CCing Pets

This is one thing I'm sorta surprised I don't see that often. Alot of teams tend to either kill pets or just ignore them (or fake cast around spell lock, perhaps). CCing pets is a pretty powerful tool that will let you force cooldowns where you otherwise wouldn't have been able, albeit it's somewhat situational.

Example: You're on a warlock. His felhunter is on you. Frost nova it, then move around a corner before casting. I don't think I've ever seen a warlock command a felhunter to self-devour nova to deal with this (admittedly, devour is probably usually on cooldown from trying to catch sheeps), so you've just guaranteed yourself an easy 3-5 frostbolts without having to fake cast around spell lock. This is easier than ever with square pillars.

I also sometimes blow deep freezes on felhunters (usually just on openers, it makes it alot easier to force trinkets vs some comps). A guaranteed shatter with your entire team winding up on someone can be pretty brutal as pretty much any mage comp. Also, remember to try doing a quick fake as the felhunter comes out of deep freeze, there's a pretty good chance the warlock will be spamming spell lock going "wtf".

Sapping felhunters is a great way to get sheep to stick to warlock at the start of a match - it's a little hard to pull off on certain maps, and in 3v3 in general I find, but it's very powerful playing rogue mage in 2s (vs shaman lock especially, you can force all their cooldowns pretty much immediately with this strat if you do it right on most maps). Keep in mind that felhunters drop combat as soon as they stop moving to attack you, so while alot of warlocks will send their pets in to get in combat (and their pets as well), as soon as they pull it back to prevent you from beating it up, your rogue can sap and you can move in.

Sometimes you will be winding up a shatter vs a DK team and see the ghoul heading towards you (well, it will leap when it gets in range most likely). Usually if you're freecasting like this, the dk is going to use his ghoul to stun you, so try pet freezing it, ideally catching a player (probably your target) with it as well. The same principle applies to BM hunter pets somewhat - but frankly, most BM hunters aren't too concerned with using their pet stun to interrupt frostbolts I've found.

Sheeping priests

Almost anyone reading this probably knows of the ability for priests to use the kickback damage from shadow word: death to break polymorphs - it seems fairly common knowledge these days even in the lower brackets. Here are a few tips and tricks I've picked up playing against priests.

1. Catch him in global cooldown. This is alot easier if you use 4pce pvp (which tbh, you should be right now). With 4pce bonus and a bit of haste, you should be looking at 1.15 or so polymorphs without icy veins. With IV, PI, berserking or hyperspeed accelerators, you should be pushing 0.8 sheeps pretty easily, so it becomes a simple matter to wait for the priest to cast an instant (pw:s, dispel, prayer of mending, whatever) then fire off a rapid sheep before he can shadow word: death it.


2. Sheep someone else. When it seems ridiculously obvious that you're going to sheep the priest, just sheep someone else instead to make him waste his sw:d cooldown. A great example: You're running rmp in a mirror, and you catch the rogue in a kidney with his trinket down, you have full sheep dr on the priest and he has no trinket. Sheep the mage instead, probably interrupting an incoming sheep or frostbolt in the process, and sheep the priest immediately afterwards when he's blown his sw:d.


3. FoF Deep freeze -> sheep. This one is pretty obvious, but I figure I'd throw it out there. Obviously you can do it with regular novas etc as well, but usually you'll find priests are pretty quick about getting nova off themselves to avoid that.


4. Juke it. This I feel is the worst option as it results in the most wasted time and is the riskiest (ie with priests not blowing sw:d on your juke giving you absolutely no results), however you should still go for it if for whatever reason, the other options can't be used. I understand that in the bursty environment of wotlk, it can sometimes feel like it's not worth "wasting time" doing stuff like fakecasting sheeps and putting up anti-dispel debuffs. But at the end of the day, having a 10 second sheep stuck to them is always going to be worth it.

Farmin dat rep

Ashen Band of Endless Destruction

Epic

Binds when picked up

Unique

Finger

+73 Stamina

+73 Intellect

Yellow Socket

Item Level 277

Equip: Improves hit rating by 51.

Equip: Increases spell power by 101.

Equip: Improves haste rating by 64.

Your offensive spells have a chance on hit to increase your spell power by 285 for 10 sec.

Needless to say, you're looking at the best in slot ring for pvp in 3.3/season 8. Totally aside from being 51 ilvls above the worse of the two available pvp rings (Furious or Titan-forged), hit/haste/sp (and a socket!) is pretty much perfect itemisation only seen on one other ring this expansion, and you'll certainly never see it from pvp.

Given blizzards penchant for only offering one pvp ring per season, along with keeping the offset lower ilvl than pve equivalents, and the high probability next season ring is a crit one, getting this should already be a no-brainer. But the proc is what makes it. This ring can basically be seen as the new reign of the dead, any mage with it is going to have considerably more burst potential than one without it (regardless of what other ring they use), and burst is what wins games.

Oh yeah, one last thing? All this takes is rep, and you can get rep from just farming trash in the icecrown raid. It'll definitely take a bit of farming, but if you can get a few friends in a similar situation to you to come with you, you should be able to get this after a while. There is no excuse for any pvp mage NOT to be using this thing by halfway through the next season.

3.3 fire

So, how does fire pvp stand in 3.3? It's... still really bad. Check the end for TLDR.

Now, having said that, alot of stuff is better. Or perhaps, "less bad". With dragon's breath and blast wave both reduced to a base mana cost of 281, mana feels alot more manageable as fire now. At least, most 1v1s don't carry a ridiculously high threat of running oom without touching mana shield.

The new glyph of scorch is very nice. A quick test on a ret paladin wearing 887 resil revealed these numbers for scorch:

1770
2629 crit
1762
1791
1770
2609 crit
1754
2552 crit
1761
1789
1757
1787
2557 crit
1824
1794
2565 crit

This is with the glyph of scorch, 5/5 burnout, 5/5 fire power and wearing 2564 spell power (copied over earlier in the season with not so amazing gear).

I know it's a small sample size, but we should get a very rough idea from this. I got a 2582.4 average scorch crit damage, which is okay (if not amazing) considering the lowish spell power and a highish resil target for a 1.5 sec cast. Average hit of 1778.1

So, scorch spam works out to roughly 1200 dps in "decent" gear in 3.3. Now, it's pretty clear that 1200 dps is not enough to make anyone fear a freecasting fire mage. Throwing in hot streaks changes this somewhat, but at the end of the day, it's still too low. However, replacing fireball or frostfire bolt with scorch spam in pve with the glyph actually doesn't result in a particularly large dps loss, from what I understand it's around 400-500dps below fire when accounting for increased mobility.

The problem here is living bomb. Living bomb is quite alot of damage, and if you're keeping living bomb up while you spam scorch, along with the occasional fireblast you will put out pretty respectable (though certainly not over the top) dps. Enough that freecasting dps actually feels about right. However, living bomb has some serious issues in pvp. I'll post more on this later, just expect to spec living bomb if you want solid freecasting damage even with the glyph.

Firestarter is not particularly amazing. The general clunkiness of targeting it along with its poor single target damage make me hesitate to put more than one point in it. I do feel it's situationally useful enough to merit one point, being obviously very efficient dps that you can use while on the move. Also, you can do a few neat los-related tricks with it. Still, I feel you will usually have it when you need it with only one point.

TLDR:

Burst unreliable but fine
Sustained damage requires living bomb but is okay with
Mana is okay
Survivability is still pretty meh.