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Arcane Brilliance: Adventures with and observations on the Raid Finder
Joystiq Bottom line, my initial impression is that with some simple adjustments, this will be a valuable tool. The important thing to focus on, I believe, is this: With the Raid Finder, if you want to raid in World of Warcraft, you totally can. That's big. |
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we spend some time sniffing around the PTR. Which is difficult, because all I can smell right now is burnt warlock. How do you guys get that out of your robes? Maybe some Febreze.
I have to admit: Nothing in patch 4.3 excites me as much as the Raid Finder. Not transmogrification, not the Deathwing raid, not the fact that we’re drawing ever closer to me being able to roll a Pandaren kung fu mage. Nope, I’m excited about the Raid Finder.
There was a time during my WoW career when I was able to adjust my schedule around my guild’s raid nights, but that time hasn’t really existed for some time now. My family has grown, my work responsibilities have grown, and my WoW time has become increasingly limited and far more unreliable. I play when I can play these days, and it’s nigh impossible to plan a raid schedule around that. I’d wager I’m not alone in this.
So the idea of being able to see much of the same endgame content and gear up enough to help my guild on my own schedule much the same way I gear up through 5-mans now … that just thrills me to death.
But putting together a 25-man raid is an exponentially more complex endeavor than simply throwing together a 5-man run. How does this Raid Finder tool function in practice? Well, I’ve taken my mage to the PTR, and I’ve tested it out for myself. And I’m here to tell you:
It totally works. And it totally doesn’t.
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Adventures with and observations on the Raid Finder
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: Adventures with and observations on the Raid Finder originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we engage in wild, baseless speculation and make hasty, groundless assumptions based on that wild, baseless speculation. So … just like every week.
A quick recap for those of you who have limited internet access and choose (understandably) to use each of your precious online moments reading this column each week, but otherwise ignore the internet completely:
Blizzard announced a new expansion for World of Warcraft. It has pandas. The WoW online community appears to be simultaneously overjoyed, mildly excited, meh, and borderline suicidal. Monks are the new class, and they will be able to tank while drunk, which makes them pretty much identical to every other tank I know. Most importantly, though, the design team plans to throw our current talent system into a virtual wood-chipper, pick up the pieces that come out of the other side, and mash them together into a completely new singular talent tree for each class.
The three distinct mage trees will survive, but the majority of the school-specific talents and spells we have now are slated to become baseline abilities that we’ll gain as we level (automatically, no more going to a mage trainer). Ability customization once Mists of Pandaria hits will exist as six talent choices available regardless of spec, one choice between three talents every 15 experience levels. Talent specs as we have known them since the game began in 2004 will cease to exist once patch 5.0 hits, and I expect that to occur in less than a year.
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: A preliminary look at the Pandaria talent tree for mages
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Mists of Pandaria
Arcane Brilliance: A preliminary look at the Pandaria talent tree for mages originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Arcane Brilliance: A preliminary look at the Pandaria talent tree for mages
Joystiq Blizzard announced a new expansion for World of Warcraft. It has pandas. The WoW online community appears to be simultaneously overjoyed, mildly excited, meh, and borderline suicidal. Monks are the new class, and they will be able to tank while drunk, … |
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we come bearing information from the patch 4.3 PTR. Many warlocks died to bring you this information. Well, many warlocks died; bringing you this information had very little to do with that.
Coming soon.
Those words have mocked me for what feels like forever but in reality was only a couple weeks. When the initial patch notes were released for the patch 4.3 PTR, other classes got changes. Other classes had new things to discuss, new topics to broach on the official forums and then engage in rational, polite discourse about. But not mages. Under our section of the patch notes, we got those two hateful words, Blizzard’s dubious trademark phrase.
Coming soon.
But no more! We can cease our waiting, our trembling, anxious vigil. For the latest build of the PTR has delivered to us a handful of discussion-worthy changes. Let’s all release our collective bated breath and move forward as a class. Because, my fellow mages: Soon, apparently, is now.
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: News and notes from the patch 4.3 PTR
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: News and notes from the patch 4.3 PTR originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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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.
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Optimizing your mage’s gear through Rawr
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: Optimizing your mage’s gear through Rawr originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we take a look at the newly announced and quickly revised mage tier 13 set bonuses. I’ve provided a picture of the tier 13 helm above. Also, I am a liar.
So yeah, that isn’t really the mage tier 13 helm at all. No matter how desperately I want it to be.
Still, any clothing that makes me look like a time chicken wizard is welcome. But we’ve spent enough time in past columns discussing the appearance of our tier 13 set. It’s high time we started the conversation about the actual set bonuses this gear will provide. And what a conversation it will be …
Mage tier 13 set bonuses:
All right — let’s discuss, shall we?
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Time to talk about the mage tier 13 set bonuses
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: Time to talk about the mage tier 13 set bonuses originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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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.
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: On mage healing and other miscellany
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: On mage healing and other miscellany originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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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.
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Mage wishlist, late 2011 edition
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: Mage wishlist, late 2011 edition originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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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 re-roll 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?
Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: The threat hotfix and you
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Arcane Brilliance: The threat hotfix and you originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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