Each week Arcane Brilliance examines the magical majesty of Mages, and usually makes fun of the wimpy whininess of Warlocks. See that? That’s some crazy alliteration right there. Also, I’d like to call attention to the fact that Arcane Brilliance called Warlocks whiny. Oh, snap! Coming from a column about Mages, that has to burn, [...]
MIMIRON
Mimiron is…kind of complicated to describe. Suffice it to say that it’s a four-phase fight with different abilities to worry about on each phase. Short of writing a 3,000-word tract on Mimiron alone, I’m simply going to refer you here and here, and we’ll proceed under the assumption that you have a basic familiarity with [...]
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, as other people continue their march through Ulduar, I continue to ask myself if it wouldn’t be more cost-effective in the long run just to take my ailing graphics card out behind the woodshed and end its pathetic misery [...]
With Ulduar due to hit in the near future, Tales of a Priest addressed a pretty timely subject for 25-man raiders yesterday with a blog post on Val’anyr and how you’re going to assign it. As it’s a constructed Legendary like Atiesh rather than being a dropped item like the Warglaives and Thori’dal (sudden thought: [...]
Each week Arcane Brilliance glances around to make sure there are no Death Knights in the area, then daintily tiptoes out from cover long enough to throw together a column about Mages. Usually, this ends badly for Arcane Brilliance. Out of nowhere, a big purple rope-looking thingy wraps itself around Arcane Brilliance’s neck and drags [...]
Delicious new glyphs and some rework of old ones in this massive content Patch 3.1. In the midst of all the excitement, let’s try to look at the Paladin glyphs and what they mean for the class.
Glyph of Exorcism – Increases damage done by Exorcism by 20%. (Old: Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 [...]
When they said the 3.1 PTR patch notes were incomplete, they weren’t kidding. The undocumented changes that have been discovered make the patch notes look like a sketch. But I’m not complaining; it’s nice to have actual numbers to go with phrases like “damage increased” or “ranks reduced.” So here I’m going to run through [...]
Earlier today Blizzard posted a preview of Ulduar, the tier 8 raid coming up in patch 3.1 (which they promise will be on the PTRs “very soon”). Most of it looks really cool – 14 bosses, massive rooms, hard modes. However, there is one topic that Blizzard enthused about that really worries me: vehicle combat.
We’ve [...]
This installment of All the World’s a Stage is the twenty-third in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.
Any class needs its role models. Rogues don’t have all that many great heroes from lore, [...]
I mentioned it the last time, but more than ever, it’s a good time to be a Paladin. We’re not perfect yet, and indeed the class needs a little more tweaking, but it’s incredibly playable right now and is a lot of fun. We’ve always had traditional roles of tanking and healing for Paladins, but [...]
Each week Arcane Brilliance drops at a 100% rate from your computer screen. It can be equipped in any slot, and doesn’t bind to your character in any way, shape or form. It can be disenchanted into whatever you want, and sells to merchants for a million gold. It is of legendary quality. When equipped, [...]
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
A bad case of space cancer put me out of commission for the last few days, and for that I apologize. In addition to my apology, I blame the pandas. They caused me [...]
Welcome to Lichborne. Your host is inflicted with the space plague this week, but has done his best to write for you people anyway, so be grateful, you hear?
We’ve covered 3.0.8 pretty extensively, between Mike Sacco’s coverage of the initial round of changes and our week before last discussion, but the devs weren’t done yet. [...]
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
Good afternoon, WoW Insider! I have nothing useful to say in my preface today, because I need to go put my new power supply and video card in my PC so I can [...]
Welcome to Lichborne, the Death Knight column. Yes, that is yours truly in the above picture, and yes, fellow Alliance Death Knights, you can be jealous.
So here you are, a new level 80 Death Knight. You’ve made your triumphant return to Ebon Hold to train your level 80 skills and hearthed back to Dalaran, and [...]
Each year, Arcane Brilliance cooks up 52 columns about Mages, each one roasted at precisely the right temperature for precisely the right amount of time (usually a couple hours on Saturday morning over a soggy bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, to be honest). As we arrive at the 52nd week of 2008, Arcane Brilliance would [...]
So we have a 3 AM to 11 AM Pacific downtime today. But honestly, I’m sort of hoping it’s not for patch day, because I have a Death Knight column going live later this morning that assumes testing’s going to go on for another few weeks. Besides, they just added a few new tweaks to [...]
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW Insider’s weekly Death Knight column.
Yeah, I definitely have to put out a mea culpa here. Alas, Lichborne is a little bit late again. I have a valid excuse, I swear. It involved a flaming plum pudding, a flailing geist, and a sudden snowstorm at the Shadow Vault over in Icecrown. But [...]
One of the cooler vanity items you can get in Wrath of the Lich King is the Iron Boot Flask, which turns you into an Iron Dwarf for 10 minutes every hour. Currently it only costs 10 Relics of Ulduar (an item that has a chance to drop off of anything in Storm Peaks), but [...]
At around this time, a good bunch of us should have hit 80 by now. A fortunate few will already be raiding, while others will slowly be gearing up for them. I’ve put together a quick guide to the gear that Paladins of all specs should be looking forward to. With blue, or rare, gear [...]
Each week, Arcane Brilliance gains 5,000 reputation with the Kirin Tor by writing a column about Mages. That’s right, I said 5,000. Are you reading this, Kirin Tor? I’m declaring myself exalted. Give me my dagger already, you selfish jerks.
I may have mentioned this before, but I’m an Arcane Mage.
I wasn’t always. I spent my [...]
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I’m certainly having fun playing my death knight. I can solo a lot of the more difficult quests in the game; my Blood self-healing along with my glyphed Death Strike keeps me topped off and out of danger almost all the time; and I [...]
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for nearly three of it’s four year run. It’s kind of amazing to me to see how things have changed over time. Many of the adjustments have been by player suggestions, and most of them for the good. The folks I’ve been playing with lately don’t have nearly as [...]
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
It’s Friday, the second best day of the week, in stark contrast to Wednesday which was the worst day of the week. What is the number one best day of the week? Well, [...]
I tried to find some great caster/healing staves for you to work towards this weekend, but they’re hard to come by, and strangely enough I couldn’t find a single caster staff as a reputation reward — Druids get all the good ones I found. This one’s from an instance you can run this weekend, though, [...]
One of the ways to gear up as you level and prepare for endgame in Wrath of the Lich King is by making use of the reputation gained via questing for various factions in Northrend. In addition to the main Alliance or Horde factions the Alliance Vanguard and Horde Expedition, there are a variety of [...]
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
First off, I want to apologize for an error I made yesterday. I didn’t research the sockets that Blacksmiths can give only to themselves enough, and due to one-part misinformation, one-part assumption, I [...]
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
Just a few questions today, because slow weekends are slow. Who wants to ask questions when you can be playing? Certainly not me. I will still answer questions, however. Let’s jump right in [...]
That’s right, Atlasloot Enhanced has been updated to include the Northrend instances and raid. Personally, I’ve been waiting to be able to browse and try-on the gear from the new dungeons and raids since the expansion launched.
Atlasloot Enhanced is absolutely one of my must-have addons, and I’ve watched it grow with loving admiration since the [...]
Before we get rolling with today’s column, I direct you to yesterday’s good news for elemental shamans. Soak it in, folks. Buffs for elemental with no huge nerfs attached? It’s like a holiday or something. You should go eat Turkey to celebrate. I’ll wait.
Okay, now we move on to yet more gear. Last time we [...]