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Arcane Brilliance: A Cataclysm 101 guide for mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we'd like to welcome any and all of you who decided the end of the world was as good a time as any to roll a new mage. For you newbies, here's magehood condensed into sound effects: Pew pew! Splat! Rez! It has come to my attention that there are still some of you out there who are not mages yet. Unacceptable, people. Frankly, there are only a few legitimate reasons left that make not being a mage OK: You are a warlock. You are a tauren. (A reminder: the Interracial Humanitarian Association of Tauren and Everyone in WoW Against Race Limits On Choosing Kinship with Sorcerers, or IHATEWARLOCKS, still meets every Saturday, right here at WoW Insider. I'm bringing nachos and punch this week. You should totally come.) That's it, really. I don't know, maybe you have a severe allergy to massive crits or something? Just roll a mage already. I imagine that the combination of a new and immeasurably improved leveling process, exciting new race/class couplings, and the introduction of worgen and goblins has already inspired and will continue to inspire a fresh influx of the uninitiated to join the hallowed ranks of magedom in the coming weeks. As is our custom here at Arcane Brilliance, we would like to offer a quick and dirty guide to being a mage for those of you plan to join our awesome little club of awesomeness in the coming weeks. It is our ongoing mission to keep magehood the single most highly prepared and well-played class in the game, so here is a basic primer in advance of the release of the biggest WoW expansion yet. Join us, won't you?
Lichborne: Frost DPS 101
Welcome to Lichborne, where we're taking a break from all the Cataclysm info and analysis to focus on the here and now in death knight issues. One of Patch 3.3.3's biggest focuses was adjusting frost DPS to be viable at the end game. The changes proved to be mostly successful, and as a result, dual-wield frost DPS is back on the map and may have an outside chance of not getting you laughed out of a raid. With that in mind, it's a perfect time to take a look at the spec. This guide will give you a rundown of the basic stuff you need to know to break into the ground floor of the spec. The goal is to make speccing, gemming, glyphing and doing damage as simple to understand and implement as possible, making it easier for you to break into the playstyle and start using it on your own character. In some cases, this means "cutting corners," and in other places it means making judgment calls on gemming and glyphing options that are still a bit more nebulous once you get to the really heady theorycrafting stuff. This article is meant to make being moderately success at frost an easier task. Without further ado, then, let's begin!
Arcane Brilliance: Frost 101
It's the weekend again, and that means it's time for another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that would like to continue its ongoing series of "Pictures of things you're hitting that warlock in the face with." In today's installment, we'll be hitting that warlock with a large chunk of ice. As you can see, the ice has sharp edges, pointy parts, and is hurtling toward the warlock at an absolutely painful rate of speed. Other things we'll be hitting that warlock in the face with in future installments include massive balls of flame, rapid-fire salvos of arcane energy, and of course monkey feces. To contribute to the increasingly awesome collection of guides that make up WoW.com's class 101 series, I bring you Frost 101. As with the Arcane 101 column I did a few weeks back, let me begin with what this guide is, and also with what it is not: What it is: A general overview of the spec from a PvE perspective, directed at relative newcomers to either level 80 or the spec in general. It will provide basic idea of where to start, how to spec, how to gear, and what to do as a frost mage. What it is not: A guide to in-depth theorycrafting, detailed hard-mode raid strategies, min-maxing, which weapon kills Sparkman fastest, how to pull off an ultimate combo, or burn an entire quarter on one play with Bo Jackson. We'll cover all of those topics on some other day. Well, maybe not all of them. But definitely the Bo Jackson run, because that was crazy.
