Monday, October 13, 2008

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?

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Congratulations on your sweet, sweet victory. Sonny was always jealous of that talent (-:

krizzlybear said...

I'll admit that this battle of mages would ultimately become a war of attrition. and when attrition is involved, arcane meditation is the x-factor.

The battle may be won, but the war is far from over. A new era is upon us. You better be watching your back, little pink-haired gnome.

FROST4LYFE

Gevlon said...

And soon the arcane explosion will be even stronger. The fire tier 1 talent incineration will provide +6% extra crit chance. With Spell impact, Arcane instability, Arcane potency, it will have altogether +18% crit, just from talents.

BOO!

Anonymous said...

Arcane FTW!!!!

IMO in the expansion arcane will be a most useful spec to level up (at least for someone like me that hates frost), but not to raiding at least until someone in blizzard discover a form of nerfing more sutile than a 200% penalty to our main nuke

Anyway thanks to the dual-spec new posibilities I probably come with a compromise in my ARcane/fire esquizofrenia

Green Armadillo said...

I think Arcane is definitely on the rise for the expansion. I'm not sure that ANY of the mage 51-pointers are worth passing up 21 in an alternate tree, and that passes a big advantage to Arcane (where your points affect ALL your spells). At the same time, several key frost talents now cost fewer points than they used to, so you're really getting bang for your buck by going with a hybrid.

The other key point is that we're going to get to have two specs at our disposal sometime next year. At that point, you can be an Arcane spec AND have a water elemental in your back pocket for those situations where you can see that you're going to want a second frost nova at your disposal. Again, this flexibility means that it's a good time to buy stock in Arcane Mages Ltd.

Anonymous said...

@Sonny: thanks! I'm not sure I won but if you say so...

@Krizzlybear: I seriously doubt I'll ever go deep frost. I've never been able to keep a plant alive, keeping an element seems to be too big a responsibility to me.

@Gevlon: that sounds nice... When dual specs come I suspect we'll see a few mages keeping an rcane spec for spamming trash, even though their main is frost or fire.

@Eishen: really? It never occured to me to be anything but fire levelling. But maybe I've given up after the AB nerf too easily.

@Green Armadillo: Another arcane supporter, yay! You really make the patch spec decision hard to me. I haven't made up my mind yet. But right now it's leaning towards at least TRYING a deep arcane built one raid before (maybe) dismissing it and going fire. If nothing else my whole stock of flasks is supporting arcane...

Fish said...

I had a comeback in mind, but as usual, you've gotten me to thinking. I've seen AE spam at it's finest and it's impressive.

I knew there was a reason I had you in the "acceptable gnome" category. . .

ha ha

Anonymous said...

Great way to end the battle Larisa.. going out with a bang...

Thanks for the fun... now I can slow down and look forward to my well earned holiday.

Keep up the great Mage work!

Anonymous said...

Ohh and I have a wierd follow up coming this morning... Inspired by PewPewLazerz

Anonymous said...

O.o