Posted on November 30th, 2009 by admin
It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that wishes each and every one of you a magical holiday season. Arcane Brilliance would also like to point out that it is writing this immediately following three days spent alternating between being in the company of in-laws who like to discuss politics and on the road for 12 combined hours with a five-year-old and a two-year-old possessed of mind-bogglingly small bladders. Arcane Brilliance cannot be held responsible for any grammatical errors or disturbingly homicidal thoughts you might find herein.
So how was your Thanksgiving? And if you don’t live in the United States, how was your Thursday? Ready to get down to business? We’ve got a leveling guide to finish!
What’s that, you say? Finish what? You’ve been otherwise engaged for the past couple of months and have no idea what I’m talking about? Fear not! On the interwebs, you can find anything. Here, for your convenience, is the complete compendium of Arcane Brilliance’s mage leveling wisdom, such as it is:
Part 1: getting started
Part 2: 1-10
Part 3: 11-20
Part 4: 21-30
Part 5: 31-40
Part 6: 41-Outland
Part 7: 59-68
Part 8: keep reading, because this is part 8.
Part 9: completely revised Cataclysm mage leveling guide I’ll probably
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Posted on November 26th, 2009 by admin
I love FigurePrints and this has been widely documented. I stare at my FigurePrint of Turpster a hundred times a day. A model? Not just a model, but a FigurePrint. Handmade in Italy, they carve it out of illegal whalebone. They only make eleven of them a year. This one cost me $12,000 or 30 million liras. Perfectly balanced, low drag, minimal torque. (Please note: FigurePrints aren’t constructed from illegal whalebone, nor do they cost $12,000 (only $129.95/€99.95) but Turpster’s been watching far too many Will Farrell films lately.) No exaggeration, I could not love a human baby as much as I love my miniature real life version of my favorite fantasy Warcraft character.
The folks over at FigurePrints and FigurePets are introducing some great new products and features to coincide with WoW’s 5th Anniversary. You’ll find all of the new features now available on their site after the break.
They include:
An Onyxian Whelpling FigurePet. This cute little guy matches the in-game pet Blizzard is introducing and will be available on the FigurePets website through the end of the year.
A Slain Onyxia Base. Now your character can be posed next to the head of the slain Onxyia! This base caries a small additional charge ($9.95, €7,99).
Along with the anniversary items
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Posted on November 23rd, 2009 by admin
Blizzard is milking Mr. T’s mohawk for all its worth in yet another ridiculous commercial. At the risk of being a complete downer, I have to ask: Is anybody else bored with this campaign? I admit that I laughed and laughed at the original Mr. T WoW commercial (and probably contributed to this campaign’s birth) but enough is enough. Are you advertising World of Warcraft or a line of Mr. T hair care products?
Anyway, you can watch the commercial above and if you weren’t yet aware of it, you can pick up mohawk grenades in the various starter zones throughout Azeroth. But please, for my sanity and your safety, don’t throw them at me. There might be repercussions if you know what I’m sayin’.
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Posted on November 19th, 2009 by admin
The latest build on the PTR has uncovered the stats of the World of Warcraft’s newest legendary weapon, the two-handed axe Shadowmourne. Apparently bandied around by random GMs on the PTR, players were able to see the highly impressive stats of this weapon, which requires an epic quest to complete. MMO-Champion also has it in its database, the entry of which can be viewed here.
Notable among its features, aside from the ridiculous +223 Strength and 344.1 DPS, are three red sockets and an interesting proc. The sockets can combine for a total of 68 Strength when socketed with Bold Cardinal Rubies and obtaining the +8 Strength bonus. If we understand it correctly, the proc also stacks Strength for a total of 360 before firing off a damaging effect, presumably resetting the Strength bonus to 0. Needless to say, even without the proc, this Item Level 284 weapon is the best two-handed melee weapon in the game and should serve players well into the next expansion.
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Posted on November 16th, 2009 by admin
We’ve been talking a lot about Patch 3.3’s new Dungeon Finder feature lately, and for good reason — it’s leaps and bounds better than the LFG tool we’ve been dealing with for the past several years. One of the features that’s caught everyone’s attention is the great reward that level 80 players get for completing random WotLK Heroic dungeons. Well, if you’re a lower-level player using the tool to run random dungeons at your level, it turns out you get something too.
The Satchel of Helpful Goods is a level-scaling bag o’ rewards, which EU Community Manager Wryxian says will contain one piece each from two sets of loot rewards. Quoth the crocolisk:
…these satchels are rewards from doing a random dungeon through the LFG tool at lower levels. There’s two groups of items that can be inside them. One includes bracers, rings, necklaces and cloaks. The other has belts, boots, gloves and shoulder items. What you’ll find in the satchel is one item from each group, and this is also further influenced by a ten level range. So for example, what is in a satchel received for completing a dungeon between levels 20 and 30 might be a nice necklace and some gloves, but from a dungeon between 50 and 60 you might get a ring and some new boots.
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Posted on November 12th, 2009 by admin
Another PTR build was pushed out today for patch 3.3. The item levels for the Frost level gear are 264. As always, there’s a new assortment of trinkets to select from. Tanks may be interested in the Corroded Skeleton Key. Healers who don’t already possess decent healing trinkets will want to pick up Purified Lunar Dust. For DPS players, you have the choice of a Herkumi War Token or Maghia’s Misguided Quill. The latter is for casters due to the increase in spell power. Can’t comment too much on the physical DPS trinket. That’s a lot of haste.
Another interesting thing to note is that Primordial Saronite is on the vendor. I’m not sure if this will be a permanent change when it goes live. I have a feeling the Primordial Saronite is only obtainable within the Icecrown instance for crafting reasons (like Crusader Orbs).
Anyway, new ranged slot items, trinkets, capes (back pieces), chest pieces, gloves and belts will be available for purchase. And of course, you can exchange an Emblem of Frost for an Emblem of Triumph.
Remember, Emblems of Frost are gained by completing the new weekly raid quests, taking down bosses in Icecrown Citadel or the new Vault of Archavon boss.
For the full list, check out MMO Champion.
Update: You use the Primordial Saronite to purchase
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Posted on November 9th, 2009 by admin
In among all of the “omg fake pets for real money” drama from this week’s announcement, we may have missed something big: the Pandaren are now live in the World of Warcraft. The Pandaren are my favorite Azerothian race, even though they’re essentially a joke — Samwise Didier just loves pandas, and he made art for an April Fool’s joke that Chris Metzen loved so much they decided to include the bears as real characters in Warcraft III. Since then, they’ve become fan favorites (not least of all, especially for me, because alcohol and ale are a big part of their culture), but we’ve only seen hints of them in World of Warcraft. There was a rumor going around a while back that they would never appear in the game because China didn’t allow depictions of violence against the bears, but that was just a rumor. Still, the Pandaren have existed in WoW only as a Blizzard in-joke. We assume they’re out there somewhere, but until now, no one has ever seen one.
Of course we say “until now” because there are now little Pandaren monk noncombat pets running around, bowing, and doing magical kung-fu. Does this mean that the future Emerald Dream expansion will have us all playing as Brewmasters? While yes that would be awesome, not so fast
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Posted on November 5th, 2009 by admin
Sound files in Patch 3.3 uncovered over at MMO Champion have got players all abuzz. In particular, lore-nerds who have listened to the sound files and put them together in the most reasonably coherent fashion are going nuts over the possibilities and implications. Tissue-sniffling, underpants-changing nuts. The kind of nuts that happen in Twilight Zone episodes. So understand that clicking on any of the links below are on a Need to Know basis. That means it’s full of spoilers.
No, seriously. It has so many spoilers that unsuspecting players can explode just by clicking on the Read More link below. It’s that dangerous. The sound files are so revealing, so incriminating, that every agent sent by SI:7 to safeguard them has been removed from active duty and sent to the loony bin. They’re so volatile that even Ragnaros got burned when he read the rest of this post. So juicy that it cost Lady Vashj an arm and a leg — or six arms and a tail — just to listen to them.
The sound files in question are mined from the goings-on in Icecrown, which may (or may not) reveal the ultimate fate of the Lich King. It also includes previously unrevealed first names of only sons, emotional moments from hot mages, uncharacteristic coolness from leaders heretofore labeled as hate-mongering
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Posted on November 2nd, 2009 by admin
Reader Verdus sent us a tip reminding us that this weekend is the one-year anniversary of one of the simultaneously most loved and hated events in WoW’s history, the zombiepocalypse. Right around this time last year, infected crates started appearing all over the world, and that expanded out into a full-blown zombie invasion (which was so big it made it out into mainstream news). After the zombie plague had been quelled, the Scourge attacked with full force, leaving us to fall back and fight for our necrotic runes up until the expansion released. It was definitely a huge event, and now, a year later, I’m sure most of us (though not all of us) look back on it with fond memories.
And surely Blizzard learned a lot from what happened a year ago — Linedan has a nice wrapup of the good and the bad that Blizzard may have taken away from the zombie apocalypse. The idea of turning players on players was great, but that unfortunately led to more griefing than most players would have liked (and the fact that, by the end of it, you couldn’t avoid the zombies at all, probably didn’t help). And for all of the disruption, there was no real reward (the eventual rewards came with the Scourge invasion, and then it was simply just farming tokens), and no real payoff (the final world
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