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Arcane Brilliance: Leveling your Mage, 40-60
Each week, Arcane Brilliance endeavors to distill the vast and complex world of Mages into a thousand words or so. How does Arcane Brilliance do it? Magic. Yep, it's an 81 point talent, learnable at level 100 and only available in the upcoming 5th expansion, tentatively titled, "World of Warcraft: The Burning Scarlet Crusade of the Lich King." This is leaked straight from the very early Alpha Beta Alpha Gamma of that expansion, and Arcane Brilliance is the sole invitee. In fact, It's so early that the game doesn't technically exist yet, which may explain why most of these columns end up being closer to three thousand words than one. Blizzard's working on a patch.Level 40. You've burned and frozen your way through 39 levels of experience and two whole columns worth of leveling guides to get here, and now you're level 40. Have a party, invite your friends. It'll be fun. If it isn't, turn somebody into a sheep. Just trust me. Works every time. Well, unless your friends aren't humanoids, beasts, or critters, in which case I can't help you, and perhaps no-one can.Level 40 is a milestone of such epic proportions that it's probably only rivaled by dinging 70 as far as stages in WoW progression go. When you're done celebrating, it's time to get going. You've got a lot to do. After the break, we'll talk about level 40 and all the wonderful new toys it makes available to you, and do our level best ( pun totally intended) to cover the 19 levels that follow, stopping only when we hit 60.
Arcane Brilliance: Leveling your Mage, 20-40
Each week at some point on Saturday, Arcane Brilliance brings Mages together from every corner of Azeroth to discus how awesome we are. Five seconds later, the discussion degenerates into a whole lot of whining about Warlocks. Someone ninjas all the manna biscuits, a scuffle breaks out, a million Frost Novas erupt at once, and the very fabric of the universe is sundered when everyone tries to Blink away simultaneously. Then the next Saturday arrives and we get together to do it all again. Secretly, you see, we enjoy sundering the universe. We're Mages. That's just how we roll.Level 20! Grats! Last week we talked ourselves through the first twenty levels of Magehood, from our humble beginnings slaying kobolds in Elwynn Forest or boars in Durotar to sheeping adds in The Deadmines or Wailing Caverns. This week we'll take our maturing Mages through the next twenty levels, all the way to level 40, halfway to Arthas. Numerically, anyway.When you ding 20, you've reached what could reasonably be defined as your first major milestone within World of Warcraft. You have 11 talent points under your belt, which means you likely have a clearly defined specialty for you Mage, whether it be Frost, Fire, or Arcane. You've now got access to many of the spells that set you apart from other classes, and are learning how to use them. You've hopefully been into an instanced dungeon or two, and have some grasp on your role within a group dynamic. And now, at level 20, you get to do a whole mess of new junk, and all of it is awesome.Join me after the jump for a more specific quantification of how awesome.
Arcane Brilliance: Leveling your Mage, 1-20
Every Saturday, Arcane Brilliance freezes you in place, then Blinks behind a pillar and turns Invisible. You can look for Arcane Brilliance if you want to, but I can tell you that's a bad idea. You see, while you're looking, Arcane Brilliance is positioning itself behind you, cooking up a giant Pyroblast and aiming it up your tailpipe. You really only have a few options here. You can a.) cry, b.) curl into the fetal position and wait for the sweet embrace of death, or c.) distract Arcane Brilliance by quickly yelling "Spell damage is more important that spell hit rating, discuss!" and then log out while Arcane Brilliance is busy posting on the forums about what you just said. I'd go with c.), personally. Works every time.Recently, I discovered that there seem to be leveling guides on this site for just about every class but Mages, so it's time I stepped up to the plate. The problem is, Mage was my very first class, on my very first character, on my very first foray into the World of Warcraft, which took place approximately forever ago. Ok, so it's only been about two-and-a-half years, but in WoW years, that's the rough equivalent of a million kajillion years ago. My memories of those first few levels are fuzzy at best, and I can condense what I remember learning into two statements: "Murlocs are evil," and "The only way out of Undercity is to use my Hearthstone." One of those statements eventually stopped being true for me, and the other one is "Murlocs are evil." Needless to say, I didn't feel entirely qualified to write a leveling guide for the first few levels of Magecraft.To rectify the situation, I decided to roll a brand new Mage, so that I could experience those first few levels all over again. To ensure that the experience was as pure as I could make it, I created my Mage on a new server--the newest actually--Cairne. I knew nobody on that server, and had no alts there, so this Mage, a Human female I named Niwt, would be an entirely virgin Mage. I had never played an Alliance Mage before, and never leveled any character in the Human starting area, so the quests would be new to me, and the landscape foreign. I disabled all of my mods and dove in.It was horrible.I learned a lot though, or remembered learning a lot, depending on how you look at it. After the break, more text!
