Yesterday was fantastic. I’d successfully travelled halfway across the country, got home and managed to get settled in front of the computer. For the first time in a few days I was planning on helping myself to a nice portion of Warcraft goodness. I figured that since the raid lockouts had just reset that there’d…
Tag: mage
Mixing Mage Mechanics
One of the frequent accusations a Mage suffers from in Warcraft is about our buttons. Apparently we have two of them and we spam them repeatedly. We ignore everything else on the screen – for all we care we could just have a couple of small icons at the bottom, with large yellow numbers appearing…
The Fresh 80 Mage: An Arcane Raiding Guide
Levelling a mage to 80 is no mean feat – it takes dedication, patience and practice to pull it off. This is especially true for the last twenty levels in Outland and Northrend, as instance groups are a rarity and solo questing is pretty much all that’s available. But once you’re at level cap there’s…
Getting Time To React
One of the things that I’ve seen thrown around lately is how reaction times are going to become important in Cataclysm. It’s not enough to have phased fights where a boss might require you to change tactics three or four times in order to defeat it. In the new expansion I’ve heard that we’ll need…
Mage Playstyles in Cataclysm
The dust is beginning to settle following the almighty stack of class changes that came out last week. While Paladins are still waiting for theirs, the rest of the Warcraft population has been trying to work out what the changes mean for them. Mages are no exception – I wrote up an initial assesment shortly…
Patch 3.3.3: Twisted Firestarter?
For us over in Europe tomorrow is Patch Day, while those players in the US are already downloading, installing and waiting for servers to come back online. Regardless, the theorycrafters have been out in force, pouring over every talent change and glyph update. But while some classes get some interesting updates, the changes for mages…
The Crutches, They Do Nothing!
Over the last few days I’ve been raiding slightly more than usual. I’ve been back into Icecrown a couple more times, where it feels that we’re around the Festergut-Rotface level of progression. I’ve also been back to ToC10 in order to pick up more badges and test out my new UI. It’s been a pretty…
UI Quest: Mashing the Buttons
For the first step in rebuilding my UI, I’m going to concentrate on what I think is the second most important part: the buttons. These colourful icons are usually laid out like strips of candy, just waiting for you try one. What I’m going to try and do is make them more useful, ensuring that…
The Annoyance of Addons
Once you play Warcraft for any length of time, you end up using addons. These small pieces of software are designed to make them game better, either by presenting new information or showing existing stuff in a clearer way. But just as using some of them can enhance your performance, using them badly can be…
Care For Some Cheese With Your Whine?
Since this is National Whine On Your Blog Day, I’m going to confront the amorphous entity known as Mage Hate head-on. There’s this general feeling I get sometimes that players think mages are scum. Yes we have our ongoing rivalry with Warlocks, but this feeling goes beyond it. It’s like the rest of the Warcraft-playing…