Warlocks and Mages are the two support dps classes. Their main roles does not only include the provision of good dps, but also to enforce crowd control and silences on the adversaries. Mages have Sheep as a spell for Crowd Control, this turns opponents into sheep rendering them unable to do anything. They also have counter spell which either silences all trees for 4 seconds or if a person is counter spelled during a cast, they cannot cast a spell in that tree (fire/holy/shadow/frost) for 8 seconds. Besides these abilities, Mages possess great damage per second (dps), making them great as a support class. Also they have great kiting abilities and find it very easy to keep melee out. “Blink” gives them the ability to shoot 15 yards ahead, “frost nova” allows them to freeze everyone within a specific rance for x seconds, and Mages can wear armor that when hit will slow down or freeze other opponents. However to keep balance from these powerful abilities Mages are notorious for being weak and liable to die quite quickly while in combat.

On prolonged fights, Frost mages are best used with teams that are more defensive. Fire Mages are not able to survive sustained damage for long spells of time. Frost Mages have 2 ice blocks which are immune to everything except heals, ice barriers for absorbing damage, they have further kiting options like chill armor, and a pet with its own frost nova and abilities which will greatly increase a Mage’s dps. Due to these abilities which are best used for defensive teams, Warriors will hop on a Frost Mage if it has Blessing of Freedom to get through all the kiting. In 5v5 areans, Frost Mages are not often targeted since an ice block will stop all dps on him. Although this does not apply until very high brackets of 5v5, Mages high up often spend the majority of their time crowd controlling opponents and mitigating heals and dps through CS and kiting. Mages will only really start to dps once one of the opponents drop below the 50% range, then the mage goes all out hoping to drop the target.

Convesely Fire Mages are more often in aggressive team, such PvE Clickers and some dps 4 line ups. Fire Mages have much less chance of survival than Frost Mages but make for this with their ability to put out incredibly hight burst dps. Fire Mages show up best when people who play them have learned to kite them effectively. Deep Fire Mages when attacked have the chance to sprint, and do not lose the frost nova and blink allowing them to stave off the other opponents. In one instance I had a problem in a 3v3 arena with a Fire Mage who was amazingly good at sheeping, cciing and kiting and we just could not bring him down at all. In a short amount of time he was also able to put out insane damage in very little time. He was able to take me down, with over 13k hp and 250 resilience (which is very good), in only 8 seconds after he counter spelled me. Such damage does definitely come handy with 4 dps teams, where their goal is to kill off opponents very quickly. In this scenario, the Mage is usualy the first to get attacked unless there is a Shadow Priest around, so its job is to get either a sheep or a cs off at the start and then unload all their abilities on their target before it dies, although as mentioned before some of the tope players will manage to survive.

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Second Life + Google + IBM = Open Source Avatars? TECH.BLORGE.com, Australia -9 hours ago It hits the other virtual worlds — World of Warcraft? Quake? Maybe it'll even stomp through Google Earth. It won't happen today, but the first step was just … Is Microsoft headed toward a virtual world?Austin American-Statesman (subscription) Digging Deeper Your Guide to Virtual WorldsMediaShift all 104 news articles

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