Something else you can do, if you have other ranged classes you can rely on, is put a target mark on one of them (I like triangle or circle, they show up best in most situations) and have her stick close to that person. Theoretically, the marked person will stay out of the fires, so as long as she’s attentive and moves with them, you won’t have to yell at her on vent. It’s something we used to do in - for example - Kara on Nightbane where we had a couple people who couldn’t see the ground AE’s, and it worked well once they got used to watching their marker.
Scorch vs Fireball: Scorch isn’t just “half a fireball”. Due to the way the game rewards longer casting spells, not to mention the many strong talents that prop it up, Fireball winds up easily dishing out more hurt than two Scorches. Scorch, however, exists for those times when a fireball just isn’t practical. If you’re in a running battle with something then it’s much easier to stop and squeeze off a quick Scorch in between sprints rather than wind up a full Fireball, but without the hefty mana cost and cooldown of Fire Blast. It’s a complementary spell that fits in between those other two. It also fills in the role of plink-spell, to pick off weak additional targets like totems, at least until you get Ice Lance or for the targets a Lance won’t quite kill.
For the PVPers out there, Scorch is also stealthy - it has no projectile graphic, you just wave your hands and the target goes pop. If you lob a fireball, it has a glorious billowing trail pointing right back to your position, but you can Scorch to your heart’s content often without the target noticing.
Hellfire vs Rain of Fire: Hellfire has a larger total area of effect, does at least a quarter more DPS, and costs less mana - in short, it’s outright superior. When a healer is available, the self damage is pretty trivial, it’s more of a psychological restriction than an actual one. Heck, most raiding warlocks consider the self-damage of Hellfire to be a blessing. Player-caused deaths don’t cause durability damage to your equipment, so if you’re in a situation where death is obviously coming to greet you, you can suicide via Hellfire to save some money 
It’s not Rain of Fire that makes Hellfire obsolete, it’s Seed of Corruption.
Another mage question:
Any good guides out there on setting up my spell toolbars/hotkeys? On my paladins I have a small selection of abilities that I use in combination for just about everything, and I’ve got them grouped in a way that is convenient for me, with less-used incidental abilities placed where I can easily pop them if needed. But my mage, even though she’s only lvl 22 … dang, I’ve already got so many different spells that I can’t find room for all of them.
Oh, well then. I’d say that’s a legitimate reason to be playing on a shitty computer. (Pretty much the only one, actually.) Shout away!
If you mean you hope the gender’s right, yup!
I’m assuming by “strongest” you mean “has the most armor.” This is actually a pretty common mistake for new players to make. Once you start getting armor with stat bonuses, the stats are almost always going to be more important than how much armor the item has.
To pull up the list that **sohvan **posted earlier, here is what you want to look for (I rearranged the order to be more-or-less the priority you want):
Good Stats:
Strength
Agility
Stamina
Hit rating
Armor penetration rating
Attack power
Critical strike rating
Expertise rating
Haste rating
"Bad" Stats:
Spirit
Intellect
Spellpower
Spell penetration
Restores X mana per Y seconds
One way to open up some spell hotkey slots: Get the addon called “PortalBox”. It will let you pop up a panel that has all teleport and portal spells on it as buttons, and also lets you know how many reagents you have remaining for casting those spells.
Something else you might look into is macros. My 52 Mage uses a macro for every city she can teleport or create a portal to: when she’s solo, the button teleports; when she’s in a party or a raid, the button creates a portal (with no modifier key) or teleports her (with any modifier key).
Make sure you have all four extra action bars enabled, too: you’ll use all of 'em.
DagAssist. It’s out of date, but still works with 3.2. It’s really nice, it moves all your non-combat but still often-used stuff to a single pulldown menu, including not only portal spells but professions, hearthstone, and other class-specific stuff. It’s very useful.
Is that frequently true with belt buckles? With almost every other common crafted item I’ve needed, the AH price for the item is cheaper than the AH price for the mats. It drives me nuts.
The others have given you lots of good feedback on statistics, but just to make this part clear: do not rate your armor based on the “armor” statistic (at least not after level 20 or so). All armor that has the same level requirement will have pretty close to the same armor stat anyway, the the other stats are much more important.
Here’s what I did:
First, figure out your fighting style. I like to have all of my offensive spells on my left hand (the number keys across the top of the keyboard), my buffs and defensive spells on my right hand (the number pad on the right of the keyboard), and everything else arranged in groups where I can click it with the mouse or look down to see the shortcut key I’ve assigned.
I loaded the “Dominoes” add-on, which allows me to arrange a row of buttons all the way down the left side of the screen, across the bottom, and up the right. Infrequently-used stuff (ports, professions, pets…) are tucked off to the sides. I arrange a block of buttons in the lower-right the same shape as the number pad.
On all of my tunes, I use the “H” key for healing (on the mage, it’s potions, bandages, and food – on the priest, it’s spells) and the “P” key for mana potions & things (on the mage, it also includes evocation). “Control” makes it smaller, “Shift” makes it bigger, “Control-Shift” is the biggest.
The zero key on the number pad is one of the biggest and easiest-to-hit keys on the keyboard, so I put my “super-escape” spell there (e.g. Ice Block or Invisibility).
If you’d like a screen shot of my UI, let me know and I’ll make one.
The cheaper-than-mats crafted items are generally going to be things that the crafter made a bunch of to level their skill, thus flooding the market. Things like belt buckels and BOE crafted epics are still in high enough demand on most servers for it to be worthwhile to just buy the mats and have them made.
I’ll check out the suggested addons for my mages - thanks 
I can see already that I’ll need to set up my mages’ action bars in a completely different way from my other toons. I use Bartender, and my “stock” action bars are set up like so:
Bar 1: Lower-left corner; Contains my primary combat abilities
Bar 2: Same position as Bar 1, accessed via Shift-2; Contains my profession buttons
Bar 3: Right-center edge; holds all my food/drink/bandages/potions/hearthstone
Bar 4: Right edge below Bar 3; shrunk to 5 spaces; used to hold activate-able quest items, such as the fishing net for the Howling Fjord Kalu’ak daily
Bar 5: Left-center edge; Holds my mounts and trinkets
Bar 6: Directly above Bar 1; Holds “utility” abilities.
This arrangement works well for my melee toons; clearly it needs some work for my casters.
Thanks for the explanations regarding gemming, guys – very helpful.
However, one additional note regarding the hit cap – I asked around while playing with the hunter DPS spreadsheet at femaledwarf.com (which is an awesome resource for 80 hunters as it’s much easier to use than downloading an .xlsx file and mucking about with that) because it was telling me that the planned hit-bedazzlement was putting me rather over cap. It turns out that I had forgotten about the additional hit from Focused Aim, which I have 3/3 in. D’oh. So the cap for me is actually 164, which is a relief as I was trying to count up how much g I’d be out otherwise. 
Well, our organized “price fixing” scheme to sell Saronite Ore for 25g/stack doesn’t seem to be working. There are a handful of mindless undercutters who have managed to drop the market price from 20g to 15g to 10g/stack. And by “mindless” I mean that it appears the people selling for 10g have completely failed to notice that a stack of 20 Saronite Bars vendors for 25g. It takes 2 Saronite Ores to make 1 Saronite Bar, but that works out to 12g 50s from a vendor per stack of ore that has been smelted, and you get to keep the whole 12.50, instead of losing part of it to AH commission. Selling Saronite Ore on the AH for anything less than 15g/stack is cutting your own throat.
Also, I came to the conclusion that selling Saronite Bars on the AH is not cost-effective, because a stack of 20 comes with a 15g deposit, so you’re already down 15g the first time a stack doesn’t sell.
So I’ve passed this information on to our little consortium’s organizer, suggesting that we all either just sit on our inventory for a while, or just smelt & vendor our stockpiles and wait for supply & demand to bring the prices back up.
Yeah, we kind of went :smack: - we knew they were in real financial trouble but didn’t realize exactly how crummy her computer situation was until we bugged her yet again about Standing in the Green Stuff. Marking another ranged person is a good idea, too, and my husband (when he plays his healer shaman) is trying to get her to stand near him so she stays safer.
Ooooo, shiiiiny. Downloaded.
When I made my draenei mage I chose the darkest available skin color for her and gave her dark hair and horns. But I hadn’t anticipated how completely awesome she would look when I dressed her in the Black Velvet Robes that I’ve had sitting in my guild bank just waiting for a clothie to reach a high enough level to wear them 
Check her out:
Linky no workity, unfortunately.
Damn, but I love draenei ladies. Even sexier than BElf women.
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I’m in Gadgetztan killing Wastewater Thieves and Bandits and stuff. If I use my thunderclap, does it “summon” other bad guys? I’ve been reluctant to use it for that reason - also my shouts - same question.
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I know my rep is gaining strength (I’m honored in SW), but what does it take to get adored, or is that even in there?
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Battle strategy: If I make a kill and approach another quest enemy, I make Wolkie back away from them and lead them into the position where the dead one is. Is that what y’all do, and does it do any good?
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HOW many action bars can I load? I currently have two, and I stay away from “Defensive Stance” because I think that’s used mostly for tanking, is that right? Also, my guru, Amberale gave me the impression that I should not use D. Stance yet.
Thanks!
q
I see what you mean, Rik!
Need me some of that Enzyte, though!
Q
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At your level, I think if you’re close enough to another bad guy to make them mad with Thunderclap, they’d probably run up to beat you up anyway, even without using it. Don’t take my word as gospel though!
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After Honored there is Revered, then Exalted. Basically you have to do a whole lot of quests that give you rep for them, and maybe even turn in a bunch of cloth to their Cloth Quartermaster.
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That’s pretty good - typically the area where you’ve already killed an enemy should be safe for a little while, unless there’s an enemy who “patrols” through that spot at some point. If you wait long enough, an enemy will eventually “repop” on that spot to replace the one you killed, so don’t expect it’ll be safe forever.
Always there for us, aren’t you, Liebes;)? Ja, das ist vat I meant! 
Thanks! So at this point, SHED what Wolkie has and go back to AH, or just remember what you wrote here for next time?
He seems to be doin’ okay in Wastewater Flats (or whatever that place is called) I just window away when I get killed and talk to y’all;))
So whatever y’all think. We need to auction some stuff anyway!
Thanks
Q