Tag: theorycraft

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.

Mage Cataclysm Preview

Posted on by Gazimoff

On the early hours of Saturday Morning, Bashiok unveilled the planned changes for Mages in Cataclysm. Some of them represent light touch changes, while others are fundamental changes to the way the class will work. As a response, I’ve stepped through each of the key changes and highlighted the changes that they’ll bring to the class.

New Spells:

Flame Orb (available at level 81): Inspired by Prince Taldaram’s abilities in Ahn’kahet and Icecrown Citadel, this spell allows the mage to cast a flaming orb that travels in front in a straight line, sending beams that cause fire damage to passing targets. Once it’s cast, the mage is free to begin casting other spells as the Flame Orb travels. While the spell will be useful to any spec, Fire mages will have talents that improve it, possibly causing the Flame Orb to explode when it reaches its destination.

In this copy of a raid boss mechanic, I’m hoping that this will be a targetable spell. I’m also hoping that the augmenting targets will increase the damage it causes while passing as well as the final damage it does when it arrives. I’d also really like to see some interaction between this and Living Bomb.

Time Warp (level 83): Grants a passive Haste effect much like Bloodlust or Heroism to party or raid members. It also temporarily increases the mage’s own movement speed. Time Warp will be exclusive with Bloodlust and Heroism, meaning you can’t benefit from both if you’ve got the Exhaustion debuff, though the movement-speed increase will still work even when under the effects of Exhaustion.

Although this initially feels useful, it’s essentially a tweaked copy of a Shaman’s Heroism or Bloodlust abilities. It’s also a copy of the Chrono Lord Deja’s ability in Culling of Stratholme. It’s unfortunate that it’s further ability homogenisation – unless there’s a reduction to the duration of Exhaustion we’re unlikely to see both Time Warp and Heroism being used at the same time.

Wall of Fog (level 85): Creates a line of frost in front of the mage, 30 yards from end to end. Enemies who cross the line are snared and take damage. The mana cost will be designed to make Wall of Fog efficient against groups, not individuals. This spell is intended to give mages a way to help control the battlefield, whether the mage is damaging incoming enemies (Blizzard can be channeled on top of Wall of Fog) or protecting a flag in a Battleground. 10-second duration. 30-second cooldown.

This feels like a situational spell more than anything else. I can see this being used heavily in battleground PVP (as will Fire Orb), but the raid uses aren’t as clear at present. If anything I feel that it brings back an old Mage role of add management – snaring, kiting and bringing errant adds back to the main or offtank. These old-school skills used by Hunters and Mages seem to have been dropped in favour of off-tanking.

Changes to Abilities:

Arcane Missiles is being redesigned to become a proc-based spell. Whenever the mage does damage with any spell, there is a chance for Arcane Missiles to become available, similar to how the warrior’s Overpower works. The damage and mana cost of this spell will be reworked to make it very desirable to use when available. This change should make gameplay more dynamic for the mage, particularly at low levels.

This is an interesting standout – in essence it’s extending the arcane endgame raiding rotation. It also means that there will need to be a replacement for the primary Arcane nuke for mages to use as they level up. If anything I think that this will make playing a mage more entertaining – having this mechanic interact with a Fire Hot Streak spec or Frost Deathfrost spec (I’ll touch on this later). I’m also expecting the Arcane Tree to act as a modifier on this proc chance.

We are planning to remove spells that don’t have a clear purpose. Amplify Magic, Dampen Magic, Fire Ward, and Frost Ward are being removed from the game, and we may remove more.

This seems a little dissapointing – I’d prefer to have more buttons than less, and have an increased use for this. The biggest knock-on effect for this will be Incanter’s Absorption, which will struggle to remain viable. I’m also dissapointed to see Amplify/Dampen Magic go – in pure physical fights Amplify Magic was a huge boost to healing, while Dampen Magic was a great help to the solo mage farming spellcaster mobs. The biggest resistance to using these was the duration and application of the buff – if it was party or raid-wide I think it would have seen a much higher use.

The ability to conjure food and water will not become available until higher levels (likely around level 40), as we’re making changes to ensure mages generally won’t run out of mana at lower levels. Once mages learn how to conjure food and water, the conjured item will restore both health and mana.

This is another dissapointing touch – seeing a core mage mechanic being pushed out to the middle levels. One of the appealing aspects of playing a mage is the strong level of self-sufficiency, and this changes push this aspect to one side. I’ll wait to see how a new mage levels before making a final judgement, but I’m not convinced by the mention of mana regen at low levels.

Scorch will provide a damage bonus to the mage’s fire spells. Our goal is for Scorch to be part of the mage’s rotation and a useful damage-dealing ability, even if someone else is supplying the group with the spell Critical Strike debuff. Scorch will provide the mage with more specific benefits, which can also be improved through talents.

This seems to be a hark back to the original scorch mechanic, where you had multiple Fire mages ramping up the Scorch debuff on a target. I’m also hoping for some use of this by Destro warlocks as well. The two specs used to complement eachother well, and I’d like to see a return to it. I’m hoping that it’ll work by applying a debuff to the target, rather than the debuff on the player that Arcane Blast creates.

New Talents & Talent Changes:

Arcane Focus will now return mana for each spell that fails to hit your target, including Arcane Missiles that fail to launch. We want Arcane mages to have several talents that play off of how much mana the character has and give the player enough tools to manage mana.

I like this change, mainy because it ditches the +hit component of the original. I’m hoping that we’ll see Precision go the same way, either by being modified or removed completely. Depending on it’s location in the Arcane Tree, it might be something that mages with other specs will pick up.

The talent Playing with Fire will reduce the cooldown of Blast Wave when hit by a melee attack, instead of its current effect.

Blast Wave is currently one of the spells that tanks hate mages using, mainly because of the knockback effect. Having said that, it’ll be great in PVP. It’ll also be great to augment with a Frost Nova->Blink, particularly by players with an elementalist spec.

Pyromaniac will grant Haste when three or more targets are getting damaged by the effects of your damage-over-time (DoT) fire spells.

This is a really interesting mechanic change. Currently Blizzard rules the roost when it comes to applying AoE to packs of targets. This will bring the Living Bomb Tab Flamestrike back into play, with multiple targets being dotted up before dropping the big AoE. I’m also hoping that mages will benefit from haste on DoTs in the same way that Warlocks and Shadowpriests will.

The Burnout talent will allow mages to cast spells using health when they run out of mana.

This is another steal, this time from the Warlock Lifetap. It’s going to be interesting to see how the health-mana conversion works. It’ll probably best be used while waiting for an evocation or mana gem cooldown to pop, but it also presents Mages with a new way to kill themselves. As if Spell Reflection and Standing In The Bad wasn’t enough to worry about…

Mastery Bonuses:

Mana Adept: Arcane will deal damage based how much mana the mage has. For example, Arcane mages will do much more damage at 100% mana than at 50% mana. If they begin to get low on mana, they will likely want to use an ability or mechanic to bring their mana up to increase their damage.

This is going to hit Arcane Mages hard, and probably push them back into the Arena PVP role of burst damage. In a raiding situation the Arcane Mage is going to be running out of mana towards the end of a fight, and with that drop in mana we’ll see a drop in damage. When you have players warming the floor and only a few left standing, this will not help.

Ignite: All direct-damage fire spells will add a damage-over-time (DoT) component when cast. The flavor will be similar to how Fireball works; however, the DoT component will be much stronger.

This will work brilliantly with the Pyromaniac change. I’m hoping for some stacking DoTs, so that we won’t see clashes between more than one mage. I’d also like to see these interact positively with other DoT enhancing abilities.

Deathfrost: Casting Frostbolt places a buff on the mage that increases the damage for all frost, fire, and arcane spells. The only damage spell that won’t be affected by this buff is Frostbolt.

Again, this looks like an interesting spec. I’m hoping that this will play well with Brain Freeze and Master of Elements, and that the new Arcane Missiles proc will work well with this. I’m also hoping this will encourage more Elementalist specs, bringing Frostfire Blot back into play. Having a spell that would benefit from Frost talents as well as being affected by Deathfrost will be incredibly useful.

All in, it’s a mixed bag for mages. Some good, some bad, but mostly a step in the good direction. As always though, the devil is in the detail, and we won’t see that until Beta. Till then, it’s all theory, guesswork and conjecture.

The Flow of Gold

Posted on by Gazimoff

Gold is something that we pretty much take for granted. We get rewarded when we turn in quests, we loot it from our fallen enemies. We spend it when we want to buy something from the auction house or when we want to get our equipment repaired. It’s all automatic – a few mouse clicks and we’ve either earned or spent thousands of coins. But do you ever think about where the gold you have comes from, or where it goes to?

I started writing this as a response to Tarinae’s Shared Topic, about how Blizzard is pushing account security and how it seems to be matched by the efforts of gold sellers. But in order to explain why gold selling is wrong, it’s worth explaining the problems it causes in the first place. Before getting into the meat of the topic, there’s a few things you should consider:

  • If you are a Guild Master or Officer, you owe it to your guild to ensure that you have an authenticator registered to your account. You should also ensure that anyone with access to anything of value in the guild bank also has an authenticator. If there is anyone in these positions that does not, you should revoke their guild bank access immediately.
  • You should ensure you practice good computer hygiene. Ensure that you have a virus checker installed on your computer and make sure you keep it up to date. If you use FireFox, install the NoScript addon. If you do click on a dodgy link by mistake, NoScript will make sure that the site cannot install anything onto your computer.
  • If you are a Guild Master or Officer and see one of your members get repeatedly hacked, question their computer hygiene practices. If they don’t do anything about it, you may want to consider suspending them. Do your best to help them, but ensure that they take responsibility for their situation.
  • If you use an email address for your World of Warcraft account, don’t use the same one when posting on blogs, registering on Warcraft-related/Guild forums signing up for other game betas and so on. Hackers harvest these sites for addresses to send scam emails to. Keep your Warcraft email address to as small a number of people as possible.
  • Get an authenticator. Seriously. Either get the key-ring, the free iPhone app or the cheap mobile phone app.

In almost any MMO there are two economies working in parallel. The server economy is designed to regulate the flow of gold into and out of the game. Gold enters the game when you vendor an item, when you loot gold from a creature or when you get rewarded for completing a quest. It also exits the system in much the same way, in repair bills, food/water purchases and so on. By contrast the player economy is based on the trade of gathered materials and finished items, either via the auction house or a fee/tip for crafting. The theory is that the server economy should provide a steady inward trickle of gold, while the player economy should ensure a constant circulation of gold in exchange for goods and services.

The theory is that the two economies work at an even pace to keep the player economy relatively constant. The price of materials stays relatively static from one day to the next, meaning that the price of crafted items is fairly easy to predict. Although the price of goods would tend to decline as demand gradually dries up, the constant of influx of gold from the server economy provides a steady rate of price inflation.

All well and good you might think, but what happens when you start to disrupt the economy by introducing gold farmers and hackers? It’s worth splitting out the two here, as they have a subtly different effect on the economy.

A gold farmer is interested in maximising the amount of gold they accumulate while spending as little as possible on armour repairs and consumables. Although this might mean that they don’t consume much (if anything) from the player economy, they do want to make sure that their auctions sell for the best possible price. They’re unlikely to severely undercut existing server prices, instead making sure that their materials are competitive. Of course if gold farming gets out of control then it heavily deflates prices, meaning that players can’t compete against the gold farmers.

It may also mean that players struggle to gather materials themselves as they’re forced to compete with gold farmers. As resources are limited, a high number of gold farmers means that there are fewer resources available for players to harvest. It can become so problematic that players are forced to buy materials from the gold farmers at the auction house purely because they are unable to gather them themselves.

A hacker by contrast wants to sell everything as quickly as possible before the account owner regains control. Anything that they sell at auction will be priced up to shift quickly, and can often crash a market. Think of the times when you’ve seen titanium ore or eternal elements being sold at a very low price – chances are they were being offered by a hacker. On a server where hacking is a regular occurrence the market can be continually flooded by “fire sale” items.

You might think that this isn’t really a big deal. You probably play the game in a specific way – you might be a pure-bred raider or a determined PvP’er. You barely touch the economy – only picking up the occasional flask or uncut gem from the auction house. But by the same token, you want to be able to make sure that the cost of what you’re doing stays roughly the same. It’s great to know that 50g this week will buy the same number of flasks as 50g next week, or that the gem you need for your latest gear upgrade will cost roughly the same. If you need a quick bit of cash you’d like to know that your spare herbs or ores will sell for roughly the same amount, week in and week-out.

Why do the gold sellers bother to hack at all? Surely they know that they’re damaging their own reputations and annoying the very people that they hope to sell their services to? It’s true that some gold sellers do take their reputations seriously, but not all of them. Eurogamer recently ran a series of articles on gold trading, explaining how the industry was structured.

A hacker or gold farmer will sell accumulated gold to a Collector. The gold collector might employ farmers or hackers directly, or they might subcontract or freelance it, paying the agent a fixed value for the gold they provide. The collector then passes the gold on to the Seller, again at a fixed value. Once the seller has the gold, they then offer it to the player by running a website through which gold can be bought, as well as customer support. As a result the person you see spamming trade chat might work for a completely different company to the gold farmer or hacker.

The increase of account hacking guides on the internet means that the person stealing your account could come from San Francisco instead of Shanghai. Either way the effect on the economy of an account hack is the same – freefall prices, guild disruption and loss of an account for several days. The gold might not end up being sent to a gold seller, but might just as easily end up in the coffers of a rival guild on another server.

Finally, hacking a computer is a crime. In the UK the Computer Misuse Act covers everything from unlawful access to obtaining information. From there it becomes a grey area – the gold you buy from a seller may have been partly obtained through illegal channels. There’s the potential of being in receipt of stolen goods, or of complacency or conspiracy to commit a crime. It’s not been tested in court, but in these litigation-happy times it probably won’t be long until we see the first account-hack related lawsuit arrive. By buying gold, you run the risk of leaving yourself open to being sued later down the line. Regardless of the legal risks, it also perpetuates and endorses the damage to the economy, degrading the game experience for both yourself and other players.

So there you have it: why gold selling damages the game, why hacking increases the problem and why buying gold is legally dubious. I’ve also covered what you can do to ensure than your guild and it’s members are protected, and what you should do to maintain their trust in you.

Still feel the shortcut is worth it?

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.

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):

More on Mastery

Posted on by Gazimoff

In what feels like a healthy dose of rumour control, Blizzard today released a huge update on how Mastery will work in Cataclysm. While there are no mage specifics, there’s a ton of information available to allow us to predict how Mastery will work. It’s also worth looking at what problems Mastery won’t solve for mages and other DPS caster classes.

A key disclaimer though: while I’ve covered the basics of Mastery, the impact on mages is largely educated guesswork. Where I talk about a specific stats or spells these are just examples rather than official intended changes. For the official line, read the blue post.

Mastery will be made up of three bonuses:

  • A boost related to the role we play. Since our single purpose in life is to deal damage, this will probably be a straight increase in spell damage. It also means that our spell damage can scale outside of intellect, which will be the main contributor to spell damage in Cataclysm. Even mages with sub-optimal gear should have a solid baseline from this bonus.
  • A boost related to the stats we look for in gear. Bearing in mind that spell damage is only going to appear on weapons in Cataclysm, this will probably be stats like Haste or Crit. I’m really hoping that we don’t end up with a Hit bonus, but I have a feeling it’ll creep in somewhere.
  • A boost related to the tree that we spec into, in order to provide funky additional affects. For arcane this might be a play on Arcane Concentration, Fire will probably get an increase to the DoT affect of their spells and Frost is likely to get some kind of boost to slowing or snaring abilities.

There’s also some important information about how these bonuses will grow as you develop your character:

  • The first two bonuses (the generics) will increase as you sink talent points into the various trees. It’s not yet clear if you’ll get the same level of bonus if you sink all 71 points into a single tree or if you spread them across all three.
  • The third bonus (Spec Mastery) will increase based on the gear that you’re wearing. Some of it will come from come from wearing gear relevant to your class – this means moonkin in leather, holy paladins in plate and elemental shamans in mail. If they start downgrading (wearing cloth gear) then they lose the mastery bonus. In addition, new gear in Cataclysm will have a further +Mastery stat on it. This stat will go directly to the Spec Mastery bonus – as long as it’s your armour type. Moonkin wearing cloth with +Mastery on it will be wasting the stat points

With all that in mind, what does it mean for mages?

  • Hopefully this will mean the end of bland “increases this stat by x%” talents like Precision, Arcane Focus and Piercing Ice. The Generic Mastery bonuses can take care of sliding scale stat boosts such as these instead of players feeling forced to take “mandatory” talents. I’m also hoping that “pop” talents like Arcane Power and Icy Veins still remain, as they provide the opportunity for burst damage when needed.
  • We should get a bit more free talent spend to help with picking up playstyle-based talents, and there should be more wiggle room for experimentation.
  • Mages that focus on PvE and PVP should be able to dualspec comfortably, as Spec Mastery gear bonuses will apply to both specs, with each tree specialisation providing it’s bonus when that spec is active. Of course, resilience is another issue entirely. It might also mean that just as you have Discipline/Holy dualspec priests, you might end up with dualspec mages that use different specs depending on the shape of the raiding encounter (static fight versus constant movement).

What questions still exist?

  • There’s still the question of how the Spec Mastery bonus will scale with the number of talent points in the tree, if at all. Will it be something that’s activated purely on whichever tree has the most points? Will we have to hit a 51 point talent in order to select it? I’m nervous about ending up with 76 point Arcane mages, purely because it’s the only way to maximise the Spec Mastery stat.
  • With a number of talents being eliminated, will we end up with thinner talent trees in Cataclysm? If that happens, will the number of points in our talent pool go down, or will we end up with more spread between trees?
  • Are we throwing away the idea of hybrid specs such as Frostfire?

All in, the further detail is making me quite excited for mages in Cataclysm. I’m hoping that it’ll mean that more of the stuff that we need to do our job will be built into our class as standard instead of being chosen by our spec. I’m also hoping that with the changes to how stats affect each class (e.g. mages no longer benefiting from Spirit) that we’ll see an easing of the loot competition that’s plagued a lot of Burning Crusade and Wrath.

On the other hand, I’m expecting to see a lot of gear that “could” be useful to someone with current itemisation end up being sharded or junked in the expansion. Also, depending on how Reforging works, you may end up with only those characters with skills such as Tailoring or Blacksmithing being able to re-tool a soulbound item and make it useful. I’m hoping that it’ll work in a similar way to Enchanting, but we’ll have to see.

Hit It Like You Mean It

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ask a mage to talk about the Hit Cap, and you’ll probably get a tirade of ranting. They’ll start to froth at the mouth as this haze of madness descends upon them, a rage of arguments involving calculations and forecasts that seem like some encrypted mathematical riddle. It’s a horrible stat that never feels ‘useful’, just one of those things that you need to have enough of. Not too much though – anything more than enough is a waste.

To understand more on the problems mages face with the Hit Cap, it’s worth reading the WoWWiki article. The amount of hit needed from gear, enchants and gems can change dramatically based on what talent spec you have as well as what racial abilities you have and who else you have in the group. And since you can’t bank on having the same group make-up every time, you end up building your gear based on worse case scenarios.

Add on to this Blizzard’s habit of ‘tweaking’ and you have a recipe for frustration. In the start of Wrath of the Lich King, Deep Fire had the highest damage output. While you were gearing up, a solid Arcane spec would allow you to pick up talents like Precision and Arcane Focus. We even had progression, from Arcane, to Frostfire, to Deep Fire, as we geared up. Then patch 3.2.2 came out and suddenly the spec that provided the most hit was also the one with the highest DPS output. Overnight every high end mage had to go out, respec and re-asses their gear. It was a nightmare.

This form of ‘stat tetris’ is something that Blizzard are working on with Cataclysm, in order to make hit gear more useful. But then again, if you look at the overall stat changes that are planned for Cataclysm there are still some questions that remain. Looking at what’s being planned, we’ll have the following stats to juggle.

  • Stamina – affecting our health pools, possibly impacting spell damage
  • Intellect – affecting our mana pools and spell damage
  • Haste – how fast we can cast our spells
  • Crit rating  – a spell’s chance to critically hit
  • Mastery – a ‘bonus’ stat for wearing gear relevant to us (cloth)
  • Spell damage – no longer on gear, but will remain on weapons
  • Hit rating

Currently, the responses on how hit rating will work are pretty vague. Is it something that we’ll need more of as we go into higher tier brackets of dungeons, becoming part of the ‘gear check’ that we’ll need to leap over regardless of skill? Is it one of these stats that’s going to scale pretty linearly up to a soft cap, in the same way that haste and crit rating do now? Will it have a multiplier or booster affect on our other stats, but without a cap? Currently these are unknowns and will probably remain so until the launch of Beta later this year.

Why not ask another question though – why is hit needed as part of the spellcaster damage mechanics? Does it have an important role to play as a stat in the overall damage calculation, or is it there to serve purely as a gating or limiting mechanic? Does it need to exist as a stat in talent trees, or can it be moved out to be a purely gear-based stat?

Does it need to exist at all, or can it be thrown in the trash?

I’ll be eagerly waiting on further news, but I really hope that we can avoid having to juggle stats around a pivot point of some magical number. After all, I’d rather play Peggle instead of Tetris.