Tell me about mages in vanilla:P
Which specc was most popular.
And more stuff if you want;)
Did anyone use arcane and which rotation did they have since they didnt have arcane blast?

MC and most of BWL was frost only. Mobs had high fire resistance
No ice lance, no water elemental, no procs, no frozen target.
Just spamming frost bolt all day and blizzard on AoE.
When ZG,AQ and Nax came fire was the new pve spec.
Also, 99% of mages did not go full fire/frost, they went down to PoM to get instant pyro and stuff like that.
'Arcane' spec was half arcane and rest into fire so you could use arcane power + pom + both trinkets = i win button

From what I remember it was fire/frost with arcane as backup. Arcane didn't have potential on its own. So you would get all your fire/frost talents that you need then combine them with arcane for POM/arcane blast/arcane power. Then you could do something such as Sheep, arcane power, Fireball, POM pyro, finish off with Arcane blast and fireblast. And that would be the end of the fight as fire.
Frost was strong also. but it had less CC, no deep freeze or elementals and such. And classes had less interrupts/escapes. No ice lance from what I remember. So it was all about making them waste their cds, then you could actually nova someone and get a couple of frostbolt off on them as long as you knew how to fake cast. .
Pathologist made some good videos of fire back in the day, nice editing.
unkown 2: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7272407138399193939#docid=9439442055867511
unkown 3: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7272407138399193939#docid=-2382415553649726461

There was no Arcane Blast in vanilla.
Desudesudesu has it quite right :)

Arcane explosion is what I was talking about :p. you should of been able to work that one out if you pvped in vanilla oO.

When AV was pure ranged zerg (and could last over 10hours), and mages got healed whilst they did the AE in the mass of players..
I was a priest -.- fun times -.-

You had to spend 5 points in Arcane Explosion in order to make it go from a 1,5 sec cast to instant. You had to spec into Evocation.
Speccing sub arcane was mandatory. Frost was the @@%% in MC/BWL as stated while Fire was the @@%% later on. The only real difference was that you clicked Frostbolt as Frost and Fireball as Fire.
As for the use of arcane, many mages used Arcane Missiles on the second encounter in BWL, for the sole reason that you could use Arcane Missiles without getting pushback, due to the old Improved Arcane Missiles talent (5 points to get 100% pushback resistance on 1 spell :> ). Vaelastrasz (second boss), pulsed some fire damage quite frequently, and due to Arcane Missiles being our only spell with 100% spell pushback resistance, we used it. We also had infinite mana due to the Essence of the Red buff which you get during that encounter.

oh man they vanilla talents where so cool you could upgrade your wand damage and stuff ^^

oh man they vanilla talents where so cool you could upgrade your wand damage and stuff ^^

Ah yeah, while vanilla had a lot of good stuff going for it, there was a significant amount of fail talents (and fail talent trees).

oh man they vanilla talents where so cool you could upgrade your wand damage and stuff ^^

Actually, back in early season 3, you could, with your pvp wand (the one with the highest max damage), which had a slow cast time for a wand, crit up to 1.2k with your wand. Why? The talent which granted 13/25% wand damage still existed, also, wands damage scaled with talents (such as old Fire Power), and since this pvp wand was fire damage based, you could reach this insanely high number for a wand.
Ofc. not many people knew about this, or cared, since it was only possible with a fire spec and 2 points in wand specialization, but it sure was fun to kill people of with giant wand crits. Yes 1.2k was kinda much back in season 3.
This was nerfed ofc. and wands no longer scale with talents. Sadly. Good times.

Originally imp wands wasnt a 2 point talent though it was a 5 point for 5% each point.
Anyho my recollections from vanilla raiding.
Early MC raiding consisted of mainly frost specs. Where people put their points didnt matter that much as long as you had imp frostbolts and there wasnt an Elitist Jerks site to min/max your specs. People could raid as fire as well in MC although this consisted of mainly yelling at the warlocks to put up CoE. Tier 1 epics also had some buffs that were to frost damage only.
BWL turned fire from semi-viable to a big no-no. Unless you wanted to spend most of your time doing !!!# all on the bosses you raided as frost. Mobs/bosses had gone from merely resistant to fire to full out immune. 30/21 frost/arc was a pretty popular spec now.
Temple of AQ made fire finally viable to play again. Gone were the immunities and fire started to shine. This was before mage patch so 21/30 arc/fire was most peoples mainspec. You could still play frost though, I managed to top the meters as 41/10 frost /arc during an entire TAQ run. And IB was pretty useful with all the raiddamage that was starting to get felt here.
Then we begat the magepatch and after that there were only one spec to rule them all. 31/17/3 fire/arc/frost. If you werent that spec you didnt belong in a raid. If you did you were chasing the nr 1 spot on the dps meters. Thanks to that we spent the next expansion in the **!%ter.

I remeber you could get kicked from 5 man dungeosn if you didn't have instant arcane explosion. That is free today, but you needed to hav 15 points in arcane to have it back then.
Most had 16 so they could also get evocation, that was on a 10 min Cd back then. It was also affected by spirit instead of your max mana, so most raiders had a weapon and wand with spirit and also enchanted with spirit so they could switch weapons midfight to get a bigger effect of evocation and then switch back. With lots of spirit evocation coudl easily give you over 80% of your mana back.
We also had wand specc in arcane tree. 25% increased dmg with wands for 5 talents. We moaned about it for years before they removed it.
Polymorphs had full 50 sec duration on PVP targets and there was no diminishing turns, so even if they broke out of it, you could just resheep. That went for all CC though. So a team with 5 priest and 10 others was unbeatable becouse we chainfeared everyone, all the time.
We also had a spell that made us able to see an opponents, both PVP and PVE, buffs as without that noone could see it. Since we didn't have the mark system, that mark and hunters mark was used as markers instead as they wher the only 2 spells in the game that didn't aggro the mobs.
Oh and yes: We was glass cannons. The only one that could really rival us on dmg was rogues, and we where kings of AOE. I remeber raids with up to 9 mages(out of 40 people), and 1 lock to boost our dmg. In PVP this ment, that if we saw you first, you was dead. If you got to us first though, we was dead as we was incredible fragile. 2 mana for 1 hp absorbs seemed quite ok, since you nromally had about twice as much mana as you had hp.
You also had to do a quest to get crystal water, wich was the best water back then. It involved going into DM. I didn't have the key and get 3 groups to DM was close to impossible for alliance as it lay far away from everything and thre wasn't even summoning stones. So I used a bug and blinked to an invisible crack in a door(Took me like 15 min of trying before it worked). Wich ment I could do with only one run. Crystal water also only conured 4 waters at the time, so the mages logged on 30 min early for the raid to conure up water for teh whole raid. To make one stack took almost a full mana bar.

I was a rare one that didn't spec any into arcane for a while. I did when we started MC and BWL as people said earlier they had fire resi so frost was the only way.
fire/frost was the awesome spec, especially for PvP. And we used to be able to stack 2 spell power trinkets,Arcane Power and PoM (makes next cast instant spell) all at once :)
We had PvP ranks that meant something, rather than ones we'll be able to purchase at some point.
We had no Battlegrounds and it was awesome :)
On the note about water, i always thought that the crystal water was added in a later patch, i'm sure we used to get into Molten Core, and spend ages making lvl 55 water for every group member manually. None of this 'table' crap -- and it was 40 of us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2Xsfjm7e7Q : )

I was a rare one that didn't spec any into arcane for a while. I did when we started MC and BWL as people said earlier they had fire resi so frost was the only way.
fire/frost was the awesome spec, especially for PvP. And we used to be able to stack 2 spell power trinkets,Arcane Power and PoM (makes next cast instant spell) all at once :)
We had PvP ranks that meant something, rather than ones we'll be able to purchase at some point.
We had no Battlegrounds and it was awesome :)
On the note about water, i always thought that the crystal water was added in a later patch, i'm sure we used to get into Molten Core, and spend ages making lvl 55 water for every group member manually. None of this 'table' crap -- and it was 40 of us.

Umm we had battlegrounds? Honor system was added couple of months after release and battlegrounds soon after that. And yes the best water was also added soon after release.
And of course every mage who played at vanilla will eternall remember that one patch.. Rather soon after release some patch did massive amount of upgrades/updates for many classes while everything that was said under mage patch notes was 'Mage armor has new, unique icon'. ^_^

And of course every mage who played at vanilla will eternall remember that one patch.. Rather soon after release some patch did massive amount of upgrades/updates for many classes while everything that was said under mage patch notes was 'Mage armor has new, unique icon'. ^_^

Yeah I remeber that patch. My mage wasn't my main back then, just an alt that wasn't even max lvl, so I didn't care to much. Didn't make this my main before my raiding guild was headed towards Naxxramas and I couldn't stand the fact that you had to spend more time grinding money and consumable for the raids than you actually did raiding.

vanilla? mages were the best dmg in the game. simple

I am not sure about PvP, but for PVE Arcane was the real deal. A mix of all specs, providing unreal dmg when geared. Miss the old times with Arcane, but hey, still really good if you know how to play it.

I am not sure about PvP, but for PVE Arcane was the real deal. A mix of all specs, providing unreal dmg when geared. Miss the old times with Arcane, but hey, still really good if you know how to play it.

holy necromageballs

Mages played 'elementalist'. Mixed frost since it had a low mana cost, threat reduction and not many mobs resistend frost - and you mixed it with arcane to get more intellect/spellpower/

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