Tag: mage

My Diamond Shoes are Too Tight

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 be a wide variety of choices available, even at the late hour I logged on. As luck would have it, there definitely was.

I managed to get get myself into an ICC25 PuG being organised by a few people from some of the leading guilds on the server. Everything filled up nicely, we marched in and managed to take down the first four bosses as well as the mini random quest encounter. Thirteen badges in the bag, twenty achievement points and a fair chunk of fun for the evening. We’d have progressed further too if it wasn’t for the double-maintenance whammy we’ve had this week.

The awesome thing that came out of the run though was that I picked up Nibelung from Lady Detahwhisper. I’d heard some great things about this staff, particularly how the Val’kyr that it summons can really ramp up your DPS. The trouble with procs like these though is that you never really know if they’ll be worth it until you gem and enchant the thing and give it a go.

I’m also building up an armoury of weapons that I think I should really start cutting down.  But the stats, procs and so on make it very hard to choose which combo is better. I must have spent about three hours at one point trying to work out which was mathematically superior until I realised I was no longer playing World of Warcraft and instead had somehow logged into MetaCraft: Spreadsheet Theory. It was not a fun place.

Currently I have the following taking up room in my bags:

I know it’s a bit like moaning I have too many pairs of shoes, or that the menu at a restaurant I’m visiting has too many tempting options, but it’s a pain nonetheless. And I really don’t want to go back to spreadsheets and searching forums for definitive answers on the best weapon to get. Sometimes I wish itemisation was easy.

So here’s the plan – go to the target dummies and test each weapon in turn to see which gives the biggest answer. Of course, if you reckon you have an answer for me then feel free to pipe up. If we had a unified Mage resource site, I’d post it there, but we currently don’t.

I’m keeping Nibelung though – being able to have Val’kyr proc from by Blizzard AoE (about all I do in heroics these days) should mean I have a harem of these things following me around…

Mixing Mage Mechanics

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 when we press them.

As mages we all know there’s more to our class than the robe and the pointy hat. If there wasn’t we’d be little different to Warlocks, except maybe with a better education and less irrational fear of sunlight. But how often have we peeled back the robe and looked at how our class works? When it gets down to fundamentals, do we really have the best game in the world?

The Gatling Gun Mage

If you think of a Warcraft Mage, you’re thinking of this guy. He spends his time casting spells as frequently and as potently as possible. The player can frequently be found mashing buttons, frothing at the mouth and cackling wildly. It’s one of those very pure and raw mechanics that instantly provides you with feedback on how you’re doing. Push Button, Receive Bacon.

It also means that being a mage is directly linked to your performance. If you’re the top of the damage meters you’re good. If you’re somewhere in the middle you need to push your buttons harder. If you’re at the bottom you’re a Warlock. It doesn’t matter what spec you play or what gear you have. If you’re pro it will show.

The Spellweaver

For some mages, a thirst emerged for something more cerebral and involved than just mashing buttons. A further concept emerged, where a mage would start by casting one spell, but would then elaborate on it further by drawing on additional components to make something truly special. Age of Conan was a game that demonstrated this, although it began to become more of a caster version of Dance Dance Revolution than anything else.

There is still this unmet dream of a mage pulling off some incredible spell, the skies going dark and the boss being hit with a column of fire as a devastating finishing move is unleashed. It feels counter-intuitive that the most devastating mage a spell has in his arsenal is the same one he’s been using for the last seventy four levels but just hits harder.

The Master of Buffs

For the real back-seat mage, the concept of dishing out short duration buffs and debuffs is a possibility. Working in a similar way to a healbot, your sole purpose would be to apply damage buffs to your party members and vulnerability debuffs to their target. Your job is then managing and juggling all those buffs to make sure the rest of the group still does shedloads of damage.

The problem with this model is that you become a passive and boring symbiote that cannot exist without a group to support you. You give them buffs, they give you loot.

Besides, there are no big yellow numbers. Well, none that you’ll see anyway. And life’s all about big yellow numbers.

The Ritualist

You remember those Warlocks? They have a collection of spells that require others to help them – the common ones being Summoning party members and Soulwells. To be fair though they also have a couple of other tricks up their sleeve – have you ever played Doomguard Roulette for example?

The basic mechanic is that a cluster of mages group together to cast spells in the midst of battle, pooling their power to launch a powerful attack at the enemy. Trouble is it means you’d need to take more than one mage with you into battle. It would also mean that as your mages died (from standing in the bad stuff of course), the amount of power in the pot would drop.

So if you were to build your own mage from scratch which bits would you pick? What would you choose from the jumbled box of parts in order to make the ultimate wielder of spells? What would you avoid completely – what would be the last chocolate left in the box? As always, leave your ideas in the comments.

The Fresh 80 Mage: An Arcane Raiding Guide

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 nowhere else to go except heroics and raids. This guide is intended to help you get ready to raid as quickly as possible.

Before We Begin

This guide assumes that you’re already a level 80 mage. If you’re currently looking to roll a new mage and level up to 80, I suggest you check out Psynister’s excellent levelling guides. Using these you should get to 80, but you’ll also pick up guidance on how the class works and how the mage talents contribute to the class mechanics.

This guide also focuses exclusively on the Arcane raiding spec. For other raiding specs I’d suggest checking out Empowered Fire’s guide to raiding in 3.3.3, or the  info at Frost is the New Black or Spicytunas. Although Arcane is currently Flavour Of The Month, it’s worth being aware of other specs so that you can swap to them as the buffs and nerfs change things.

The final thing I should mention is that this guide is designed to get you started as a raiding Arcane mage. It doesn’t cover individual raid tactics or advanced strategies. For those, I’d reccomend the resources avaiable at the Elitist Jerks mage forums or the mage section of Epic Answers.

Playstyle

Mages are the typical glass cannon. They do a high amount of damage, but can only take very little punishment before falling over dead. As a result, your job is focused on doing two really simple tasks:

  • Doing as much damage as you can, over as long a time as you can. As a raiding mage, you’re looking for consistency – there’s no point to being able to frontload your damage in the first ten seconds of a fight. Having a consistent DPS rate from the start to the end of the bossfight is what you’re looking for here. You also want to stretch your mana as far as it will go – this means that you need to have a healthy mana pool and know how to keep it topped up.
  • Taking as little damage as possible. This means moving out of the bad stuff quickly and being very aware of what’s going on around you – dead mages don’t DPS. It also means knowing what spells you can use while you’re moving so that your DPS doesn’t plummet as soon as you start running around screaming. I’d also suggest having a good read of the healing tips for DPS, as we’re so fragile that getting on the good side of healers is strongly encouraged.

Setting Up

When getting any new character ready to raid, it’s worth spending time to freshen up the talent spec and glyphs. I’ve included a basic Arcane raiding talent spec below that’ll be useful for most fights. You might also want to have a look at it on the armoury.

From this baseline, there’s a couple of things that you can play around with if you’re feeling adventurous. Incanter’s Absorption can be a little situational, but allows you to use Mana Shield, Fire Ward and Frost Ward to boost your DPS. By dropping the points in Student of the Mind and Slow, you can throw a point in Magic Attunement to get a bit of extra range and throw the rest in Incanter’s Absorption. You can even take the points out of Ice Shards and put them in Frost Warding if you want to make this mechanism even more useful. It’s worth noting though that both wards are being removed in Cataclysm, so this additional technique might not be as viable. Experiment with it though and see how you get on.

For Glyphs, it’s again a bit of a mixed bag. There are four absolute must-haves, but the two leftovers are pretty much up for debate.

  • Glyph of Molten Armor is worth having as it makes all that surplus spirit on your gear more useful. Although crit rating isn’t as useful as haste rating to an arcane mage, the increase to your damage output is still significant.
  • Combining with the Molten Armor boost, the Glyph of Arcane Missiles will increase the damage your missiles do when they crit. It’s a win-win situation.
  • The last major one to go for is Glyph of Arcane Blast, as it works to improve the bonus you get from your spell rotation.
  • If you’re fed up of buying Light Feathers from the Auction House, it’s worth going for Glyph of Slow Fall to remove the annoying reagent requirement.
  • The two remaining minor slots are flexible. Most people tend to use Glyph of Fire Ward and Glyph of Frost Ward, but they’re not essential and depend on your playstyle.

Rotations

Arcane has three basic rotations: a standard one that provides the best balance between DPS and mana consumption, a light one that reduces your DPS but stretches your mana out for long fights, and an all out nuke that ramps up your DPS but drains your mana quickly.

Spam until you have four stacks of buff and procs , then cast

Your standard rotation involves casting Arcane Blast a minimum of four times. You’re trying to get Missile Barrage to proc, but you’re also wanting to make sure that you get the full boost that Arcane Blast gives. If Missile Barrage hasn’t proc’ed by the time you’ve cast Arcane Blast four times, just keep on casting it.

Spam until you have four stacks of buff and procs, up to five times maximum, then cast

This rotation is a halfway-house between doing solid DPS and having your mana stretch out over the duration of a bossfight. In fact, considerign the downtime that you get from Evocation, it can sometimes result in higher DPS. The rule with this rotation is to only cast Arcane Blast a maximum of five times. If Missile Barrage hasn’t proc’ed by your fifth Arcane Blast cast, use Arcane Missiles anyway. The casting time is longer and it’ll cost mana to cast, but it’ll also eat up the Arcane Blast stack and reset it for you.

Spam until procs , then cast straight away

If you’re trying to conserve mana, just cast Arcane Blast until Missile Barrage procs. As soon as it does, cast Arcane Missiles. You’ll lose out on DPS as you’re not get the full benefit of stacking up the Arcane Blast buff, but your mana will stretch much further.

Spam until you run out of mana

You can perform burst damage just by spamming Arcane Blast. This will suck through your mana incredibly quickly though, so only use it when you absolutely have to.

You can also boost your DPS through the use of long-cooldown spells. The key ones for an arcane mage are Mirror Image, Icy Veins and Arcane Power. Use them as soon as they become available on trash and general boss fights, or at the same time for a significant boost in DPS when you need it. Sync their use up with Heroism/Bloodlust for even greater effects.

There are times when you need to move around, like getting out of the Bad Stuff or changing fight phase. During these times, switch to using Arcane Barrage instead of Arcane Blast as it’s an instant cast that you can use while moving. You can also use Presence of Mind to make an Arcane Blast instant cast if you’re doing a lot of dancing.

It’s worth going to a target dummy and practicing all of these rotations so that you can get a feel for their nuances and build up some muscle memory. Being able to switch gears during a fight is incredibly useful, especially if several people are floor-tanking and you have a healthy mana pool to give you options.

Gearing Up

At this late stage in the expansion, your quickest way of gearing up is running heroics till you’re blue in the face. Get as many Emblems of Triumph as you can from running heroic instances and pick up the five pieces of Tier 9 gear. You’re going to need 220 emblems for the full set, needing roughly 37 instance runs to collect so it’ll take anything between three days and a week to complete. Surplus badges will end up going towards gap items (belts, rings, trinkets etc) or gems, so every extra badge is worth getting.

It’s also worth keeping a careful eye out for any other gear upgrades that might come your way. Chances are that any loot that drops will be yours if it’s an upgrade. The RatingBuster addon does help, but in order to do a quick comparison, there’s a couple of simple rules to follow:

  • Spell power is the most important stat, with haste rating being a very close second. If an item has less spellpower but much more haste, grab it. point for point they work out very similar.
  • Crit rating is the third stat to look out for, but each point of critrating is only worth about half a point of spellpower. It’s usually not worth going for if you’re going to lose a lot of spellpower or haste.
  • Reaching the hit cap is important for raiding, but don’t downgrade gear purely for the sake of getting more hit. You already get 6% hit through your talents, meaning that in order to be self-reliant you’ll need about 289 hit rating to be capped. Depending on the raid composition though, you might be able to increase it to as much as 10%. You might find you can get away with as little as 184. There’s a good comparison table on Wowwiki’s Spell Hit page.

When gemming your gear, there’s only four to consider. For your headpiece the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is undoubtedly the best choice. Red or no-colour (belt buckle) sockets are best suited to using a Runed Cardinal Ruby. The orange Reckless Ametrine is the best one for your yellow sockets, while the Purified Dreadstone is the best for your blue sockets.

It’s also important to keep your gear enchanted, particularly when you pick up an epic quality item. It’s worth having an Arcanum of Burning Mysteries, a Greater Inscription of the Storm and a Brilliant Spellthread ready for any outstanding gear that you pick up. You might also want to do the same with enchanting scrolls – spellpower boosts, hit/crit boosts or overall stat boosts are the ones to look for here.

Managing Consumables

Apart from the obvious need for a large stack of Arcane Powder, you’re going to need to bring a hefty amount of consumables. As you start out raiding your performance won’t be as good as that of more seasoned mages, it’s very important to make sure that you’re prepared for the raid. Part of this is making sure that the gear you have is optimised, but part of it means that you have the right consumables with you.

Fish Feasts are pretty much the standard buff food, but a cheaper alternative might be Firecracker Salmon, particularly if you’re in a PuG. Either way, you can’t guarantee that there will always be a fish feast for you to use, so it’s worth keeping a stack of these in your bag.

Make sure you have a stack of Runic Mana and Runic Health potions, as you never know when you’ll need them. To avoid using mana potions, make sure you create a Mana Sapphire at the start of every raid, and replace it if you think you’ll exhaust the charges. Also make frequent use of Evocation to keep your mana topped up.

A good number of Flask of the Frost Wyrm are essential for raiding. There’s no need to drink a flask at the start of the raid, but make sure that you’re under the effects of one during every boss fight.

Further Reading

As I mentioned at the start, this guide is designed to get you in a position to raid as quickly as possible. If you feel that there’s something worth adding, please feel free to shout about it in the comments.

For those of you after some further detail on Arcane mages and raiding specs, the following sources are worth checking out. If you think that there’s something worth adding here, let me know.

Getting Time To React

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 to pull off Nintendo-kid button-taps with incredible precision if we’re going to get near the top grade content.

One of the things I like about MMOs, particularly Warcarft, is that I don’t need some ninja-keyboard skills in order to play well. My reaction times aren’t nearly as great as when I was a d-pad wielding kid on Sonic the Hedgehog, and I like a game that respects it. Not only that, I like that the game runs on a variety of connections and doesn’t expect you to have the purest broadband money can buy. You don’t have to be lightning-fast in order to play, just reasonably stable.

The other thing that gets me is how reaction time is relative to what you’re doing. If you’re expecting something to happen, you can react to it quickly If you’re not expecting it or you’re focused on something else (like mashing your buttons as hard as you can or playing Grid whack-a-mole), then your reaction time is much worse.

Reaction times also change according to the role your playing. I know that I’m much better doing some things on my priest than I am doing them on my mage.

Besides, it’s not like tanks don’t have their own set of problems during boss fights. Their ordeals even extend into trash pulls.

It’s not like I don’t want there to be some challenge to game content – I want to face struggles and difficulties in-game as it makes the taste of victory so much sweeter. By the same token I don’t want an army of middle-aged geek gamers to feel that they suddenly can’t keep up because they don’t have the reflexes they had when they were 10 years old.
Warcraft rocks because it’s attractive to a wide demographic, not in spite of it.

Mage Playstyles in Cataclysm

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 after the changes came out. There are a whole bucketload of opinions out there though that are worth digging through.

  • Euripedes starts off with a squee over the changes, following it up with a rant about the loss of Wards, the crappiness of Mana Shield and the Shaman hate.
  • Arioch has a desire to dance the Time Warp everywhere, but hates the Arcane Missiles changes.
  • Gnomeageddon is trying to be inspired by the changes, but struggling.
  • Krizzlybear is also doing the Time Warp and savouring the flavour of the changes.
  • Tarinae thinks the gains are pretty positive for mages.
  • Aurdon got crit by the wall of text and is still trying to recover.
  • ArcaneTinkerTank says the changes make him go hmmmmm.
  • Archaius thinks it’s Christmas with all the presents mages are getting.
  • Empowered Fire are excited by the changes.
  • WoW.Com has some initial reactions from their resident mage.
  • River is still waiting for more teleports. Oh, and he wants Blink fixed.

Now that the changes are out and the initial analysis done, what do the they actually mean? Can we start to work out how the typical mage will play, how the talent trees will play out and what each spec will bring to the table? Based on the information we currently have, I’ve done a rough sketch-out of how the three mage types will work.

Frost

The Deathfrost mechanic is probably the most interesting – cast Frostbolt on a mob and gain a damage buff. Now you could just carry on spamming Frostbolt, but then you wouldn’t take advantage of the Deathfrost bonus. Remember though that you’ll get random free Arcane Missiles procs, which will take advantage of Deathfrost.

But hang on – we’ve already got a spell that will make use of most of our Frost talents and it’ll take advantage of the Deathfrost bonus. Yes, Frostfire Bolt will live again in endgame raiding. In fact, as you gain more gear with the Mastery stat, this spell will do even more damage. Add into the mix talents like Brain Freeze and you have a setup that will allow you to cast high-damage spells that are instant cast, have no mana cost and benefit from Mastery.

The crucial bit is how Deathfrost will work. Is it a stacking buff that you ramp up, or a buff that sticks at the same level after you’ve cast Frostbolt once? Either way, you’ll end up with a rotation that has Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt and the occasional Arcane Missiles proc. As the Deathfrost mastery bonus ramps up, you might even switch from one rotation to another, depending on how much bonus Frostfire Bolt gets. It could easily come out on top as the raiding spec of choice purely on the strength of Mastery

PVP as a Frost mage will be similar, except I’m expecting a lot more battleground play. There are bound to be talents that give you a boost to Wall of Fog, which are going to be incredible in rated battlegrounds. What I’d like to see though are two Wall of Fog bonuses – one in Fire and the other in Frost. The Frost one increases snaring duration, while the Fire one would increase the damage component of the Wall. Freezing Fog/Choking Fog.

I think there’s also a lot of chance for elemental mages to double-team as Frost and Fire, the Frost mage uses Wall of Fog, while the Fire mage uses Flame Orbs to send fiery death down the line from one end to the other. Depending on setup, it could easily hurt a whole group of players depending on how many get snared by the wall. A couple of classical AoEs and it’s all over.

Fire

It’s already been said that Fire Mages will play like Affliction Warlocks in Cataclysm, and the Ignite Mastery mechanic will make this even moreso. A Fire mage’s rotation is likely to shift from Living-Bomb-Scorch-Fireball then Pyroblast on Hot Streak, and change into something that focuses on maintaining DoTs and only casting Fireball or Pyroblast when you’re not reapplying a DoT or a debuff. Again, I think we’ll see a shift from one rotation to another as you accumulate Mastery bonus and the DoT element of the spell becomes more significant.

Burnout’s going to be a boon for Fire mages in raiding scenarios, as it’ll mean that they can continue casting even when out of mana. I’d like to see how this dynamic works – will it be a Life-tap style health to mana conversion, or will spells start consuming HP instead of MP? It’s also another way Mages can kill themselves, as if spell reflection and standing in the bad weren’t enough.

A Fire mage in PvP will be largely the same as it is now – great in battlegrounds where there is a chance to ramp up some serious damage against a single target or small groups. There’s also going to be comedy gold available when applying Living Bomb to multiple targets, triggering the haste buff from Pyromaniac and laying down some very quck cast Flamestrikes. I would like to see some kind of talent that will either cause Living Bomb to infect nearby targets, or that pushes all fire DoTs on additional targets.

In Arenas I expect the Fire mage to struggle. There’s no burst damage and little utility there, areas that the Arcane and Frost trees have always been good at. Let’s be honest though – Fire mages will play fine, I’d just be surprised to see them in the very top brackets of PvP. I don’t think the new Playing with Fire mechanic will help that much either – with Rogues able to stunlock a player completely, being able to AoE knockback, snare and get away is going to be tough to perform.

Arcane

I think that the Arcane spec is going to be possibly the only one that gets more annoying to play as the Mastery bonus becomes more relevant. The Mana Adept bonus basically means that in order to do the most damage you need a full mana pool. Great if you only need a short burst of damage to nuke someone down (arenas) or where you’re doing relatively short fights (solo or 5-man work). As soon as you have fights that stretch out and require you to start playing around with Mana gems and similar, it’s going to become more of a pain. Trying to keep your mana pool as full as possible when you’re in the last 30% of a bossfight is going to become a pain.

In fact, the only time I think Arcane is going to be reasonable is when you’re still gearing up at 85 and you still miss regularly in boss fights. A miss means that Arcane Focus triggers and you’ll get a small amount of mana back. With this mechanic it might make the mana management game easier, but it’s only going to be until you have enough good quality gear to hit bosses on a regular basis.

The other loss is in the three different rotations that Arcane has in Wrath. Currently there are three traditional rotations that are swapped when mana conservation, overall DPS or burst damage are required. I think that the Mana Adept bonus will upset this balance, meaning that just a single rotation becomes usable.

That said they may yet pull it back, particularly if there are talents that adjust the new Time Warp spell in some way. Currently the Exhaustion debuf lasts 10 minutes, meaning that you can’t fire off both a Heroism and a Time Warp in the same fight. If the Arcane mage is able to talent a way around this, either by reducing the duration of Exhaustion or increasing the duration of the warp, they may become much more useful.

The final kick-them-when-they’re-down for Arcane Mages is the final nerf of Incanter’s Absorption with the removal of the fire and frost wards. Euripedes pointed out on his rant (see link at the top) that Mana Shield is just not useful to mages at the moment – we have other ways of getting out of the bad stuff or avoiding damage. I agree that it really needs serious work to become useful again in order for this mechanic to become useful.

PvP as Arcane will still be doable – all the burst damage you know and love will still be there. As that fuel gauge moves from Full to Empty though the damage output will drop. It goes back to the old Three Minute Mage back from vanilla, where an arcane mage would pop Zandalarian Hero Charm and Talisman of Ephemereal Power along with your other cooldowns to do an obscene amount of damage for a whole fifteen seconds. They might rock in Arenas, but battlegrounds might be more of a sniper rather than Gatling gun affair.

Overall

If there’s one thing that’s clear from this arrangement of talents, it’s that mages will need to work with eachother and other classes moreso than ever in order to optimise their abilities. This isn’t just the Focus Magic round-robin that we currently have going, this is about syncing our crowd control and AoE together in order to deliver the best result. It’s about making sure that there’s a Scorch on the boss so that the Frostfire-bolt casting frostmage can take advantage of it as well as the fire mage. It’s about hitting Time Warp when it’s needed for the raid, and not when you need the 40% speed boost to Get Out Of The Bad.

It’s going to take some raw numbers to see how these stack up, followed by a bunch of people coding some spreadsheets, but you can see how the principles will pan out. It’s also early, but my feel is that it’ll be a close battle between Fire and Frost, with Arcane losing out as the spec of choice. It’s partly because of the mastery bonus being hard to take advantage of, but also because of the change to Arcane Missiles and how it’ll affect the spec’s rotation.

I’m also struggling to see how Time Warp will help that much. Don’t get me wrong, it means that a Shaman no longer has an automatic spot in a raid, but it also means that you’ll have a lot of Heroism shaped abilities and a huge cooldown in which to use them. Without reducing the duration of Exhaustion or allowing more than one to be used during a boss fight, there seems to be little practical purpose in spreading the ability around more.

For now though it’s a case of pulling up a chair and waiting until Beta is announced. When it opens, you can be sure that a lot of questions about the Mage mechanics will be answered by those with access to it. I think there’s something for all mages to look forward to, either in terms of how the Mastery bonuses will actually play out or in terms of how the new rotations will shape up. Either way, it’s a good time to be playing.

In the meantime, if you have your own insight into how the mechanics will play out, or want to share your own insights, feel free to sound off in the comments.

(Image Source: Poster for the stage magician Alexander Conlin)

Patch 3.3.3: Twisted Firestarter?

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 seem bland by comparison.

Before I get into my opinions though, let’s look at what’s been changed in the patch.

Arcane

  • Arcane Empowerment: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc off of critical strikes. The self damage buff remains unchanged.
  • Incanter’s Absorption: This talent now only grants additional spell power when damage is absorbed by Mana Shield, Frost Ward, Fire Ward, or Ice Barrier. The limit of 5% of the mage’s health on the spell power buff has been removed.

Fire

  • Burning Soul: Threat reduction is now 10/20%, up from 5/10%.
  • Combustion: The cooldown on this spell is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
  • Empowered Fire: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.
  • Torment the Weak: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.

Frost

  • Frostbolt: Spell power scaling on this spell has been increased by approximately 5%.
  • Brain Freeze: This talent now allows your next Fireball or Frostfire Bolt to be instant and cost no mana. There is a small internal cooldown to keep the Frostfire Bolt from immediately triggering Brain Freeze again.

Glyphs

  • Glyph of Fireball: No longer increases critical strike chance of Fireball. Instead, it now reduces the cast time of Fireball by 0.15 seconds.

Bug Fixes

  • Arcane Empowerment: Fixed a bug preventing Rank 3 from granting 3% damage.
  • Burning Determination: This talent will no longer sometimes have its effect removed by the same spell that triggered it.
  • Dragon’s Breath: Druids can no longer remove the disorientation effect from this spell by canceling their current shapeshift.
  • Enduring Winter: Tooltip corrected to match actual Replenishment mana regeneration numbers.
  • Fingers of Frost: Mages with Molten Armor active who have the Shatter talent will no longer lose Fingers of Frost charges when Molten Armor causes reactive damage. In addition, the effect from this talent now displays the number of charges on the buff icon.

In a nutshell, Arcane mages get a flat-rate buff instead of one that relied on crits, but lose out on the Incanter’s Absorption trick. Let’s be fair though, only the high-end mages were using this trick – for the average mage it’s no great loss. Fire mages get some interesting changes in the form of threat reduction, more crits and more damage when they crit often. It means that hitting the Hot Streak proc and getting that Instant-cast Pyroblast is becoming even more important. Frost mages get some slight love, mainly from the Fingers of Frost bug fix and the Frostbolt scaling changes.

Will this change anything? I’m seeing a lot of talk from the high-end about Arcane mages going back over to Fire, but the difference I’m seeing is marginal at best. I’m more worried about the practical rather than the theory, and how it’ll translate into bossfight combat.

While theory is great for when you’re standing still and just tapping your hotkeys, most Wrath bossfights involve some kind of movement or rhythm. Looking at the relative casting time of Arcane Blast versus Fireball, I think that Arcane will still win out for most fights where movement is important. It might be that the extra range from Flame Throwing will compensate for some of it, but I’m thinking more about encounters like Blood Princes or Marrowgar.

I also think that a fair chunk of mages just won’t bother. We ditched a ton of hit gear when Arcane became the spec to have and I reckon that there are several who can’t be bothered to collect the additional hit gear again just to go back. This is another one of those reasons why Hit modifiers really need to come out of the talent trees.

Frost will still be the spec for PVP mages, but the buffs still don’t push it up next to Arcane and Fire for raid suitability. It also feels like the tweaks and bugfixes are tinkering around the edges. I don’t think that Frost players will be on a level playing field until much later.

I think the real excitement will hit with 3.9, when the talents get their full revamp along with the Cataclysm stat changes. Until then, it feels like we’re just waiting for people to run the numbers before we go out, change our specs and regem our gear.

The Crutches, They Do Nothing!

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 interesting experience, as I’ve suddenly realised a couple of things.

The first thing that struck me was how I didn’t miss my boss mods, although it feels a bit weird playing without them. I had it drummed into me after blowing up the raid on Baron Geddon in Molten Core that I needed to download CT RaidAssist and pay attention to the pings. As I progressed through content, I moved to BigWigs then DeadlyBossMods, but I’ve always had something installed. I thought that it was one of those essentials, like raidframes.

Back in the day of Baron Geddon, you needed the boss mods. The debuff was a subtle effect, so unless you were watching out for it the first thing you’d know about it would be when everyone yells at you on Vent. Nowadays it’s like a giant Christmas bauble has landed on your head, making it blatantly obvious that Something is Wrong. Even The Bad is more blatant now – Blizzard famously changed the flooring in the Koralon encounter to make the flames easier to see.

As a mage it’s even easier – you don’t need to watch for when the boss is doing his Super Special Ability as he’ll usually shout it to make it blatantly obvious. The XT-001 fight is a typical example – you have plenty of time to prepare for the heart to drop, pop your trinkets and nuke your face off. The only time I was missing things slightly was during the Lord Jaraxxus Fight, and that’s only because I was missing out on some great spellsteals.

I know it’s different for healers. When I’m on my priest I like to pre-empt the nasty AOE ith a precast AoE heal. I’m not doubting that it’s different for other classes as well, who either struggle to see The Bad from their perspective, or need to track debuff stacks etc. But even though I’ll probably get round to reinstalling DeadlyBossMods, I don’t think I’ll rely on it much unless the fights change drastically later in Icecrown.

The other thing that rebuilding my UI has brought out is this incessant need in me to tessellate everything. The action bars must be square, which must line up with Recount and Omen. Everything must be the same colour, and have the same style, and fit together.

And there must be NO GAPS

Which causes a problem when the minimap is round, but I want it in the bottom corner with my other stuff. I could make it square to fit neatly, but then it doesn’t look all shiny. But with it being round there are gaps, which wastes space, which drives me nuts. Still, I’ll relax. I’ll go and flick through the Warcraft Ikea Catalogue that is Curse Gaming’s addon site, and find something that works and fits.

Finally, I’ve promised that if I ever get the Argent Resolve on my priest, I’ll race-change him to Gnome as soon as Cataclysm launches. People will hate me for it.

UI Quest: Mashing the Buttons

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 only the important ones are shown while the rest are tucked out of sight.

In case you’re wondering, the most important element of any user interface is the collection of video settings. If you’re thinking of playing around with these, this excellent forum post should help to get you started. A good baseline is to go for around 40 frames per second (FPS) while in a 25–man raid or a busy battleground before you start using any addons. You’ll probably find that your FPS will vary wildly from area to area, so it’s a good idea to design your UI based on where your computer will be working the hardest.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m using a 20.1″  TFT monitor set at 1680×1050 (that’s a 16:10 aspect ratio) and hooked up using a DVI connector. If you’re using a different screen resolution or aspect ratio you’ll probably want to tweak things to suit your own needs.

Before going through the button bar changes, it’s worth taking a look at the default UI and explain what I’m hoping to change. As standard, the default interface comes with a single action bar (configurable row of buttons), the minimenu and a row of bags. There’s also an XP or reputation bar that runs above the buttons. The XP bar and bags will be tackled another time, but for now we’ll focus on the action bars and minimenu.

There are a few addons that will replace your action bars but by far the most popular is Bartender4. This addon adds a beer tankard shaped icon from your minimap, from which you can control where the bars sit on the screen as well as adjust each bar’s settings. I’ve started off by enabling bars one through four, and dragging the first three to the bottom of the screen.

I’ve left bar 4 floating to one side to start with, but then start using it to hold actions that I don’t need in combat. Abilities like crafting professions, mounts and conjurations can all be moved to this fourth bar. I’ve deliberately left off portals completely, as there’s some useful addons that I’ll cover later that are great for these.

Now that I’ve got my block of three actionbars, I can start to tidy the others.

My fourth action bar – the one with all the stuff I rarely use – will end up on the side of the screen. Likewise the minimenu will be changed from being a long strip to a block. By playing with the Rows attribute for both of these, I can change them from their default appearance so that they’ll fit where I place them. I can also change the size (scale) and spacing (padding) of these buttons to suit their low usage.

I also want to make some further tweaks to bar four so that it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the action. I’m going to make it more transparent out of combat by setting a fade, but I also want it to vanish completely during combat.

By setting the visibility of the fourth action bar to Hide in Combat and by giving it a suitable Fade Out Alpha, I can make it look transparent unless I hover over it with the mouse cursor. As soon as I go into combat it vanishes completely.

To finish the look, I’m going to use two further addons: ButtonFacade and OmniCC. The first one allows me to change the shape and look of the buttons in a process called skinning. You can find several different skins from minimalist boxes to cog shapes as separate downloads from addon sites. OmniCC adds an overlay on top of the button to show what the cooldown remaining on an ability is. I’ve used the default settings on OmniCC and the Zoomed skin that comes included with ButtonFacade to complete the setup.

I’ve not covered macros in this guide as they tend to be class specific. And as I’ve said before, I’ll be coming back to that bag bar and XP bar later on.Of course, this layout may not be to your taste, so feel free to experiment!

The next one in the series will be around unitframes and making sure you have enough information about your character and your target. As always, if you have any questions or if you spot something I’ve missed, feel free to shout in the comments.

The UI Quest Series (in progress):

The Annoyance of Addons

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 a millstone around your neck.

For me this all kicked off yesterday when I decided to try out ForteXorcist based on Derevka’s recommendation for priests. I thought the same tool could be used to keep track of Mage cooldowns such as Arcane Power and Mirror Image. This was a big mistake because of two things:

  • I didn’t practice with the addon first to get used to the information it was telling me, how it would help and how I would integrate it into my UI
  • I decided it would be a great idea to go raid ICC with my guild instead and tweak it during the raid

Seasoned veterans will probably be laughing at this right now, and yes it was a schoolboy error. More than that though it’s also got me thinking of how my overall UI layout affects my performance, both as ranged DPS and when I’m playing my healer.

Currently my UI looks something like the chart below, and by all terms it’s crap. It’s evolved over a number of years, where I’ve “just grabbed an addon” to do a particular task and just plonked it in a blank spot on the screen. Some of it’s a hangover from when I was running as a raidleader or officer, while others seemed useful at the time but are now pretty pointless.

The biggest issue with this interface is the sheer amount of wasted space. In my primary role as DPS on my mage, I don’t need to know the health and mana of everyone else in the raid. An overall snapshot might be useful, but this level of detail is too much. When I’m on my priest the unitframes show too much information – I end up having to enable Grid just to get the information at a reasonable level.

The next problem is eye focus. I should be looking at the centre of the screen, making sure that I’m on the right target and that I’m not standing in the bad. Visual prompts near the centre should be helping me in hitting my rotation and maximising DPS – anything else is clutter. I shouldn’t need to look at my button bars unless something outside of normal combat occurs – everything else should be driven from muscle memory. Having things scattered around the screen like some kind of neon buffet doesn’t help either – it means my eyes bounce around and get distracted by all the shiny.

Having to do a lot of eye movement is a bad thing – I’ve felt knackered at the end of farm runs and it’s not because I’ve been focusing. The eye strain from having a badly laid out UI is tiring, making me a slave to the goddess of coffee for the following four or five hours.

The third problem is performance – by running a shedload of addons I’m degrading my computer performance. I’m spending CPU cycles on calculating stuff that I pay no attention to anyway, when I could be spending it on making the game run smoother or look better. By cutting out what I don’t need, the technical experience of the game should improve.

What would an ideal interface look like? I’ve had a rough stab of it, so although it’s going in the right direction it’s nowhere near a perfect ideal. It basically takes the idea of getting rid of the crap I no longer care about, grouping similar stuff together and making everything else optional depending on the role I’m playing.

As a result of all this, I now have a quest. Over the coming weeks I’m going to be working to streamline my UI in order to reach that nirvana of elegance and efficiency. When I find something cool (like ForteXorcist), I’ll share how I’m using it and how it’s configured. Over time this should build up into a collection of posts on how to get the most out of your interface as well as having something that’s fit for those action shots or fraps videos.

At the end of the day, a UI has to bridge that gap between what you want to do and what the game is telling you. If you’re getting overload with information, it’s failing in that basic mission. By being ruthless about what you choose to see, the theory is that you’ll only focus on what’s important. This should lead to better performance, which is what we all want to reach.

The UI Quest Series (in progress):

Care For Some Cheese With Your Whine?

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 population think we’re all button-mashing maniacs that struggle with anything more complicated than “Nuke the target as hard as you can.” While some of this is fair, there’s a balance that needs redressing.

So pull up a chair while I go through the biggest gripes I have as an endgame mage. Fellow mages, don’t think you’re getting out of this either. Every time we group up with others we’re ambassadors of our class. We owe it to other mages to play well, play solidly and play as part of the team. If we stop doing some of the things we have a bit of a reputation for, perhaps we’ll get less hate and more love.

  1. I enter the instance and start my Summon Table ritual. I’m then waiting for the rest of the group to click the thing just to get the table to spawn. You no clicky, you no eaty. No point complaining ten minutes later – either click at the start or accept a couple of stacks of strudel in a trade window later.
  2. On the same table thing – if you’re going to demand a table and a buff, wait for me to get some mana back before you start pulling. Going “Table-buff-yum-pull!” just isn’t playing fair. Have a little give and take here.
  3. I know the priests that are getting fed up with mages rolling on crit-haste-spellpower gear. Some rightly think that we should be rolling on hit gear and only hit gear. In a perfect world you’d be right, but since the Arcane tree got buffed mages have been trying to offload hit heavily. This means that gear that was previously a priest exclusive is now very attractive to us. I don’t like having to regear, but I’m also not going to carry around a bunch of wasted itemisation points.
  4. If you’re a Paladin, Shaman or Druid and you’re rolling on cloth gear against cloth-only wearers, hang your head in shame. Get used to not having any mastery bonuses in Cataclysm due to your strange armour choices.
  5. Frostnova–blink–invisibility is not a cheater move. I understand that when groups wipe that it’s a pain to corpserun, but to have a go at me for using my spells to escape a repair bill is just stupid. I’m all for group solidarity, but for you to have a go at me for not eating dirt along with the rest of you is laughable. If you’re a hunter that died because you were too slow with your feign death button, yet have a go at me for being able to press three correctly in sequence, I will point and laugh at you.
  6. If you ask me to crowd control a mob, I will do so to the best of my abilities. I’ll put it on Focus, I’ll use my PoM-Poly macro and I’ll even offer you one of a selection of different animals if you really want. I’m not going to sit there and keep polymorphing if you keep on hitting the target, or if you drop a consecrate underneath it, or it gets dotted up. You spank it, you tank it.

Mages, I told you this part was coming and I’m not going to disappoint. But I think you’ll agree I’m being fair. Some of us are consistently letting the side down and need to raise our game a little. I’m going to say some unpleasant things, but it’s all for our own good. Really.

  • Learn that being able to AoE packs of mobs is a luxury that comes with having a highly geared tank with buckets of threat generation. If you start AoE early and you’re pulling mobs off the tank, pop your iceblock. If it happens again, pop invisibility. If it keeps on happening then throttle back – either put in a delay before opening up with Blizzard or switch to single target damage. Note that for three mobs or fewer you get more DPS from single target damage, so you’ll be doing yourself a favour as well.
  • Install Omen or another threat meter and pay attention to it. There is a fine balancing act between maximising your threat and pulling aggro. Pulling a mob – particularly a boss – off the tank doesn’t mean that the tank is crap. It means that you’re not paying attention to your threat generation and modifying your playstyle accordingly.
  • Don’t expect buffs in heroics. If you’re walking around in Tier 9 you outgear it anyway and won’t really benefit from buffs. Especially don’t wait for a paladin buff – they’re a pain to do and to refresh. The only time you should expect to be fully buffed is in raids, and even then only at boss fights. Anything else is once again a luxury.
  • Don’t obsess over recount in heroics. There is only one time where your DPS contribution is important, and that’s on boss fights. I really don’t care if you can pull 6K DPS on trash – it’s just trash and doesn’t really matter. If you think your performance isn’t up to scratch, talk to another mage in your guild or raidgroup. You can also try EpicAdvice – there’s a really helpful bunch of people there.
  • Don’t pull, EVER. There is only one person that should be pulling, and that’s the tank. If the tank asks you to polymorph something then that’s OK, but apart from that you should not be using Ice Lance to kite mobs over the tank’s consecrate. You have a job, they have theirs. Do it.
  • Learn to dance during fights. Mages are like one of those Martian tripod-death ray things, not a fixed turret that’s bolted to the ground. If there is The Bad under your feet, learn to move away from it. I don’t care if it hurts your DPS to take a couple of steps out of it, because it’ll hurt your DPS even more to spend the rest of the fight warming the floor. Heroics are no excuse to be lazy either – they’re practice for when you’re raiding.
  • Knowing when to stop DPS is just as important as when to go full-tilt nuke. If you’re fighting the Devourer of Souls, remember to stop DPS at the relevant times. If one of your group is mind-controlled, use crowd control instead of nuking them down. And if you die because of spell reflection expect to be laughed at.

So there you have it, a whine about both how mages are treated and how we treat others. While this has been fairly therapeutic, I’m not expecting much to change. My only hope is that other classes understand that not all mages are the same, and that some of us will try our best to play well with others.

Of course, there have probably been things that I’ve missed on both sides of the coin. If there’s something you’ve seen that really annoys you as a mage, or if it’s a particular thing mages do that really annoys you, feel free to share it in the comments.

(image credit: User:Arnaud 25 from Wikimedia Commons)