I've come over to the Mage forums looking for some information. I'm an SV spec Hunter, and I've just recently started running Heroics with some people I've been running non-heroic level 70 content with for several weeks. Included in our rag-tag bunch is a Frost Mage, and he's getting mightily frustrated with me.
There are two things of concern to me, and I can't really speak to him about it because I don't know nearly enough about mages to have a valid perspective. The concerns are around managing threat and use of AoE.
For Hunters, threat management is pretty straightforward. When we get close to the tank's threat line, Feign Death to clear threat and then start fresh. Only in the longest of fights do we need to do this more than once or twice. So far as I know, Mages have no such option to dump threat, so threat management for them seems probably a little more tricky.
As far as AoE goes, anything that does damage to a mob in a Freeze Trap will break the trap. In this particular case, I think if our Frost Mage hears, "Don't break my traps!" over Vent one more time after he uses Frost Nova, he's going to try very hard to reach through his monitor and throttle me. The trouble seems to stem from one of two situations: either we're fighting in close quarters and I'm limited to where I can place my traps without either putting myself in the dead zone relative the tank mob (ie. I can't shoot at all) or backing myself into a wall where I'm going to take a couple of hits before the mob gets into my trap. In non-heroic instances, this was rarely an issue...I could take a couple of hits no problem. In Heroic instances, two hits is often enough to kill me. If one of them (much less both) happens to be a crit, I'm pretty much a goner. The other is when the Mage has been moving around a lot and seems to forget about my traps when he busts off a Frost Nova.
The two kind of play off one another. He's complained in the past that it's hard to manage threat when you get a bunch of back-to-back crits. I can accept that. Unfortunately, his instant response when he pulls aggro off the tank is to Frost Nova. He doesn't stop to think that he's already been bouncing around the field like a madman and gone too close to my trapped mob. He'll forget to keep an eye on his sheeped mob and when it breaks out of sheep and goes after him, he runs around trying to resheep it and when he gives up trying to get the cast off...Frost Nova.
I'm doing my concerted best to place my traps where they're the least likely to find themselves in range of the next knee-jerk Frost Nova, but sometimes my options are very limited. It seems to me like the situation would be much better if he had some better strategies for managing threat and was able to keep a closer eye on his sheeped mobs (and target them quickly to resheep them easier) so that he spent less time in run-around-panicked mode breaking my traps and more time blasting out the dps.
Any ideas for threat management? Addons that might be helpful for this sort of thing? Experiences with Huntards that blame mages for breaking their traps when it was actually the Huntard that could have been doing something differently?
Thanks in advance for your input.