If you're looking to maximize your Mage's AoE farming potential in World of Warcraft Season of Discovery, you've come to the right place. AoE farming can be an efficient way to level up and gather resources quickly. In this guide, we will provide you with tips and strategies to optimize your Mage's AoE farming capabilities.

6 Tips to Mage AoE Farming in WoW Season of Discovery Phase 2

#1. Jumping to Increase AoE Distance

For those that don't know AOE that come from players models can have their range increased by jumping when they cast the spell. We learned this back in classic when we were speed running Blackwing Lair Raid. We used to jump to maximize the distance for that sappers would go. This works well with all AOE that come from the player. When using Arcane explosion and it not hitting the mob, neither of us move but when jump in the air, the Arcane explosion gets a little extra distance. A lot of the time when we are Arcane explosion spamming, we will be jumping to make sure we are hitting every mob in my range.

#2. Avoiding Daze

Daze is a pretty annoying mechanic, it reduces your move speed by 50%. And if you are unlucky, you can get chain dazed and die. There are two pretty cool ways you can avoid this mechanic, Daze has a chance to happen when a mob is hitting you in your back, you can avoid days easily by making sure you turn and face the mobs as they are hitting you. Another way to avoid days is from shield effects, you are unable to be Daze when you have a shield buff applied. This includes power word shield, mana shield, and Ice barrier. You can only be dazed by melee attacks, not range attacks. Using mana shield and Ice barrier as well as facing mobs will be key to future farms in avoiding days.

#3. Leeway 

Leeway is in the game for lag and melee attacking, it's a latency system that buffers melee combat to allow people to hit targets a little further than you normally would in case there is weird lag going on. Leeway attacks increase the range of the melee swings pretty massively. Melee attacks have an increased range when the player is strafing side to side or jumping. When someone in combat is strafing or jumping, melee range is increased by a lot. This happens for enemy mobs too, if you are strafing or jumping, they will benefit from leeway. This is a trick we see use a lot currently in Wailing Caverns. You can avoid a lot of melee damage taken when abusing leeway correctly such as backpedaling.

#4. Iceblock Mob Stacking

Iceblock Mob Stacking is used for more than just saving your life, it is very important for getting a lot of mobs stacked in one spot. When you ice block, all range mobs will stop using their range attacks. No bow shots, no spell cast, nothing. When you're an in ice block, all range mobs will run to your position and start auto attacking your ice block. There are a lot of farms where you don't have the ability to line of sight and get range mobs closer to you. You will see Mages constantly using ice block to get a large amount of units stacked for an easy kill phase. When you leave an ice block, never jump, as this will cause you to take a lot more damage from melee attacks. If you just hold forward out of the ice block and spam nova, you'll be able to avoid a lot of instant damage coming out of the ice block.                                                                                                                                                                                

#5. How to Face Tank AoE

The first play style we want to go over is face tanking which we use a lot in open world farms or versus mobs such as deadmines. The key interaction for the face tank farming is living flame and regeneration. Living flame does spell fire damage which counts as Arcane damage for the healing from regeneration. The amount of healing you receive will keep you alive versus some pretty insane damage. You want to make sure you have temporal beacon on yourself before casting living flame. We like to get four to five living bombs out then living flame. Then you just Spam Arcane explosion until all the mobs die. Add on the extra healing you receive from the Arcane explosion spam and it's a pretty incredible what you can live through.

#6. How to Dungeon Blizzard AoE 

This is the play style we expect to be dominant going forward into Season of Discovery. Blizzard will be amazing for massive pools where you can't handle the incoming damage from Elite slapping you. You can play this style with or without regeneration. In phase 2, we will have five points in the shatter for 50% increased crit chance, it will be pretty amazing what you want to do for this style is grab as many mobs as you can and then get to your kite spot. You will then start throwing out six to eight living bombs, living flame and then begin to Blizzard kite. By using living flame after the living bombs are out, you'll ensure that the Blizzard slow is keeping all of the mobs stacked tightly in the living flame, making sure they're taking maximum damage. Add on the living bomb crits from fingers of frost and you speed up the kill phase so much. Come phase two with all the extra mana and talents we will have, this style will be king for a lot of the content.