Lhivera’s Library

Adventures in World of Warcraft, Dragon Age, the real world, and beyond

August 2012

The New Mage

Sunday, August 26 2012 at 11:09pm CDT

The Mage class got a significant overhaul for Mists of Pandaria, but if all goes well, it won't feel like a drastic change. Unlike the Warlock overhaul that involves significant changes in design, the Mage overhaul was instead an attempt to preserve the essence of the existing design while replacing a lot of the machinery under the hood. On the eve of the 5.0.4 release, I wanted to reflect on how the class is evolving, what I think has gone well, and a couple of things that I think can still be improved. This will, of course, be from a PvE perspective.

Lhivera’s Compendium

Saturday, August 25 2012 at 3:22pm CDT

Sorry it's been so quiet here for so long; my limited game time has mostly been dedicated to testing, improving SimulationCraft, and working on this thing I'm about to show you.

Lhivera's Compendium is the evolution of my old stickied "Non-Obvious Mage Mechanics" thread from the Mage forum. It's not intended to teach you how to play a Mage well — I'm a terrible teacher, other people do that sort of thing much better than I do — but rather to explain how various Mage mechanics and abilities work. It isn't complete, and will probably always be a work in progress, but there's enough there for people to start taking a look at, and there's a form where you can pose questions that aren't answered if there's some Mage mechanic that you don't understand.