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Arcane Brilliance: Mists of Pandaria mage guide to stats and reforging
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we talk about how awesome mages are. But did you know that you can make your mage even better? I know! It's like chocolate-covered chocolate. Or a cheesecake that also grants you three wishes. Or an Avengers movie that is also directed by Joss Whedon. Or a warlock that is also dead. With just over a week of this pre-expansion/post-patch limbo to go, it's high time we covered one last piece of patch 5.0.4 mage business before we turn our eyes almost exclusively toward the impending influx of pandaren and monks and ... pandaren monks. But good news! Most, if not all, of what we discuss here today will also apply in Mists. Though there are always small shifts in stat weight at endgame, we're still quite far removed from knowing exactly how things will shake out when we're all doing hard mode raiding. This expansion brings some major changes to our stats, radically altering the benefits they do and don't provide. Before we get to each spec and its stat weights, let's look at each stat and familiarize ourselves with its Mists of Pandaria version.
Arcane Brilliance: Patch 4.0.1 stat weights and gemming for mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're discussing stats and gemming. As you all know, the most important stat for mages (once you've hit the whine cap) is pew-pew -- which you'll want to stack at all costs -- but as far as secondary stats go, you should be reforging everything into QQ. In our ongoing coverage of all the crazy crap you need to worry about after patch 4.0.1 dropped a crazy crap-bomb on our class (and, to be fair, every other class also), we've discussed talent builds, spell rotations, glyphs, and of course, the fact that most of the glyphs currently in the game are wrong. But one thing we haven't yet covered is all those numbers next to your character sheet. You know the ones I'm talking about: defense, dodge, expertise, and the most important of all, RBIs. Which one is the most important to get? And which is best for warlock-slaying? I'm joking, of course. Employing comedy to deflect your attention from the fact that I'm not wearing any pants, and also from the fact that I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about. But good news! Nobody else does, either. When it comes to stat weights in this uncertain, pre-Cataclysm world, we're all still figuring it out on the fly, really. It's actually kind of fun to go to the official forums and see violent disagreements between people who are equally ignorant of their subject matter. It's like watching any Fox News panel of "experts" argue about the evils of video gaming. Mass Effect is hardcore cyber-porn! Medal of Honor trains terrorists! Plants vs. Zombies encourages plant-on-zombie violence!Frankly, that last one is true. Also, I made it up. Just like a lot of people on the forums are essentially making up their stat weight and gemming strategies right now -- because to put it as simply as I know how: We just don't know yet. Nobody does. Even the evil geniuses over at Elitist Jerks are still sorting this mess out. And they're evil geniuses.
