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Posts with tag pyroblast

Arcane Brilliance: Why we Mage

Hi there! Yes, after a long hiatus, Arcane Brilliance is back. Snack tables all around! Anybody ninjas the biscuits, they get a Fireball in the face. Nah, just kidding. Even ninjas are welcome here. As long as they're mage-ninjas.

I've been a Mage since day one with WoW, and until a few weeks ago I had never really questioned my class choice. I liked the idea of being a caster, a back row fireballer with robes and a pointy hat. When I came over from FFXI I asked my WoW-playing buddy (the aforementioned shammie) which class I should be. He asked what I was into, and I said something like "I want to be a huge caster-tastic wizard in a dress who sets things on fire with his mind. Is there a mage-type class?" He said. "Yes. It's called...Mage." And that was it. I rolled my undead Mage and began conjuring flaming death and croissants. I happily leveled my Mage to 70.

And then...the bubbling, Healthstone-critting warlock happened.

After the jump: Shameful self doubt, soul searching, and finally...sweet redemption! And more Mage-talk.

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Why we Mage

Breakfast Topic: One-shots

You know how it is: you're just running a long, minding your own business in a battleground, when suddenly some enemy mage hiding in a bush casts Pyroblast on you, and crits you for more damage than you can count. "Whaa?!" is you can say as you drop dead before you even knew what was going on.

They're called "one-shots." I'm not talking about Massively's snazzy screenshot feature -- I'm talking about any player being able to kill another player in effectively one hit, from maximum health all the way down to zero. In a forum post by "Deathanddecay," there's apparently a big argument among himself and some friends as to what exactly counts as a "one-shot." Does it have to be like a Pyroblast critical strike? Or can a three-in-one windfury proc count?

For my part, the distinction seems unimportant. Either way, you're dead before you have any chance to react and defend yourself. This sort of thing used to occur all the time before The Burning Crusade came out, but since then players' stamina has increased faster than their damage, so one-shots tend to happen a lot less. Now that the expansion's been out a year, however, if one player is in the best gear while another just hit 70, it could definitely happen quite a bit. What's your experience with one-shots? Do you prance around gleefully decimating your helpless opposition without effort? Do you dread going to battlegrounds for fear that you'll just die without being able to contribute anything? Or do you find that everyone is more or less balanced and one shots don't happen much anymore?

Build Shop: Mage 10/47/3


Welcome back to Build Shop! After a two week hiatus to spend time with my family over the holidays, I'm back and ready to get down to some good old fashioned discussion about builds. This week we're discussing a Mage build, something that hasn't been done in a long, long time. For awhile now, Fire has been the tree of choice for the raiding mage (though some vets will remember fire-unfriendly MC and BWL). Although Fire isn't the only spec for raiding, it is the build I'm examining today.

So what makes Fire so great? Well, this build picks up all the damage-increasing talents in the Fire tree, some goodies from the Arcane tree, and even gives you a free point to put wherever you want. Hey, no one can say I'm not generous. Alright, so actually I'm not generous, there just seems to be no general consensus on where to put it, so I'm leaving it up to you. Without further ado, let's jump right in and take a look at what makes this build tick.

Continue reading Build Shop: Mage 10/47/3

Spell haste rating revealed

This came up when we reported on the new "rating" system a long time ago (implemented so that Blizzard could better scale gear on the way up), but like Cyberdemon of Frostwolf-A, I missed it. Alongside the self-explanatory stuff like critical strike rating, and the new resilience rating, there's a new rating called "Spell Haste." Cyberdemon wondered what it was, and Tseric confirms that a higher spell haste rating speeds up the cast times of all your spells. Pretty cool.

The reason we likely haven't seen it much yet is because so far, spell haste stuff only drops at the highest levels, and, from what I can see, in the form of temporary buffs that allow you to get a few casts off quickly. An equipped high spell haste rating would fundamentally change the way the game was played in many situations-- if mages could kick out a quicker pyroblast whenever they wanted, that would have a big effect in a lot of PvP situations.

Tseric also clarifies that this only affects cast time, not DoT tick time, or duration of spells. And while the two trinkets linked above are the only places I could find it in the game so far, I wouldn't be surprised if this rating found its way into certain instance specific buffs, either for us (players could get a DoT put on them that would kill them in 30 seconds, but let them cast all their spells almost instantly within that time) or against us (mind-controlled players get their spells hasted for a short period against the raid). Either way, as more and more players move into the endgame, spell haste will be something to look out for.

Update: Commenters have found a few other spell haste items, including this 60 trinket, and an awesome BoE caster sword.


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