Mage AoE Farming Is Priced in Mana
Most income on this site belongs to a profession. This one belongs to a class ability: a mage clearing a packed room earns from trash, cloth and the odd green, and pays for all of it in mana, drink time and repairs before any of it reaches a vendor.
Where the coin in an AoE pull comes from
An AoE pull does not pay in one lump. Most of what drops off a cleared room is grey trash sold on the way out, and the rest is cloth, a few whites and the occasional recipe or green worth posting. The vendor half arrives the minute you leave; the auction half arrives whenever somebody buys it. A mage who counts only the vendor coin is reading half the route, and what vendors pay per stack is the floor under the other half.
- Grey trash, sold at the first vendor you pass.
- Cloth, which goes to the auction in stacks rather than singly.
- Greens and recipes, priced one item at a time.
The second thing a pull sells is time. Clearing a room in a handful of casts is the appeal; the cost is the sit-down afterwards and the walk to the next camp. A route that looks dense on paper can return less per evening than a quieter one with shorter gaps, which is the same arithmetic behind what a dungeon run returns. The comparison most mages actually face is against bringing other people, and solo runs against group runs answers differently depending on how drops are split.
Mana is the cost line, not the damage
Every pull is paid for before it earns. The mage spends mana to gather the pack, mana to hold it, mana to kill it, and then spends minutes drinking the bar back. Water is the visible part of that bill, and conjured water only covers the casts spent conjuring it; the rest is bought from a cook or a vendor. That is why the mana bill casters pay belongs next to repairs in any route plan that claims to be honest.
The second part of the bill is time rather than coin. Drinking is dead time, and the ratio of casting minutes to drinking minutes decides whether a route is worth repeating. A pull that kills 1 extra pack but adds 2 sit-downs is not an improvement. Players who track this end up counting mana per pack cleared rather than mana per cast, and a caster's restock bill is the same number written in gold.
Dying is the third line and the one most plans leave out. An AoE pull that goes wrong usually goes wrong completely: the repair, the run back and the lost drink time all land in the same stretch of the evening, and what a death costs is enough on a thin route to erase the hour that produced it.
Downranking and where it stops paying
Downranking means casting a lower rank of a spell because the top rank is more than the job needs. A pack of weaker mobs dies to several ticks of a cheaper area spell just as surely as to the full rank, and the saving goes straight into fewer drinks. Control spells follow the same logic: a snare or a nova does the same work at any rank, because what you are buying is the pack standing still, not the damage printed on the tooltip.
Where it fails is at the edges. Downrank too far and the pack lives long enough to chew through everything you saved, which is why route advice contradicts itself so often: the rank that is efficient on one pull is a wipe on the next one, 2 levels higher. The usable version is to settle the rank per route rather than per spell, and to re-check it whenever the mobs or the spell numbers change.
Gear moves the same decision around. More spell damage makes a low rank finish sooner, more spirit shortens the drink, and which one is worth buying depends on whether the route is limited by kills or by sitting down. That is a shopping decision as much as a talent one, and what a caster weapon costs is the largest line in it.
What we do not know about this in Forever
We have not seen Blizzard publish anything specific about mage AoE pulls in Forever. There is no statement on spell rank costs, nothing on how Legacy talent points interact with area damage, and no confirmation that the old farming spots behave the way they did in earlier Classic versions. Beta testers argue about all 3, and the argument is live rather than settled. Any fixed mana cost per pull you read, on this site or a forum, is a player estimate until it turns up in notes.
2 further things sit outside the class entirely. How crowded a spot is and how fast it refills depend on how layers affect respawns, which no spell rank fixes. And test builds move numbers, so a route tuned one week can read differently after changes landing in beta patches. We will write here when something is confirmed rather than observed, and we will say which it was.
Questions
Does mage AoE farming replace a profession?
No. It is income from a class ability, so it sits alongside gathering and crafting rather than instead of them. A mage still has 2 profession slots, and the clearing route mostly produces cloth and vendor trash, which is a narrow supply line compared with what a gathering slot returns. Most mages who farm this way treat it as the evening activity and keep a profession for the parts of the market the route does not touch.
Does downranking always save gold?
No. It saves mana per cast, which only becomes gold if the pack still dies before the saving is spent holding it. On weak mobs the lower rank is clearly cheaper; on tougher ones the fight runs long, more casts go in, and the bill ends up higher than the full rank would have been. The rank is a property of the route, not of the spell, and it has to be settled by trying it rather than by copying somebody else's bar.
What decides the mana cost of one pull?
The size of the pack, how long the mobs survive, how many control casts the pull needed, and how much of the bar you were starting from. Gear changes it in both directions, since spell damage shortens the fight and spirit shortens the recovery. Because all 4 of those vary by route, a single mana figure per pull is not a useful number to carry between spots, which is why we do not publish one.
Has Blizzard confirmed anything about mage AoE in Forever?
Not that we have seen. The spell rank costs, the talent interactions and the behaviour of the classic farming spots are all being discussed by testers rather than documented by the developers. We treat forum reports as observations, mark them as such, and update when something appears in official notes.
Sources
- Blizzard's official Classic hub, where class and profession changes are posted when they become official rather than observed — WoW Classic official site.
- The Blizzard forums, where the beta argument about AoE pulls and spell rank costs is currently running — Blizzard WoW forums.