The real living bomb puts an end to the war

TBC is soon going to end and so is the Battle of the Mages. Gnomeaggedon has finally hurled his huge pyroblast ball and is now spamming little blast wave fires where we can warm up and treat ourselves with some grilled marshmallows before entering the tundra.

The mage fireworks are coming to its crescendo and I’m no worse: I’ll join with my lovely arcane explosions.

The living bombs

I must admit it right away: I love spamming arcane explosions. You all know there’s a new spell upcoming, “Living bomb”. I think they’ve got it all wrong there. The living bomb already exists. It’s exactly what arcane mages are when we go full out aoe:ing. We’re the living bombs.

It doesn’t only look awesome, especially on a little gnomish girl, exploding over and over again. It also hurts – a lot and many at a time, no matter if you’re boosting someone in Stockades, taking out dozens of mobs in a couple of key strokes, or if you’re dealing with the trash waves in Mount Hyjal. Just make sure to have a plan for mana recovery, off you go and enjoy!

Whenever an arcane mage is about to start another of those crazy bombing aoe-sessions he gets a happy glimpse in his eye, knowing that he’ll give the locks a decent fight about the first place on the dps chart. Watching the scrolling combat text, with the damage numbers falling like a heavy rain in November, all over the screen is pure pleasure.

Now, it happens occasionally that fire mages cheat in the arcane arts. After futile efforts to place flamestrike in the right spot, only to see the mobs running away in another direction, they may want to copy our bomb trick. But Gnomeaggedon and his colleagues fail! Why? Because they’ve neglected the wonderful talent, reinforcing Arcane Explosion: Arcane Impact, which increases the critical strike chance with 6 percent.

And they lack a bunch of other lovely damage increasing talents in the arcane tree, such as arcane instability, which increases spelldamage as well as critical strike chance by 3 percent. It takes an arcane mage to have a real bomb.

The last mage standing

With this post I’m afraid we’re coming close to the end of The Battle of the Mages. The enemies seem to have fled the field. Gnomeaggedon is already in India in his mind and soon enough physically too. I don’t doubt he’ll do some arcane meditation over there, but we probably won’t see the result from it before next year. Zupa hasn’t posted in over a month. He could be preparing a Very Impressive Last Frost Post, but I’m afraid I believe the silence is rather because he’s having a break from blogging. Krizzlybear has turned his back to us, devoting himself entirely into novel writing and frostsaber grinding, waiting for the expansion.

So the last remaining mage standing on the battleground is Larísa, doing another round of beautiful arcane explosions as homage to her beloved spec until she’s completely out of mana.

I’ve enjoyed playing arcane mage immensely. I don’t yet know if I’ll keep doing it in the expansion – or even after the patch coming in a few days.

I bet will start another war once we’ve got the hang of our specs in WotLK and Gnomeaggedon’s back from his journey. Maybe the roles have switched there. I could end up as a pyromaniac once again and perhaps Gnome has chilled down and turned frost. You never know, do you?