel the need to switch. I agree Damage is a good point and there's ways to keep combos going for long periods of time if you really wanted to. Once you get the pet perk up to 20 and can heal just by casting the default spell there's not much need to heal it anymore.

How is survivability on mage? I think reclaim elements is it's only real heal? Without auto attacks for leech, where do you get life from?

Not bad - basically Reclaim elements let you heal off of your pet ( which you can heal with enrage); you also have that other spell (can't remember the name right now) which transforms all damage into heal for 6 sec, if it's well-timed it's great, but tricky...

@lost_map: I've tried all pets and I find ice the best, then fire ( earth is the worst ); I use mostly the ice pet, its freezing special attack and the chanche to freeze mobs are great, plus my dmg is mostly fire, so that helps too. In zones where there are fire weak mobs I'll sometime switch to fire, but also ice fares well - I haven't max it yet, deciding between maxing pet or earthquake atm...
EDIT: How's the pet dmg at lvl20 perk? I see and use it more as a meat shield and healing help, but at lvl20? Considering also that it heals from your default spell, is it worth?

Wow Hell is really true to its name, the difficulty spike from Nightmare is impressive, progression is really slow - and so is killing mobs... Could also be that my RNG with gear drops sucks,no good elite drops so far.

So I started levelling an alt out of frustation, will get back to my Mage in the weekend and see how it goes. But I'd like to hear from people who've played a Magician in Hell, what spell/gear choices you used?

You won't start seeing Elites until Act 2 of hell unfortunately.

Hell i brutal, I'm still waiting to see if every class manages to clear hell this season.

It just occurred to me. I think earth pets should snare instead of root. This would slow mobs' cast time (as of 1-0-4 snare change).

That would be a fantastic addition to mage, but you should give the other pets some love as well then. That would make earth pet amazing (assuming the melee slow is intact as well?)

Yep. I want each pet to be desireable in different circumstances. I'm thinking:

Earth: Snares (slow casting and attacking)
Ice: High duration single-target freeze
Air: Cone stun?
Fire: Mad deeps?

Something like that. I'll have to check up on them when I have time... lol

That would work. Each of those would be good for different situations.

I like the sound of designing each pet elemental to favor certain mob types. That way the magician could bring the appropriate pet to the fight based on the area but not in a way where they feel like they need to switch pets mid-chain.

Earth: caster counter through Snare.
Air: boss counter through Bleed.
Fire: swarming option with aoe fire damage aura.
Ice: melee counter through Chill.


Disclaimer: I have no idea how the magician plays. *Scampers back to the Rogue Safehouse*

That could work, Earth was really bad imho 'cause rooting casters is a very bad idea, and for melee Ice pet was superior.
Give Fire an AoE buff that will also benefit the Mage as well (only for his/her fire dmg); as for Air, stun ability is ok , bleed could also work... Ice is in a good place right now, however changing its special ability to work only single-target (now it hits a cone, iirc) but last longer sounds good.

Thanks always for this great game and your efforts!

In 1-0-5 earth pet gets a single-target snare. Elemental Fury makes it snare all targets, so this is obviously a defensive pet with good resists and lots of health. Great for hardcore or people that don't like dying (grinding 98).

Snare doesn't help with ambush - that's how you die in 98+, not mobs running

Snare slows mob attack speed AND casting speed, too. Not just mobility.

Yep, I've tried Earth Pet in Hell Act I, slowing down mobs helps a lot even in an ambush; I was able to survive a double ambush where otherwise I would've died for sure.
Still slow in killing anything that shows up, and god help you if it's a chrome champ...

I'm gonna let's play Magician and wreck this whole game on hardcore.

oh, good to know!

Giving that ele a try right now. Mages certainly do lack dps - probably because all of their abilities are on super long cooldowns. The damage isn't scaling with the skill bump very well either.

Arcturin, The Lich King - Hell.

The fight took FOREVER! Earth Ele certainly helps for slowing things down a bit. I'm using Firestorm as my main CD attack. 15 second CD, 28x626dmg -842dmg.
Fire Dmg: 23%
All Magic: 33%

For being in Hell, 3300dps on a boss is really, REALLY low.

Sentoth, Lord of Rapture - Hell..

The really crappy thing about this whole area is EVERYTHING is fire resistant.. That's pretty much all a magician has.. is fire spells.

OUCH. That was a crapload of damage...

Interesting. Cool, I'll make Magicians OP beyond belief next update.

That's what I like to see. GO MAEL. /sarcasm off.

Similar to Druid, I'm sure just some small tweaks are needed. It would be pretty cool if the ele pet damage scaled with your % in that element (not sure it does that now). You could make some pretty cool utility or builds around pets. Would definitely be a fun and different type of class.

Make pet damage benefit from +% elemental damage? HMMMMM

They should be hitting significantly harder as well. I'd expect them to be at LEAST 30% of my overall dps - provided none of the other abilities changed much, that would be close to the rest of the classes.

Mages do have amazing CC. The ability to lock a mob down for 30 seconds saves their lives. Without that I'd say a good chunk of encounters would be impossible due to incoming damage and no ability to really mitigate it other than a very long CD heal.

Anything that is fire resistant is a magicians bane... It essentially halves their DPS - most mobs who are fire resistant I'm sitting at ~1500dps. Normal mobs take me roughly 30 seconds to kill. That's pretty crazy, considering.

Fire zones are a magicians bane.. Anything with Fire Resist is... which in a couple of zone's instances are all mobs within a specific zone. They're absolutely terrible.