Tag: theorycraft

Beta Patch – The Pyromaniac’s Impact

Posted on by Gazimoff

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 talent masteries. Wearing our normal gear (complete cloth armour) nets a handy 5% increase in Intellect. For fire mages, Mastery now gives us a tasty bonus to the DoT component of our spells. Both the specialisation and mastery appear in our spellbook once we’ve learned them from the trainer.

The new teleport bar that I mentioned after the previous patch has now been fleshed out with all teleport spells. The only snag is that only the Dalaran and Shattrath spells work now, meaning that for most mages it’s now a two-hop trip to wherever we want to go. Even so, it’s still better than catching a boat everywhere.

Apparently there are new teleport and portal spells available to the new Tol Barad PVP zone, although I haven’t had a chance to test these yet. There are currently no teleports or portals to Vash’jir, Deepholm or Uldum, although there are static portals at Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

The other big change is that creature damage has been heavily ramped up from level 65 onwards. Level 82 outdoor creatures now do four times as much damage as they used to, which is horrendous news for cloth classes with little to no damage mitigation.

Currently, solo questing involves constant use of mana shield, counterspell and frost nova. And that’s for every single pull, just to stay alive. Going toe to toe with mobs in Deepholm is an excruciating experience – you have to work hard to take down a single mob. If you have anything add to the fight, you’re toast. Don’t forget that Polymorph won’t help you there as almost everything you fight is an elemental of some description.

Continue reading “Beta Patch – The Pyromaniac’s Impact”

Entering Beta: The 80 Fire Mage

Posted on by Gazimoff

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). I’d been holding off doing any serious work on my level 80 transfer because these changes were inbound, and it’s definitely been worth the wait. The subtle playstyle changes have livened up the spec, both for PvE and PvP fans alike.

First up, let’s look at the baseline. Comparing my mage to his Wrath counterpart, his health pool has crept up almost 10k hp while his mana pool has remained flat at around 25k. Spellpower, haste, hit and crit percentages are also broadly in line with those in the current live game (although Spellpower is slightly higher in beta). Making the transition should be fairly smooth. The biggest issue will be the wasted spirit statpoints on non-set or filler gear – reforging or replacing may be the best way to deal with these items.

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Early Look: Mage Talent Revamp

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: There’s a fair bit of discussion about the new Mage talent trees. It’s limited to theory, analysis and scenario discussion. Fairly strict game mechanics focus.

The most recent Cataclysm beta push brought with it the overhaul to class talent trees. It’s all part of a grand design – remove the talents that everyone took and integrate them into the core mechanics of the class, while trashing the ones that no-one took. In doing so, drop the size of the trees and reduce the number of points available to spend. You can find Wowhead’s Mage talent calculator here.

It feels like Vanilla all over again.

Continue reading “Early Look: Mage Talent Revamp”

Polymorph or Polydeath?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: Discussion of Mage talents in Cataclysm, focusing on one new talent in particular.

I feel like I’m almost betraying my class by raising this discussion. We’ve been handed a gift almost, a rare glimmering tool that would be oh-so-nice to have. But I don’t like it and really hope that it doesn’t make it out of beta in it’s current form. From what I’ve managed to read on it so far, this new talent could have far-reaching ramifications.

Since Vanilla, us mages have been complaining about  Polymorph. One of the most versatile forms of crowd-control, it suffers from a single flaw – any damage done to the target breaks the spell. There are tools like Glyph of Polymorph that can make maintaining crowd-control a little easier, but in the main it takes a mix of practice and luck to get it right.

Classic situations like a sheep wandering into a Consecrate used to be a big deal back in the original game and even for part of Burning Crusade. Nowadays though, heroic dungeons and raiding are largely an AoE affair. Simply round up the trash, heal the tank and drop Blizzard on the pack of mobs underneath. I don’t think I’ve needed to use Polymorph at all during this expansion, save a few trips into battlegrounds and some dicey solo questing situations while levelling.

Blizzard’s already announced that crowd control will play a bigger part in dungeons and raids in Cataclysm, and I’m looking forward to dusting off my old macros as a result. But they’ve also added a new talent, Improved Polymorph, to help make things a little easier:

When a target you've polymorphed is damaged, that damage is delayed for 3.0 secs.

This talent is right at the top of the Arcane tree – you can have it maxed out at level 11. On the face of it, it looks fantastic – we’ll get a bit of a safety net from all the crazy AoE damage flying around. But what happens if we take it out of the dungeon environment and use it elsewhere?

For solo and questing PvE it still sounds great. I’ll be able to pull a mob using Polymorph, blitz it with a ton of damage over the following 3 secs then finish it off if it doesn’t die from all the damage I’ve dealt it. By having it from such an early level it should also be something I can get into the habit of using, right?

Wrong. Crowd-control is exactly that – controlling a crowd of mobs to make them more manageable. There are snares like Frost Nova and slows like… well Slow, that can help out with single target mob management. But using Polymorph as a three second stun? That just feels like you’re encouraging Mages to learn bad habits.

There’s also the huge PvP issue as well. If I go into a battleground, use Improved Polymoph on a player then burst them down in an Arcane spec, I can probably get close to killing them outright for very little effort. If other people gang up on the target as well, they’re toast. It’s not clear if they get dealt all the damage at once or if it’s only delayed by 3 sec, but either way that’s going to get messy. Considering this is going to be available at early stages, imagine what it’ll do to the twink setup? I know Blizzard don’t balance around early-level battlegrounds, but this does feel excessive.

There’s also the overall battleground and arena fight style to consider. I’m fairly certain that Blizzard wanted to remove the reliance on burst damage in PvP situation. This talent seems to encourage it though – can you make the weasel pop before the polymorph breaks? I know that plate-plate-plate teams have been emerging to counter the rogue-mage-priest team, but still.

That’s not to say all is lost. I’d suggest an easy change to this talent to make it much more balanced and not nearly as obscene:

When a target you’ve polymorphed is damaged, that damage is delayed for 3.0 secs, up to a maximum of x% of the target’s health.

I prefer this as it allows the total amount of damage to be fine tuned, but still handles accidental damage from multiple sources. We’d still get our new toy, but it wouldn’t be completely overpowering.

Why suggest it? I like the concept of the talent and it’s cheapness, so I want it to make it into live. But I’m also aware of how other classes will react to the talent, and want to address that with a suggestion. The last thing I want is for this shiny new toy to be taken away before all mages get a chance to play with it.

Cataclysm: New Mage Experience

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: In-depth description of changes to the Mage class, levelling experience and spell ranks and usage. I’ll also be touching on the Cataclysm talent trees. Note that as I’m not in beta the content here is largely based on recounts and information gathered from elsewhere.

The floodgates have opened and the Beta has begun. But while there’s a general level of information about the upcoming expansion, it seems as if detailed looks at the individual classes are rare. There are a couple of notable exceptions – Restokin has a large amount of Druid information, while Gravity has Death Knights pretty much covered. Generally though, it feels as if there are some notable gaps in class coverage.

The experience that players will have in Cataclysm can largely be separated into three camps: those who roll a new mage after the expansion, those who are levelling up an existing mage from 80 to 85, and those who will be playing at endgame. At the moment the endgame experience seems to be largely capped and it doesn’t look like the new spells are fully implemented.

That said, the new levelling experience is largely there and is worth discussing in detail. If you’re thinking of rolling a new mage in the expansion or have a lowbie mage that you’re thinking of dusting off and getting back in with, this may give you a few ideas.

If you’re not sure about trying out either a Worgen or Goblin, you might want to go for a Troll or Gnome mage instead. The starting experience for levels 1 through to 5 is completely new for these races, so if you’re bored of killing the same old boars or wolves this might be an option for you.

The immediate difference when levelling is the lack of spell ranks. Not only does this mean fewer trips to the class trainer, but it also means that every time you visit them it’s to get something new and cool. When you level you get an alert to tell you which new spells and abilities are available, just to nudge you in the right direction. The spellbook has also been enhanced to show you which spells you’ve learned, which are available to learn at your current level and which aren’t available to you just yet.

A small factoid – the complete Mage spell list has dropped from nearly 300 to roughly 70.

The second thing you’re likely to notice is the change to conjure food/water, especially if you’ve played a mage before. The spell mechanics have been tweaked at lower levels, resulting in far less downtime for your average mage. The movement from fight-drink-fight-drink to something more fluid is welcome, but has some knock-on effects. Instead of getting Conjure Water at level 4 we’ll be picking up Conjure Refreshment at 38, with Mana Pies and Strudel replacing the single food/water we currently create at lower levels.

Defensive spells have also had a slight change. Frost Ward and Fire Ward are both gone, replaced by Mage Ward which drops in at around the same kind of level. Mana Shield has been pushed back from level 20 to 56, but the new version only requires 1 mana per point of damage absorbed (down from 1.5).

For a mage getting about should be that little bit easier. Basic teleports still come in at level 20, with Darnassus/ Thunder Bluff and Stonard/Theramore arriving at 22. Portals are a similar story at present, becoming available at levels 40 and 42. Information is still a little hazy on this, with some reports suggesting that all old-world teleports are now at 22 and portals at 42. I’ve also heard that both portals and teleports are going to be trainable by mage trainers, so you won’t need to visit a capital city in order to learn it’s teleport/portal spell.

Other than these changes, your basic Mage arsenal is fairly unchanged. There’s still talk of Arcane Missiles becoming a random proc from all spells, but I haven’t seen anything to see this change in affect.

Talent trees for mages are still in a state of flux. While the Arcane tree has had a slight makeover, the Frost and Fire ones seem largely untouched. I’m expecting to see further iterations on the trees as time goes on, mainly to reduce clutter and redundant talents. That said, talents like Arcane Tactics and Improved Polymorph could make Arcane once again the tree of choice for endgame, particularly if crowd control becomes more  relevant in the expansion.

Overall, mages seem to be benefiting from the streamlined levelling experience that all classes will go through. It’s still unknown how a mage will stack up at endgame, but this is likely to be the case until raiding guilds are trying out the new raids for the first time. This might not happen until the end of beta or possibly a few months after launch.

Scorched Fingers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier on in the week I put up an article about going back to my old fire spec on my mage. It was basically a brain dump – this is what I’m doing, this is how it works, this is what I remember. Unfortunately, mid dumpage I got something wrong.

To be fair, it isn’t just me that has trouble with how Improved Scorch works – there seems to be a whole rash of confusion out there. Luckily though, there are some great resources as well to help put people on the Right Path.

Now, I can imagine that some of you are thinking “But Gaz, how can you get something like this wrong? You’ve been playing the class for five years, surely you should know something as basic as this?”. And it’d be a fair criticism. I’m just glad to have readers who will point out when I get something wrong so that I can go back and correct it.

Getting back to Improved Scorch, the devil is in the detail. The tooltip is as follows:

Increases your chance to critically hit with Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt by an additional 3% and your damaging Scorch spells have a 100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 5% and lasts 30 sec.

Wait, what?

Let’s break it down. The first part of Improved Scorch is a passive bonus that you get to your Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt spells. For fire mages, this means that your Fireball has an extra 3% chance to crit, making Hot Streak more likely. Worth having.

The second part of Improved Scorch is the vulnerability debuff that you apply on targets when you cast Scorch. This debuff makes spells 5% more likely to crit against them. This debuff acts independently of the passive bonus and benefits the entire raid.

That’s not the end of it though. The Scorch debuff doesn’t stack with Winter’s Chill, so if you’re raiding with a frost mage it can lead to complications where one debuff prevents the other from being applied. It also doesn’t stack with Improved Shadow Bolt, although crucially this debuff will overwrite Improved Scorch.I think that the difference in behaviour is due to it being hotfixed rather than implemented by design.

It’s managing this 5% spell crit chance debuff that’s the biggest difficulty with this spell, especially once you scale up to 25-man raiding. It’s also the source of a lot of confusion which isn’t helped by having an unclear tooltip, as well as different behaviours for resolving debuff conflicts.

Historically you’d resolve all this by having discussions within your raidgroup, but with so much raid content being tackled by Pug groups these days a slicker solution is needed. As a kind of stop-gap I’m having a look at what addons like Power Auras can do to help. Longer term, I can’t help but feel that this is somethign Blizzard need to fix.

Maybe Cataclysm will hold the answers? Let’s hope we don’t have to wait long to find out.

The Flaming Boomerang

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ever since patch 3.3.3 was released I’ve been thinking of switching back to my Fire spec. It made me  feel nostalgic about the early days of Warcraft, where I originally levelled as a fire mage. I only deviated from this spec for parts of both Molten Core and Naxxramas, sticking with fire throughout Burning Crusade. When I started raiding in Wrath I only went to Arcane due to the hitcap benefits. The spec then received an almighty buff, propelling it to become the must-have raiding spec for nearly all mages. I’d been stuck as Arcane ever since.

As a result my fire spec has been largely abandoned until earlier this week when I decided that I had to change. There’s only so much I can take of going through the same instances as the same character casting the same spells until something snaps inside. Not wanting to go all medieval on my keyboard, I dusted off my old fire spec and went down to the target dummies to practice.

The first challenge to face is gearing – even though +hit gear is thrown at you so that you can comfortably make the Arcane hitcap, it’s not quite sufficient to reach the 446 that a fire mage needs. Luckily I’d kept back Dying Curse for just such an occasion. Couple that with the fact that I usually raid with a Draenei for Heroic Presence plus either a shadow priest for Misery or a balance druid for Improved Faerie Fire, and all I have to reach is a manageable 342 hitrating.

The next trick to master is keeping up a solid set of debuffs. The fire spec is slightly more complex than an arcane one in that Living Bomb always needs to be on the target. Each fire mage needs to cast their own Living Bomb, making debuff watching that little bit trickier if you’re not the only one in the party. Once you’ve got that down, you can happily Fireball away at the target until Hot Streak procs. When Hot Streak goes off, cast your instant-cast Pyroblast then go back to Fireballing. Just make sure that Living Bomb is constantly on the target.

The complication sets in when working out Improved Scorch. Even if you’ve got other effects in your group to provide the critical strike chance by 5%, you’ll still want to apply it for the 3% crit chance buff to your Fireballs. This one works slightly differently though in that one mage can apply the debuff for all the others in the group. This means that you need to coordinate with others about who will apply the debuff. Luckily the chance of encountering another fire mage in a raid is fairly rare, so you can usually apply anyway. Again, like with Living Bomb, this always needs to be applied on the target.

UPDATE: The above paragraph is wrong. Have a look at this article for an update on Improved Scorch

There are various tricks you can use to alert yourself to various spell procs as well as tracking when debuffs need to be applied, and I’ll be talking about some related addons in the near future.

Things can get even more complicated when you start looking at converting gear from an Arcane spec focus to a Fire spec focus. The reason being that haste benefits Arcane mages tremendously – the more haste they have, the more spells they can cast. For a fire mage with Burnout and Hot Streak, crit strike rating has more of a part to play. Not only do you deal more damage from your spell critical strikes, but you have an increased chance to trigger Hot Streak as your chance to crit increases. For me it’s not currently clear if haste is the better stat to go for above crit for fire mages, but it’s something I’m looking at closely.

At the end of the day though it doesn’t matter to me as long as I’m having fun, and going back to Fire is something that’s hitting all the right nostalgia buttons for me. I’ve also been able to “prove” it’s a viable raiding spec after managing to pull aggro during phase 2 of Lady Deathwhisper and topping the damage and DPS meters on Saurfang. These are inconsequential though, as long as I can cackle like a maniac while smacking my buttons.

Under the Hood

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler alert: In-depth discussion of the planned changes to Cataclysm, primarily focusing on mechanics and core engine changes, leveling experience and endgame experience. All information here is public knowledge unless specified.

Over the weekend an avalanche of news came out about how development on Cataclysm is progressing. In an interesting change the majority of information was shared through a series of interviews rather than through blue posts on the official Blizzard forums (although there are some follow-ups). The removal of Path of the Titans and Guild talent trees are the two big items, along with the changes to Inscription and Archaeology.

What’s interesting is the overhaul the core game engine is receiving in order to make the overall experience better. One of the Ghostcrawler interviews mentions that the game was only expected to last for two or three years. Now they’re not just looking at the capability they need for Cataclysm but also for future expansions and development. In another interview he mentions that the revised game engine will have a number of hooks that can be adjusted, allowing for individual spells and abilities to be fine-tuned much more precisely.

What does this mean? Hopefully it’ll get classes to the stage where individual talent trees will be on an even level, so for example Fire, Frost and Arcane mages should be very close together. You’ll probably still get an “optimal” spec, but the differences between the three should be much smaller. It should also mean there’s less reliance on random-number-generation – something that the Fire tree suffers from immensely.

The problem with building a game engine is that it takes a lot of time and careful planning to pull it all together – especially something as complex as Warcraft. It’s also a problem that doesn’t scale well as you throw additional resources at it – as you scale up a programming team you can easily lose focus on the goal unless you have very tight project management. Having to put a large amount of your coding and design effort into bringing an old, creaking engine up to date is also going to pull them away from generating new content for the expansion.

The end result though is that most of the hard work won’t be visible to the player, at least not initially. It’s like changing stuff under the hood of a car, replacing the engine and upgrading the shock absorbers. It’s still the same car and works in the same way, it just remains unseen unless you flip the lid open and take a look inside.

It should however creep into the game through subtle ways, one of which being the revamped glyph system. In essence, being able to provide additional hooks into the spellcasting (or perform ability) process means that you have greater control over how they can be adjusted. Part of the change to glyphs includes providing a “middle tier” between powerful spell changes and basic cosmetic or remove reagent requirement ones. This middle tier is going to rely on the additional hooks to perform the subtle tweaks to abilities, so that the situational stuff can truly be situational and not incredibly overpowered or ridiculously weak.

There’s also scope for more interesting racial abilities, item bonuses and so on. You might find that items have properties that would work like a glyph, providing unique interactions with the spell casting pipeline in ways we haven’t seen before. It also means that we could get to the stage where an item does different things depending on the class or spec of the character using it.

Of course this additional complexity is going to be a nightmare for one team of people – the theorycrafters. As spells become tweakable in more ways, so the models used to predict their behaviour become more complex. if you think the guys with their spreadsheets and simulators have it bad now, imagine how bad things could get for them in the expansion?

In essence though it feels that in order to get at all the expansion’s content, you’re going to need to roll alts. Both Cory Stockton and Tom Chilton have commented on the amount of new quests that are being sunk into the game in order to sort out the level kinks. Improved crafting profession itemisation should also help, particularly around Inscription. If you’ve ever leveled a mage you’ll understand the frustrations around getting offhand items, rings and trinkets at the lower levels.

What does all this mean for me as a player? Larisa says that all she wants from Cataclysm is good raiding and a good guild, and I can appreciate that. But a hangover from my single-player days is that I want stuff to do in the game – zones to explore, quests to complete and characters to progress. I currently don’t feel that I’ll get that on my main character, and will have to roll an alt if I’m going to truly explore all the changes that have been brought in. Whether it’s a Worgen Mage or a Gnome Priest, I feel it’s going to be restarting that gets me the most out of this impending expansion.

Choose Your Weapons

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I mentioned that I had four different weapon sets on my mage and was having trouble choosing which one was the best. Theorycrafting wasn’t really helping me much, with no clear winner emerging. In the end I decided that the best way to test them was to go out, do some target dummy tests and run a few heroics with them. It means that I can test them against my own playstyle as well as getting a feel for each of them.

Unsurprisingly, both Nibelung and Sister Svalna’s Aether Staff came out at around the same for single targets, with Nibelung really coming into it’s own for those AoE sessions in heroics. Abracadaver was only slightly behind, which surprised me as I was expecting a much bigger boost from the haste. I only have 450 haste normally so I’m nowhere near the softcap, although I do get the tier 10 2-piece set bonus most of the time.

The Frost Needle and Scourgelord’s Baton came in last place, and so will be banked. I can’t risk disenchanting them though – if a substantial one-hander or off-hander drop then I’ll need the other one to sit alongside it.

As I was doing all this testing I gradually became frustrated – it didn’t really make sense to me why I could end up with four sets of weapons, all from the same instance and all similar in quality to each other. It wasn’t as if I could say that there was a clear upgrade path, or if there was a clear best-in-slot that I could work towards. Instead, the approach was to offer similar weapons that do similar things, but work in slightly different ways.

  • A sword and off-hand combo
  • A staff with an “on use” ability
  • Another staff with a low procrate ability
  • A third staff with just high base stats and nothing unusual

Frustratingly for me, I couldn’t even decide what I like more as a player. Do I like to be able to just compare raw numbers – if the numbers are bigger on the new item, it’s an upgrade? Do I like to go for things that are a little unusual? I know I don’t like on-use items as I always forget to use them (trinkets being a perfect example), but that’s more preference and playstyle than throwing away good quality gear.

Anyhow, just as I was beginning to settle on which items to keep and which to put into cold storage, along comes this blog post from Tachyon. If you’re not aware of his work, Tachyon is a mage blogger who is heavily into theorycrafting. His best achievements are developing simulators that calculate DPS for a given gear selection and spell rotation. The information he generates is fantastic in terms of working out stat priority and so on.

His latest post on DPS volatility is a real eye-opener – it shows why ten tests or samples are unreliable for calculating DPS, and that you need something like a thousand in order to build up even a rough picture of DPS. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m unlikely to run the same instance with the same gear a thousand times just to test if it’s a marginal improvement.

But more fundamentally though, I’d probably never be able to tell which was the better or worse weapon for me because they’re all so close to each other. That and Lady RNG adds her own influence, distorting whatever results I get. I might end up feeling that the mathematically worst choice gives me the best result just because it’s “lucky”.

It also makes me wonder if any of this will get better in Cataclysm? I mean, I love choice, but I’d rather not have to be a mathemagician just to be able to pick and choose between the huge range of loot on offer to me. It might be that with the Spirit mage changes there will be a clearer choice for us – if it’s got intellect and stamina but no spirit then it’s a mage weapon. I like to have plenty of upgrade chances and I do appreciate the idea of moving away from identikit gear choices as well, but I’d really like it to be easier for me to work out if something is an upgrade or not.

I’m also reminded of the times when I first started raiding. Everything seemed so much clearer – it was an upgrade or it wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be as much choice – Molten Core only really had the Staff of Dominance or the Azuresong Mageblade to choose from. There also seemed to be much more competition for loot, with about nine other players also keen to get their hands on the same gear. I’m not saying that an abundance of choice is a bad thing, but it just seems to take that epic edge off things.

I guess I’m looking forward to Cataclysm all the more as a result – the raid dungeon changes mean that loot will be the same for both 10 and 25-man. This in turn makes itemisation easier, which should make upgrade paths clearer. I’m aware that the expansion isn’t a panacea or cure-all, but I can live in hope.

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…