leveling-guides
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Arcane Brilliance: Tips for leveling your mage from 85 to 90
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we take a break from pet battling to actually level our mages. Seriously. Put down that Armadillo Pup for a second and let's get to level 90. I'm talking to myself as much as you. I want you to know that. I imagine I'm not the only slow-poke out there who's taking their sweet time getting to level 90. My playtime since the expansion hit has been almost non-existent until recently, and in fact I only just dinged max level this week. Still, even though time-constraints kept me from playing as much as I wanted to, it still felt like I was getting to 90 slower than I should have been. What can I say? I like to read the quest text, watch the cutscenes, listen to all the dialogue, explore the countryside. Oh, and I may have indulged in the occasional pet battle. We all have our vices. Though in this case, I'd hazard to say we all have the same vice. But I did eventually get there, late or not. And for those of you who are still enjoying the journey rather than the destination, I've compiled a few of the thoughts and observations I had along the way into this week's column. For those of you for whom this advice comes too late, I'll start hitting the post-90 content next week. Pinkie swear.
Spiritual Guidance: Levels 80 to 85 as a priest, plus recent beta changes
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests and makes the occasional StarCraft 2 reference. If you ask her, she'll tell you disc priests are like sentries and holy priests are medevacs. There is a lot to cover in Spiritual Guidance this week, so I'll be diving right in to the content. I was going to outsource my creative introduction to Mr. Fox Van Allen, but he wanted to be paid entirely in red M&Ms, so we'll just have to do without. We'll be covering two topics today. The first will be to cover the latest build released on the Cataclysm beta earlier this week. There were some large changes made to AoE healing that affect both holy and discipline priests in different ways. Second, I've written up my advice on leveling from 80 to 85 as a healing priest.
What happened to TourGuide?
There have been many Addon stories that will live through World of Warcraft's history and beyond, as cautionary tales, expressions of visions or the refinement of a segment of the MMO genre that, rapidly, is becoming the norm in most games. Tekkub's TourGuide is going to be, if it is not already, one of those stories. Join me on this adventure where we discuss what all the drama was all about and an interview I did with Tekkub concerning the transpired events. [This article has been updated.]
The Queue: Why won't you move, Mr. Bubbles?
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Before I get to your questions today, I have a question for all of you. What kind of dirty monster do you need to be to harvest the Little Sisters in Bioshock? My word, they're adorable. I mean, I have no problem playing jerky characters in games, but I physically could not hit the K key while looking at one of those poor little things. You people running around murdering them willy nilly should be ashamed of yourselves. You know who you are. I'm watching you. And now we actually discuss the game this blog is named for. Fancy that. Radioted asked... "Is there any word on who does the voice for Krick? Every time I run PoS, I can't help but hear Wallace Shawn in the role."
Arcane Brilliance: Mage leveling guide, the thrilling conclusion
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that wishes each and every one of you a magical holiday season. Arcane Brilliance would also like to point out that it is writing this immediately following three days spent alternating between being in the company of in-laws who like to discuss politics and on the road for 12 combined hours with a five-year-old and a two-year-old possessed of mind-bogglingly small bladders. Arcane Brilliance cannot be held responsible for any grammatical errors or disturbingly homicidal thoughts you might find herein. So how was your Thanksgiving? And if you don't live in the United States, how was your Thursday? Ready to get down to business? We've got a leveling guide to finish! What's that, you say? Finish what? You've been otherwise engaged for the past couple of months and have no idea what I'm talking about? Fear not! On the interwebs, you can find anything. Here, for your convenience, is the complete compendium of Arcane Brilliance's mage leveling wisdom, such as it is: Part 1: getting started Part 2: 1-10 Part 3: 11-20 Part 4: 21-30 Part 5: 31-40 Part 6: 41-Outland Part 7: 59-68 Part 8: keep reading, because this is part 8. Part 9: completely revised Cataclysm mage leveling guide I'll probably be writing in six months or so...TBA Part 10: (after the great zombie apocalypse of 2011) Brrraaaaaaiiinnnnssssss..... Join me after the break as we head for Northrend and level 80.
Arcane Brilliance: Mage leveling guide 31-40
Welcome to the latest Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that is your absolute best source for all things mage. Leveling guides? Talent spec guides? Loot guides? PvP guides? Profession guides? Random, vindictive, mean-spirited, and wholly superfluous warlock-bashing? Check, check, check, check, check, and CHECK. Arcane Brilliance has all your mage needs covered. And the leveling parade continues! Your mage is level 30 and you've grown in your mastery of the magical arts. Your Fireballs are now significantly more likely to set your enemies aflame than they are to go off in your face, you now arrive at your teleport destinations with your extremities more or less intact, and small children no longer cry at the sight of the pastries you conjure. In celebration of our new-found competence, we'll be changing the content of these leveling columns a bit. We'll no longer be giving each two-level gap its own blurb. Instead, we'll be covering each new spell as it comes, and every major milestone at the appropriate point. If that means that more than two levels go by without a specific shout-out in the text, so be it. Enough preamble. Read on and we'll see how it goes. If it's terrible, we all know I'll just blame warlocks.
Interview: Jame of WoW-Pro
Jame is someone whose work I've enjoyed for much of my WoW-playing career. For those of you who might not be familiar with the name, he is the author of a series of leveling guides hosted over at WoW-Pro, which currently cover levels 30 to 77 on both factions (the rest of Northrend will be coming soon). Most recently, he's posted an addon version of the guides, so you can play along without even having to tab out. And did I mention this is all free? I recently got the opportunity to interview Jame on his guides, how he plays, and what he thinks of recent changes. Come on behind the cut to find out what he had to say.
The Daily Grind: On leveling guides
With as busy as life can get, some consider leveling guides to be a nice way to be able to catch up to friends on very limited time. After all, you are still seeing content; you're just just following an optimized course and saving yourself from aimlessly wandering, looking for things. Of course, many people feel that this is basically cheating, because you're not exploring, or bothering to read the quest log seriously. (Of course, with item database sites like WoWdigger or mods like the above-pictured Lightheaded/Cartographer combo for World of Warcraft that point the way to the quest completion for you, the argument about "not reading the quest log seriously" kind of flies out the window.) This morning we'd like to ask you where you come down in this debate? Are you one of the people who feel that playing through using a leveling guide is cheating, because you're basically following in someone else's footsteps and not experiencing the game on your own? Do you think it's OK to use a leveling guide once you've been through the game "the hard way" and you're just leveling alts? Would you ever pay, or have you ever paid for a leveling guide? Do you think that paying for them adds to the stigma, or are they just worth it versus the general quality of many free guides available?
