As you might have seen, three guides are now online in the guide section namely Hydra&Kalimist with macro, spec and gear guides and Rosetsu’s macro guide for Restro Shaman (or really anyone who is interested to save some binding slots). If you haven’t you better check it out scrub. Honestly though, I picked up a Shaman recently and there is quite some useful stuff in there. Go check it out.

Camera angles

For you emos in our reader base, no I’m not talking about the angle you look the best, fatty. Recently I’ve noticed a trend in WoW movies especially among players who play with the standard UI (mostly tournament players). The best display of this for me has been Woundman’s new video “In the Raw” which you can find here (watch it, it’s way better than Nokhi 9). At times, he seems to play in an RTS-esque camera angle and the benefits from this are apparent. When you don’t have Addons telling you when to breath (like I do), you have to get your information from the battlefield rather than only the unit frames/l2pbars. Seeing that someone used a trinket over the assumption that he did can sometimes be the difference between win and loss. Not only does zooming far out help you with that, but you also get a better field vision, you can anticipate switches earlier and so on. This is not PvE people and you shouldn’t tunnel vision your grid. As for the angle, playing at a ~75° from the ground seems to be the best choice. You still have a good feeling for your own character’s movement, you can still catch spell casting animations, but you can also see what’s going on behind you. Players can’t allow to zoom in Isolee-style like in TBC, to have the full melee experience.

I may sound like a broken record, but positioning and situation awareness is the department where most players lack in comparison to top players. Whenever I play, I see even people around ~2k fake casting like champions. Personal character control has simply gotten way better over the years. Positioning and exploitation of bad positioning on your enemy’s part has not really been explored by the average player. The term tunnel vision does not only apply to “cleaves” training one target, but for everyone else only paying attention to their own character. Even if you are not a tournament player, playing with fewer mods but actually taking your information from the actual game rather than your UI will help tons once you manage to absorb the information thrown at you.

WCG games announced

And sadly there is no WoW. For those who aren’t familiar what WCG is, it’s the World Cyber games which basically is the Olympia of e-sports, but they happen each year. Just like at Olympia, players play for their country. This fact also adds to the big complications tournament hosts face when trying to organize a WoW tournament (Realm, Internet etc.). But just imagine for a second WoW would be at WCG and try to come up with teams to represent their country. Hydra/Kalimist/Daisyduke would probably be my favorite team (surprise).  Which country would have the best line up in your opinion? Leave me a comment.

For those who are generally interested in e-sports, the following games will be played:

Official game titles - “Warcraft III” (PC, Blizzard, RTS), “Counter-Strike” (PC, Valve, FPS), “TrackMania Nations Forever” (PC, Nadeo, Racing), “Carom 3D” (PC, Neoact, Sports), “Guitar Hero 5″ (Xbox360, Neversoft, Music), “Forza Motorsport 3″ (Xbox360, Turn10, Racing), “Tekken 6″ (Xbox360, Namco Bandai, Fighting), FIFA Soccer 10 (EA, Sports) StarCraft: Brood War (Blizzard, RTS)

Mobile
- Asphalt 5 (Gameloft, Racing)

Promotional game title – “Lost Saga” (PC, IO Entertainment, Action)

It looks like WCG was gambling on an early Starcraft II release hence why the held back the announcement of Starcraft for a while. As the officials surely are in contact with the higher ups at Blizzard, we can assume that the release date will be after the first national qualifying tournaments. You can find the news link here.

Mage Preview

Considering I played Mage for approximately the last 5 years,  this is the only class that I am comfortable sharing my personal opinion off. Then again, I’m bad. I still think I can judge if something will be fun, like eating (which I’m very good at). Let’s jump right in.

Flame Orb (available at level 81): Inspired by Prince Taldaram’s abilities in Ahn’kahet and Icecrown Citadel, this spell allows the mage to cast a flaming orb that travels in front in a straight line, sending beams that cause fire damage to passing targets. Once it’s cast, the mage is free to begin casting other spells as the Flame Orb travels. While the spell will be useful to any spec, Fire mages will have talents that improve it, possibly causing the Flame Orb to explode when it reaches its destination.

Hmm, yummy. Can you taste them? The sweet Rogue tears from this ability breaking their vanishes? Tasty. It kind of reminds me of Frost Sphere from Diablo II and Sorceress was my favorite character. It kind of feels like Mages are really strong in the AOE department again. AE, Flame Strike, CoC, Blizzard, Living Bomb, Frost Nova and now Flame Orb almost feels like overkill. Will Flame Orb and Flame Strike be the damage rota for mobs without too much health. Because surely, it won’t surpass Living bomb spam on higher HP targets. I also wonder how the possible Flame Orb explosion should work, which largely depends on how long it travels. Having to position yourself exactly X yards away from a mob group and arrest to your mob group would feel kind of clunky.

Time Warp (level 83): Grants a passive Haste effect much like Bloodlust or Heroism to party or raid members. It also temporarily increases the mage’s own movement speed. Time Warp will be exclusive with Bloodlust and Heroism, meaning you can’t benefit from both if you’ve got the Exhaustion debuff, though the movement-speed increase will still work even when under the effects of Exhaustion.

Mages have been the class who have been stacking haste pretty much as the first class in arena, also because they could get away with the haste PvE gear back then (starting from S4, greetings Affix). If it makes sense to give this to Mages? I think it’s a decent decision. With slowed down games in general, Heroism/Time Warp will become less powerful anyway. There have been some concerns with haste stacking and interrupting those abilities. It’s not so much the reaction time required, but the terrible netcode crippling the interrupting class to really hit it and on top of that also the bugs that have been in the game for quite some time. It feels like I see KS’d casters channeling spells during the stun to full effect every arena session. All ranting aside, I as a Mage of course like this change and it was important that another class gets Heroism, but if Mage was the right choice? We’ll see in Beta.


Wall of Fog (level 85): Creates a line of frost in front of the mage, 30 yards from end to end. Enemies who cross the line are snared and take damage. The mana cost will be designed to make Wall of Fog efficient against groups, not individuals. This spell is intended to give mages a way to help control the battlefield, whether the mage is damaging incoming enemies (Blizzard can be channeled on top of Wall of Fog) or protecting a flag in a Battleground. 10-second duration. 30-second cooldown.

And another AOE, geeez… Anyway, Wall of Fog is part of the new trend of designing abilities for rated battle grounds. While it probably feel like overkill in arena, the possibilities in battle grounds is pretty decent. The spell description screams “WSG TUNNEL” in your face and it even spit a little and now you have to wipe drool of your cheek. The lama says “LAME!” as this will be about as annoying as desecration ground, but then again DesGr is a rather passive ability while you will use wall of fog actively much like frost trap. It will probably break CCs and it feels like this ability won’t be as fun for everyone.

On to the abilities and mechanics:

Arcane Missiles is being redesigned to become a proc-based spell. Whenever the mage does damage with any spell, there is a chance for Arcane Missiles to become available, similar to how the warrior’s Overpower works. The damage and mana cost of this spell will be reworked to make it very desirable to use when available. This change should make gameplay more dynamic for the mage, particularly at low levels.

I don’ t like this at all. Arcane Missiles already were an incredibly situational spell that required some kind of skill to use to keep damaging opponents when they are breaking LOS. Even in PvE it helped to make the tedious Arcane Blast spamming a little less tedious. On top of that if they keep the cast time for non Arcane Mages (which they probably won’t), one can barely afford to cast this at all as your arcane tree (which at least now is the more important than the Frost tree most of the time) would just be too open. If this makes it into the damage rotation of any other spec than Arcane, we will also see a lot of tears.


We are planning to remove spells that don’t have a clear purpose. Amplify Magic, Dampen Magic, Fire Ward, and Frost Ward are being removed from the game, and we may remove more.

Thank god Ghostcrawler backpedaled harder than me in a regular Arena match on this statement. Our dearest Purdie read the preview today and immediately went “LOL w00t” in Skype and when I first read it I hoped this was a mistake in wording of some sort. Both in PvE and PvP at least the wards are used all the time and it’s outright ridiculous how awesome frost warding is. Add Incanter’s absorption to the equation and on every boss that does fire or frost damage, the global is entirely worth it.

[...](Talents not really worth talking about)

The Burnout talent will allow mages to cast spells using health when they run out of mana.

Fire Mages turned into semi-Warlocks? Lulz.


Casting Frostbolt places a buff on the mage that increases the damage for all frost, fire, and arcane spells. The only damage spell that won’t be affected by this buff is Frostbolt.

I kind of like the design and I really hope that the damage boost is enough for Mages to throw in an instant while repositioning after casting a Frost bolt. If the damage boost doesn’t justify everything else than another casted spell, this is going to be BS *cough*. Moreover I really hope the effect pops up once Frostbolt is casted and not when it hits, so Ice lance can benefit from this.

Finally for all the avid follower’s of Team Dignitas WoW or the art of RMP in general, Ghostcrawler had this to say:

Rogue/Mage/Priest Arena Comp
For everyone focusing on the RMP Arena comp, I really think you’re going to see a shift to more PvP concerns in Cataclysm being about Battleground balance. There will still be players playing Arenas for sure, but a lot of the players currently doing Arenas are going to shift to rated BGs instead.


I, like many, read this with my arms crossed in front of my chest while pouting a little. Without new maps, this is going to be bad for WoW as an e-sport. The word at Blizzcon 09′ was that Arena would offer still the best PvP gear in the game. The recent wording whenever the issue was brought up sounded differently. Will Arena and BG PvP reward the same gear? Will PvP only be balanced around rated BGs? Unless we get smaller maps with less players, I’m very skeptical about this.