Aerodynamic Sleigh Bird

E-mails

I am getting your e-mails. I receive lots of them, read them, then sigh in deep regret because I can’t just dash of a quick couple sentences to them. Nearly every e-mail I receive would require time, effort and a lengthy response to adequately respond to. Yes, I could reply to a question about frost mages in arena with a quick bulleted list, but that doesn’t really answer the question, just addresses it.

I’m sure you see the difference.

I may only be in first year University, but I am taking second year level history courses. I went into the IB (International Baccalaureate) program in high school, which can be best labeled as the “International program for students who think they’re smarter than everyone else and want to prove it.” Oh do I have stories about IB… anyway, it means I get treated as if I have already done the first year course of whatever classes I took in IB and did great in.

University is hard, blah blah, not really, it just eats up a lot of time. Especially the history courses.

So in answer to all those people who’ve e-mailed me your excellent questions, consider this your public acknowledgment. Keith, Dan, Theodore, Ripples the Pengiun (I’m not kidding either), I got it. Your e-mail is safe in my inbox with a little frowny face tag.

I’ll get to them… hopefully…

My last final is Monday, I should have a LOT of free time after that to get out proper answers to them.

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Arcane Shatter

Going frost for PvP is so Burning Crusade. The new hotness? Arcane, baby!

I prefer arcane over frost for general PvP, largely for the following reasons:

• Mobility
• Mobility
• Did I already say mobility
• Cause Seriously
• This spec is MOBILE
• Also stupidly powerful crits

Specifically, I use a specific kind of arcane spec, known as “arcane shatter”. It’s a kickass spec, full of ass kicking, though it’s honestly a rather cheap spec to use against the undergeared and underskilled. It’s possible to defeat most opponents by using only slow and arcane barrage. That poor ret paladin…

Anyway, the spec itself is rather simple. 51/0/20, picking up all the good stuff arcane power, icy veins, slow, ABarr. It detours from a “normal” arcane PvP spec in that it doesn’t use arcane blast or arcane missiles. The main nuke is, in fact, frostbolt.

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Don’t Be So Hasty

If I ever remember to log off in my raid gear again, those of you who actively stalk my armory to see what I’m up to (and I know you’re out there!) will note that I have forsaken spellpower gems in favor of haste gems.

Shock! Le gasp! I know, eh? (Canadians do not say “I know right?”)

The reasoning is actually very simple. Fact is, there is no appreciable difference between spellpower gems and haste gems.

Well, there is, slightly. An epic +23 spellpower gem will grant me 29 DPS, whereas an epic +20 haste gem will grant me 28 DPS.

To me, a difference of one DPS is just far too small for me to give a damn, especially considering that stacking haste gems is infinitely more fun. It’s invigorating, it’s exciting. Arcane Blast has a base cast time of 1.9 seconds, and it feels absolutely out of control. In a good way.

Have you ever been on a really fast roller coaster? Think of the surge of adrenaline when you aren’t really doing anything complicated, just roaring along the track as fast as you can go. Unstoppable, relentless speed. I suspect driving a car real fast evokes a similar feeling.

That’s what playing arcane feels like with 700+ haste. I’m shooting for 800+ in my next few upgrades here, but the point is casting spells really fast is just an awesome feeling.

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An Inconvenient Truth

With the Onyxia patch hitting either this week or next, we stand on the cusp of arcane’s third or fourth facelift. Honestly I’ve stopped counting, poor girl’s had more tweaks and fixes done than a ret paladin.

In case you missed it, the tweaks are as follows:

• Arcane Blast buff can now stack to 4, increasing mana cost by 175% per application.
• Missile Barrage now has a 40% chance to proc from Arcane Blast, and causes Arcane Missiles t0 cost no mana.
• Arcane Blast buff only lasts 6 seconds.

Alright, not that we’re all up to speed here, let’s start talking consequences.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, these changes render arcane dead even with the standard fireball spec. On a patchwerk fight, considering perfect play and BiS gear, arcane is actually 1% ahead.

Realistically speaking, there is no appreciable difference. Fire is better at movement and AoE, arcane has way higher burst potential and can change targets far faster.

In other words, which one you choose to play is the one you want to play.

A bright, fantastic day for mages everywhere! Except frost mages.

In theory, anyway.

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Arcane and Val’kyr Twins – Two Quick Notes

The twin val’kyrs have an interesting “light” and “dark” mechanic that sounds confusing at first, but is actually incredibly easy to pick up. Basically, if you can down faction champions, the twins will not offer any challenge whatsoever.

See, every member of the raid chooses to become light or dark. If you’re dark, you deal more damage to light targets, absorb all dark damage, but take a crap ton of damage from light energy. And, of course, vice versa.

Each twin pulses an aura that deals damage. The dark one hits everyone for 1500 shadow damage, the light one hits everyone for 1500 fire damage. If you have, say, the light buff, that aura that pulses fire damage every 2 seconds is simply absorbed.

As many of you are no doubt aware, arcane mages have this talent called Incanter’s Absorption. This talent increases your spellpower whenever you absorb damage.

I’ll let that sink in for a second.

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Onyxian Arcane

ZOMGWTFBBQARCANEGOTBUFFED

Please, Rip, make haste to the PTR.

Tell me this makes arcane viable again.

ARCANE IS BACK BABY!!!!

ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT I GET IT.

/exhausted

So you want to know, how’s arcane doing? How does it stack up? How’s it going.

Come one guys, it’s just a PTR. It doesn’t

OkholycrapPUTTHEPYROBLASTDOWN!

Now let’s… let’s all just calm down here. There’s no need to incinerate my flesh quite yet. Besides, Ice Block is off cooldown and it wouldn’t work anyways.

SHUTUPPUTYOURPRIESTALTAWAY.

Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Gather around.

You might want to sit down for this. The news is pretty huge.

You ready?

*Deep Breath*

Arcane and Fireball are equal.

Naturally there’s some fluctuation, as fire is still dependent on RNG and arcane is far less forgiving of screw ups, and you can go into all sorts of debate about which brings more utility, which has stronger AoE, and so forth. But the simple fact remains that Arcane and Fireball produce equivalent DPS.

Now don’t take this to mean that they are equal on every fight, or even every part of every fight. The two still have vastly different styles and skill sets. There’s still lots of factors to take into account, like whether you’ll get more mileage out of multi-target LB or more controlled, on demand damage.

If you are a true raiding min maxer, you will have to have an arcane spec AND a fireball spec to be good at every fight. For the rest of us… some fights you’ll be a little behind the fire mages, other fights you’ll be a little ahead.

And isn’t that exactly how it should be?

Essentially, it has come down to this: which do you like more?

You wanna be arcane? Go for it. You aren’t holding anyone back. You wanna stick with fireball? Rock on, you burning mage you.

I’m… really not sure what else to say here.

Congratulations mages, we now have two perfectly viable and equal end game raiding specs?

Congratulations Blizzard, you’ve managed to do what all thought impossible?

Congratulations cryomancers, there’s hope for you yet?

In any case, Merry Friday, amirite?

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Multiple Tier Sets for Purists

I am, by far, not the first person to come up with this idea.

I could go into a long explanation, but why bother? Y’all aren’t incompetent idiots, and I’m sure by now all of you are familiar with hybrids and their varying sets of gear.

Why are the hybrids the only ones with different tier sets?

For now, let us simply divide the mage class into two groups, the crit specs and the haste specs. The crit specs being fireball and frostfire, the haste specs being arcane and frost, of course.

Bear with me.

Of the crit specs, frostfire is the more extreme of the two, valuing crit significantly higher than haste, where fireball deeply loves it some crit, but likes haste just fine.

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In Which Fireball Makes Me Angry

It took less than a month to get the gear together to legitimately try a FB/TtW build. (Yes, I still refuse to capitalize that middle t.)

I’ve got 4pT8 now, and am only 1% shy of the hit cap, though it doesn’t seem to matter. A thousand casts of Scorch on a test dummy and no misses. I’ll be trying the farm content this way, see what happens.

I had heard a FB spec was random in it’s DPS, but man… there is nothing that can prepare you for DPS swings that huge. I’ll be poking along at 3k DPS, when lady luck smiles on me and suddenly I’ve dealt 100k damage in ten seconds.

Lemme put it this way. Spamming scorch and using HS procs as they come can grant me DPS anywhere from 2k to 3.5k.

It’s like that one D&D game where I one shot a dragon, then killed a party member accidentally, cut off my own foot, and impaled myself all in the same round. Admittedly the dragon one shot was a coup dentist (or whatever that french word is), but still, it ain’t easy beating 65AC as a level 6 monk.

D&D nights that cause the DM to weep aside, all this respeccing has instilled in me a deep sense of anger that my beloved arcane tree is being so rigorously ignored.

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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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Arcane Flushing

In the real world, we don’t have magic. We have technology. We can’t fly by muttering “levitate”, but we can move 700 people across four oceans with little difficulty. We can’t instantly communicate using magic orbs, but we can via the internet.

In a world with magic, magic itself replaces technology. We don’t have huge airplanes, but we do have the ability to near-instantly teleport to other planets.

For example, instant communication. In our universe, we use things like skype, MSN, or e-mail to communicate near instantly with each other.

This technology exists in WoW, too, and all of us have used this device to it’s fullest extent.

An invention created by a high elf mage during the Third War, the Communications Hub Arcane Teleprompter (or CHAT) is essentially a small, highly configurable box that allows it’s user to instantly communicate with anyone else who has a similar box.

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