Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we use our mystical time chicken powers to gaze into the future, which, incidentally, is so bright, we gotta wear shades. Or rather, we gotta wear mystical time chicken goggles.

No time to talk. We need to focus. A whole lot of ground to cover, guys. The Mists of Pandaria talent calculator has been updated, and all sorts of craziness be jumpin' off, yo. We've got entirely new abilities, we've got fresh takes on traditional favorites, and we've got substantial retoolings of the root mechanics of whole specs. Let's dive right in.

Talent changes

Talent tier 1 has stayed the same as the last go round, but tier 2 has a brand new ability in it, as well as a reworking of Blazing Speed that should make it a far more attractive choice.

Temporal Shield (New ability) Envelops you in a temporal shield for 4 seconds. Damage taken while shielded will be undone over 6 seconds. Not on the global cooldown. (3% base mana, Instant Cast, 25-second cooldown)

Blazing Speed Suppresses movement slowing effects and increases your movement speed by 150% for 1.50 seconds. May only be activated after taking a melee or spell hit greater than 2% of your total health. This spell may be cast while a cast time spell is in progress. (Instant cast, 25-second cooldown)

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we look forward to our bright post-Cataclysm future. May it be warlock-free and panda-filled.

That Super Bowl commercial that inexplicably featured the guy from The Darkness singing that song that I loved back in 2003 reminded me of one thing: The end of the world is coming. We all know it. I mean, come on. When have the Mayans ever been wrong about anything? These are the people who invented basketball! Only instead of baggy shorts, tattoos, and millionaires who can't hit free throws, Mayan basketball features decapitations. I'm fully prepared to declare the Mayans right about everything ever.

So with the world coming to an end, what else do we have to look forward to other than a new World of Warcraft expansion? Well, Diablo III, I guess, but we all know that's not going to release before Armageddon (Blizzard's claiming Q2, which we all know is Blizzard-speak for "after the zombies rise up and civilization descends into chaos"). So let's just assume Blizzard's release schedule will somehow outpace the coming apocalypse, and set our sights on what may very well be the last game we'll ever buy: Mists of Pandaria.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about specs, and DPS, and possibly smurfs, though I shouldn't get ahead of myself.

Patch 4.3.2 has dropped, and for mages, the only item in the patch notes is a 6% damage nerf to Fireball and Pyroblast, ostensibly to bring fire mages back in line with arcane mages for top prize in the What Spec Will My Raid Leader Expect Me to be Raiding With This Week Sweepstakes. For good or ill, every patch brings changes like this, as the spec balance carousel continues its eternal round.

That's been mage history, in a nutshell -- fire and arcane take turns pushing each other from the top of the PvE heap, and frost just shakes its head and queues for an Arena match. It's like a giant teeter-totter, with fire damage stacked on one end and arcane damage stacked on another. Blizzard goes back and forth between the ends, adding just a bit more of each type of damage or taking some away in an attempt to get the thing perfectly balanced, but try as it may, one end or the other is always sticking up in the air.

The number crunchers crunch the numbers after every damage pass and crown one spec king ... until the next pass, when the cycle repeats. And frost mages just watch and wonder when it will be their turn to go raiding.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we focus on those two most vital gear slots for making your keychain look cool: trinkets. You put them right next to your tiny NES controller and that little rubber pig that poops when you squeeze him, and so what if the trinkets on your key ring outnumber the actual keys on your key ring? Now if only we still had key rings in WoW ...

Trinkets do three things:

1. They keep your keys from being lonely.
2. They hurt like hell when you forget to take them out of your pocket before playing pick-up basketball.
3. They have the potential to increase your DPS more drastically than any other single gear slot in the game.

No other gear choice we make in this game will either positively or negatively impact our raw output than the two trinkets we select, and no other loot drop can be more infuriating to wait for. With trinkets, it's imperative that you identify what you want, know where to go to get it, and then focus your efforts until you reach your goal.

With that in mind, let's go over the best trinkets available for mages in the game right now and where to go get them.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we try to help you accomplish the most important thing any mage can ever do: kill something just a little bit faster.

You're a mage, so right away we know two things about you:

1. You're awesome.
2. You're in the business of damaging things.

We hear jokes about mages being portal-merchants/sheep-bots/cake-vendors, but our real purpose -- the only role we play that really matters -- is that of DPS. We destroy things, and we do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. And if we can't provide that service, our raid will replace us with someone who can.

So if damaging things is our business, it follows that we should always be striving to make sure business is good. We're in competition for DPS slots with literally every single other class in this game. It's in the interests of all mages that we work to improve ourselves at every opportunity. If we don't, it's entirely possible that our raid might take a warlock along instead.

And with God as my witness, I will not allow that to happen.

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Filed under: Mage, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we discuss some ways to make sure your mage's wardrobe is filled with only the prettiest dresses, most mysterious cowls, sparkliest wands, and ... er, staffiest staves.

Patch 4.3 has been with us for a good solid month now, and I sincerely hope that by now we've all escorted our mages through a good portion of the new content it offers. As all the best patches do, 4.3 has ushered in a fresh tier of gear and a new progression hierarchy to follow in getting said gear. Best of all, we have a whole new gearing tool to play with in the Raid Finder.

If you happen to be one of those mages who looks at his item level and finds it still languishing somewhere below the minimum requirements to join the battle to vanquish Deathwing, I believe a gearing guide is in order. Without further preamble, I present Arcane Brilliance's Handy Guide to Shiny Things, patch 4.3 edition.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we leave 2011 behind and look toward 2012, which I predict will be the magiest year ever!

A new year is upon us, my wizardly cohorts. It is a time for reflection, a refractory period when we bask in the afterglow of the year that was and then take a quick shower to rinse off the stink of it. But most importantly, it's a time to look forward, to set new goals, to examine ourselves and determine how best to progress, to improve, and to somehow avoid ending the world in a fiery apocalypse that only John Cusack can save us from.

In that spirit, I thought this eve of the new year might be a good time to take an honest look at the mage class, examine our weak points, and conjure up some ways to shore them up in 2012. I figure we still have a at least a few months before Armageddon, and I can think of no better way to spend those last few moments of our existence than by killing as many warlocks as possible.

I'll do a full column on gearing up in 4.3 in the coming weeks, but for the time being, suffice it to say there is some phat, epic mage loot out there right now, and all you need to do is take it. Preferably from a warlock's smoking corpse, but we'll take it however it comes. We're at the point now in this expansion where the epics are flowing with almost ridiculous ease. If you've been waiting to level a mage, it has never been easier to get that mage fully kitted out in purples than it is right now. And if, for some reason, you've been neglecting your mage, now is the time to get him up to speed.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. this week, we seek to aid those of you who have made or will make the noble decision to level a mage in the coming months.

In the past, we've done our leveling guides here at WoW Insider as sprawling, multi-post epics, spanning 10 or 20 levels a week over the course of a month, covering every aspect of every facet of everything you could ever want to know about leveling each class in the game. The problem with that approach is that you could probably just go in blind and level your mage from 1 to 85 faster than I could tell you how to do it. The simple fact of the matter is that the leveling game just isn't terribly difficult. The process has been streamlined over the years to the point that I don't believe such detailed leveling guides are really necessary anymore. Most of this game is intuitive and user friendly now, and the part of the game that really requires in-depth strategy doesn't really start until after the experience-gaining part of it has stopped.

Knowing this, I won't be filling this guide with talent analysis, ways to optimize your level 45 boss fight rotation, or a detailed travelogue of every quest hub you'll be traipsing through along the way. This will be a more stripped-down endeavor, focusing on the parts of leveling that I think are important -- not the spell coefficients and spreadsheets, but the basic concepts your mage needs to learn while leveling, not only to make the process easier and more enjoyable, but also to help them step from mage adolescence into mage adulthood so they can shoot Deathwing in the face with a Fireball of wisdom and maturity.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we finish our conversation about things that may or may not ever happen, and even if they do, they won't for a very long time. Man, I love wild speculation.

This week, because they hate me, and because I actually had something written in advance for once, Blizzard went and stealth-updated the MoP talent calculator with no warning whatsoever. I submit that from here on out, Blizzard needs to give me at least a week's notice before it makes significant changes to the game or any of its future versions. I think it's only fair, since mages are getting the ability to Alter Time, that we get just a little bit of a jump on the future. I have deadlines to meet, people! Work with me here.

The good news is that the majority of the changes appear to have been made to the part of the talent calculator we haven't discussed yet: the actual talents. If you missed them, here are the first two parts of this discussion:

• Part one: The baseline spells
• Part two: The spec spells

And now, if you click the link below, you'll magically teleport to part three. No, I won't port you to Org. Stop asking.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we teleport ourselves back into the thick of the newly revealed MoP talent calculator, and this time, we aren't teleporting out until we get that calculator down and it drops phat loot.

I trust you're all knee-deep in patch 4.3 by now, snatching up sparkly new gear from the new dungeons, raid, and Darkmoon Faires and such, and then promptly transmogrifying that gear to look like something you wore five years ago.

Last week, we talked about the baseline abilities that all mages will be learning. If you skipped it for some reason, kill a warlock as penance (I'm not sure how that could be considered a punishment, but just stay with me here), go read part one, then come back and resume the conversation with us this week.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance