The stigma Wizards have

It's no secret Wizards have bit of a stigma (in classic especially) for not being all the great in groups, some even doubt their value in raids. I always liked Wizards in my group, never really played one. Thinking about rolling one on Mischief, interested to here thoughts of the TLP audience, do you hesitate to take on that LFG Wizard in your groups?

Just don't be the guy that blows all his mana on 1 or 2 regular mobs and then goes afk for 15 minutes.

I've always enjoyed wizards as well, especially in TLP. The DPS, ports, and eventual evacs are a good save. The only issue is the aggro control. It seems that quite a few wizards I hang with have trouble keeping their dps up while keeping themselves up as well.

Lots of valuable wizards out there. The problem is that a fair percentage of the others either go AFK a lot, or they are paying too much attention and go ham on their nukes, which causes its own problems.

I've seen that as well. They toe the line between doing very nice DPS, or getting smashed into oblivion (or at minimum causing aggro bouncing).

The class is more subtle than people think, requires more skill than people think and is one resist away from being useless. It's a high skill floor class, I think. You've really got to be good at finding the sweet spot in managing aggro, damage and mana useage.

Exactly, and that is what appeals to me.

One thing to consider if you are going to play a wizard on a TLP, they are not gear-dependent like most classes are. And aside from the teleports and evacs, wizards bring more utility to the group than they are commonly given credit. First off, as with a lot of classes, they can ghetto CC using Root. At level 27 they can snare, though it's not nearly as mana efficient as other classes. And once they get the Staff of Temperate Flux, they can pull. It does no damage, and have never had a tank fail to pull aggro from me on the first attempt. Also wizards can be very helpful in scouting dungeons. Eye of Zomm and an /assist button can make splits workable. Yeah, wizards have a bad rap as being AFK a lot, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Wizards are crap until they start getting their good familiars past Classic (reduce resists, fizzles, etc). Also, their AA's help a butt-ton on mana consumption, damage-per-mana, etc.

In classic they're garbage because of the massive mana costs, high resist rates, and lack of focus items.

Focus items need to be re-implemented for TLPs. It's absurd that they took them out, because a LOT of class balancing/mechanics are heavily focused on "Focus" items.

Edit: It also doesn't help that a LOT of popular Raid targets are "Belly Casted". aka: You gotta be within melee/aoe/mechanics range to actually hit them. Even then you're getting resisted like a mofo. Melee dps is just far superior in terms of sustained dps with low snap-aggro. Also, melee dps is "free" constant dps.

Wizard life is rough, I've done Wizard, Necro, Rogue and Mage now on a fresh TLP during classic. They are a mage without a pet in groups that also can't provide mala for the chanters charm pets. If you aren't getting in a guild/friends group then just using LFG is pretty tough.

That being said, it's still a lot better than being a rogue in classic!

I ran parses as a newbie wizard and up until the 30s wizard is very good DPS when played even decently. However, after that mage pets start to take off and charmed pets really get to be OP.

I think taking wizards is fine, just make sure they don't play that whole "blow your mana bar then sit out" style.

This is my experience as well. A few odd fights you can do really well on, like Vulak and AoW. Once Luclin rolls around, you're gonna parse #1 pretty frequent. XP groups are still a challenge when you can't use a horse though.

Wizard I think is the one class that has a playstyle pre-PoP that is very 1 dimensional
(I only played one up to GoD (as a secondary main) so I have no right to comment beyond that)

The spell line up does not really help the class be a nice "active" class, if it had a few lower damage but more mana efficient spells it would play a lot better at lower levels, rains were an option when you had a safe place to use them but I always wanted a higher activity level from the class than what it had.

I did used to do a lot of CC (root & snare) in the group I was regularly playing with but other than that activity it was 1-2 casts & sit on my backside to regain mana..

It is as bad as they say. Honestly, I think a wizard does less total damage than a paladin over the course of a grind session. They're great on raids where you can dump a whole mana pool into a boss, but for sustained damage in a chain-pulling group, they're absolutely terrible. Like on par with a meleeing bard or something. Seriously, it's complete trash.

If you look into the mana regen rates and compare it against spell costs, it comes out to such a pitifully low amount of DPS that it's almost funny. It's not impossible to find groups, but I know some people avoid inviting wizards unless it's guildies and friends.

The problem is you have to fit your spells into a small window where you arent going to waste your own or someone elses mana and pay attention constantly to hit that window. You also have to think about aoe radii ect to not hit mezed mobs to even be mana efficient in multi mob situations.

And after all that you get to be 'okay' dps. Just play a /petattack or /autoattack class and do more with bare minimum effort

I'd argue Wiz is the actual worst class in Classic. Mana regen, even with buffs, is so slow, that if you look at your overall DPS over say...an hour in a group, you are lightyears behind other DPS. Monks/mages/necro will seriously outdamage you. In raids, if the fight is short, you blow all of your mana, and you don't get resisted, you will be ok.

Wizard is kind of a suckers game. People see bigish numbers for a single hit, and get excited about it, but if you start parsing over the course of a leveling session, you'll see that the DPS is really pathetic. It's not at all unusual for a monk or mage to parse 4x your DPS over an hour session.

It's a very simple problem, you don't have enough mana, and it doesn't come back fast enough. Plane of hate is a great example of why not to play a wiz in classic. You'll be able to cast maybe 7 nukes, most will outright resisted, or at best partial, and then you'll sit for 15 minutes getting mana back.

Now...if you want to play an incredibly lazy class, and make money porting people around, by all means, best class in the game. If you like watching netfix while you play, and hitting your /assist hotkey/macro once every 30 seconds, you've hit the jackpot. Wiz is definitely the 'carry me to 50' class.

I'm sure you'll be able to find groups, there will be tons of them, and most people don't actually know just how bad wiz DPS is over the course of time.

One aspect being overlooked here is that often, espicially in classic, you don't have unlimited mobs to pull. You're in camps like unrest mainroom/FP/basement that have a finite amount of mobs worth killing.

Wizards shine in this scenario has it allows the kill times to remain fast, thus leading to faster respawns, but since you're not in combat constantly wizards are able to med up some mana.

This is the main reason why they are underrated.

Even in cases like that, they remain worse than magicians and monks, necros as well, and probably even rogues despite the fact that they kind of suck early on. I did some math once, and while it was on P99, the conclusion I came to was that if a necro's pet got to auto-attack for at least eight seconds per mob, a necro using exclusively their nukes was more efficient DPS than a wizard with clarity. There's no reason this would be different on a TLP.

What wizards have is lures and bane spells. Those are really good on raids. In an exp group, the class is so hilariously awful that it beggars belief. The best you can possibly hope for is one nuke per mob, and literally any melee class will do more damage auto-attacking for the duration of the fight. The math is just against the wizard class. There's no hypothetical scenario that changes this fact.

While chain-pulling infinite mobs won't be a guarantee in vanilla, it's not like it can't happen. If there's eight picks of LGuk and you go into one with seven players in it, you can hold an entire wing of the zone. There's no telling how long the pick will remain sparsely populated, but as long as it does, you're golden. Infinite chain pulls are absolutely possible early on, it's just a matter of getting the good pick. It's not as if the zones inherently don't have enough mobs.

On a new TLP launch it's hard to see wizards being worse than rogues. Typically a rogue enters unrest and proceeds to look for a mage, possibly the rogue even brought a spell scroll with them.