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.

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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.

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“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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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