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Arcane Brilliance: Catching up on mage Cataclysm changes
Each week, Arcane Brilliance steps out of a portal from parts unknown, bringing with it a knapsack full of delicious mage content conjured expressly for your consumption. Try not to overconsume, though. Nothing's worse than waking up one morning to discover your robes don't fit and your fingers are too chubby to waggle your wand properly. And after that culinary intro joke, it's time we got to the meat of the matter -- specifically, the Cataclysm beta and the constant mage changes going on therein. Each week (and sometimes more than once during each week), a new beta build hits that brings more new stuff for mages. Sometimes these changes are big, and sometimes they're not, but I feel like it's high time we spent a column talking about the more recent ones. I've let like five builds go by without dealing specifically with this stuff, so we'd better get going. I figure we'll start with the most important change and move forward from there.
Arcane Brilliance: Mage AoE in Cataclysm, part 2
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that likes AoE. In fact, you can expect those three specific letters in that precise configuration to appear approximately fourty-three thousand times during the course of the column to follow. Pretty impressive, considering the column's only a shade over 1,500 words long. How'd I do it? A true magician never reveals his tricks, guys. A brief history of fire: 17,000 B.C. - Motivated mainly by an intense desire to cook bacon, mankind discovers fire. 3,000 B.C. - On Azeroth, the first mage, motivated mainly by an intense desire to cook warlocks at range, discovers how to hurl a Fireball. 2004 A.D. - Mages set fire to Hogger for the first time. Bacon is served. 2010 A.D. - Cataclysm comes out, bringing with it such fiery wonders as Flame Orb, moving Scorches, and the reworked Combustion. Warlocks are served. 2015 A.D. - Following the Zombie Apocalypse, mages find that Blast Wave + conjured strudel is the ideal skill-set for surviving in a world full of ravenous undead. Zombies are served. Also: zombie warlocks. Also: zombie bacon. Mmmm ... zombie bacon. Last week we discussed the general changes to AoE spells across the board, as well as the specific AoE capabilities of the arcane and frost trees in the upcoming WoW expansion, Zombie Cataclysm. Those trees both have their ways and means of killing things in large groups, but I think we can all agree that when it comes to mass murder, the fire tree is where it's at. Join me after the break, won't you?
Arcane Brilliance: Things I'm going to miss
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column extraordinaire, and source of 99% of your daily recommended allowance of warlock hate. It's also rich in vitamin D. If you're wondering where you can get the other 1%, the answer is inside-out cheeseburgers. Very tasty, and warlock-hate is the secret ingredient. There comes a time in everyone's life when they must say goodbye to something. My first major loss came in the summer of 1986. I wept like a little girl when the rubber band holding Snake Eyes' pelvis to his legs and torso finally snapped on that day, after a hard day of battle in which he and Storm Shadow had faced each other in mortal combat no less than twenty times. Even his ensuing career as the first, incredibly violent casualty in every firefight didn't dull the pain of that initial loss. I loved Snake Eyes! Why couldn't it have been Snow Job's stupid pelvis that snapped? For the love of God, why? Incidentally, I asked that same question when I redboxed the recent movie bearing sullying the venerable toy-line/cartoon series' good name. And though I've spent the last few weeks laying out palm fronds and rose petals in preparation for Cataclysm's triumphant entry into the World of Warcraft, perhaps all is not as wondrous as I've made it out to be. Even in my optimism, I am becoming painfully cognizant of several aspects of the current game that I'll be missing to varying degrees once Deathwing arrives and brings with him all of his fancy new talent trees, masteries, guild perks, and approximately 11 million level 1 worgen hunters. Yes, despite all the awesomeness in store, we mages will also be losing a few things. Follow me past the jump to gaze wistfully one last time at a few of these soon-to-be-gone relics of a bygone age.
Arcane Brilliance: These are a few of my favorite things
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column from the author of Don't Break My Sheep: Diary of an Angry Mage and 101 Ways to Cook Warlock. This is going to be slightly shorter and even more rushed than usual, guys, because new baby. I'd post pictures, but this is the internet. I'll wait till he's a bit older and can ruin his own life. The kid's our third, our first boy, and I'll only say one thing about that: After two girls, I simply wasn't prepared for the peeing. Seriously, the kid fires that thing straight up, without warning, and with laser precision. I've taken to placing a washcloth over his loins during changings, a tip suggested by my genius wife. Now that I've grossed you out, let's move on to today's topic: awesomeness. Paternity leave from work has given me some extra time between hilarious eye-peeing episodes to fiddle in earnest with my mage on the beta. And though I have some complaints, I'll save them for another week, one in which I'm not still basking in the afterglow of seeing my wife push a baby out from her nether regions. I'm too happy to complain this week, so if you've come here looking for constructive criticism, you're in the wrong place. Join me after the jump for a few of my favorite things about each of the three mage specs in the beta.
Arcane Brilliance: The early levels for Cataclysm mages
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that loves warlocks. Arcane Brilliance loves warlocks so much. It loves them right in the face. With a Pyroblast. Can you feel the love? Does it feel like your heart is melting? And like your brain is running down the side of your face? Because it totally is. And ... I think that used to be an ear. Oh, warlocks. So much love! If you still had anything resembling a face, Arcane Brilliance would totally kiss you. Let me get this out of the way: I love my goblin mage. I love him as much as it is possible to love a short, ugly, green man who values profit above anything else. When I'm playing my main, trying out new talents and abilities, I can't stop wishing I was spending time with my irredeemable little goblin, attaching rockets to chickens and riding robotic laser-sharks. It's not healthy, but I just can't quit the tiny little monster. So my beta testing this week has been pretty focused on the low-level stuff in Cataclysm, rather than clicking Fire Orb and hoping that this time it actually works. I figure this is okay, since Cataclysm itself is an expansion focused not just on the endgame stuff, but also on overhauling the leveling process. So today, put down your spreadsheets and your nerdrage; we're going to have a brief conversation about leveling.
Arcane Brilliance: Random impressions from the beta
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, your one-stop shop for weekly mage columns. Seriously, any time you want a weekly mage column, you can come here and obtain one. We do one thing here at Arcane Brilliance, but we do it well. Or if we don't do it well, we at least do it hard. Or maybe just adequately. Pick an adverb. Any adverb, really. Insert it at the end of the phrase "we do it." Chances are -- at least some of the time -- that's probably how we do it. Good news everyone! I'm in the beta. It is awesome. I have been thoroughly impressed, and because I like you people, I would like to share some of those impressions with you. As you may have guessed from the title of the column, they will be fairly random. Most will be related in some fashion to mages. I've come to understand that there exists a sizable contingent of folks who play this game but would prefer not to know about future iterations of it in advance of actually playing them. I respect that. I'm not sure, really, what beta information would be considered a "spoiler" and what beta information wouldn't (is talking about new talents a spoiler? UI changes? The new launcher? I don't know!), so I'll go ahead and bury all of my scattered thoughts behind the jump. That way, those of you who came here to this WoW news site in an attempt to avoid WoW news can turn back now, your virgin eyes still pure and unspoiled. And yet, part of the purpose of placing text in front of the jump is to whet your appetites, leading you on to the meat of the article, so I feel obliged to mention two things before we adjourn and retire to the page beyond this one. Earlier today, I set fire to a bomb-throwing monkey. Prior to that, I ran over a pirate with my car.
Arcane Brilliance: Fire mage 4.0
It's Saturday, and that of course means it's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column, hero to the downtrodden, vanquisher of evil, dispenser of justice. That's right. By day, Arcane Brilliance is a mild-mannered mage-related wall of text. But by night ... Arcane Brilliance is Deathspank. Another beta build hit a couple nights ago -- as they tend to do -- and it brought a number of class changes. A quick glance at the new talent trees revealed the expected (some talent position swaps, a few talents vanishing, some tooltip alterations, the occasional loss of a rank here and there) and the ... unexpected. Three changes in the fire tree, particularly, caught my eye: Critical Mass Molten Shields Oh, and Impact. Yes, the tooltip for Molten Shields really is "Redesign!" With an exclamation point. For emphasis. So clearly the fire tree is in a certain amount of flux? I became instantly excited. The fire tree, perhaps more than either of the other two trees, really has been due for some focused attention. Then I saw this, from none other than Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton:
Arcane Brilliance: News and notes from Cataclysm beta build 12604
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that strives to bring you all the latest in Flame Orbs and Deathfrosts, Arcane Missile Barrages and Frostfires, Arcanefireflamefrostfreezes and Iceflamefrostfirecanebolts and everything in between. Well guys, we just got our second pass. The arcane tree is finally beginning to resemble something semi-coherent, and the other two trees have gotten a spot of polish applied to them in this build. The mage talent situation in Cataclysm is finally beginning to take shape, and now that things are beginning to come together, it's time to pick apart that embryonic shape and see what makes it tick. Because that's just how we roll. Grab your blowtorches and put the kids to bed, we've got some deconstruction to perform.
Cataclysm Beta: Mage talents and specializations
Let me begin by telling you I had an Arcane Brilliance column about halfway done last week before a family health emergency intervened, preventing me from finishing it. The column was going to be all about predicting what the new revamped talent trees were going to be like. Now that Cataclysm beta build 12479 has dropped upon us like manna in the desert, the entirety of that now-ancient text is so outdated as to be worthless. Let me assure you that it was witty, and brilliant, and possibly mankind's greatest written work -- art of such singular value that small children would have been taught of it from textbooks with my picture upon their covers. But, alas, now it is gone, relegated forever to a remote corner of my hard drive, never to be seen by human eyes. The literary world mourns. Still, I was able to salvage one small fragment of it. It is but one of a batch of haiku I wrote about Improved Polymorph. I will reprint it here, because whatever else this monumental beta build has altered, my passion for this new talent remains. improved polymorph flaming warlock sheep corpses snuffleupagus On second thought, perhaps it's best that no more of that sees the light of day. Anyway, let's move on the rest of the awesomeness.
