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Azeroth is a world made of memories. Whether you’re talking about mind-blowing scenery, incredible in-game experiences, or just good times with friends, you’ll experience plenty of WoW moments that you’ll remember for the rest of your life. Just like in real life, it’s helpful to snap a quick picture to supplement your walks down memory lane.

Taking screenshots in WoW is fairly simple. Just press the Print Screen button on a PC or Command+Shift+3 on a Mac, and the photo gets dropped in your game files.

While that’s all there is to actually taking a screenshot, there’s a difference between getting a picture and getting an awesome picture. Let’s take a few tips and tricks from seasoned photography pros and make our screenshots truly spectacular.

Technical tricks

While I’m mostly going to focus on methods and framing here, let’s get the must-know technical tricks out of the way first.

Hit Alt+Z to make your interface disappear. Unless you’re purposefully taking pictures of your UI, a gleaming row of hotbars doesn’t help your picture look awesome.
Hold down the right mouse button to scroll the camera view without moving your character. This is how you get pictures of the front of your character.
Experiment with your zoom buttons; the mouse scroll wheel zooms by default.
Don’t ignore your graphic settings. You can turn them all the way up for an amazingly detailed picture or even turn them down for a clear, instructional screenshot.
Spray and pray

While the spray and pray method of photography is muchly maligned by veteran photographers, it’s still a valuable aid to anyone working a digital camera. Spray and pray is equally worthwhile to a WoW enthusiast. Each screenshot takes up a miniscule portion of your hard drive’s memory — why not shoot rapid-fire photos and hope for a bit of luck?

The spray and pray method says that if you take thousands of pictures, chances are, a few of them have to be good. Of course, sorting through those thousands takes a lot of time, and your eye for composition is still the key component in decided which screenshots are the best. But still, you don’t lose much by taking a bajillion screenshots and hoping for the best.

Rule of thirds

Without getting deep into photography philosophy, the rule of thirds basically says you want the key element of your picture off-center. It should be about one-third into the photo. (This is a general rule, mileage varies, etc., etc.)

When you’re taking profile pictures of your characters, avoid the temptation to frame your character dead center. At best, it’ll look like a yearbook picture. Take the time to experiment moving your character off center and putting some fun elements in the rest of the picture.

Dynamic action

Taking action photos can be tough. This is why you’ve practiced the spray and pray method. As soon as something exciting starts happening in-game, mash that screenshot button like your life depends on it. Don’t wait for something to happen; you’ll have to anticipate it. Start taking screenshots as soon as you pull the mob and don’t stop until one of you is dead.

You’ll have to go back into the logs and figure out which pictures really worked, but hopefully you’ll have a few.

Anticipate those special moments

One of the most important parts of taking in-game screenshots is being prepared. Have a list in your head of special moments you want to capture in pictures. Your first mount, hitting the final levels, or maybe killing the big bosses.

While knowing you want a screenshot won’t magically make your pictures better, per se, it will definitely keep you from looking back and thinking, “Gosh, I wish I’d taken a screenshot.”

The Stormstout Brewery is one of the two instances you’ll be running once you start on dungeons in Mists. It’s available at 85 and is probably the easiest of the ones currently available in the beta. So it’s a great place to start out your journey to 90!

Being lovely, helpful people, we here at WoW Insider thought we would put together a short and sweet set of tips to aid you in your attempts to cleanse the Stormstout Brewery of its pollution. This isn’t intended as a full guide (although of course we have furnished you with one of those in the past) but more as a helping hand for those who don’t want a step-by-step walkthrough.

So what does the brave adventurer need to know?

1. Watch your debuffs! There are a lot of debuffs flying around in the Stormstout Brewery, there really are. My favourite debuff is Bloat, which makes you shoot beer out of your ears. If you’re a melee player or a ranged player who likes to cuddle up to other ranged players, you’ll need to check if your healer’s able to keep up with the damage you’re no doubt inflicting on your teammates. If not, you should probably take your beery ears elsewhere.
Bloat is definitely not the only debuff you’ll get. There are various others that inflict damage, stun you, silence you, slow you, and do all of the above. “But my healer can dispel me!” I hear you cry. Well, not if you’re standing in one of the debuff puddles. A what, now? Well, there are many puddles of bad in Stormstout Brewery, especially around the Alementals just after Hoptallus, that put a debuff on you while you stand in them as well as inflicting damage. So if you notice that you’re debuffed, move, jump, run away, run back again. Try everything. And keep an eye on your debuffs!

2. In order to mount the barrels, you need to click them. Those of you who’ve read the guide or played the instance will know exactly what I’m talking about here — it’s Ook-Ook’s barrels. They come along fairly regularly in this fight, and you can either dodge them or jump on them and steer them around. Only if you spot someone doing it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you just leap cheerfully into the air and use your cat-like reflexes to land gracefully on the barrel. But you’d be wrong. What you actually do is get within range of the barrel and click it. You’ll notice how your pointer turns into the mounting arrow. There, wasn’t that easier? Also, you can cast while running on the barrels — yes, while moving. What larks!

3. Click the hammers. Oh come on, Olivia, now you’re just being obscure. No, seriously, after the first boss, Ook-Ook (of barrel fame), you’ll enter a gauntlet of angry little bunnies called Virmen. You’ll notice that some of the angry bunnies have hammers. Keep an eye on them, and you’ll spot that they drop hammers. The onslaught of bunnies may seem overwhelming until you’ve got your greasy mitts on a hammer, which you do by clicking it. Once you have your hammer, an extra action button will appear in the middle of your screen, and clicking on it will cause you to do a short-cast hammer smash. This pretty AoE will send angry bunnies flying into the air to meet their doom. Take that, bunnies!

4. It’s a gauntlet — keep moving. Yeah, a lot of the trash in Stormstout Brewery is gauntlet-styled. What does that mean? Well, apart from being a fetching glove, a gauntlet means that the trash will just keep coming until you achieve a certain objective that ends it. Remember the trash on the way up to Akil’zon in Zul’Aman? Exactly like that! Keep pushing forward through the trash, and it’ll stop coming eventually. In a couple of cases, the way to stop it is to pull the boss, which can put a bit of a strain on mana if you’re healing. Good luck!

5. Watch your character! Particularly if you play a ranged DPSer or a healer, you may have become accustomed to not paying a huge amount of attention to your character, apart from positioning. Stick them in the right place and go back to your rotation, am I right? Melee players may be more attentive, but not necessarily. In Stormstout Brewery, there are two debuffs that spring immediately to mind that make your character shoot damaging streams of beer. The beer damages the rest of the party, and while this dungeon isn’t the hardest you’ll encounter, your healer will no doubt thank you for not spewing beer on your cohorts. Alcohol is bad for you, you see.

As in WoW, the primary resource that makes the world go ’round is gold. There’s no silver or copper here, though; it’s gold all the way down, and lots of it. If you’re still in the WoW mindset of “Gee, a couple of thousand gold is a lot of money,” then you’ll want to recalibrate. You can expect to have several thousand gold by the end of the first Act. Your primary source for gold will be drops. Monsters, chests, objects — most everything drops gold, and the amount increases as you progress through the game.

Of course, if you’re not finding enough gold to suit, there’s also Gold Find. This attribute (known as an “affix”), found randomly on magic weapons and armor as you progress through the game, increases the amount of gold that drops by a percentage. A full set of Gold Find gear could increase the amount of money dropped by several hundred percent; of course, your character won’t be as strong, so there’s a trade-off to be made.

This gold can be spent in one of three ways. First and most obviously, there are vendor NPCs that sell items. There isn’t much of a selection, but occasionally you might find something useful if you’ve been unlucky with random drops. Second, you can spend gold on leveling your artisans and increasing your stash. Finally, you can visit Diablo III’s auction house and go shopping. I’ll cover these last two in detail.

Before I do, however, a short discussion of items is in order. The vast majority of Diablo III’s items are random drops, similar to WoW’s world drops. Diablo III bosses and champions (upgraded regular enemies similar to WoW’s elites) do not have a fixed loot table; instead, they simply have a higher chance to drop magical items. This means you can kill what you want, when you want, and still have a chance to find something good. Of course, you’ll also find a lot you can’t use, and that’s where the artisans and auction house come into play.

The Artisans: Blacksmithing and jewelcrafting

To put things in WoW terms, every Diablo III character you create will have access to the blacksmithing and jewelcrafting professions. These professions, once unlocked via story progression in game, are not leveled by crafting items. Instead, you simply invest gold to advance in skill and learn how to make more things. The vast majority of craftable items are learned automatically, but several items (most notably the ones at level cap) can only be learned via plans, which are random, rare drops. All unlocks are done at the account level, thankfully, so all your characters can contribute to leveling your crafter of choice.

The blacksmith, much like WoW’s crafting professionals, allows you to make weapons and armor. Leveling the blacksmith is a step-wise process; instead of paying a flat fee, you play a smaller amount to increase his XP by 20% and unlock a few additional recipes at a similar level to the other items. This repeats four times; then a fifth payment jumps you to the next level and makes available a new tier of items to craft. For example, the blacksmith starts with five apprentice-level crafts available; each investment of 2,000 gold adds two more apprentice-level recipes and 20% to your XP bar. Once you’ve invested 10,000 gold, you reach level 2 and can start creating journeyman-level items, which require a higher level to wield.

The blacksmith can be leveled to 10, but the costs become very high around level 5. At this level, each 20% gain begins requiring several Pages of Blacksmithing, which are, you guessed it, random, rare drops.

Of course, once you’ve leveled the blacksmith and learned the appropriate recipe, you still need to gather the materials to craft the item you want. All crafting materials are found by salvaging (read: disenchanting) other magical items. This essentially gives you another chance at good gear. Even if you don’t get a good weapon drop, simply salvage all the bad weapons and have the blacksmith craft you one! Of course, some of the magical bonuses on the crafted weapons are random as well, so it may takes several crafts to come up with a good combo.

The jewelcrafter is a simpler fellow. Instead of creating new items for you, he simply enhances. He can add gem sockets to your armor, combine your gems to make them stronger, or remove gems from sockets so they can be reused. Leveling him is much easier and cheaper than the blacksmith, as no step-wise function exists here. A simple flat fee (and later, some Pages of Jewelcrafting) will step your JC to the next level and unlock the next level of gem combinations.

Finally, you can spend gold on upgrading your stash. This works just like WoW’s bank slots — spend your money, get more space to hold stuff! Just like WoW, however, if you don’t want to spend the cash to upgrade your storage, you can create one or several additional characters (aka mules), whose sole purpose in life is to hold your extra items.

Since Diablo II was released 12 years ago, it’s safe to say that Diablo III will be the first Diablo title many people will have ever played. When we first mentioned that we would be providing some coverage of Blizzard’s point-and-click dungeoneering action title, one of the first requests we received was a guide to Diablo basics. How do you play the game? What does it have in common with WoW?

We have you covered.

The core of Diablo gameplay is the mouse click. You do everything from combat to looting to movement with your mouse, and your interactions with your keyboard are extremely minimal overall. On Twitter recently, I noticed many people mentioning they were buying a new mouse specifically to use with Diablo III — and that’s not a bad idea. No, we’re not talking a brand new $80 Razer Naga; we’re talking some $10 to $15 thing you can pick up off of a department store shelf. You want a mouse that you’re not going to mourn when your buttons inevitably give out from the mountain of abuse you’re about to unleash upon them. Grab something cheap and disposable so that when it dies, you will consider it a victory — just another technological corpse for the bone pile.

Movement

MMO and FPS players are accustomed to using WASD or their arrow keys to move, using the mouse only to pivot. That is not the case in Diablo. Movement is handled entirely via clicking somewhere in the game world. Click a specific point to move your character in that direction, or hold your click down to make your character chase after your cursor. You’re not going to be using WASD at all. If you’ve played RTS games or a MOBA game like League of Legends, you’ll have some familiarity with this system already.

Each class has some ability that can augment their movement, such as the barbarian’s leaps or the monk’s dash, but those are usually combat-specific, and you’ll learn how to use them just like any other combat ability. They don’t change the basic click-to-go locomotion.

Combat

Fighting monsters makes up almost the entirety of the Diablo experience. That’s what these games are all about — tearing monsters apart in the most epic ways possible. Demon hordes will crash down upon you, and when the storm breaks, you will be the last man standing.

Just like movement, combat is handled through clicks. Your left-click controls one ability, and your right-click controls another. You will have some additional skills that you can bind to a few of your number keys, but those are used infrequently compared to your clicks.

Like World of Warcraft, every class in Diablo III has a combat resource — fury, mana, arcane power, hatred, and so on. Your left-click will most likely be bound to a basic attack that generates your resource. Your right-click will most likely be bound to a more powerful attack that spends your resource.

Here’s an example for someone who might be playing a monk:

You’ve bound Fists of Thunder to your left mouse button. Every time you left-click an enemy, you hit it for lightning damage — and on every third hit, you do some AoE lightning damage. Every time you hit with Fists of Thunder, you generate 6 spirit.
On your right mouse button, you’ve bound Lashing Tail Kick. You spend 30 spirit to perform a roundhouse kick that deals massive damage and knocks enemies back.
If you want to compare this to WoW again, think of it as a DPS rotation. Click, click, click, right-click, and so on. It sounds a little boring written out like that, so imagine that with each click, a few dozen demons explode into sprays of gore. That’s more exciting, right?

You may be wondering if you click to move but you also click to fight, won’t you run all sorts of places you don’t want to go if you miss clicking on the little monster? Hey, don’t worry. If you hold down the shift key while fighting, your clicks won’t make you move at all. You’ll use your attacks while standing in place. If you absolutely do not want to be moving, hold that shift key.

You’ll inevitably take damage while fighting all of those demons. That’s fine. When you kill monsters, they’ll occasionally drop health orbs. Run over the orb, and it will heal some of your health. The faster you kill enemies, the more potential chances for orbs and the healthier you’ll be in the long run. Enemies also drop health potions, which go into your inventory as consumables. If you’re having bad luck with health orbs and you’re afraid you’re going to die, swig a potion. Diablo III’s potions have a cooldown just like World of Warcraft’s do, so don’t expect to spam them to cheat a tough fight.

I’d toyed with the idea of quitting entirely, seeing no practical way to consistently scrape together enough time each week with the current demands on my time to provide you guys with quality mage columns. But as the weeks went by, I found I simply couldn’t abide not writing about turning warlocks into sheep and then hurling volleys of Arcane Missiles at those sheep until they explode. There was a gaping hole in my life that could only be filled with a massive Pyroblast.

So this past week, after squeezing in some quality time with the Mists beta, I sat down at my keyboard and began typing. At first, I wasn’t even writing with a clear goal in mind. I had no intention of posting any of my thoughts. But as I played, and wrote, and played, and wrote, I found I was becoming more and more stupidly excited about the prospect of talking to you guys about new stuff. So I had to come back, you see. And it’s all your fault. I hope you’re happy with yourselves.

Josh has already done a marvelous job of sharing his beta analysis with you over the course of several columns. If you haven’t already, check them out here, here, and also here. Though some of the ground we cover today may overlap, what follows isn’t anything resembling analysis. As I get myself back up to speed, I’ll go more in-depth — but this week, we’re going the full stream of consciousness, random observational impression route. Strap in, and for God’s sake, keep your arms, legs, and wands inside the vehicle.

The first thing I did upon starting up the beta was create a ridiculously adorable female pandaren mage and level her through the new starting area. I’m not even kidding, guys. Even when that fuzzy little spellslinger was in heavy combat with mutant rabbits, I mostly just wanted to give her a hug. Pandaren females are the cuddliest death-dealers you’ll ever meet.

Frostfire Bolt as early-level nuke

Since its introduction in Wrath, Frostfire Bolt has worn a wildly varying variety of hats. At different times, it’s been overpowered, it’s been the basis for an entire hybrid spec, and it’s been a situational spell. At other times, it’s been largely irrelevant.

In Mists, it has a very clear role. If you’re a disenfranchised Frostfire mage hoping for a return to former glory, you’re not going to be happy with that role.

When you create your mage in Mists, you begin the game with a single spell: Frostfire Bolt. Until you select a specialization at level 10, that will be your main nuke. You will begin every fight with it and then spam it from there on out with very few exceptions. It serves as snare and nuke. Once you hit level 10 and more narrowly define your mage as arcane, fire, or frost, Frostfire Bolt fades to a secondary spell. If you go fire or arcane, you may still find yourself making use of it from time to time for snaring purposes. If you go frost, you’ll replace it on your action bar with Frostbolt and never look back. I suppose it could serve some later purpose as a fallback spell for use when locked out of your main school’s spells.

Frostfire Bolt is such a pretty spell. It’s nice that it gets some dedicated use in the early going. But I’d still very much like to see it given some late game relevance, and I sincerely doubt I’m alone in that desire.

Wands as main-hand weapons

One of the first few things that I found particularly jarring about logging into the beta the first time on my main was that the wand slot is gone. I knew this had been changed, but I wasn’t fully prepared for it. My wand was sitting there in my inventory, with stats competitive to the dagger I had equipped.

Now, as I see it, there is an upside to this change, but also a downside. Wands are relegated to stat sticks on the live servers. You never really use them. You just stick them in the ranged slot so that you get their stats. So getting rid of the need for that gear slot and repurposing wands as a ranged main-hand weapon makes sense. And it is kind of cool, especially at early levels, to have a ranged option that costs no mana. I guess.

The thing is, at max level, that ranged functionality serves no legitimate purpose. The only thing it does, as I learned to my chagrin, is give me a way to screw up a pull. I have a nasty habit of right-clicking on my intended target on a pull, instead of just tab-targeting or left-clicking. With a normal melee weapon, that’s not an issue. You just ready your staff or whatever and sit there in combat stance, not hurting anybody.

With a wand, this is a bad idea. Nothing quite compares to the horror of realizing that my stupid wand’s tiny bolt of impotence has gone off before the pull, bringing the mobs down on my poor mage’s squishy head while the tank was hitting the fridge for another beer.

So I guess the bottom line is that I need to unlearn that habit.

Arcane Barrage: Pretty much the best thing ever

You might think I’m overstating things with that subheading. You would be wrong.

So here’s how Arcane Barrage works now: You have this new arcane debuff called Arcane Charge. Most parts of the arcane rotation build up charges of that debuff, stacking to four. The debuff increases the power and mana cost of Arcane Blast. Arcane Barrage both benefits from the damage buff of those four charges and consumes them, resetting the stack. So you basically cast it when you need to stop burning through your mana pool with all that Arcane Blast spam you’ve been doing.

But here’s the twist: Now, Arcane Barrage hits up to five targets, one for each Arcane Charge, for 50% damage. So you’re fighting a five-mob pull. You’re Arcane Blasting happily away at the main DPS target. You get four charges stacked up. You hit your Arcane Barrage button. You watch five awesomesauce sparklebolts of kickassery streak out of your mage’s splayed fingertips toward the enemy group. You drop to the floor and spin around going “Woop woop woop” like Homer Simpson for like 10 minutes.

It does solid AoE damage, saves you mana (since Arcane Barrage costs very little on the beta right now), and looks just splendid. I know everybody hates arcane mages after being forced to roll one for the majority of this expansion, but man, it might be time to reconsider your stance.

According to reports by MMO-Champion, the Black Market Auction House is now live on beta realms. Attempts to confirm this by chatting with Madam Goya just kicked back a UI error at me, but there seem to be plenty of people stopping by to check her out. Madam Goya makes her home at the Tavern of the Mists in the Veiled Stair, north of the Valley of the Four Winds. She’s not alone, as Wrathion is still quietly hanging out in the tavern as well.

So what’s available at the Black Market? A little bit of everything, including rare mounts like the Ashes of Al’ar, pictured above. Also included are pets that require a grind to obtain such as the Sen’jin Fetish, previously available only from grinding out Argent Tournament reputation, and high-level crafting recipes, although we don’t have a lot of information on what those recipes are exactly.

However, perhaps the most interesting note to glean from this is that the Black Market Auction House appears to be carrying the original tier 3 sets that were removed from the game when Naxxramas was moved to Northrend and changed from a 40-man raid to a 10- and 25-man raid in Wrath of the Lich King. Obviously, this means that those looking to transmogrify into these rare tier sets can now pay to do so — provided they’ve got the gold to fling around.
I’m hoping this leads to other items that were removed from game showing up as well. How about rare blacksmithing specialization plans that were taken out of the game? Or the recipe for Dirge’s Kickin Chimaerok Chops, which disappeared with Cataclysm? Or mounts we can no longer obtain, like the tiger and raptor from the original iteration of ZG, or the black and plagued proto-drakes that were removed when Ulduar was released? The possibilities are endless here — as long as you have the gold to spend.

What I am hoping, however, is that transmogrification items like the old tier 3 will also be made available in replica versions like we’ve seen over at the Darkmoon Faire. I really like the idea of replica armor and weapons. I’d hate to see that method of obtaining old sets removed in favor of a gold sink. And that would leave a few alternatives to obtaining the gear, just in case people would rather farm tickets than farm a lot of gold. Still, it’s nice to see a good old-fashioned gold sink for players who have entirely too much gold and entirely too little to spend it all on.

I’d toyed with the idea of quitting entirely, seeing no practical way to consistently scrape together enough time each week with the current demands on my time to provide you guys with quality mage columns. But as the weeks went by, I found I simply couldn’t abide not writing about turning warlocks into sheep and then hurling volleys of Arcane Missiles at those sheep until they explode. There was a gaping hole in my life that could only be filled with a massive Pyroblast.

So this past week, after squeezing in some quality time with the Mists beta, I sat down at my keyboard and began typing. At first, I wasn’t even writing with a clear goal in mind. I had no intention of posting any of my thoughts. But as I played, and wrote, and played, and wrote, I found I was becoming more and more stupidly excited about the prospect of talking to you guys about new stuff. So I had to come back, you see. And it’s all your fault. I hope you’re happy with yourselves.

Josh has already done a marvelous job of sharing his beta analysis with you over the course of several columns. If you haven’t already, check them out here, here, and also here. Though some of the ground we cover today may overlap, what follows isn’t anything resembling analysis. As I get myself back up to speed, I’ll go more in-depth — but this week, we’re going the full stream of consciousness, random observational impression route. Strap in, and for God’s sake, keep your arms, legs, and wands inside the vehicle.

The first thing I did upon starting up the beta was create a ridiculously adorable female pandaren mage and level her through the new starting area. I’m not even kidding, guys. Even when that fuzzy little spellslinger was in heavy combat with mutant rabbits, I mostly just wanted to give her a hug. Pandaren females are the cuddliest death-dealers you’ll ever meet.

Frostfire Bolt as early-level nuke

Since its introduction in Wrath, Frostfire Bolt has worn a wildly varying variety of hats. At different times, it’s been overpowered, it’s been the basis for an entire hybrid spec, and it’s been a situational spell. At other times, it’s been largely irrelevant.

In Mists, it has a very clear role. If you’re a disenfranchised Frostfire mage hoping for a return to former glory, you’re not going to be happy with that role.

When you create your mage in Mists, you begin the game with a single spell: Frostfire Bolt. Until you select a specialization at level 10, that will be your main nuke. You will begin every fight with it and then spam it from there on out with very few exceptions. It serves as snare and nuke. Once you hit level 10 and more narrowly define your mage as arcane, fire, or frost, Frostfire Bolt fades to a secondary spell. If you go fire or arcane, you may still find yourself making use of it from time to time for snaring purposes. If you go frost, you’ll replace it on your action bar with Frostbolt and never look back. I suppose it could serve some later purpose as a fallback spell for use when locked out of your main school’s spells.

Frostfire Bolt is such a pretty spell. It’s nice that it gets some dedicated use in the early going. But I’d still very much like to see it given some late game relevance, and I sincerely doubt I’m alone in that desire.

Wands as main-hand weapons

One of the first few things that I found particularly jarring about logging into the beta the first time on my main was that the wand slot is gone. I knew this had been changed, but I wasn’t fully prepared for it. My wand was sitting there in my inventory, with stats competitive to the dagger I had equipped.

Now, as I see it, there is an upside to this change, but also a downside. Wands are relegated to stat sticks on the live servers. You never really use them. You just stick them in the ranged slot so that you get their stats. So getting rid of the need for that gear slot and repurposing wands as a ranged main-hand weapon makes sense. And it is kind of cool, especially at early levels, to have a ranged option that costs no mana. I guess.

The thing is, at max level, that ranged functionality serves no legitimate purpose. The only thing it does, as I learned to my chagrin, is give me a way to screw up a pull. I have a nasty habit of right-clicking on my intended target on a pull, instead of just tab-targeting or left-clicking. With a normal melee weapon, that’s not an issue. You just ready your staff or whatever and sit there in combat stance, not hurting anybody.

With a wand, this is a bad idea. Nothing quite compares to the horror of realizing that my stupid wand’s tiny bolt of impotence has gone off before the pull, bringing the mobs down on my poor mage’s squishy head while the tank was hitting the fridge for another beer.

So I guess the bottom line is that I need to unlearn that habit.

Arcane Barrage: Pretty much the best thing ever

You might think I’m overstating things with that subheading. You would be wrong.

So here’s how Arcane Barrage works now: You have this new arcane debuff called Arcane Charge. Most parts of the arcane rotation build up charges of that debuff, stacking to four. The debuff increases the power and mana cost of Arcane Blast. Arcane Barrage both benefits from the damage buff of those four charges and consumes them, resetting the stack. So you basically cast it when you need to stop burning through your mana pool with all that Arcane Blast spam you’ve been doing.

But here’s the twist: Now, Arcane Barrage hits up to five targets, one for each Arcane Charge, for 50% damage. So you’re fighting a five-mob pull. You’re Arcane Blasting happily away at the main DPS target. You get four charges stacked up. You hit your Arcane Barrage button. You watch five awesomesauce sparklebolts of kickassery streak out of your mage’s splayed fingertips toward the enemy group. You drop to the floor and spin around going “Woop woop woop” like Homer Simpson for like 10 minutes.

It does solid AoE damage, saves you mana (since Arcane Barrage costs very little on the beta right now), and looks just splendid. I know everybody hates arcane mages after being forced to roll one for the majority of this expansion, but man, it might be time to reconsider your stance.