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Arcane Brilliance: Why the one true spec assumption is a lie
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Now, before we get started, I want you all to look at that picture and realize that at one point in my life, that kid was rad. He was cool. I was never that cool, but you better believe I wanted to be that cool. I wanted to have a sweet mullet and wear acid-washed jeans and a pink shirt and give a thumbs-up while I played Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers one-handed in my Nintendo/baseball/helicopter lair. Just remember that. This kid was the absolute best, and everybody knew it. I don't know how to tell you this, but we are all wrong. All of us. Oh, we mages are right about some things: Most everything can be improved by turning it into a sheep, If you're going marshal arcane energy and bend the fabric of space time to conjure food from thin air, you might as well be conjuring cake and strudel, and yes, it is still and always will be true that the only good warlock is the one that has been reduced to unrecognizable chunks of scorched viscera. But about a few very important details, we are most definitely all mistaken. Here are a few things we all seem to accept as true: Arcane is the undisputed top mage raiding spec. If you are a mage, and you are raiding as anything other than arcane, you are hurting your raid and limiting your own effectiveness. Frost is a PVP spec, and hasn't been a viable raid spec since the days when Ragnaros lived in Molten Core and didn't have legs. All of those statements contain elements of truth, but I am here to tell you -- as emphatically as I can -- that they are lies. They are gross generalities that rise from popular perception, and I firmly believe that our almost universal acceptance of them as fact hurts the game as a whole.
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?
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.
Arcane Brilliance: PvPing as a Frost Mage after 3.1
Each week Arcane Brilliance brings you a column about Mages. This column used to be housed on Wowinsider, but now it's featured on some newfangled site called WoW.com. The url is a full seven letters shorter. It's crazy. where did those seven letters go? I don't know, but I blame Warlocks.There's an old saying: you can please some Mages some of the time, but you can't please all Mages all of the time. Or something like that. Last week, several of you complained that I was spending too much time writing about PvP, while ignoring PvE completely. This will be the fifth PvP-related Arcane Brilliance in a row. Previous to that, you have to go back to October 25th of last year to find our last PvP-centric column. A short list of things that have happened since then: Wrath of the Lich King was released. Barack Obama became the president of these United States. 5 dollar foot-longs. Arcane Brilliance brought you 24 PvE columns in a row. Seriously, guys. Make up your minds. I don't know what you want from me anymore. Anyway, on to Frost Mage PvP.
