Your Patch 3.3 Survival Guide

Amagah! Amagah! Amagah!

RAIDING!

Arcane brings the Ferocious Inspiration buff! 3% more damage for you and the entire raid for 10 seconds whenever you crit with any arcane spell! (Effect attached to our current Arcane Empowerment talent.)

A nice buff for arcane, it spreads out yet another raid buff to allow for even more raid flexibility if somehow your raid doesn’t include a BM hunter or ret paladin.

For my 10 man guild, this is nice, as both our hunters go the survival/marksman style route, and our ret paladin is going to be a full time tank from here on out. He hated ret anyways, so this works out well for everyone. I don’t change anything, paladin gets to tank (something he actually likes doing), and me DK friend changes from full time tank to unholy DPS.

You hear that? Yeah, that’s the sound of me destroying the damage meters. It sounds like hunters and rogues crying.

Read Full Post »

Why Walk When You Can Blink/Slow Fall?

Mages have access to a whole bunch of skills that make others go green with envy. Blink, evocation, blink, frost nova, blink… I think you get the point.

In and of itself, Blink is a fairly innocuous ability. All it does is teleport you forwards 20 yards, and it sometimes fails if the terrain is stupid (like all of the Blade’s Edge arena). The PvP implications here are pretty obvious, after all, the ability to instantly traverse a distance (and escape from stuns!) is incredible.

Of course, the ability to instantly move away from something or towards something is an extremely powerful skill in raiding, too.

This is yet another thing I just sorta assumed most, if not all, mages do. Nearly every boss fight in the game has some sort of mechanic where blinking can make your job easier, the healers job easier, and even utterly trivialize some boss mechanics.

So I made a list!

Note: this list only includes current raid content, and in many cases, will exclude hard mode content, as I have not played that content. If you have, and would like to add your own tricks, by all means do so! I’ll add it to the original post.

Read Full Post »

“Buff” Your Reflexes

There’s an interesting little mechanic related to key presses and WoW, which some of you probably know all about. But I’d bet currency of some sort that there are many of you don’t. So allow me to enlighten you.

When you press a key, nothing happens. The button itself is lit up on your client, showing you which spell you’ve selected to cast. But it does not transmit the request to cast the spell until you release the key. If you have a button pressed, you can continue using other abilities as normal. The pressed key doesn’t interfere at all.

Most of you have probably noticed this behaviour, but how many of you have actually trained yourself to take advantage of it? If you have, epic kudos to you, you rock so hard.

For the rest of you… consider the following.

Read Full Post »

Quick Living Bomb Macro

Tired of tabbing? Finding it difficult to find that one last mob that doesn’t have Living Bomb?

While it ain’t perfect, there is a solution, via the incredible powers of macros!

==

#showtooltip

/cast [target=mouseover,harm,nodead,exists] Living bomb; Living Bomb

==

It’s as easy as that!

Read Full Post »

Ask Jeeves

Not dead yet!

The amount of mail I get is inversely proportional to the amount I post. Lots of posts, very little mail. Few posts, and I get so many e-mails that getting through them all is a half hour ordeal every day. And that’s if I don’t respond to any of them.

It’s actually flattering the number of mages who seek me out and ask for my honest assistance. It’s a big step, exposing yourself to a stranger for criticism.

Well, a virtual self that has no relation to the real you, anyways.

Naturally, the primary question I get asked is “halp my dps is crap!”

I’m noticing that the vast majority of you (you here used to refer to those mages who seek out my infinite wisdom) seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again.

Allow me to try and address those mistakes here and now, in an effort to help your fellow mages from repeating these same errors.

Read Full Post »

Raiding as Frost

Common Spec

18/0/53 is the best spec for frost mages. There is some variation, though with a spec that requires a minimum of 50 points in one tree and 18 points in another, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room.

Most mages in earlier gear levels will put three points into Brain Freeze for the extra damage that provides for them. Some invest in Ice Barrier, some in Blizzard talents… generally, whatever you wish to have.

See my detailed guides to specific talent trees for further information to choose your talents.

Abbreviations

BF – Brain Freeze, a talented proc that gives you a free fireball.

FoF – Fingers of Frost, a talented proc that allows to to treat any target as frozen.

FrB – Frostbolt. FB typically stands for Fireball, so I’m using FrB (pronounced “furbie”) until someone tells me what it’s supposed to be.

IL – Ice Lance.

IV – Icy Veins.

WE – Water Elemental, your little personal squirtle.

Read Full Post »

Raiding as Arcane

Common Spec

57/3/11 is, by far, the favored spec for arcane mages. There are some variations in the arcane tree, based on personal style and taste.

Where those final points are spent vary from mage to mage and what they deem to be the best options for themselves. Ones concerned about pushback invest in Arcane Stability, ones that cannot depend on a slow from a tank pick up Slow, some pick up Magic Attunement for the extra range, some fill out Student of the Mind…

You get the idea.

See my detailed guides to specific talent trees for further information to choose your talents.

Abbreviations

AB – Arcane Blast, your bread and butter nuke.

ABarr – Arcane Barrage, the end tree talent.

AM – Arcane Missiles, Captain Pew Pew himself.

AP – Arcane Power, a talented cooldown vastly increasing your damage dealt in exchange for a higher mana cost.

IV – Icy Veins.

MB – Missile Barrage, a talented proc that greatly reduces the cast time of AM.

MBAM – An Arcane Missiles casted under the effects of Missile Barrage.

PoM – Presence of Mind, a talented cooldown allowing you to make your next spell instant.

Read Full Post »

Raiding as Fire/Frostfire

Common specs

Fire: Something along the lines of 18/53/0.

You need 18 points in the arcane tree (deep enough for 3/3 Torment the Weak) and 51 points in the fire tree (for Living Bomb). The details are largely up to you. Some mages skip Imp. Scorch, some mages get 2/3 in Arcane Meditation for a 20/51/0 build.

Frostfire: Something along the lines of 0/53/18.

Again, the details are largely up to you. Living Bomb is needed, and you also need to get Ice Shards from the frost tree. Getting Piercing Ice, Icy Veins and Frost Channeling is also highly recommended.

See my detailed guides to specific talent trees for further information to choose your talents.

For both specs, Combustion is a very useless cooldown. Highly recommended to not take it.

Abbreviations

FFB – Frostfire Bolt, compare FB for Fireball.

HS – Hot Streak, that proc that gives you an instant Pyroblast.

LB – Living Bomb, the end tree talent for fire.

Spell Rotation

Fire and Frostfire mages have essentially identical spell rotations. Just replace the word “nuke” with Fireball for Fire mages, and Frostfire Bolt for Frostfire mages.

As with most casters in today’s world… of warcraft, fire/frostfire mages do not have a proper spell rotation, merely spell priorities. These are those:

Read Full Post »

Newbie Tips for the Arena

Season 6 is right around the corner, and it’s shaping up to be a rather “new guy” friendly place. With all teams starting at 0 rating, a team has nowhere to go but up. No more will your moral be dampened by watching your rating go down for three weeks solid when you start.

If that wasn’t enough, arena gear is being offered for those with lower ratings. Even if you have a “mere” 1400 rating, there’s still arena gear you meet the requirements for and can purchase.

Of course the gear won’t be the same quality as, say, a 2400 arena team has access to, but still. It’s something, which is a whole lot better than the nothing new players had in previous seasons.

So if you’re new to arenas, maybe just dabbling in them for the first time, or just haven’t played them in a long, long time, here’s a quick primer of things to get you started.

Read Full Post »

How to Stop Being a Clicker in 3 Easy Steps

Ideally, every single one of your major combat abilities, important combat utilities, and emergency buttons should be bound to a key to give you the fastest possible reaction time to using them.

It’s not easy getting there. It takes time and practice to get used to a new control format, which can be frustrating if you don’t exactly have a lot of time.

This guide is meant to ease you into the art of key binds, slowly and casually so you have time to adapt to your new controls and become proficient with them.

If you already use key binds, then this guide is not for you. 🙂 Feel free to leave your own tips and tricks in the comments!

1. Plan and Schedule when you’re going to try key bindings.

Realize beforehand that this isn’t going to be easy to do. It’s highly likely you will make mistakes when you accidentally press the wrong button. It’ll likely be frustrating, definitely awkward, and will certainly seem more difficult than just clicking.

Stick with it, you’ll see results shortly. The more you play, the more comfortable you become with your new control set, the better you will be.

Secondly, make sure that you have a large-ish block of free time before you have to do anything responsible in-game. If you’re a healer, and your guild raids Monday and Wednesday, starting your adventure into keybinds on Sunday or Monday would be disastrous.

Read Full Post »