Lhivera’s Library

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.

I've put in a fair amount of time the last couple of days working with the SimulationCraft devs to get the Mage profiles functional. Not good and optimized, just functional. There's work to be done on all three profiles to improve both the gear configuration and the action priority list.

If you'd like to help, there are a couple of ways you can.

This hasn't received much discussion that I've noticed, but a very nice little quality-of-life improvement has been made in Mists of Pandaria: stronger snares no longer wipe weaker snares off the target.

Ever since vanilla, the normal behavior of snares has been that a stronger snare removes a weaker snare from the target when applied, regardless of duration. I recall a chat with an in-game support rep one day while I was farming Guardian Stones in Un'goro Crater; I was annoyed that if I had a Cone of Cold snare on the target, the Frostbolt snare would not apply, and thus the mob would start running full-speed when Cone of Cold wore off until I hit it with the next Frostbolt. Ultimately, we determined that this was intended, though irritating, behavior.