- Author: Qxu
- Date: March 17, 2021
- Updated: July 28, 2021
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Movement is KEY
Compared to other Mage specs, Fire has so much damage over time (DoT) so basically you can move and keep doing damage at the same time. That being said, nature cover is your friend and ally here. Keep Living Bomb and Ignite up on your target all the time and keep playing out of their FoV (field of view).
Keep in mind that you lack survivability so make sure to use Dragon’s Breath on cooldown so you can get out of the enemy’s range and get away from their sight as soon as possible
Jumping CC
Try to predict when you’re going to get hit by a stun and then try to “jump it.” This means that you’re jumping as you get stunned and so you end up landing on the ground further away. Try to use this to get behind line-of-sight to avoid following CC or damage (ex: Shadowfury + fear combo). Getting good at this will mitigate a lot of damage and you might be able to save your Blink cooldown.
Fake casting (Juking) & Interrupting
Most good players will try to interrupt you asap because they think that their reaction time is better than yours. This is mostly true for rogues because they’re usually trying to prove that they’re better than everyone else. So those guys often try to “pre Kick” a lot which means using your interrupt when you think that your enemy is going to start his cast and not when you actually realize that he is casting something. To be fair though, it is true that the only way to kill some healers is to pre Kick otherwise he’ll just keep on trying to juke your Kick and so if you don’t interrupt him then his instant cast heals are going to come back off cooldown and he’ll be able to slowly get back to full health. A good tip to pre Kick is to watch for when your target stops moving because usually you never stop moving unless it’s to hard cast something. So knowing that your enemy knows this fact, you can try to abuse it by delaying your cast just a little bit when you stop moving and “pre juke” as I like to call it which is interrupting your cast as soon as it starts. Or you can try to not juke at all and use a fire spell like scorch and maybe he’ll Kick that. When you’re able to juke pre kicks that’s when you’ve won the mind game because your enemy will start to hesitate a lot in how and when he should use his interrupts. Then you change your playstyle over and over and you become very hard to predict.
If you want to play safe then it’s best to wait until the very end of the cast because if you do get juked then the time it took for your enemy to get to the end of his cast before juking is sort of like an extra free “stun” on him.
Also, a good trick to make your enemy use spells like Grounding Totem or Spell Reflection is to turn around at the very end of the cast so that you’re no longer facing him when your cast ends and so your cast bar goes all the way up but your spell doesn’t go off.
Secondary Tree Interruption Bait
If you are in a situation in which you simply can’t get away or can’t afford to waste time fake casting then you should try to cast a spell in the tree that you don’t care about if it gets locked. Ex: if a rogue is riding me and I want to get a Polymorph on his teammate. Instead of trying to juke his Kick I might decide to start spamming Frostbolt in his face and make him use his Kick on my frost tree so that I can freely cast my Polymorph and then if he wants to stop that he’ll have to use Gouge. You can easily avoid it by spinning really fast while you cast or simply Frost Nova him for 1 sec and not face him as you cast or maybe he’ll use Kidney Shot or Vanish/Shadow Dance, Cheap Shot, either way no matter what he chooses to use, it’s me that’s forcing him to use it at a not so desirable time for him and so it’s a win/win for me. And if they don’t interrupt you on your Frostbolt spam then you’ll actually start to do more pressure than them damage-wise. This tactic works very well in 2s but not so much in 3s because there’s more interrupts and the pressure on you is usually higher and so you don’t want to take the risk to get locked on your Frost tree and then die because you can’t Ice Block. Another example is if you’re left in the open to free cast and your goal is to dish out a lot of damage by spamming Frostbolt and you know that spell lock or Counterspell is up then you can cast Polymorph so that they lock your Arcane tree and not your Frost tree. I use this tactic in mage duels too but no other mage understands it, which combined with a spell steal game means that I will most likely win every time. So then they’re like mages ”shouldn’t spell steal in duels” but that’s just BS for bad mages because then you’re forced to trinket the first sheep and to Ice Block as soon as your Arcane tree is locked. And if your first Counterspell is juked and you don’t juke him then it’s pretty much auto lose.
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