Best Trinkets for Arcane Mages 4.2

Posted on September 23, 2011 by
Shard of woe

Due to the obscene nerfs to firelands i’m sure a lot of mages are getting their first rag kill this week :) If you did manage to kill rag and were lucky enough for Variable Pulse Lightning capacitor to drop you might have a dilemma on which trinkets to use. Let me give you a quick rundown of what you should be using based on normal mode firelands raids.

As it stands right now believe it or not Shard of Woe is still BiS for arcane mages in the normal tier 12. This is then followed by VPLC and then either the moonwell or heroic theralion’s mirror. If you have the heroic mirror use that, if not go with the moonwell which everyone should have from doing dailys. If you don’t have either of those you can still use your darkmoon card although there are plenty of trinkets out there in the list above that would be a much better choice.

 

Posted in Mage Tips | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Winged Guardian Mount Giveaway Contest!

Posted on September 16, 2011 by
State of Mage Guardian Mount Giveaway

State of Mage Guardian Mount Giveaway

We are doing another winged guardian mount giveaway! We will be giving another mount at the end of november. If we can reach 1000 twitter followers at that time we will also give away a second mount! All you have to do to be eligable is be a follower of stateofmage on twitter. If we reach 1000 followers before the deadline I will pick another random follower for a second mount. Let the retweets begin :)

Posted in Giveaways | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mage Tier 13 Armor Preview

Posted on September 16, 2011 by

 

 

Below is a preview of tier 13 mage armor. It’s modeled after our time warp ability and called the Timelord Regala set. What does everyone think?

Posted in Preview | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

MageManaBar: An Arcane Mages Best Friend

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

A great mana management addon for arcane Mages

Being an Arcane Mage means putting extreme importance on mana management. Wasted mana is a dps loss. One of the challenges of doing this properly is dealing with intellect procs whether they be from trinkets or profession perks. Allow me to introduce you all to MageManaBar. This addon will quickly become your new best friend when it comes to dealing with the problems mentioned above. MageManaBar will show you not only your actual mana during a intellect proc but also anticipates your mage armor regeneration. One of the biggest problems I’ve seen with arcane mages is they tend to sometimes evocate a little bit early based on what the ui mana bars are telling them. A lot of the times this is a false reading. For instance Darkmoon Card Volcano adds quite a bit of intellect for a short period of time. Quickly glancing at your mana bar could lead you to believe you are almost to the point where you need to start your conserve phase even though this is not the case. It can also lead to you missing a little extra arcane blast spam if it procs at the beginning of a conserve phase. If you have 100% mana and the darkmoon card procs you can spam all the extra int away till the buff ends and then start a true conserve phase. This happens to me more often than you would think and definitely will lead to some boosted dps overall.

Whenever you are wasting mana MageManaBar will tell you by showing a red portion in the blue bar that is pictured above. It also includes an evocation timer to let you know when to start your burn phase, as well as monitoring if your mage armor buff is up and you have mana gems in your bag for burn phases. I can’ tell you how many times when I first switched from fire that i forgot to make sure I had three mana gems ready to go before a fight. It was really really annoying :) MageManaBar also lets you know when to pop flame orb if you like to use arcane missiles spam to regen mana using mini burn phases. I personally don’t do this, I just use flame orb on cool down but if you like using missiles spam regen this will tell you that as well.

If you aren’t already using this I recommend you download it right away from curse. The link is enclosed below. Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments with any other addons you feel can help make mages be more productive.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/magemanabar.aspx

 

Posted in addons | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The arcane mage soft haste cap and why its important to reach it

Posted on September 7, 2011 by

Hey everyone,

I apologize for the lack of content lately. I have been extremely busy, but I promise to get back on a regular update of content starting now. Lets get down to business shall we?

Today we are going to talk about the soft haste cap for arcane mages in 4.2, why its important to reach this cap, and what the cap actually is. The arcane soft haste cap is based around bloodlust or heroism or timewarp :) . The idea is to get your haste high enough so when bloodlust/heroism/timewarp is popped your arcane blast 4 stack cast will be exactly 1 second. Now your first question is why is this important. With tons of intellect being added due to firelands gear haste and mastery are extremely competitive. Having a one second arcane blast time during lust will surely give you a really nice dps boost during your burn phase. A lot of people have asked me why 1.0 seconds exactly? Why not less than 1 second? If your arcane blast cast time goes below 1 second you will be doing what is called Global cooldown clipping. If your cast time goes below 1 second its actually a dps loss. Since there is a global cooldown between arcane blast casts your actually losing cast time. So remember the goal is one second. The next question is what are the haste ratings required to reach these levels.

If you have your tier 11 4 piece bonus the haste rating required is 857. If your a goblin its 712. 4 piece tier 11 gives you a 10% cast reduction time on arcane blast so you can basically reforge everything into mastery and get pretty close. Probably a little bit over the cap depending on what gear you have. Before I picked up my tier 12 4 piece i had 10% haste and almost 29% mastery. With those numbers I was able to keep up with mages who had a much higher gear level then I did :)

If you don’t have the tier 11 4 piece bonus haste should be your primary secondary stat until soft cap. If you’re not a goblin the soft haste cap rating is 1767. If your a gobin its 1624.

So remember your stat priorities should be INT > HIT TO CAP > Haste to SOFT CAP > MASTERY > CRIT

if anyone has any questions feel free to email me at propayne@stateofmage.com or leave a comment.

Until next time,

Propayne

Posted in Mage Tips | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Arcane blast stealth nerfed? plus some info on possible changes to fire in 4.3

Posted on August 22, 2011 by

Happy monday mages,

Lots of talk going on regarding reduced arcane dps over the weekend. I have heard some rumors from some inside sources blizzard nerfed arcane blast damage by 8%. After doing some target dummy and raiding sessions I can definitely say overall dps as arcane seems a bit lower. I am no longer able to get up to my usually 40k-50k bursts. Is anyone else noticing a dramatic drop in dps?

Also there is a rumored change for patch 4.3 to increase fireball damage by 6%. I’m not sure if this will be enough to keep up with arcane even with the stealth nerf. I guess we will have to wait and see.

 

Posted in Mage Changes | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

9 days till the guardian mount give away and 100 followers to go for a second contest!

Posted on August 22, 2011 by

Stateofmage.com will be giving away a free winged guardian mount in just 9 days. If we can get 300 followers by 8/31/2011 we will give away a second mount at the end of september. If you don’t win the first time around this is a great opportunity to get a second chance. All you have to do is follow us on twitter to be eligible.

Good luck to everyone.

propayne

Posted in Giveaways | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment