Tag: cataclysm

Reader Q: From Arcane to Fire

Posted on by Gazimoff

I recently got a reader email asking for some advice with improving their fire spec. I love getting messages like this as it gives me a chance to help someone out and get geeky about my favourite spec at the same time. This particular email was eerily familiar…

We started raiding last evening and had great difficulty controlling the adds. Since then I have been asked to go as fire for the supposedly superior AoE. I’ve spent a little time on the dummies and my DPS is at best unpredictable. I’m guessing this is because I’m not criting enough to proc Hot Streak often enough and therefore having to recast scorch to get the de-buff. Just how much crit do I need and what would be worth reforging?

The first thing is that you’re not alone. I was also struggling with my fire DPS, particularly when compared with Arcane mages. Arcane is great for when you’re learning fights as the simple rotation allows you to focus on positioning and targeting. The great thing is that I found some really simple techniques that allow me to maximise my fire DPS.

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Mages and Patch 4.0.6

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s about a month and a half since Cataclysm was released. In that time we’ve seen a flurry of tweaks, changes and hotfixes to some of the biggest bugs in the game. Not everything can be fixed with a hotfix though, which is why patch 4.0.6 is bringing some pretty serious changes.

Why 4.0.6 though? Blizzard will never admit it, but patch 4.0.4 could not be found anywhere. Patch 4.0.5 was desperately trying to be an expansion in it’s own right, but this method was not allowed. It was last seen on the hills outside Irvine, howling to the other feral patches that never made it and living off stale internets discarded by open wi-fi outlets.

This leaves us with Experiment 4.0.6, a patch designed to bring union and harmony to the classes, restoring balance throughout the playerbase. Or something.
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Warcraft Versus the Traditional MMO

Posted on by Gazimoff

Box art for the original World of Warcraft

I promise I’ll get back to talking about mages soon. I’ve been doing some research on the latest PTR patch which I think will make interesting reading, but that can wait a few more days. Today I’d like to ask you a question.

Do you play World of Warcraft because it’s an MMO, or because it’s Warcraft?

The reason I ask is because your expectations of the game were probably different depending on what angle you were coming from. If you’re a veteran MMO player you’d probably expected many of the genre conventions to be applied to this game. The game world would then have been moulded and shaped around those genre conventions, effectively making a Warcraft MMO. It would still be fun to play but it would probably have had a much more traditional feel to it.

If on the other hand you’re a veteran of the Warcraft games then you’d probably expected the game world, environment and storyline to come first. You wouldn’t have felt too worried about genre conventions being cast out and disregarded as long as the game had that Warcraft look and feel. It would still have been fun to play with that unmistakable Blizzard polish, but it probably wouldn’t have felt like a traditional MMO.

Why do I make this point? Because sometimes we need reminding that games aren’t designed with our individual tastes in mind.

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Justice Points Are Useless

Posted on by Gazimoff

Gearing up for PvE content has always been a struggle, and with the difficulty dial set firmly on Cataclysmic you want to make sure that you have the best gear you have access to before you start raiding. But what does having the best gear actually mean?

  • Running heroics until you’re bored of them just to try to get a stupid item to drop. For mages there’s a big lack of iLevel 346 bracers (there’s two without Spirit, one dropping from an optional boss) and wands (again there’s two without Spirit).
  • Running heroics to grind reputation with factions until you’re guaranteed some nice gear once you hit exalted. (Flamebloom Gloves and Desert Walker Sandals are examples)
  • Running heroics to gather up the cloth and Chaos Orbs in order to tailor some epic items. Don’t expect any nice raiding gear from your profession as it’s pretty much only good for PvP starter sets.

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Mage Stat Priority in 4.0

Posted on by Gazimoff

For many of us, January marks the beginning of Cataclysm raiding. It’s time to start getting those gear upgrades from heroic dungeons, digging out those gems and finishing everything off with a nice coat of enchants. This can be fairly expensive, so it’s worth doing properly rather than wasting money on mistakes.

I’m hearing that the minimum DPS you want to be doing is around 10k sustained while raidbuffed. This isn’t just the burn phase either – you need to be able to provide decent damage output during your recover phase as well. But how do you make sure that the gear you pick is good for you? As an example, there are four cloth headpieces available at iLevel 346, all with the same base stats. Which would be the best for your spec?

I’ve put together a handy list for all three mage specs to give you an idea of what gear to look for and what gems and enchants to pick out. This mage stat priority list should help you focus on what’s important while letting you comfortably shard what’s not essential.

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Casual Is Not A Dirty Word

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, being called a geek was a crude insult thrown around by those unwilling to accept that people didn’t share their interests and hobbies. Nowadays it’s worn as a badge of honour. I’m not saying that you’ll see me standing on the top of a mountain with my shirt torn off, shouting “I AM GEEK” into the wind, but you get the idea.

I can see the same thing happening within gaming culture. The terms “casual” and “social” are thrown around with a sneer in the voice. After all, social gamers aren’t real gamers, are they? Casual gamers just don’t play games properly? Unless you’re playing the game in the style of a seasoned professional, you must be doing it wrong, right?

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Blog Azeroth Secret Santa

Posted on by Gazimoff

Every year Blog Azeroth organises a Secret Santa event where bloggers from across the community write guest posts for each other. This year was the first time I entered, with Arphalas from The Dark Order pulling my blog in the draw. I’d like to thank him for putting together such a great post and I’ll be sharing my own Secret Santa soon. Enjoy!

Greetings everyone!

secret santa bannerThis is a bit different than your normal blog post, but instead of Gazimoff I will call the shots tonight! My name is Arphalas and I am a Death Knight Blogger from The Dark Order on a mission called ‘Blog Azeroth’s Secret Santa’.

With that out of the way shall we begin?

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Coping with Cataclysm Heroics

Posted on by Gazimoff

LFG screnshot header

Let me say one thing up-front: the experience of running heroics in Beta is both different and identical to that in live. It’s different because healing was less of an issue – premade level 85 healer classes were given gear that’s suitable for their role, including Spirit on almost everything. It’s the same because even when the Tier 11-clad epic premades became available, people were still wiping on bosses because they were unable to adapt.

What does adapting mean though, exactly? There’s a term that my wife affectionately calls “management bollocks”, but it’s basically making sure that you set your expectations reasonably.  We’ve had our perceptions shaped by the state of the game over the past year or so. The changes the expansion has brought have been a shock to a great many people.

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The Veteran Mage Toolbox

Posted on by Gazimoff

Cataclysm has been a wake up call for many of us. After enjoying the new quests and zones and chomping through five more levels, several of us have thrown ourselves into the new dungeons. While completing these new instances on normal mode is straightforward, heroics can be a brick wall.

The trouble is that Wrath has made us lazy. The tricks and techniques we kept up our sleeves were crucial back in the days of Vanilla, and remained so for the early days of Burning Crusade. Unfortunately that all went out of the window with instances that could be zerged and almost limitless healing available. With the arrival of the new expansion, those days are gone.

The biggest obstacle to completing heroics is survivability. This means either avoiding or preventing the causes of damage, or being able to withstand damage when it occurs. Crowd Control is a large chunk of this – being able to polymorph a mob so that it doesn’t engage in combat. That’s only part of the picture though – Mages have a ton of other tricks and abilities that can help to keep a mob busy or help you take less damage.

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Mage Resources Need You!

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s incredible to think that we’re days away from the next expansion. In less than a week, we’ll be doing the new quests, entering the new dungeons and collecting the new gear. Expansions are the great equaliser – everyone starts at the same position again. Newer mages get a fresh chance to join raidgroups at the start of an expansion, as almost all are recruiting to replace tired veterans or character changes.

It also means that it’s time to sweep away the older guides that no longer apply to a sundered world. A lot of the core mechanics have changed, while guides to the new dungeons, heroics and raids are sorely needed. There’s also a need for gear information, upgrade paths and so on. Think of all the questions you’re likely to ask as you level through the new content, and these are the ones that are likely to be asked.

Over the next few days I’ll be refreshing the content in the Mage Resources page to ensure all the links are relevant for 4.0 and Cataclysm. But this also means that I need your help to update it and ensure all the great guides and articles that everyone has written get included.

If you’ve written a guide or article on anything mage related for 4.0/Cataclysm – or know of one that someone else has written – please leave a link in the comments.

If you’re thinking about writing something  but don’t yet have a blog, feel free to post it in the relevant part of the Mage Forums. I’ll be sure to include a link to it from the Mage Resources page, plus other forumites can provide their own thoughts and feedback on it!

Thanks for all your help!