Every so often I hear this argument crop up: character classes that can only deal damage shouldn’t exist in modern MMOs. Every class should instead be able to switch to tanking or healing, or possibly even both. The idea is that a shortage of any one of the three roles should be resolved by players…
Tag: talents
Star Wars: The Old Republic – First Impressions
The NDA for Star Wars: The Old Republic has now been lifted and I’m finally free to share my opinions with you. In theory this would mean that I’d be unleashing a huge mega-post containing details of every single nuance about the game. I’m going to resist the urge and scale back a little bit…
Looking Through The Mists
This weekend has been a firehose of information. Although I’ve never been to a BlizzCon in-person (something I hope to rectify), I’ve been glued to the internet and live streams for information. There’s nothing quite like getting the latest on a games franchise straight from the source. Like a good meal, it takes a while…
Comparing Mages: Warcraft Vs. Rift
There’s a common theme among fantasy MMOs. It doesn’t matter what game it is, you can expect to find the same three character classes. There’ll always be a plate wearing warrior type that’s ready to soak up the damage and a cleric or priest (or even minstrel) type that throws out healing. Then there’s the…
Reader Q: From Arcane to Fire
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…
Mage Stat Priority in 4.0
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…
Ratings and Mage 4.0
Back in Wrath, mages were driven by a small number of key stats. Spellpower and Haste Rating were key, with Crit Rating coming a distant third for all specs except Fire. Bringing up the rear were Spirit and Intellect, with the former being useful for Molten Armor and the latter supporting a larger mana pool….
The Mage 4.0 Compendium
The game of Warcraft is changing. In the next few weeks the first of a series of patches will be pushed to the live severs. The first of these patches (4.0.1) will bring with it the core changes to all classes, as well as various UI and interface changes. This guide to the key mage…
Beta Patch – The Pyromaniac’s Impact
Spoiler Alert: Discussion of Mage changes in patch 12759. In this article, I’ll also be focusing on Impact, Pyromaniac and AoE talents and how they’ll work together in a solo, dungeon and raid environment. A whole slew of mage changes came out in the most recent patch. The main ones were around armour specialisations and…
Entering Beta: The 80 Fire Mage
Spoiler Alert: Discussion of the latest changes to fire mages in build 12694. Also covering a few general and mage related UI changes and some speculation around what they indicate. The latest beta realm patch was recently released, bringing with it a range of changes to the Mage fire tree (full notes in the forums)….