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Comment by xabbott

If you are a new mage and wondering when to use this or ice armor. I personally use this for raiding and farming.

Comment by Necrotic

Good for use in raids / instances where the fights can be long and mana regeneration is useful. Not to mention the +resists are always nice. Not much use in PvP.

Comment by Necrotic

Good for use in raids / instances where the fights can be long and mana regeneration is useful. Not to mention the +resists are always nice. Not much use in PvP.

Comment by ChillingOut

I have this armour on whenever i am in a group / raid and know the fights can take over 2 minutes. The mana regeneration is very good, coupled with the Arcane tree talent for 15% more mana regen, i get about 45%, which is not bad at all.

Most of the time on trash in Karazhan i use Molten Armor thought because more crits = mob is down quicker = no real meaning to try and regen your mana as you can drink after the fight anyway! :)

Comment by 70297

A must-have in BM. Mana regen means more than crits there.

Comment by geoffster

This is great for farming, because drinking after 2 kills is annoying. With this your mana regen will make u drink maybe every 5-6 kills or so. However, if you are facing large groups of 3 or more, Ice Armor is usually your best bet.
Mage armor is also not recommended for PvP. You will have buffs from other party members to make up for it anyway.

Comment by 108147

No longer a Magic effect and thus no longer dispellable in Patch 2.4.3.

Comment by 117826

Test notes for patch 2.4.3 state "Frost Armor, Ice Armor, Mage Armor, and Molten Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled."

A positive change for mages, particularly in PVP.

Comment by XodoK

With the addition of 50% reduction of duration of magic effects this Armor will be a handy tool for Mages to deal with Warlocks. Also, 30% mana regeneration will be much more noticeable since WotLK cloth gear will have substantial amount of Spirit on it.

Comment by Marat

Does this stack with the the Arcane talent so it would be 60% while casting?

Comment by 178827

Oh yeah, it really seems like Arcane was buffed a lot... I'm thinking deep Arcane is finally viable, even rivalling the other two trees. Also, with 140 resistance to all magic and a much more useful Mana Shield, Arcane also increases survivability dramatically. Add that up to end of the line Arcane spells dealing tons of damage and lots of criticals with Arcane Potency (I see a mage can almost out-dps a full on warlock with only Arcane Barrage and Fireblast in a rotation:P), and unending mana pools, Arcane will certainly be interresting to spec into.

Comment by 140011

The first armor that mages are able to cast that actually helps you level. =D

* https://www.wowhead.com/cata/spell=6117 plus the Glyph(https://www.wowhead.com/cata/item=42749) is a very solid regen combo. Both available at level 34.

Comment by Madril

Wouldn't the percentages apply multiple rather than additive?

Comment by Railander

Right now this is the best armor for most PvP cases. Unless all your enemies are melee you can change to Frost Armor.

It's sad that Blizzard have no idea how to play a spellcaster. They don't play shadow priests, they dont play mages, they dont play warlocks, they don't play elemental shamans... This 50% magic reduction along with the magic resistance is certainly the most overpowered armor in the game since the old Fel Armor.

I don't know. I think I'm giving up playing spellcasters, going to level my rogue.

Comment by marc314cel

At the time of this writing Arcane is the mage's PvP spec imho.
Arcane gives a big boost to Mage Armor, adds the Slow instant cast, Improved Counterspell and finalizes with Arcane Barrage.

The 50% duration reduction of DoT is nice for people in quest reward gear, to stop them from dieing on the first Warlock curse.

Just one question: does "all magic" include the Physical school?

Edit: grammar

Comment by 1067

Just one question: does "all magic" include the Physical school?

You are very stupid and I feel the need to use this forum to point this out to you and everyone wasting their time by reading this remark.

Comment by 256807

This armor has grown to be pretty nice in WotLK.

PvP
Obviously great for fighting other casters. Resistance and reduces magic durations in half.
This will make a shamans slow last shorter than their cooldown, the fears and stuns from locks and priests lasts shorter etc.

But there is one thing people need to realize:
50% duration is not the same as -50% damage taken from DoTs.
You would just have to reapply the DoTs more often. However, it helps great on DoTs with cooldown and procs (like ignite).
And also on DoTs that start with low damage, and then grow higher and higher. You'll end up only getting the lower ticks.

But remember to remove it if you get Living Bomb on you! :)

PvE
Extra resistances for resistance-based fights.
50% mana regen while casting,.

Comment by flicker

This new spell deals a huge blow against shadowpriests and warlocks, they will see reduced damage output (more GCDs keeping dots up = less time to cast nukes/beam spells) against mages for double the amount of mana. they will lose even more time since this also seems to affect fear/silence/stun procs. and mages already have formidable defenses against magic damage in general, specially dots (iceblock, ice barrier, mana shield, resistances, dampen magic). It just seems like an impossible match for these classes against mages, who, by the way, will kill them with a single button if specced arcane.

this armor should be made dispellable, for the sake of preventing retarded pvp matches

Comment by Rach3l

Does not increase resistance to holy spells. Which becomes important when choosing armors in PVP versus paladins in particular.

Comment by 111153

If You Used Glyphs Pre-Wrath You Were Able To Stack The Same Glyph On Different Slots...Which If you used The 20% Increased Mana Regen Glyph You'd Be Able to Hit...100% Mana Regen While casting If Only The 3rd Major Glyph Was Avaliable At 70...
120% mana Regen...But Then That'd Almost Make No Sense

Comment by LandSavage

just picked my mage up last night, he has been 17 for about 9 months. I was just to busy on my main. I am a mana regen junkie, I believe it is the key to leveling. According to someone above stating it stacks, then the glyph would give you 80%? My my, this character might become addictive at 34, I got him to 21 last night and his 20 skills were sick.

Comment by 171369

As a fire mage I am so longing for this! (Currently level 32)
I am gonna get the mage armor glyph to get 50% regen. Then, at level 40+ i also get:
https://www.wowhead.com/cata/spell=34296#comments

= 80%!

Gotta love being Fire spec nowadays ^^

I think I might go for 2 points of https://www.wowhead.com/cata/spell=18464 too at higher levels. 100% mana regen while casting is no joke! Although, it MIGHT be a little bit overkill... I will have to see for myself hehe!

And about the stacking: 30% + 20% = 50% ...where did u get 80% just like that? You thought ahead like I did maybe? Cuz, NO, multiple glyphs of the same kind CANNOT be stacked.

Comment by taohu

Changed to 50% mana regeneration while casting in patch 3.1, up to 70% with the mage armor glyph. However, this will only stack with Arcane Meditation (which will be buffed to a max of 50% at rank 3 as well) to give a maximum of 100% regeneration while casting.

Comment by 351416

I think they could make this armor and other mage's armor spells into somethign like self-only-auras somewhat like paladin auras or warrior stances since mages will always have one armor or another on. I guess they would have to do something like that for paladin seals and all other long duration/not normally dispellable self-only buffs though.
It would be a good idea since the mana cost is trivial unless you have been occupied and losing mana for 30 minutes constantly. I guess it does matter when they run out if you happen to be in combat, but most players tend to refresh any long duration buff before that could happen.
It would be an interesting and very good idea though.

Comment by Arnen

As of 3.1, this spell gives you 50% of your out-of-the-five-second-rule (spirit-based) mana regen while casting.

Arcane Meditation and Pyromaniac now give you 17/33/50% mana regen while casting, and Glyph of Mage Armor gives 20% extra regen to this spell.

This means that, by going 18 points into the Arcane tree or 33 points into the Fire tree, one can now achieve 100% mana regeneration while casting using Mage Armor, without glyphing the spell. With more than 2/3 points in either talent and the glyph, there is 3/20% extra regen, which is wasted, as while-casting mana regeneration cannot exceed 100%.

Comment by 54491

well , a good mage could always de-curse the agony:) . Although physical dots, like rend or deep wounds are not reduced by mage armor

Comment by 170498

Not enough mages use this ability, particularly for leveling.

50% mana regen while casting means much less downtime. Frost/Ice Armor is nice if you're running to quest objective locations, but while leveling you have the luxury of picking and choosing your targets and when to fight them for the most part, so you shouldn't be getting hit often. Molten Armor is also nice for the crit, but the crit really isn't tremendously helpful. On the other hand, 50% mana regen while casting means that you will be able to fight another 3-4 mobs before you need to drink each time, which over the course of time adds up.

Comment by 133454

Does this work to reduce the time on boss applied debuffs like light bomb, aoe fear, nature's fury and mimiron's napalm shells/heat wave?

Comment by 392114

Does this stack with Pyromaniac as well?

Comment by 64407

Funny how Armor was considered misspelled, yet "...Armor an we ahall actually see..." (...Shall...) wasn't. lol

learn the diffrence between misspell and typo.

Comment by 235419

If I'm right with the wording here this reduces all of harmful magic effects durations by 50%

So things such as diseases, bleeds, and possibly curses (Not sure on this one) are not effected.

Still a very great armor to use in PvP mainly due to the resists.

Comment by 517342

Question: Mage Armor+Arcane Meditation+Glyph of Mage Armor= 120% Mana Regen. Since the cap is 100% and anything attained above 100% wont work, would this work...

Using Mana Shield (w/ Arcane Shielding talent 2/2) would reduce your mana regen (efficiency) by 20% making it 80%. But since you have 120% would that make it 100%?

Comment by 529201

I think that this is very usefull in arenas against locks or other mages combined with this talent and plus a pa lly aura the math looks like this:

Magic absorbtion -----> + 80 to all resistances @ lvl 80

Mage armor ------------> +40 to all resistances + this = 60 resistance

Fire/Frost/Shadow Aura ---> + 130 resistance to fire/frost/shadow

Everything together its like 270 resistance to fire/frost/shadow (depending on the aura that is turned on at that moment)

this is like a lockz or mages worst nightmare :)

Comment by 229947

be warned: spells that have effects when they wear off will happen a lot faster with mage armor on:

Living Bomb explodes at the end, dealing damage. With mage armor active, it will expire twice as fast and therefore explode more otfen.

against a fire mage, this spell can be a bad idea, as not only will they actually gain dps from living bomb, but the standard pvp penetration is 130, so even if you've improved it twice, you've only actually gained 10 resistance, and he's gained explosions that can trigger instant pyroblasts, and will not break Dragon's Breath disorientate.

Comment by 318387

......The duration of all harmful Magic effects used against you is reduced by 50%...... nerf plz

Comment by Norrinir

(...) pala stun become 3s, repentance 5s, dk silence 2s, chains of ice 5s, cyclone 3s (...)

Do not forget that Cyclone is physical debuff and thus isn't affected by Mage Amor. Also, Repentance lasts 6 seconds in PvP and Mage Armor reduces it to 3 seconds.

Nitpicking aside, untalented Mage Armor provides 40 magic resistance, that translates to roughly 9.1% damage reduction against level 80. Talented Mage Armor (60 resistance) then provides about 13% damage reduction.

However, due to diminishing returns, magic resistance provides less damage reduction per point on higher resistance levels. With Magic Absorption (which provides 80 base resistances at level 80, about 16.7% reduction), untalented Mage Armor boosts resistances to 120 (23.1% reduction) - as you can see, Mage Armor provided only 6.4% damage reduction in this case. Talented Mage Armor then boosts resistance to 140 (25.9%), providing only 9.2% reduction.

Side note: New (WotLK) resistance formulae is damage_reduction = r / (r + c); where r is resistance and c is constant - the constant is 400 against level 80.

Modifying this formulae to get damage reduction per one point of resistance, we get: dmg_reduction_per_point = c /

For any constant c, we get lim r → ∞ c / = 0; thus as resistance approaches infinity, damage reduction provided by one point (of resistance) approaches zero. Just note that there's possibly cap of 75% on the damage reduction.

Comment by 492518

Works wonders on Garfrost. Reduces his permafrost duration to 1.5 seconds, just below the ticks. Sacrificing a measly amount of crit (below 10%) in exchange for healer not having to worry about 1 person is gold in this fight.

Plus, mage can Frost Ward. Yeah.

Comment by 353024

Definitely a better choice than Frost/Ice Armor for AoE grinding mages, as this will give benefits without separating your pack.

Comment by 353024

Requires level 34

I may have been mistaken about the stacking, but you definitely get this before level 68...

Edit: For that matter, there isn't even an additional rank of Mage Armor that you get at 68.

Comment by lantrix

With 4.0.1 now live I miss Mage Armor on my lower level mage. In PVE it's harder now to stay alive against other casters.

Comment by 760473

This ability is essential for PVP. 50% reduction to all magical effects (therefore, majority of CCs) is amazing.

With Cataclysm's increased mana pools of nearly 100k, the 3% max mana regeneration from this ability is just too important to give up.

Comment by Centrifuze

crit up to 10k dmg with heroism and trinkets

You guys spelled Bloodlust wrong.

Comment by chuDr3t4

3% of max mana is still 3% of your max mana. Not to say it's bad, i'm just tired of people saying 'WOW HOLY CRAP I HAD 30K MANA IN WOTLK AND NOW I HAVE 100K IN CATA WOOHOO'.
It's stiil important even if you're 60 lvl and have 3k mana pool.

Comment by Elysianfield

To be fair, the value of mage armor does change depending on what level (and gear level) you have. Since the cost of spells remain static (at a given level) but your total mana pool does not (since you, typically at least, get better and better gear even if your level stays constant), mage armor has become one of the few spells that actually gets better and better as you get gear.

The true value of mage armor is in the difference between your maximum mana and your base mana. The bigger the difference between these two values, the "better" mage armor is for you since it significantly increases the amount of time it takes for you to run out of mana.

If a spell has a base cost of 1000 mana and a 1 second cast time (ignoring the effects of latency and assuming perfect chain casting), the effective MP5 being consumed is 5k mana.
If a player has a maximum mana of 50k, then they are generating mana from mage armor at at rate of approximately 1.5k MP5 (noting that the actual percentage is higher than 3% but assuming 3% for simplicity). This player will consume mana at a rate of 3.5k MP5.
if a player has a maximum mana of 100k, then they are generating mana fromm mage armor at a rate of approximately 3k MP5. This player will consume mana at a rate of 2k MP5
In this case, the player will never run out of mana once they have approximately 168k mana

We observe that increasing maximum mana continues to decrease the rate of consumption, simultaneously increasing the time that can be spent casting before running out of mana. Ultimately, if the quality of gear at a particular level were unlimited, you could get to a point where you could out regen even the most costly spells.

Some might say, "well having a larger mana pool lets you cast more spells anyway so mage armor isn't important". They are right to a point; having more mana does indeed let you cast more spells. If, however, we look at things at their logical extremes, it takes an infinite amount of mana to cast spells for infinite amount of time if we ignore the effects of mana generation. If we include the effects of mana regeneration that are *not* based on maximum mana (examples of which I can't think of off the top of my head), than it still takes an infinite amount of mana to cast spells for infinite amount of time. It is only when we include the effects of percentage based mana regen that we get a non infinite answer (i.e. something that is actually useful in this context).

Comment by SolidSnack

That looks like an odd icon. Can anyone tell what it is?

Comment by Thottbot

I think this armor is designed especially for instances when you have a tank taking most of the damage and aren't as worried about getting hit. Obviously when you're out questing it's nice to have frost/ice armor on because you can slow down the enemy if you need to get away and you can rest at your own pace. In an instance you'll want to keep your mana up so you can continue to deal damage without holding your group up.

Comment by Thottbot

Just to give an idea what it does,a little example in numbers.

At lvl45 you heal about 50 mana / 2sec. and have about 3300 mana.
(theoreticlly it would take 132 seconds (2:12min) to fully load while casting)

In a 15 second fight (about mean), grand you 375 mana
(about one more Arcane Missiles spell).

So it helps a bit, but not THAT much.

Comment by Thottbot

Does the 30% regen stack with the extra 15% regen from Arcane Meditation? That would certianly make both more useful.

Comment by Thottbot

This is realy a great spell i cant wait to learn it with my mage!

Comment by Thottbot

This seems like a really usefull spell.... it would make killing things a whole lot quicker and not having to stop everytime for a mana break.

Comment by Thottbot

this is really only useful if u have alot of spirit otherwise it isn't so great, so if ur a int/staminia build it isnt good

Comment by Thottbot

I made a blood elf mage for the arcane talents because of their resistance to everything - 5 and I wanted to make one for the expansion

So with magic absorbtion talent i have base of 15 resist to everything and gain back 5% of my total mana every resist i do. Im also thinking about adding the arcane meditation talent for +15% mana regen while casting

with this combined with the mage armor ill have 20 resist to everything and gain back 5% of my total mana every resist i do and ill have 45% mana regen while casting so the lowest mana regen possible at all times will be 45% of full mana regen while out of battle waiting for mana to recharge

o and there is that 10% chance of clearcasting for me making my next spell free

I'll be drinking water mabey 1/3 of other mages

sure u don't get armor that helps ur dmg reduction or slows enemys down but hey we are mages we have them down to around 20% by the time they get near us anyway

this spell will be awsome

Comment by Thottbot

also usefull if u get mana drained while casting.

Comment by Thottbot

I have not used it yet. Nor I know it's main use.. but I can imagine this being imba when doing instances/raids. It isn't good for the dmg-wh0res though, who wanna be top on the dmg meters.. spec fire and AoE the hell out of them. There you go, dmg..

Comment by Thottbot

This would be a great spell for an arcane mage mostly int/spi geared. Basically negate the mana lost using imp mana shield. Casting without interruption and not losing much mana usin the shield.

Comment by Allakhazam

Mana DOES regen during battle but for 5 seconds after a spell is cast mana does NOT regenerate. What this armor does and what MP/5 does is allow for mana regen during those 5 seconds after a spell is cast.

Comment by Allakhazam

im lvl61 and i still dont get what does this do :S

does mana regen while in battle? if so whats the percentage?

Comment by Allakhazam

what this does is behave like an MP5, based off your built-in mana regeneration, which is determined by your spirit. Basically, if you're looking at your Spell page under your character screen, at the bottom you should see Mana Regen. If you hold your mouse cursor over it, it'll have a description of each. For example, my Mana Regen while NOT casting is 80 MP5. This spell makes me have 24 MP5 while casting, cuz 24 is 30% of 80. Understand now? Yes, it stacks with the Arcane talent Arcane Meditation, giving you 60% of your normal mana regen during casting. Yes, it works during combat. It also works during channeling.

Comment by Allakhazam

Does this work while channeling spells?

Comment by Allakhazam

Mana DOES increase while in battle. This can be shown using a wand.

This spell though confuses me also.

Does it act like armor same as Ice Armor with the magic reduction?

Links

Mage Armor

Mage Armor	Level 85

Instant

Increases your resistance to all magic by 46 and causes you to regenerate 3% of your maximum mana every 5 sec. In addition, the duration of all harmful Magic effects used against you is reduced by 35%. Only one type of Armor spell can be active on the Mage at any time. Lasts 30 min.

Buff

Mage Armor

Resistance to all magic schools increased by 46 and regenerating 3% of maximum mana every 5 sec. Duration of all harmful Magic effects reduced by 35%.
30 minutes remaining

Spell Details

Duration

30 minutes

School

Arcane

Mechanic

n/a

Dispel type

n/a

GCD category

Normal

Cost

None

Range

0 yards (Self)

Cast time

Instant

Cooldown

n/a

GCD

1.5 seconds

Effect #1

Apply Aura: Mod Resistance (All)
Value: 6
PVP Multiplier: 1

Effect #2

Apply Aura: Mod Total Power Regen % (Mana)
Value: 4% every 5 seconds
PVP Multiplier: 1

Effect #3

Apply Aura: Mod Debuffs Duration % (Magic)
Value: -34%
PVP Multiplier: 1

Flags

Cannot be used while shapeshifted
Generates no threat
Allow Low Level Buff
Include in Advanced Combat Log
Do Not Count For PvP Scoreboard
Aura Points On Client

Mage Armor

Buff

Spell Details

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