It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that loves warlocks. Arcane Brilliance loves warlocks so much. It loves them right in the face. With a Pyroblast. Can you feel the love? Does it feel like your heart is melting? And like your brain is running down the side of your face? Because it totally is. And … I think that used to be an ear. Oh, warlocks. So much love! If you still had anything resembling a face, Arcane Brilliance would totally kiss you.

Let me get this out of the way: I love my goblin mage.

I love him as much as it is possible to love a short, ugly, green man who values profit above anything else. When I’m playing my main, trying out new talents and abilities, I can’t stop wishing I was spending time with my irredeemable little goblin, attaching rockets to chickens and riding robotic laser-sharks. It’s not healthy, but I just can’t quit the tiny little monster.

So my beta testing this week has been pretty focused on the low-level stuff in Cataclysm, rather than clicking Fire Orb and hoping that this time it actually works. I figure this is okay, since Cataclysm itself is an expansion focused not just on the endgame stuff, but also on overhauling the leveling process. So today, put down your spreadsheets and your nerdrage; we’re going to have a brief conversation about leveling.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: The early levels for Cataclysm mages

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Cataclysm

Arcane Brilliance: The early levels for Cataclysm mages originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: The services we provide

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: The services we provide originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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 …

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Level 80 mage gearing road map, part 2

Filed under: Mage, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: Level 80 mage gearing road map, part 2 originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 22 May 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: I hope for an icy apocalypse

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: I hope for an icy apocalypse originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 08 May 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that comes to you this week from the desk in my upstairs bedroom, where I sit, pantsless (as is my custom), listening to chiptunes (Anamanaguchi!) and eating a giant bowl of Corn Pops. The wife and kids are out shopping, so it’s just you and me, mages. Let’s do this.

I’ve been writing this column once a week for over two years now, and each week, I follow the same general process. First, I figure out what I’m going to write about. Then I research my chosen topic (some topics require more research for me than others) until I feel comfortable enough to speak authoritatively on the subject. Finally, I sit down and write the thing. Then I edit the crap I just wrote until it resembles cogent thought, at which point I submit it to my editors. They notify me of any still-glaring issues with the column, and after a bit more polishing, the finished product magically appears on your computer screen, usually sometime Saturday night.

The hardest part of this process, for me anyway, is usually that first part. Sure, some weeks it’s easy. Maybe we just had a major content patch and there’s a fresh load of class changes to discuss. Maybe I’m writing the second part of a multi-part post, so I already know going into the week what I’m sitting down to write about on Friday. But most weeks, immediately upon finishing that week’s column, I begin worrying about what I’m going to write about next week. It begins as a mild itch in the very back of my mind, a little tickle reminding me that in seven days I have a column due and I have no idea what that column’s going to be about. Then, as the Friday due date approaches, that itch becomes a constant gnawing dread.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Macros for mages

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: Macros for mages originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 27 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that today brings you the above fan-submitted picture of an apparent gnome explosion. Incidentally, Gnome Explosion? Also the name of my 80′s tribute band. We play Tuesday nights in the parking lot at Scooter’s Crab Shack just off the route 17 turnpike and we’re known for our Stan Bush covers.

My father was a history professor, so I’ve always harbored a secret affinity for the events of the past. I like timelines, backstory, and dare I say it…lore. My mother, by the way, was a warlock-hunter, and warlock parents still to this day invoke her name in dire tones to get their warlock children to eat their vegetables, but that’s a story for another time.

So, in the spirit of preserving the history of all things mage-related, I’d like to bring you this brief history of the single prettiest spell in the game: Frostfire Bolt.

• November 2008: Wrath of the Lich King is released. Mages everywhere discover that at level 75 they get access to a brand new spell, called Frostfire Bolt. It combines the effects of both Fireball and Frostbolt. Because it benefits from all talents that affect either fire and frost spells, a new elementalist spec is born. It dives into both the fire and frost trees to take every talent that can possibly improve this single spell. Blizzard wholly endorses this spec, having introduced the spell for the sole purpose of allowing such a talent configuration.
• December 2008: As mages everywhere enter the initial stages of raiding content in the new expansion, they discover that the so-called Frostfire build is at that time the single best DPS mage spec in the game.
• March 2010: Frostfire what? I’m sorry. I totally forgot what we were talking about. Oh yeah. That old spell. People still use that?

Now, before all three of you serious Frostfire mages still playing this game destroy me, you should probably click through to the rest of the column.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: A lament for Frostfire

Filed under: Mage, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: A lament for Frostfire originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the weekend again, and that means it’s time for another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that would like to continue its ongoing series of “Pictures of things you’re hitting that warlock in the face with.” In today’s installment, we’ll be hitting that warlock with a large chunk of ice. As you can see, the ice has sharp edges, pointy parts, and is hurtling toward the warlock at an absolutely painful rate of speed. Other things we’ll be hitting that warlock in the face with in future installments include massive balls of flame, rapid-fire salvos of arcane energy, and of course monkey feces.

To contribute to the increasingly awesome collection of guides that make up WoW.com’s class 101 series, I bring you Frost 101. As with the Arcane 101 column I did a few weeks back, let me begin with what this guide is, and also with what it is not:

What it is: A general overview of the spec from a PvE perspective, directed at relative newcomers to either level 80 or the spec in general. It will provide basic idea of where to start, how to spec, how to gear, and what to do as a frost mage.

What it is not: A guide to in-depth theorycrafting, detailed hard-mode raid strategies, min-maxing, which weapon kills Sparkman fastest, how to pull off an ultimate combo, or burn an entire quarter on one play with Bo Jackson. We’ll cover all of those topics on some other day. Well, maybe not all of them. But definitely the Bo Jackson run, because that was crazy.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Frost 101

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: Frost 101 originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that would like to assert the following:

None of these assertions can be disputed.

Hey, mages! Let’s have an argument.

Well… maybe not so much an argument per se, because no matter how you slice it, an equally geared frost mage is going to do less overall DPS than a fire or arcane mage… but we’ll definitely be having a discussion.

Here’s a general format for how this discussion will take place:

1. I will present my reasons why raiding as a frost mage is viable.
2. You will then tell me why I am wrong.

You may be asking yourself: Christian, what has provoked this sudden defense of frost magery? You play an arcane mage! Also, where are your pants?

To your first question, I would say, “yes, you’re right. But in preparation for writing my forthcoming Frost 101 column, I have been toying with a secondary frost spec, and finding it a great deal of fun.” To your second question, about the whereabouts of my trousers, I would say stop watching my webcam. Really, you knew what you were getting into when you clicked that link.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: An argument for raiding as a frost mage

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: An argument for raiding as a frost mage originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that wants to point out that while gnomes often come up…er…short…when compared to the other races, they do have one special feature that always looks larger by comparison. Their spells are huge! Wait…what did you think I was talking about?

So anyway. It’s always an exciting time around here when a new patch hits the PTR. We all wake up, head down to the living room and gather beneath the tree to open our presents. Sometimes the bounty is rich, and we reap a choice harvest of new content and features. Other times the crop is more meager. And while patch 3.3.3 doesn’t seem to have brought with it the largest pile of new stuff we’ve ever seen, it’s turning out to be a bit more generous than I’d have previously suspected.

Yes, for those of us who play this game, a new patch is just like Christmas. You just never know what you’re going to get. Will that gaily wrapped parcel contain an N64? Or a hideous sweater? A huge buff? Or a soul-crushing nerf? Let’s all head over to the PTR together and start unwrapping, shall we?

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Patch 3.3.3 PTR changes for mages

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: Patch 3.3.3 PTR changes for mages originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s time again for another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that thinks nothing’s prettier than a mage on a balcony in Dalaran, tearing through the fabric of space with a violent explosion of arcane energy.

Ah…best in slot.

In a game that is–stripped to its most basic components–about obtaining better and better gear, it’s natural that eventually, you’d begin wondering what the holy grail is. What is the ultimate goal? Which piece of gear is actually, finally, at the end of the day, the best? And how long until the next patch takes it from best in slot to third or fourth-best in slot?

In most cases, this isn’t especially difficult to determine. Which item has the best stats? If one cloak has 80 spellpower, and another has 90, chances are good that you can identify the best option of the two. Programs like Rawr can make it even easier. Plug in your character’s information, and viola! Here’s the robe that’s best for you. But where things typically get hairy is on those final two slots: trinket #1, and trinket #2.

Unlike most of your other gear, trinkets are often more…subjective. Here are two excellent trinkets:

Reign of the Dead

Talisman of Resurgence

You’re a new mage. Which one of those is better? How do you even compare them? One appears to be an apple, while the other has a decidedly orange-like quality.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: What to do with your trinket slots, Part 1

Filed under: Mage, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Arcane Brilliance: What to do with your trinket slots, Part 1 originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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