Cataclysm has been a wake up call for many of us. After enjoying the new quests and zones and chomping through five more levels, several of us have thrown ourselves into the new dungeons. While completing these new instances on normal mode is straightforward, heroics can be a brick wall.
The trouble is that Wrath has made us lazy. The tricks and techniques we kept up our sleeves were crucial back in the days of Vanilla, and remained so for the early days of Burning Crusade. Unfortunately that all went out of the window with instances that could be zerged and almost limitless healing available. With the arrival of the new expansion, those days are gone.
The biggest obstacle to completing heroics is survivability. This means either avoiding or preventing the causes of damage, or being able to withstand damage when it occurs. Crowd Control is a large chunk of this – being able to polymorph a mob so that it doesn’t engage in combat. That’s only part of the picture though – Mages have a ton of other tricks and abilities that can help to keep a mob busy or help you take less damage.