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  • Arcane Brilliance: Optimizing your mage's gear through Rawr

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    10.08.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about what is arguably the game's most trusted gear optimization program: Rawr. Also, we're planning to see how many times I need to type the word "rawr" before my spellchecker snaps and murders me through my computer screen. Close your eyes. Imagine, if you will, that you have a mage. Ha ha, of course you have a mage. Sometimes I crack myself up. Now imagine that your mage has gear, but that gear is not optimal. Now open your eyes. Hello, every mage ever. Yeah, chances are pretty close to 100% that no matter who you are and how religiously you play the game, your mage, beloved though he may be, does not have every slot filled with best-in-slot gear and does not have every item perfectly gemmed, enchanted and reforged so that your DPS is up to its fullest possible potential. WoW is a computer game -- an old one, sure, but still home to millions of algorithms and formulas and computations and other math terms that I don't fully understand. It would take, I firmly believe, a robot from the future to calculate all of those numbers and variables and turn them into something a human brain can parse accurately enough to actually benefit from. Well, mages and magesses, I have recently contacted Kavan, one of the main authors of the ubiquitous gear optimization program Rawr, and I can tell you that he is that robot from the future. I only pray he can protect us from whatever other, more evil and technologically advanced robot from the future that might at some point follow him through the wormhole with a directive to kill our unborn children or something, because you know that's what's happening.

  • Arcane Brilliance: On mage healing and other miscellany

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    09.24.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we talk about the concept of mage healing, which in my opinion is like the concept of warlock winning. It simply isn't a phenomena that occurs in nature. Since those heady, halcyon days of 2004, when mages began to walk to wilds of Azeroth and players were introduced to their glass cannon awesomeness, the topic of mage healing has from time to time emerged, poking its strange and intriguing head up into the mage conversation and usually disappearing just as quickly. The idea has precedence. Healers in Final Fantasy lore are called White Mages. More recently, Dragon Age has its Spirit Mages. Archetypal wizards have had access to magical healing in one form or another throughout fantasy gaming and literature, though rarely is it their strongest focus. And just lately, the idea has been gaining some unprecedented traction among the WoW mage community. Recently, I've seen the concept presented with consideration and clarity on the official forums, among my own contemporaries in-game, and even right here in the comments section of this very column. It bears thinking about. Though the idea is extremely unlikely to ever be implemented, its increasing popularity and the improving practicality with which its proponents conceptualize it warrant attention. Mage healing, whenever it is brought up, is immediately interesting and always at least a little bit tantalizing, even for its most vehement opponents. Like me.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Mage wishlist, late 2011 edition

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    09.17.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. And by "every week," I of course mean "every week when I'm home, have access to the internet, and do not find my time entirely monopolized by my day job." Which, as you may or may not have noticed, did not include last week. We have some things to discuss today, most notably the recently posted mage class feedback thread on the official forums. It's always interesting to see how mages respond when given an actual, legitimate forum to air their grievances with the promise of actually being heard by the developers in charge of designing our class. I have some thoughts, and if you'll indulge me, I'd like to share them with you. But let me get this out of the way first and foremost: I love the tier 13 mage set. That's it up there in the picture. So steampunk, but in a good way. I love the goggles, the quilted armor, the gnomishness of it. I can tell you right now that I'll be transmogrifying back to this set for many tiers to come. If you haven't checked it out yet, I suggest you visit the official site and take a look at that mage tier 13 preview and visual retrospective. It's really kind of cool to see all of our past tier sets in one place, though I have to feel bad for the poor lone Undead mage in his tier 9 gear, surrounded by all of those Humans. I can feel the racial tension from here.

  • Arcane Brilliance: The threat hotfix and you

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    09.03.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're applying a hotfix to Arcane Brilliance. Beginning now, any warlock who reads Arcane Brilliance will be overcome by intense feelings of self-loathing and an irresistible urge to reroll a mage. The column's actually been functioning this way for some time now, and we thought we ought to just make it official. I figure it's about time we discussed the threat hotfix, mages. And before we go any further, I should point out that from now on, the threat level is always midnight. The hotfix has been in the game for a few weeks now, and I would have brought it up long before now but I got kinda sidetracked daydreaming about the whole transmogrification thing. Now that I've spent a few weeks going through all of the pretty dresses in my wardrobe and deciding which one I want to wear on my next date with Ragnaros (he's a passable conversationalist, a snappy dresser, and the dates are so much more fun now that he's bipedal ... but he tends to shout a lot, and he's a lousy tipper), I'm ready to talk about what amounts to the complete removal of one of the most basic MMO battle mechanics from the game. Now, removal isn't the right word, I know. Threat is still technically in the game, but it no longer really matters much. It's been sort of difficult to wrap my mind around, to be honest. It's as if I woke up one morning and discovered that I no longer needed to wear pants. For so long, pants (or a reasonable pants equivalent) were pretty much a requirement when leaving the house, but now, pantslessness is considered the style. Do I still have pants in my closet? Sure, but I only keep them in there to hide my porn beneath. So how does this new status quo impact us as a class? And is the change good, bad, or does it lie somewhere along the spectrum between those two extremes?

  • Arcane Brilliance: Old mage armor sets and how to get them, part 2

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    08.27.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we talk more about transmogrification, that oh-so-exciting upcoming feature in patch 4.3 that allows us to make our sweet tier 17 sets look like greens we got while questing in 2004. The aught-fours are so in right now! Last week, we started our epic journey into old content to find some sweet retro threads for our totally trendy mages to wear at all the hottest mage events of the season, be they spellstealing soirées, Polymorph parties or warlock-wienie-roasts. This week, we delve into slightly more recent content. Before we begin, we should point out a few important transmogrification details we've learned since we convened last week. Apparently only items with stats are candidates for transmogrification -- and by stats, I mean "other than armor." That rules out most cosmetic items. So no running around wielding a fish in each hand while raiding, I guess. Unless you can find a pair of fishes with stats on them, I guess. Weapons and off-hand items can only be transmogrified into similarly slotted items. That means no running around with two staves or dual-wielding daggers or perhaps a lantern in each hand. I don't know what you people are into ... Heirlooms are eligible, so good news for you speed levelers. Now you're not stuck for 80 levels with a single armor model. The gold cost isn't set but will probably be similar to reforging, meaning it will scale, being more expensive the higher the level of your equipped item happens to be -- so maybe not as much of a massive gold sink as I originally feared. No legendary items, which I sincerely hope changes at some point. I feel like if you earned a freaking legendary item, you should be able to keep that model on your upgraded gear if you want. Forever. All of this is still entirely subject to change. And with that out of the way, on to some more of the armor sets you and I should both be hunting down and squirreling away right this very second.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Old mage armor sets and how to get them, part 1

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    08.20.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about the stuff I now pledge to spend all my waking moments and most of my sleeping ones farming outdated content to obtain: old mage armor. So what's this I hear about some newfangled patchamajigger? Transmogrifica-hoochawhatsit? Whachama-void storage? You kids and your crazy doodads and gizmos. There's a buttload of info being released about patch 4.3, but the following literally leaped from the web page as I was reading it, plunged through my widening eye sockets and jacked directly into the pleasure centers of my brain: Patch 4.3 will be bringing us at least two massively important customization options. We will be able to replace the look of our current gear with the look of any other mage gear we possess. We will also have new storage space in which to store all of that gear. There are more details, and you should go read about them if you haven't already. But what we really need to discuss here is how we can best start doing what I'm positive we all desperately want to be doing right this very second: hunting for sweet-looking gear sets. I don't know about you, but I am going to transmogrify every single bit of my tier 12 set the very instant it is possible for me to do so. I will log out on patch night in front of the spot where the transmogrifier guy is going to spawn; then when the servers come back up, I will log in and shove my gold in his pockets as forcefully as I can, so that I don't have to look like a stupid mage candle any longer than absolutely necessary. But the questions I'm asking myself between that magical moment and this one are these: Which gear set do I want to replace it with, and what can I do right this moment to get that gear set in my inventory and ready to deploy the moment such a deployment becomes possible? Click through to see me attempt to answer my own questions.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Addons your mage should probably be using

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    08.13.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we'll be talking about ways we can make something that is already awesome (being a mage) even better. It's like when you take heaping bowl of Joss Whedon and add in a liberal sprinkling of Nathan Fillion. Yummy. I know, I know. We already get to fling massive, flaming boulders at warlock faces. Also, we wiggle our fingers and delicious cake spontaneously appears. Being a mage is already as close to nirvana as mortals can hope to aspire to. How can that experience be improved? The answer is simple: more warlock-killing. And more cake! Also? Addons. They come in all shapes and sizes, and your particular load-out may differ greatly from those of other mages you know. I'm not here to tell you you're wrong. I am here, though, to spotlight a few of those addons that have improved my experience the most of late. Join me, won't you? I promise both brevity and wit. Mostly brevity. Cake and warlocks are available in the foyer. Only one is edible, but both are cooked to perfection.

  • Arcane Brilliance: The state of the fire mage

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    07.30.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we resume our three-part look at the current state of the mage nation. If you say that fast, it totally sounds like "imagination." DELIGHTFUL. I am so sorry, guys. I want to write this column. I want to write it every week. Given the choice, I'd like to write it every damn day. I have an incredibly demanding work and family schedule these days. Each week, it's like a magician's trick trying to produce enough time to sit down and provide you guys with a quality column, and some weeks, I wave my hands and say the magic words, and a puff of smoke appears, and when it fades ... nothing's there. I'm working very hard to change my current schedule, though, enabling me to have a regular, slightly more controllable block of time every seven days during which to deliver you something worth reading. So take heart, and keep me in your prayers or thoughts or whatever it is that you think will help, you godless heathens. And if you want someone to blame for the recent irregularity of Arcane Brilliance, blame my children. They are time-destroying merchants of pure evil, and I tell them so as often as I can. Keeps them in line. Anyway, I know when I wrote the state of the arcane mage column way back in June, I remember promising two more columns, touching upon the current state of affairs for the other two mage specs. It is almost August now. Yikes. Why do you guys put up with my nonsense? Without further delay, I present to you the 2011 state of the fire mage address, delivered to you from a pulpit of pure flame perched upon the highest peak in the Firelands, to a congregation of mages seated within an auditorium constructed entirely of flaming warlock skulls. It's incredibly uncomfortable, but also crazy-epic.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Magery within the Firelands

    by 
    Tyler Caraway
    Tyler Caraway
    07.23.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we dispel mage-related myths, expose wizardly untruth, and separate magical fact from fiction ... just like the Mythbusters, only with more Fireballs. Oh, hai thar! As the master of infiltration, I think everyone saw this post coming. By this point in time, is there a single column that I haven't managed to take over? I really don't understand why people resist it; I should just be the writer for WoW Insider. The rest of the staff is pretty much superfluous at this point. Well, maybe we can keep them around as interns to fetch me coffee and deal with trolls. I swear, though, this isn't my warlock side that's taken over. No, no, we're a bit more sensible than that here; the editors would never let a warlock write the mage column. Instead, it's the balance druid part of me who joins you today, spewing out your mystical tidbits. Honest, they made me swear an oath and everything. What they didn't count on is that my balance side is rather bitter towards mages and their Focus Magic swapping; warlocks are awesome enough to give me Dark Intent. Also, mages kind of blew up the Well of Eternity thing, and that's not cool. Let's begin today's lesson, class! Editors Note: Warning! A moonkin's attempt at bitter comedy ahead!

  • Arcane Brilliance: The two-button mage myth

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    07.16.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we dispel mage-related myths, expose wizardly untruth, and separate magical fact from fiction ... just like the Mythbusters, only with more Fireballs. You may not believe this, but lately I've been finding something more annoying than the continued existence of warlocks. I know, I know. Crazy, right? What could possibly be more annoying than our emo-loving, Hot Topic-frequenting, mascara-laden, parent-hating nemesises? Nemesi? Apparently the dictionary says "nemesis" is its own plural, which is just ... boring. Anyway, the answer to the question that I just pretended you asked is this: "Mages are a two-button class." -- The internet These days, you literally can't post the word "mage" anywhere on the web without someone, usually multiple people, posting some poorly spelled, perplexingly punctuated amalgam of the above words. It's usually intended as an indictment of the class, a dismissal of what non-mages feel is the simplistic nature of of our major DPS spell rotations. The assumption is that mages are an easy, boring class to play, that one could be a successful mage simply by drunkenly alternating pressing two buttons. For a very long time, it was easy for me to ignore this. It was stupid, and false, and perpetuated by non-mages who were either clear trolls or outright ignorant. But lately, I've been hearing self-deprecating versions of this same phrase from actual, honest-to-goodness mages. Are we really buying into the ignorant assumptions of the rest of the community? It was at that moment that I realized that it was time I addressed what I call the two-button myth.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Beginner's guide to being a mage

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    07.09.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're taking a trip through the first 20 levels of the game, which are now eternal. The important thing to remember about rolling a mage is that you've made the right choice; congratulations. Between the newly adopted unending demo, the extended Recruit-a-Friend promotion, and the freshly bargain-priced WoW/The Burning Crusade bundle, it seems Blizzard is making a concerted effort to woo new players. And from my limited viewpoint, it seems to be working. I have a brother, a year and some change younger than me, who doesn't live near me. This sucks, because he and I have absolutely everything in common. We grew up taking turns watching each other play Shining Force, or designing Dungeons & Dragons campaigns to force each other to play through, but then college, family, and career separated us. I'm here in Las Vegas playing copious amounts of video games and ignoring my kids, and he's at Purdue, working on his doctorate and just generally making me ashamed of the waste my life has become. Naturally, I've been trying for years to drag him down to my level. Thus far he's resisted, but when I notified him of these new opportunities to play the game on the cheap, he finally took the plunge. And rolled a warrior. Sigh. Oh well. At least it wasn't a warlock, right?

  • Arcane Brilliance: Upgrading your mage's gear in patch 4.2

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    07.02.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Other things, too, but none of those things are nearly as important. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Arcane Brilliance is, without a doubt, the single greatest weekly mage column on this website. Period. New patch day has come and gone, and we're all now furiously blasting through the new content, hoping to upgrade our old uber gear for new uber gear. I love the weeks following patch days. It's like the twelve days of Christmas, only instead of turtle doves and french hens we get magical flaming staves and giant angry lava spiders. Sadly, all that new gear doesn't simply come down the chimney and appear below our flaming Christmas trees. We have to earn it, farm for it, slay bosses for it, and quest for it. All of those things take time, a thing I find I have precious little of these days. So where best to allocate our time in order to get the gear we want in the most efficient ways possible?

  • Arcane Brilliance: How to be legendary

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    06.25.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. The title of this week's column is a bit misleading. As we all know, mages are, by virtue of their magehood, already legendary. I probably should have called it "How to be more legendary," or "How to be legendarier." Too late now, it's already been typed. Last week, as I neared completion of Arcane Brilliance's mage guide to patch 4.2, I touched upon one of the more exciting aspects of our impending foray into the Firelands: Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest. Dragonwrath will be the new legendary staff available to casters in this patch. It will be difficult, but not by any means impossible, for a good guild to obtain. It will require a long term commitment to the new Firelands raid content. Most guilds will only obtain the staff once, and even the really high-speed guilds will only be able to pick up this staff for a select few of their caster members. It's an incredible piece of statistical candy. Dragonwrath will be the best-in-slot weapon for every variety of DPS caster the moment it becomes available, by a very large margin, and it will likely remain that way for the rest of this expansion and into a good portion of the next one. If you are able to get your hands on it, you won't be letting go of it any time soon. Absolutely every caster class/spec will want it, including hybrids and classes that use spirit. Take a look at your guild. How many level 85 DPS casters do you raid with? Now look at yourself. How many of you are there? No, your mirror images don't count. Those are your odds. So how do you lower those odds? How do you stack the deck a bit in your favor. My mission this week, ladies and gentlemen, is to help you be the chosen one in your guild who gets to wield this spectacular weapon. No, not you, warlock. My mission, this week as every week, is to see you die in a fire.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Mage's guide to patch 4.2

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    06.18.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we're taking a quick break from our look at the state of the three mage specs to deal with the impending release of patch 4.2. Yes, I know it has only been one column, and we're already taking a break. Honestly, why do you always have to point things like that out? Sheesh. So with patch 4.2 dropping at any moment (all signs now point to the 28th of this very month), I figure we'd better just sit down, look deeply into one another's eyes, and discuss our future. You see, we're going places, you and I ... more specifically, we're going into the Firelands, to kill Ragnaros and his buddies. We're looking for increasingly elaborately decorated dresses to wear, and one very impressive magical staff. I just want to make sure that we're both prepared for what we will find there, for the challenges we'll be facing, and for the changes we will be experiencing before we start the journey. We'll have deeper voices, hair where we didn't have hair before ... no wait, that was what happened when we started middle school. This is pretty similar, actually, only with fewer pimples and slightly more Fireballs.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Do mages need to be hit-capped?

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    05.28.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're discussing a topic near and dear to a caster's heart: the problems associated with reaching the hit cap. Because when you conjure a flaming boulder from the ether and hurl it toward the hideous walking nest of claws and teeth that's currently eating your tank, you don't want to miss. We've discussed this before. But this is a new expansion, and a new crop of players seems to be playing it, and I just had to berate a holy pally in Zul'Gurub for like 15 minutes about how he doesn't want the Hakkari Loa Drape that just dropped because he doesn't need the hit rating on it and he should give it to the elemental shaman instead -- and did I mention it took 15 minutes to convince him of this? Needless to say, the run was long, yeah, and lo, it was also full of wiping. So the facts are these: The game has been out a long time, but the playerbase is constantly rotating. It may be hard for old-timers to accept, but even the most basic of gameplay concepts still need to be explained, and ignorance of a thing doesn't constitute a bad player, necessarily -- just a new one or one who is returning after an extended absence. All of this is the long way of answering the many emails and comments I've gotten lately about hit rating, its importance, and whether or not mages still need to worry about capping it. The short way? Cap hit.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Patch 4.2 changes, clarifications and legendary staves

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    05.21.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we discuss the perils of writing about the PTR, which stands for "Public Test Realm." For a very long time, I thought it stood for "Pirate Taco Restaurant," which I thought sounded more fun, frankly. Yes, it's always a good time when I write something and the testing process immediately renders almost every word of it completely moot. Testing is testing, I guess, and absolutely everything that pops up on the PTR at pretty much any stage of the testing cycle is entirely subject to change. So remember what we talked about last week? The whole tier 12 set bonus thing? No longer true. Well, okay, I guess some of it still holds true, but not the really interesting part. Gone is the moving Arcane Missiles. To me, that was the single most significant bonus being offered by the tier 12 set for mages, but it's been removed entirely in the latest PTR build. The other bonuses remain, in slightly altered form, but mobile missiles is apparently out. Still, I'm not perturbed, other than my simmering rage at having a thousand or so of my words -- wrung from my brain only a week prior, sweat out over a hot (or at least lukewarm, perhaps slightly moist) keyboard, painstakingly arranged into mildly pleasing, competently conjugated sentences -- become instantly irrelevant. You see, I actually think this could end up being a good thing for mages, and I promise that in a minute or two I will tell you why I think that, and the answer will not be "because of all that paint I huffed."

  • Arcane Brilliance: On the 12th tier and the set bonuses thereof

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    05.14.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we'll be discussing the Firelands patch and the sweet new mage gear it will be providing to us. Also, what is that thing sticking out of our helmets? Is that a tail? Made of fire? A flaming headtail of magical might? So we're only a few weeks into patch 4.1, and already our sights are focused squarely on patch 4.2. You can hardly blame us, though. I mean, while I am thoroughly enjoying the current patch, what with its freshly recycled 5-man content and its new Dungeon Finder Call to Arms that I don't seem to benefit from in the slightest (my queue times are right back up to 30 minutes, thanks), but I think we can all agree that for a major content patch, 4.1 was substantially light on ... well, content. Not so with 4.2. Patch 4.2 will be bringing us the Firelands, which is apparently a raid where epic cupcakes fall from the sky like rain, hardcore raiders experience orgasms just by zoning in, and we all ride flaming unicorns across lava bridges to do battle with volcanic dragon manticores. I'm not kidding. The entire raid sounds like something you'd see painted across the side of a rock band tour van in the '70s. We're also getting two new daily quest areas with their own epic loot vendors, and yes, the game's first legendary staff. And no, it doesn't have spirit on it. New raid content means new tier sets, and this time around, we're reaching a cool dozen. The tier 12 set bonuses are interesting, to say the least, and bear a bit of looking at. Keep in mind, though, as we discuss these bonuses that we're still early in the PTR process, and everything on the test realms right now is entirely subject to change -- which is, in this case, a very good thing.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Assorted patch 4.1 thoughts

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    04.30.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we take a break from slaughtering trolls and digging up ancient relics long enough to discuss our early impressions of patch 4.1. My first impression: Cobraaaaaa! The days and weeks following a major content patch are always an adventure. Suddenly Azeroth becomes the Wild West, with unexplored frontiers awaiting over every mountain, untamed vistas as far as the eye can see, and far, far too many people wandering around who haven't bathed in months. Patch 4.1 has been no exception. Logging in on patch day is a bit like going to sleep in one world and waking up in another, one where up is down, left is right, Olivia has brown hair and wears tight shirts, and Walter Bishop has an intact brain and is sleeping with some Asian chick. You never know when you're going to discover some random new nugget of craziness that wasn't in the patch notes. You also never know when you'll be disconnected in the middle of a boss fight, but hey, patch days are patchy. It's only been a few days, but undoubtedly you've noticed some good, some bad, and some weird new things lurking about the fringes of this digital world we spend time in. Let's take a look at some of the more mage-specific tidbits, shall we?

  • Arcane Brilliance: The first things your mage should do after patch 4.1 drops

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    04.23.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we'll be discussing the sparkliest ways to blow things up. Turns out there are a lot them. Let me begin by saying that as of this writing, we don't know for sure when the patch will actually drop. What we do know, however, is that the build that's on the PTR right now is flagged as a possible release candidate build, meaning it could be the final build of the patch. That usually means the release of the patch is imminent. It may not happen this week or next (we can sometimes go through several "release candidate" builds before Blizzard finally drops the thing), but my guess is that it totally will. So when the patch does hit, whenever that may be, what are you going to do first? You know, besides go hunting for warlocks to stuff and mount on your wall? I find it's good to have a plan when new content drops. Otherwise, I just end up only hunting warlocks, which -- while awesome -- doesn't really involve any of the new content. So what to do? Fear not, I've compiled a handy list of the new features that apply directly to mages so you'll have something to channel your arcane energies toward once all the warlocks are dead.

  • Arcane Brilliance: Mage armors and the mages who armor themselves with them

    by 
    Christian Belt
    Christian Belt
    04.16.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we deal in a difficult topic for mages: armor. Armor. Our ancient foe. We can use our arcane minds to teleport our physical bodies across thousands of miles in an instant, conjure enormous balls of flame from the ether with a flick of our fingers, and bake delicious pastries without ever setting foot near a stove. But present us with a shirt made of interlocking metal rings, and you are setting before us a conundrum we simply cannot solve. Still, we mages are nothing if not resourceful. We've come up with several workarounds for our inability to master putting on protective attire: We make friends with someone who can wear armor, then charge into battle cowering bravely behind that person. We learn to fling our spectacular balls of flame at our enemies from as far away as possible. We use our magical talents to conjure our own unique kind of armor. Hey, when you have to fight monsters wearing nothing but a skirt, you learn to get creative.