by Christian Belt

This week’s installment is all specifics, all the time. In fact, this column and the one to follow are going to be filled with so much specific, easily quantifiable information that your brains, trained by months of political campaign speeches to accept vague platitudes as factual policy, may not be able to process it.

My aim over the next two weeks is to provide you with a compendium of all the currently available mage gear from the heroic threshold of item-level 435 on up to best in slot. No matter where your mage is along the gear-grubbing spectrum, you should be able to look at these lists, identify an upgrade, and know where said upgrade is obtained.

I will be organizing this by gear slot. If you need a trinket, head on down to the trinket section. If you need an off-hand frill to go with your sweet new wand, head down to the off-hand section. And if you are a warlock, die in a fire.

We will begin with heroic-worthy green-quality quest rewards that are worth seeking out during the leveling process. Well move through everything obtainable outside of raids, and then next week we’ll hit the raid finder, and then head all the way up to best-in-slot.
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by Christian Belt

I imagine I’m not the only slow-poke out there who’s taking their sweet time getting to level 90. My playtime since the expansion hit has been almost non-existent until recently, and in fact I only just dinged max level this week. Still, even though time-constraints kept me from playing as much as I wanted to, it still felt like I was getting to 90 slower than I should have been. What can I say? I like to read the quest text, watch the cutscenes, listen to all the dialogue, explore the countryside. Oh, and I may have indulged in the occasional pet battle. We all have our vices. Though in this case, I’d hazard to say we all have the same vice.

But I did eventually get there, late or not. And for those of you who are still enjoying the journey rather than the destination, I’ve compiled a few of the thoughts and observations I had along the way into this week’s column. For those of you for whom this advice comes too late, I’ll start hitting the post-90 content next week. Pinkie swear.

I know none of these tips are going to be strictly necessary. The fact of this game is that if you play it long enough, you’ll get to max level regardless of how you chose to play. But these tips are all things that I was glad I figured out along the way (or was told about by someone wiser than myself), and once I did, I found things that much easier, and my frustrations that much milder. My hope is at least some of you will find them helpful as you explore Pandaria with your mage.
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by Christian Belt

So what now?

You’re a level 90 mage. Worn and scarred from your battle with Deathwing, you wandered into this new continent, leaning heavily upon your staff, beaten but not bowed. The beauty you found here inspired you; dense bamboo forests shrouded in mystery, jade mountains capped with white, ornate temples steeped in ancient wisdom. You felt the call of the unexplored sink its hooks into your weary flesh, fill you with renewed purpose, prod your aching bones forward into new adventure and fresh conflict.

And now you find yourself invigorated with new power. You’ve gained experience and wisdom, learned new spells and ancient magic–all things you thought impossible only weeks ago. But now that you’ve reached the peak of your wizardry once more, the 90th level, still you crave more. You wish to increase your power, obtain rare and deadly weaponry, and yes, murder more warlocks. Seriously, screw those guys.
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by Christian Belt

I’ve been playing this game for the better part of 7 years now and at this point it’s sort of amazing that I’m still capable of getting excited about anything it throws at me, but I have to say that I’m pretty damn giddy right now. I want to make a panda. I want to teach it to conjure pastries and hurl fireballs. I want to gain 5 levels on my main. I want to explore Azerothian Asia. I want to learn to sew new and prettier pairs of pants. I want to put a Rune of Power right outside Hot Topic, then just stand there like Gandalf, making sure all the warlocks most certainly do not pass.

But there are still a few items of business to attend to before that expansion hits and I can do all those infinitely fun things. We’ve already discussed a lot of them.

The item on today’s agenda is mage add-ons. Every major patch or expansion is guaranteed to break all of your add-ons. Things you’ve depended upon for months suddenly stop working, and you look to to the heavens and cry out in anguish, your faith in a benevolent God shaken to its very core because Mage Nuggets is down. Well fear not. Most of the add-ons you love and need are already updated and ready for Mists to drop.
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by Christian Belt

With just over a week of this pre-expansion/post-patch limbo to go, it’s high time we covered one last piece of patch 5.0.4 mage business before we turn our eyes almost exclusively toward the impending influx of pandaren and monks and … pandaren monks. But good news! Most, if not all, of what we discuss here today will also apply in Mists. Though there are always small shifts in stat weight at endgame, we’re still quite far removed from knowing exactly how things will shake out when we’re all doing hard mode raiding.

This expansion brings some major changes to our stats, radically altering the benefits they do and don’t provide. Before we get to each spec and its stat weights, let’s look at each stat and familiarize ourselves with its Mists of Pandaria version.
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by Christian Belt

There was a point on Tuesday night, while trying out my new rotations in the LFR againstUltraxion (several times, thanks to a long string of tanks who apparently have never used a taunt before), where I fully realized that my arcane mage had Living Bomb. I mean, I knew about it, had tried it out on the beta, but had never raided with it and actually inserted it into my rotation. So there I am, blasting away with my arcane mage and his new decidedly-more-than-one-button rotation, and I see that Living Bomb button on my action bar, and I press it, and then a few seconds later it explodes and I refresh it, and what’s this? Am I crying? Yes … yes, I’m crying like a child while I blow up that giant dragon.

So I’m happy with patch 5.0.4. I know not everybody is. Most of the complaints seem to revolve around the new talent system, which we’ll get to in a minute. But me? I am completely on board. I have my quibbles. (Why do my Mana Gems vanish after logout again? I thought we fixed that annoyance a few patches ago.) But any minor issues I notice quickly drown in the massive wake of all the happy. And there is a lot of happy.
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by Christian Belt

This time around, we’ve got cuddly pandas and fun pet battles and … I don’t know … Eastern philosophy? Jokes about impending apocalypses aren’t as apt this time around.

Still, if any expansion has the potential to usher in mass chaos and confusion, Mists of Pandaria may be the one. Never before at any one time have our spellbooks and talent trees undergone such sweeping change. On Tuesday, the servers will go down, and when they come back up, the pre-expansion patch 5.0.4 will be in place (barring unforeseen maintenance mishaps), and everything we know about how to effectively wield magic will be completely different. Our current spell rotations will be gone, and we will need to go about the tricky business of learning our new spell rotations.

Which brings us to the reason I called you all together today. There’s magical cake in the back of the room, and later on we’ll be doing trust falls with warlocks where they fall and we hit them in the face with an Arcane Barrage. But for right now, our agenda has only one item on it: our new spell rotations. It’s time we learned them.

All of these rotations are priority-based, meaning you will always use the first spell on the list first, if all the conditions exist. For example, Arcane Missiles is third on arcane’s priority list. You will always use Arcane Missiles if the first two items on the list (Rune of Power and your bomb talent) are already up and if Arcane Missiles has procced (the condition). Then you go down the list, using everything if it is the highest priority spell available and the conditions for its proper use are met. (For instance, you won’t want to use Ice Lance unlessFingers of Frost is up.)

Clear as mud, yes?
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by Christian Belt

So now we know when the expansion is coming (Sept. 25), and we also know when patch 5.0.4 is coming (Aug. 28). That means we’ll be living with this patch and all of its sweeping changes to the systems and mechanics we’re currently used to for the better part of a month before we get a whole bunch of new content to distract us from how different everything just became. That’s a substantial amount of time to play with the new talent system, new spells, and … erm …pet battles that the pre-expansion patch will bring. I think this is a good time to discuss those changes and prepare ourselves mentally for all the shiny new bounty we are about to receive.
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by Christian Belt

So with the expansion less than two months away and patch 5.0 looming on the “any week now” precipice, it’s time we stopped messing around. I promise to stop skipping weeks of this column for trivial things like “family,” or “crippling work schedule,” or “violent and possibly terminal illnesses,” because, damn. The time is short. The end of the end of the world is nigh, and the coming panda apocalypse is nearly upon us. We need to get down to the nitty-gritty here, guys.

Look forward to some extra mage content in between Arcane Brilliances as we ramp up in the coming weeks, in the form of basic class 101 guides for all the stuff you need to know before the expansion hits. I’ll save the Saturday columns for more detailed analysis.

This week, we’re wading neck deep into the new talent system, since it’s probably the single biggest change our class is undergoing in Mists. It’s a bona fide shock to the system and a radical departure from the status quo, and believe me when I say that it will take all of us some getting used to before it begins to feel even remotely normal.
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