Mage Group PVE Technique

Group PVE Technique

In groups, your primary role will be to kill enemies quickly. You should generally set yourself up with an /assist macro for your main tank and cast single-target spells on whatever he or she is targetting. If necessary, you can cast area-of-effect spells, but you’ll have to be careful when doing so, as this will often disrupt things like Sap and Polymorph, and will also cause any monsters that haven’t had threat generated yet to target you.

Beyond pure damage, though, your primary usefulness will come in the form of Polymorph, which is one of the best crowd control abilities in the game, as it can knock a single mob out of a fight for 20 seconds, or more, at higher levels. You won’t be able to use it on everything, but it does work on beasts and humanoids, which are the two most populous groups of enemies. Try to use this whenever your tank draws in multiple enemies. You might want to rig this to a targeting macro, such as:

/cast Polymorph %t
/p I’m Polymorphing %t! Don’t hit it!

This way, your teammates will know which mob you’re going to Poly, and (hopefully) won’t target it until the Polymorph wears off.

You can also expect to field numerous requests for your support abilities, especially for drinks and food. Whenever you join a group, you’ll probably want to go ahead and synthesize a stack of drinks for any casters in it, just in case they need them, and don’t forget to cast Arcane Intellect on anyone with a mana bar. Don’t forget to train in teleports, as well, as these are sometimes the only way to safely extract someone with a burned hearthstone from the end of an instance.