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Arcane Brilliance: Things I've learned while dying in Cataclysm heroics, mage edition
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column of choice for dress-wearing, warlock-hating Frostbolt slingers the world over. Also, fans of the short musical films of Journey, Short Imagined Monologues, and the sublime, video game-based synth and fretwork amalgams of Sixto Sounds. Seriously, listen to this one. Holy crap. So over the past few days, I've found myself a broken corpse lying in a spreading puddle of my own bodily fluids a bit more frequently than I'm used to. The reason for this is simple: heroics. No, not the ones on the live servers -- where you can throw together a random group consisting of a ret pally tank, a six-year-old playing a hunter his mom bought him on eBay the day before, a feral druid healer who for some reason came into the instance suffering from nine more minutes of resurrection sickness, a mouth-breathing rogue who may or may not be a serial killer, and an AFK shaman farming badges while auto-following the healer -- and still blast through the place. I'm talking about heroics in the Cataclysm beta. They're absolutely brutal, guys. Now, granted -- it's still early. The testing process for these beauties is still in its infancy. We're tackling them using premade characters with talent builds we threw together by looking at the talents and thinking, "This looks nice." We're wearing gear that's barely entry-level for heroics (if we're lucky) and using spell rotations that we're basically making up on the fly. We're going into instances we've never seen before, doing boss fights nobody knows the mechanics for, and dealing with crippling, often game-breaking bugs. These places simply aren't finished, not by a long shot. But then again, that's why we have a beta. We go in, throw our soft, cloth-clad bodies against the long claws of some horrifying beast or another, use the final droplets of our blood to scrawl feedback for the developers ("Landmines ... everywhere ... can't feel ... legs ... fading to black ... tell warlocks ... hate them ... so ... much ... "), and then come back for another round. Blizzard takes the data it gathers from our gruesome deaths and uses it to construct a better game. Still, there is much we can learn -- even in this unfinished state -- from the first incarnations of these heroics. Join me after the jump, won't you?
Arcane Brilliance: What to expect for mages in patch 4.0.1
Each Saturday, your computer is visited by the Arcane Brilliance fairy, a delightful creature that sprinkles your computer with mage dust. All you have to do is leave a warlock corpse under your pillow on Friday night ... Let's do a patch 4.0.1 mad-lib! This patch is a (act of aggression) in the (body part)! (Class developer) has ruined (spec you like). (Changed spell) is a joke, and (new talent) is completely (inappropriate term for the developmentally challenged). I'm rerolling (other class) the second this (derogatory noun) goes live. What the (expletive), Blizzard? Yay, that was fun. But pre-expansion patches always are, am I right? People who haven't played in six months suddenly resubscribe, excited to see the new content. Some players are optimistic, looking forward to new life being breathed into their classes. Others are terrified, convinced the sweeping changes will destroy everything they ever loved about the game. The official forums become a teeming mass of wild speculation, irrational fear and baseless end-times prognostication. And the thing is, nobody's really wrong. Nobody's really right, either, but that's the beauty. Is the end nigh? Absolutely. Is the dawning of a new era of fun upon us? Yes. Are the changes good? Mostly yes, but also sort of no. Bad? Not really, but maybe. Indifferent? Meh. The questions aren't even remotely uniform, and their answers are entirely fluid. Turn off the lights, then start throwing darts, and you'll have an idea of the precision involved here. Still, I'd like to put one very concrete answer out there. The question at the heart of the matter is this: Should I panic? And the answer, as firmly as I can state it: No.
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: Mage AoE in Cataclysm, part 1
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column known for its special five-alarm chili recipe. It's a delicate blend of three different conjured beans, spiced up with Fireballs, Scorches, and slow-cooked over a smoldering Flamestrike, loaded with lamb, bacon, and the occasional roasted monkey, glazed with a dusting of Frostfire, then lit aflame with a Pyroblast. And the secret ingredient? Warlock tears. If there's one thing mages have been known for during the course of this fine game we all play, it's mass murder. We have at our disposal a wide array of spells that wreak havoc over a large area, perhaps more so than any other class. When it comes to killing things in large numbers, mages are remarkably adept. It's a role we embrace wholeheartedly. AoE has evolved quite since the inception of the game. In vanilla WoW, AoE was a great way to get yourself killed in an instance, a method of attack that was mostly limited to solo farming and certain trash pulls. These days, with the ability tanks have to hold multiple mobs with relative ease, AoE has morphed into the go-to way to deal with multiple-mob pulls of all shapes and sizes. Crowd control has gone the way of Wand Specialization; it simply isn't required in most situations in Wrath. Cataclysm is bringing with it some fairly sweeping changes to the way we utilize our AoE repertoire. The developers have stated their intention to return us to a time when we actually had to worry about things like crowd control and pull-sizes, and though we're not reverting completely, pulls on the beta certainly feel more like vanilla or Burning Crusade pulls than anything we saw in Wrath. Join me after the break and we'll go over how our AoE spells will work in this coming era.
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: 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.
Arcane Brilliance: Cataclysm beta highlights for mages
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that hasn't gotten a beta invite, despite an ongoing salvo of increasingly pathetic groveling at the feet of Blizzard's customer service department. Oh, the things that Arcane Brilliance would do ... It's shameful, really. So I want you guys to know that it's been difficult. I don't want you to assume it's been easy for me, this last run-up to the beta. There have been so very many things I've wanted to tell you but couldn't. I've wrestled with myself. There has been a hefty amount of soul-searching, an activity that -- for me -- requires spelunking gear and a machine gun that doubles as a flamethrower. But now the beta has dropped, the NDA has been lifted and it's open season on all the awesome changes in store for the mage class. In the coming weeks, we'll be going over everything in ridiculous detail, picking through every new build with a fine-toothed comb and just generally having a total nerdgasm on a weekly basis. There's so very much to discuss. In the interest of getting started, though, I figured that today I'll stick to what I see as the most significant changes. There are plenty of other places where you can get a full list of new stuff. That information's readily available. In the end, we'll get to everything, but I figure when you come here, it's for three things: analysis, opinion and warlock jokes. I hereby promise to deliver at least some of all three.
Arcane Brilliance: The services we provide
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that come rain or shine, snow, sleet, hail, netherstorm or cataclysmic event is always delivered to your electronic doorstep by a mysterious robed man with a strange affinity for sheep. Perhaps you have wondered why Blink is distanced at exactly 20 yards? Because that's the exact number of digital yards between your internet yard and your neighbor's internet yard. This strange wizardly paperboy blinks onto your e-porch, unfurls this week's Arcane Brilliance, magicks it under your internet door, turns your internet yard gnome into an internet yard sheep, then poofs his way next door and repeats the process. He does this whether you've actually subscribed to Arcane Brilliance or not. It's all a bit creepy, but at least it's free. Let's take a moment and talk about utility, shall we? This week, I'm going to present the case for mages as the single best utility class in the game. Sure, druids bring their gifts of the wild, death knights bring their horns of winter, shaman bring their bloodlust/heroism, warlocks bring their evil little cookies and their obscene body odor, and rogues bring ... a tendency to stab things in the back ... but mages -- I think you'll agree after I pound it into your heads for the next thousand words or so -- are the kings of utility. You may think of us (and many of us may think of ourselves) as simple purveyors of arcane destruction. We trade in damage, humble merchants of death, standing behind someone wearing more substantial attire, churning out our fireballbolts and frostmadoodads and whatnot until the boss keels over, like any good ranged DPS class should. While this is our essential function, I'd like to spend this week's column shining a spotlight of sorts on the other things we bring to the proverbial table. Protip: one of the things we bring is a literal table.
Arcane Brilliance: Ruby Sanctum preview - mage edition
You'll have to forgive Arcane Brilliance (the weekly mage column) this week. Arcane Brilliance is a little down in the dumps. You see, Arcane Brilliance just isn't sure it can live in a world where Duke is the NCAA basketball champion and the Lakers are the NBA champion. One was bad enough, but now both of those evil basketball programs are champs? Ugh. What's that, you say? I could always just give in and root for Duke and LA? I suppose I could, but that would be like giving in and rooting for warlocks to do anything but die painfully in a fire of my creation. In other words: not going to happen. All signs point to patch 3.3.5 dropping very soon. When it drops, it will bring with it a few fun UI changes and quests, but most importantly, it will herald the final raid instance of this expansion, the last raid boss we're going to get before Cataclysm erupts in a massive explosion of Goblins and Worgen and Tauren paladins and Wars of the Ancients and such. Soon after the patch hits, the portal to the Ruby Sanctum below Wyrmrest Temple will open, and the same heroes who ended to reign of the Lich King will enter and challenge the fearsome Black Dragonflight, led by The Twilight Destroyer, Halion. And I want my fellow mages to be ready. So fill your pockets with strudel, put on your best dress, and meet me at Wyrmrest, mages. We've got dragons to slay.
Arcane Brilliance: Great balls of fire
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that asks the question: Which balls are the best? The answer, of course, is also provided by Arcane Brilliance: balls of fire. Balls of fire are the best. Wait, what kind of balls were you thinking about? That's pretty gross. But Arcane Brilliance likes where your head is. When the Cataclysm class previews were announced by Blizzard lo those many months ago, my initial reactions were a decidedly mixed bag. Arcane scared the crap out of me. Mana Adept? It took several weeks and many hours of therapy before I could envision any sort of scenario in which that idea didn't sound like a terrible, terrible idea. Frost struck me as kind of meh. I gradually became more excited after I thought about it for a while, but Deathfrost and Wall of Fog simply weren't all that thrilling as initial concepts. Fire, on the other hand, sounded awesome. A giant ball of conjured flame that travels along a set path, sending out tendrils of destruction that incinerate anything in its path? Sexy.
Arcane Brilliance: Mage guide to quest rewards -- the early levels
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that proves each and every week that there's no such thing as too much warlock hate. You might think there's some kind of limit, that at some point a constant stream of warlock hate crosses the boundary of good taste -- but you'd be wrong. Each joke at the expense of a warlock, like each episode of Breaking Bad, is more satisfying than the one before it. On a related note, Bryan Cranston is a god. Nothing in the above paragraph can be disputed. I'm realizing something as I level the stinking warlock you guys thought it would be fun to have me create, and that's how incredibly fast the leveling process is these days. Gone are the days when your best bet was to pick a zone and then quest it out before moving on to the next one. I was over-leveled for the first quests in Ghostlands before I was even halfway done with Eversong Woods, and I wasn't even trying that hard. In fact, I was more actively engaged in finding new and creative ways to get myself killed than I was in questing efficiently. The fact is, you can now absolutely pick and choose while leveling. Which zone? Which quest? Do I want to just bag the whole thing and hit some random dungeons? If something is unsavory -- say, you find yourself shackled to a quest in which you need zhevra hooves, only it is becoming rapidly apparent that none of the zhevra you're killing actually have feet -- you can skip it with negligible consequences. You're just going to come back and do it later for your Loremaster achievements anyway, right? So today, and probably in the coming weeks (I have no idea if I'll attempt to bring these guides to you consecutively, but I might), I'm going to try to provide you with something of a sightseeing guide for your accelerated tour through Azeroth. But instead of pointing you toward destinations like Hoover Dam or the Louvre, I'm going to direct you toward a selection of particularly worthwhile quest rewards. If you do nothing else in these zones, do these quests. Today we'll focus on classic WoW, and hopefully tackle Burning Crusade and Wrath rewards in the coming weeks. So gather your robes about you, plant your staff firmly into the path ahead and bring lots of conjured water. Our destination today? Phat loot.
Arcane Brilliance: Love letters
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column of choice for largely hairless bipedal primates with opposable thumbs everywhere. And also for you, whatever you are. Seriously, what the crap are you, anyway? And what's with all the back hair? You look like Ron Perlman back when he used to make out with the chick from Terminator in the sewers. Which is to say, you look dead sexy. Not that I'm into that kind of thing, but rowr. As many of you are no doubt aware, I've been forced of late to do something against my very nature -- something so vile and abhorrent that I can scarcely keep the bile down as I partake in it. No, it isn't wearing pants. It's far, far worse. You see, I decided to participate in our Choose My Adventure series, and as is customary for those who do so, I left the decision-making to you, dear readers. In your vast, collective wisdom (and keen sense of irony), you decided I should be shackled to that thing I hate most. Again, not wearing pants. But, as longtime (or even first-time) readers of this column may have guessed, there remains one thing I hate more than having my lower half clad in fabric, and that thing is warlocks. "Har har," you said to yourselves (in my imagination, you are all pirates), "Belt should play a warlock! That'd be hilarious." Well it isn't hilarious. It isn't hilarious at all. Did you know that warlocks have a scent? It's the sulfurous stench of disappointment. Playing one has thus far been an exercise in humility. I am constantly reminded that there are those out there who select one of these godless avatars from the character selection screen on purpose, and do so on a daily basis. I feel there ought to be some sort of fund to which I can, for the price of a cup of coffee per day, sponsor these poor wayward souls and somehow elevate them to a better life. Still, I feel I have been able to glean at least one thing of value from this experience thus far: Mages are awesome.
Arcane Brilliance: Level 80 mage gearing road map, part 2
The dawning of another Saturday brings with it another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column delivered direct to your driveway by a paperboy who blinks from house to house, fending off overprotective guard dogs with the occasional conjured ball of flame and constantly demanding his two dollars (I really, really wish I could have found an actual clip of that, but yet again, YouTube has failed me). It's all pretty impressive, especially when you consider that this paperboy is also wearing a dress. Okay, after last week's part one of this topic, many of you disagreed with my assertion that a fresh level 80 mage should attempt to upgrade his gear prior to jumping into random heroics. I understand this point of view. Farming random heroics is by far the fastest way to gear up initially, and it is true that if you find the right groups, you and your pathetic new-80 DPS may be viewed less as a liability and more of a charity project. Thinking about it, I too secretly enjoy having someone in the group who's needing on blue drops because they're honest upgrades for him. As long as we have a decently geared tank (or a healer who's capable of keeping him up even if he isn't), even a dungeon run with terrible damage dealers can go relatively smoothly. If you wish to gear up as rapidly as possible and you don't mind the idea that you won't quite be pulling your own weight at first, then by all means, skip my first few suggestions for gearing up and head directly for the random heroics. Better yet, get together with some better-geared guildies and queue together. That way you'll always be in a good group and one that doesn't absolutely require you to be up-to-par right away. This week, regardless of the path you've taken to get there, I'm going to assume that you've been industrious and spent a significant amount of time gearing through drops and collecting emblems in those random heroics. Here's the general road you should be following ...
Arcane Brilliance: I hope for an icy apocalypse
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that has, for well over two years now, been your one-stop source for mage-love and warlock-hate. Which, of course, made it pretty much inevitable that you all would vote that I roll a warlock by such a hilariously high percentage in Friday's Choose My Adventure poll. Jerks. Just know: it may not be all that fun to watch me repeatedly drown myself or run naked into crowds of high-level mobs. Or ... maybe it will be. So, I don't know if you saw this, but I found it a little depressing. It's a collection of DPS data from the current endgame of WoW, Icecrown Citadel 25-man. And while fire and arcane mages appear to be right up there in the mix, frost is not. Instead, they're relegated to the same marginal, fringe PvE status that other under-represented specs enjoy, like subtlety rogues, or beastmaster hunters. It seems that not only were the few frost mages whose data made its way into those World of Logs parses doing some pretty woeful DPS, but so few of them were actually going into Icecrown that the data we do have is rendered completely unreliable. Maybe they weren't all that bad? It's tough to tell when there were sometimes less than 50 frost mage results. Even low-representation specs like arms warriors had thousands. This, my friends, is unacceptable. Frost mages, while kings of the PvP hill, have long been the redheaded stepchildren of mage specs when it comes to PvE content. Still, they've seen multiple recent changes to their spec that have promised to narrow the gap, and to a large extent, those changes have made something of a difference. Frost isn't by any means up to the same same level as arcane and fire yet, but in terms of raw DPS output, the gulf is narrowing. Sadly, it seems nobody has noticed. Now, I'm not blaming frost mages. I expect that a large and unsavory part of the problem is not frost mages failing to go to Icecrown or failing to perform well when they do go, but is instead a failure of Icecrown groups to allow frost mages to go. The stigma against frost is ancient, its taint deep. I have all but given up on this changing during this expansion.
Arcane Brilliance: Fire 101
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that believes there is no such thing as too much Pyroblast. You can certainly have not enough Pyroblast, as any fire mage who is desperately praying to the RNG gods for a second consecutive crit so that Hot Streak will grant him an instant one can attest. But you can never have too much. Never. Since publishing Arcane 101 and Frost 101, for our series of class 101 guides, I've received numerous requests for Fire 101. Where is it? When is it coming? Why haven't you written it yet? There's even one guy who I swear has emailed me pretty much daily inquiring as to Fire 101's whereabouts. These emails progressed steadily in their tone and verbiage from mild annoyance to frustrated desperation, to thinly veiled threats to do me bodily harm. It wasn't long before the emails began coming with increasingly creepy pictures attached: first one of a road map with a thumbtack in the southwestern portion of Nevada, then one of the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign, then one of the street where I live, then one of my house, my driveway, and so on. The picture contained in yesterday's email was of a naked man who wasn't me standing in my bathroom brandishing a large knife. So, I've decided that today is the day! Now, please ... get out of my bathroom, crazynakedguy@iwillstabyouinthefacechrisbelt.com. As always, these posts come with a small disclaimer: these are meant to be basic guides covering a general overview of the spec from a PvE perspective. This one is meant as an introduction to Fire. It will not help you maximize your DPS on heroic 25-man Lich King. It will, however, help you get some idea of what the fire spec is, and how to go about playing it. Without further ado, I bring you Fire 101.
Arcane Brilliance: Why Mana Adept might not suck
It's time again for another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that needs more screenshots. Yes, I'm reminding all of you that I need more pictures of mages to open this column with. They can be any pictures of mages, whether they're mages killing warlocks, or mages setting warlocks on fire, or mages destroying a warlock's self-esteem, or a mage stealing a warlock's lunch money, or a mage sneaking into a warlock's backyard and salting the earth so that nothing can grow there for a hundred years. Really, any mage screenshot will do. Send them to arcanebrilliancepics@wow.com; put "Mage screenshot" in the subject line, and sign the email with whatever name you want the picture to be credited to. My email's getting lonely. Seriously, all I get now are fake beta invites and porn. Sometimes in the same email. Mana Adept concerns me. I don't think I'm alone, in my concern, either. In fact, I think it's safe to assume that a very large percentage of arcane mages, upon reading about the coming mastery bonus for their spec of choice in the recent Cataclysm class preview, let out a collective sigh of deep unease. The mastery bonuses for fire and frost are fairly straightforward. Fire is getting a powerful DoT component added to all of their direct-damage fire spells. Frost is getting a damage buff applied to all of their damaging spells but Frostbolt. Compare those to the mysteries of Mana Adept: Bashiok Mana Adept: Arcane will deal damage based how much mana the mage has. For example, Arcane mages will do much more damage at 100% mana than at 50% mana. If they begin to get low on mana, they will likely want to use an ability or mechanic to bring their mana up to increase their damage. source Wait ... what?
Blood Pact: Little-known warlock facts
Blood Pact's normal author, Dominic Hobbs, has taken a mysterious one-day sabbatical, leaving his weekly warlock column exposed and vulnerable. Like a puma, Christian Belt has pounced upon it, separated it from the herd and devoured it whole. What follows is his hastily digested leavings. Before I begin, let me clear a few things up: I had a death in the family and thus a funeral to travel to and attend, and so wasn't able to write Arcane Brilliance this week for the first time in over two years. Dominic Hobbs, despite his inherent limitations as a warlock, was able to reach deep within the black, fetid recesses of his heart and pry from them enough kindness to cover for me. His take on mages was a satire, one that I actually found myself chuckling over as I read it upon my return. He suggested that the mage class was being done away with, merged with the warlock class. It was thoroughly, obviously and quite intentionally ridiculous. It made the internet angry. Since he was kind enough to cover for me, I will now cover for him, even though he is in reality not gone, and in fact my opening suggestion that he was on sabbatical was an outright lie. I'm writing this because holy crap, it's the warlock column, and I am the mage columnist, the ubiquitous Archmage Pants, the guy who's made a running joke of shoehorning increasingly repetitive warlock hate into everything he writes, and when will I ever get another shot at sullying Blood Pact? Some additional points to consider, before we get to the meat of things. If you came here for hard warlock info, as is customary in these class columns when Mr. Hobbs authors them, I apologize in advance. I am not Mr. Hobbs, and this is not hard warlock info. The hard warlock info is undoubtedly coming, if not in next week's Blood Pact, then before. To everyone who got so indignant after the warlockian Arcane Brilliance was posted, crowing over and over about how April Fools was last week and this is a news site, that you come here for news, not to be tricked, and you will now go elsewhere for your news: You only had to wait a few hours. Then I got home from my trip and posted the mage class preview analysis before I'd even unpacked my bags. The hard info you crave will always be here; please don't sharpen pitchforks and light torches when we endeavor to deliver humor to you also. The link below will lead you onward to the bulk of this post. I have already warned you what that bulk is not. Click the link if you would like to see what it is. Two final hints: it will not increase the size of your penis, and it will not be porn.
