Rotations

[forgedbyrock]

There's a lot of great information about mages on this forum but I haven't seen anything about rotations. I played hunter back in vanilla, but decided to roll mage this go round and was just wondering what my rotation should be for leveling with frost/fire and endgame pve and pvp with frost/fire.

[Lindow]

For the most part it's pretty much a spam of frostbolt and fireball. Frost mages gotta make sure 5 stacks of Winter's Chill are always up, which is pretty easy considering that all damaging frost spells refresh it. Fire mages also need to keep 5 stacks of Improved Scorch on their target, so you'll pretty much open up with scorch and then proceed to spam fireball with one eye on your debuff timer, and throw a quick scorch 2 seconds before it expires to refresh it.
I only raided as a mage in TBC, so I might be wrong, but TBC was pretty much like that. I was the only fire mage in my raids, so I would open stacking Imp Scorch then Fireball -> Fireball -> Fireball. Fire Blast only in moving situations, obviously.

Dealing damage in end game content isn't complicated for a mage. I don't consider myself to be more than an above-average player, if I'm that at all, and I had no problems topping the damage meters, or making it to top-5 in every fight. It just takes dedication, getting geared, farming your flasks, etc...

[Astixium]

Our only rotation atm is "Frostbolt until 90% of your mana -> Use Robe of the Archmage -> Frostbolt until 75% of your mana -> Use Major Mana Potion -> Frostbolt until 80% of your mana -> Use Mana Ruby -> Frostbolt until you have Major Mana Potion up and use it on CD -> Frostbolt until you have Mana Citrine up and use it on Cooldown."
Popping Arcane Power (if you're specced into it) comes down to your familiarity with the tank, if you know he is decent pop it after 5 stacks of winters chill are up, if you don't trust him and overaggro already wait a bit more.

As for fire, scorch until 5 debuffs and do the same thing with your mana management refreshing scorch debuff in between (if you're assigned to do so) but that's irrelevant since we have waaaaaay more content to face before we can think of going fire.

[Lazermon]

dark/demonic runes > rubies

[Astixium]

dark/demonic runes > rubies

That also, I just don't expect your everyday mage to carry dark runes around. They should if they are raiding tho. +1