Kaligon's Mage Blog

World First Northerend Beasts (lol)

2009-08-04T16:40:00.001-07:00

Fights a joke, we logged on first!

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=88563.msg1253099;topicseen#new

2009-08-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

Patch day!

That was somewhat quicker than expected!

I've got to confess, I, like many other people, am a little worried what the iLevel 258 PvE gear is going to do to the PvP scene... those 2350 weapons are upgradeable in ten man CC and the 25 man hard mode stuff completely blows them out of the water.

VANQUISH will of course be raiding almost non-stop with this new patch. I may have to postpone the next how-to video slightly to adjust it for patch 3.2.

I will, however, be posting high quality videos of every single fight in the 25 man instance here and on Youtube from a mage POV. You can find fairly detailed strats and information on the new patch at mmo-champion.com, but I will also be posting suplimental information here tuned specifically for mages.

-Kaligon

PS. Just eyeballing it, and from the PTR, Fire trumps Arcane DPS wise for endgame raiding. Make sure to get a living bomb glyph--those ticks that crit can now proc hotstreak (instant pyroblasts). You can also put living bomb on more than one target at once for even more pyroblsts!

2009-08-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

Episode 1: Frost in HD - Cinematic Algalon

Here's a link for an extremely high quality (yet only 265 meg) download of Episode 1: Frost

Also, what do you guys want to see next? I've got everything in Ulduar, including hard modes (except Yogg+0) recorded from a mage PoV.

For those of you who took the time to come read this Blog, here is an extremely high quality recording of the Algalon fight from a mage POV, complete with music, and the Algalon role-Playing sound files recorded seperately from normal Wow sound and edited in to make for a cinematic experince of the last fight in Ulduar.

Algalon 25 + Role Playing

A breif explination of what I'm doing in this video for people not familiar with Algalon.

On Algalon the RL will assign one, or sometimes two designated players whose job is to kill "collapsing stars." When these stars "collapse" they do 20,000 dmg (before resist) to everyone in the raid so killing them can be quite stressful. Kill them too quickly (not a problem unless you have two people on them full time) and the raid healing can't keep up. Take too long to kill them and they selfdestruct and deal their 20,000 dmg unctrollably.

By the time this boss was done, to quote FPS Doug "My hearts beatin', my hearts beatin', my hands are shaking, hands are shakin but I'm still shootin, still gettin headshots. Boom headshot! Boom HEADSHOT! BOOM HEADSHOT!!!!"

2009-08-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Mage Episode 1: Frost

So here it is, the first episode in my series "Mage." I outline two specs for leveling, one which has a focus on PvP and one with a focus on PvE. This tricks in this video work with either spec.

One thing I forgot to mention in the video is glyphs. I recommend using Glyph of Evocation, Glyph of Water Elemental and Glyph of Ice Barrier (when you're leveling add them in that order as extra spots open up).

Here are links to the official world of warcraft talent Calculator for both specs in the video:
PvP
PvE

Finally, if you like frost you can try this raiding spec. The hit cap for an Alliance raiding frost mage is 264 hit rating (10%) assuming you have all hit buffs from your raid (3% shadow priest, 1% draenei, and 3% Precision). IF you are HORDE you will need 290 hit rating for frost (to make up for the missing Draenei). Either way, you need a total of 17% hit rating--the hit cap for all level 80 casters casting on a level 83 target. Raid Bosses are considered to be level 83 even when their levels is displayed as a skull. To gear for raiding, look for gear that has intellect, stamina, crit rating, and haste rating. Spirit is not particularly useful to frost mages.

If you've got questions and comments about my video, mages, or even World of Warcraft in general, post here and I'll answer them =)

day 1

2009-07-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

Just got finished setting up this blog, I intend to add a series of how-to videos over the next couple months detailing every aspect of playing a Mage in World of Warcraft. Most of these guides will be for level 80 mages and contain tips and tricks for increasing raid DPS, choosing gear to match specs, improving Arena ratings, topping the leader boards in BGs, making gold and so on.

My first guide (with companion video) will detail the spec I advise for leveling from 70-80 and for questing, soloing, running heroics and PvP. It should be up sometime today or tomorrow.