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Arcane Brilliance: Professions for Cataclysm mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Except last week, when the holidays aggroed us. But rest easy, we managed to sheep the holidays, so now we can all go ahead and nuke down the rest of the year. As long as nobody breaks it early, our sheep shouldn't expire on the holidays for about 12 more months, give or take. So you're a mage. You have a job, and that job is taking something that was previously intact and converting it into much smaller, bloodier, often frozen chunks of that same thing. You manufacture shattered mobs, and you take pride in your work. But you may also have a side project or two. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Self, perhaps when we aren't making warlocks explode, maybe we should spend our time sewing trousers. Or baking cupcakes. Or making necklaces." Well, your self is right. You should be using your downtime in between vicious warlock kills to learn a side trade. They offer bonuses in the form of cool gear, extra money, and bonus stats, plus a bit of catharsis to help you decompress form all that murder. But which professions should you choose? That's easy: anything but mining. What's that? You'd like a bit more detail? Oh, fine.
Arcane Brilliance: Professions for Mages, the thrilling conclusion
Each week Arcane Brilliance brings you a column about Mages and all things Mage-related. That's right, Arcane Brilliance is nothing if not consistent. You won't find any server instability here. We're never down, we're always up, and you can always enter our instanced content. And the best part? Arcane Brilliance doesn't charge you 15 bucks a month. Although, donations are totally welcome.So how's everything? Did you make it through patch day unscathed? Did you log in, like me, and find that your Mage's face, forearms, and feet were gone, and there was a hole through his chest (pro tip: upgrade your video card drivers more than once every three years)? Are you running out of mana at an outrageous clip? Are your crit numbers from Molten Armor up or down? Did your guild manage to make it into Ulduar yet, and if so, did you manage to snag any phat loot? Did you dual spec your Mage so he can now both DPS and DPS? I went Frostfire/Firefrost, myself. When triple-specs hit, I'm taking a Frarcano-fire spec. Mark my words.All in all, I'd say 3.1 wasn't too bad. We have some new glyphs to play with, the Argent Tournament is good, clean fun, our mounts can swim, and we have a whole new batch of loot-pinatas to blow up. Our DPS seems to be down a bit, but we're still beating Warlocks, so I'm not going to mail any angry, expletive-laced letters to Blizzard just yet. I've written them--rest assured--but I'm not yet prepared to actually invest in stamps for them. Those things are like a buck apiece these days.So now we turn to the third and final installment in our guide to professions for Mages. If you missed them, the first two parts can be found here and here. This week we'll investigate the merits of Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, and Engineering. As an added bonus, we'll take a quick peek at the three secondary professions and enumerate the reasons for investing in them. Yes, even though you can conjure Strudel from the very air around you with but a word and a snap of your fingers, you still need to learn how to cook
Arcane Brilliance: The world of Mage-crafting, part 1
Each week Arcane Brilliance offers a place for Mages everywhere to take a short break from opening portals to Shattrath and just relax and enjoy a thousand words or two about their class. That's right, my robed brethren, nobody's going to ask you to "sheep square" or demand "table plz" around here. Yep, 'round here, all the Fireballs crit, the tank never breaks your Polymorph, and aggro is just a five letter made-up word that doesn't mean anything. So set aside your threat meters and your spell damage trinkets, sit back, and enjoy this brief respite. You can always get back to pulling aggro off the tank later. Much like life, playing World of Warcraft is a series of choices. Some of these choices (should I jump that flagged Gnome while he's already in combat, or wait till he's done and engage him honorably?) are smaller than others (should I roll Mage, or some other, crappier class?). You choose a class, a race, a hairstyle, a guild, a spec, and whether or not to accept a party invite from that Hunter who has no pet and has decided melee suits him better than attacking from range (psst...always choose "not" on that last one, trust me). One of the most important choices you will make, and one that will effect your entire WoW experience from start to finish, is your choice of professions.Your choice of a crafting profession will offer you benefits as you level your Mage to 70 and then determine many of your opportunities at end-game. Thankfully, this choice is one you can always undo, although doing so can be costly and wasteful. Join us after the jump for part one of our look at the seven primary crafting professions and what each one has to offer us as Mages throughout our WoW careers.
