WoW - Class: Mage

Okay back to World of Warcraft I suppose...
Mages wield the elements of fire, frost, and the arcane to pretty much take out or neutralize their enemies. This is another of the robed class but you excel at dealing massive damage from afar, casting elemental bolts at a single target, or raining destruction down upon their enemies in a wide area of effect. You can also augment your allies' spell-casting powers with intellect buffs, summon food or drink to restore your friends, and even travel across the world in an instant by opening arcane portals to distant lands or just teleport yourself .

When seeking someone to introduce monsters to a world of pain, the Mage would be a good bet, with their elemental and arcane attacks, it's a safe bet something they can do won't be resisted by your chosen enemy. Damage is definitely the name of the Mage game, and you do it well.
Your arsenal includes some powerful crowd control spells, also, giving them the ability to keep hordes at bay - in fact, these abilities can be used on the most common creatures in the game, thus making them extremely valuable for this purpose.
Escape with a mage is fairly easy you learn a spell called "Blink" that pretty much gets you out of most things just make sure you know where your pointed as it won't go through walls, trees or off cliffs...

There are really 2 subclasses of mages in the game, those who choose to follow the frost tree all the way down and those that choose to follow the fire tree all the way down now each has it's advantages and disadvantages of course.
Now going all out frost means you can survive major attack all your frost spells have greater range and over effectiveness as well as increasing damage, you can encase yourself in a block of ice which for a time protects you for harm allowing you to regenerate some of your health, soon you won't need to go into the frost tree to get this as they are making this talent available to all. So with this set up you can slow your enemies down for longer while doing mass damage to them or getting away, oh and the end talent "41 pointer" for this tree is a nice water elemental to help you out from time to time. Also going frost against fire type creatures hurts them a whole lot more.

As for going all out fire well that has it's advantages too, massive damage spells like the pyroblast which takes 6 seconds to cast although you might be able to reduce this time slightly, it's your opening attack spell or one used in mid fight if you've just put them on ice with your frost nova which you still get just doesn't have all the frosty advantages. There is a talent called "Presence of Mind" or PoM from the arcane tree which fire mages often get as it doesn't really require many wasted talent point to get and also getting Master of Elements from the Frost tree is useful too. Anyway back to the fire tree, you can go all the way down this and your end talent is "Dragon's Breath" sounds lethal is pretty lethal to anything close range, did someone order a rack of BBQ beef? If you go fire be prepared to die a lot as you really don't have that much in the way of survivablity you can't rely on your frost nova as much as if you went frost nor is it much use again anything the is fire based.
How to tell how an ememy mage is spec'd, see what he does first...
Generally - Fire mages will turn you in to a sheep by polymorphing you yeah it's a nasty trick I know, then warm up that big old pyroblast, hit PoM then Pyro you again, your pretty much dead as the fire tree has some "% chance to cause" effects that mean you could end up burning a little so that's healing out the window if your flying solo. This type of mage is also know as a "3-minute mage" as the PoM cool down is 3-minutes.
Frost mages will hit you with frost nova, frost bolts then ice lance you to death, I'm sure it's an abuse of power as the ice lance does so much damage and can cause another ice lance to hit you as well, double damage in the 1 hit and basically your spell casting is slowed down as well.
High level mages can also steal the spell your about to cast for themselves done correctly they borrow you big heal or big attack.

The advantages can pretty much be summed up thus: Massive damage dealer to a single or multiple target in an area. You can effect escape with frost nova or polymorph and blink. You have good long range skills. Your the only class that can learn how to teleport yourself and others to the major cities. Your crowd control ability is good but it can hard to master this one.
The disadvantages can pretty much be summed up thus: You can only ever wear cloth armor, you generally have low hit points compared to other classes and you have no healing abilities what so ever. Another thing to note is your a very, very mana dependant class without mana your screwed basically..

I almost forgot your really restricted in what you can use as a weapon as all you can use without training is a staff and a wand, with training you can learn to use daggers and one-handed swords.

More Tomorrow.....