Each week Arcane Brilliance celebrates Independence Day in its own special way. Most people celebrate the 4th of July by setting off explosive devices of varying sizes. In similar fashion, Arcane Brilliance also enjoys blowing things up. The difference is that whereas most people tend to set off pretty fireworks, Arcane Brilliance prefers to cause Warlocks to explode. The result isn't nearly as pretty, but to Arcane Brilliance, it has its own very unique charm.

I don't know if you're trying out the patch 3.2 PTR or not, but if you are, you should go out and mess with Living Bomb. Like, right now. Go cast it on some things. That's right, I said things with an "s" on the end. As in plural. As in more than one thing. Watch those things burn to death simultaneously. Rejoice.

Yes, Blizzard's present to Mages on this day when the United States celebrates its Declaration of Independence from foreign rule is apparently the ability to blow up multiple targets with Living Bomb. On the PTR, you can now have Living Bomb up on as many targets as you can feasibly cast it on before it's duration or your mana pool expires. The tooltip doesn't yet reflect the change, but Ghostcrawler has confirmed that this is not a bug, and that Blizzard is intentionally testing the idea.

How awesome would this change be? Read on after the break to hear my take on it, but let me just say that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not very awesome and 10 being more awesome than anything, this change would make the scale explode on a molecular level and then reform over billions of years into a new planet of awesome.

Why I'm excited:

Ok, maybe I'm overstating it a bit. If Living Bomb were to make it live as a multi-target spell, life as we know it is not going to end in a blazing ball of flame. The apocalypse will not be any more nigh than it currently is. The one true messiah is not going to descend from the sky and usher in a new age of peace and goodwill or anything of the sort. Still, this is a very fun change, and exactly the sort of thing I've been waiting to see happen for Mages ever since our last significant change, about thirty-seven patches ago, give or take.

A short list of things that will be 100% more awesome after this goes live than they are now:

• Yogg-Saron
• Wintergrasp
• Alterac Valley
• 5v5 Arena
• AoE trash pulls in general
• Any situation in which your Mage finds him/herself facing more than one Warlock

In Ulduar alone, I can think of several other fights on which this could be a significant DPS increase (aside from the obvious and incredible implications it would have on Yogg):

• Razorscale
• Mimiron
• Freya
• Kologarn
• Auriaya
• Thorim

Threat management is going to be an issue in some of these fights, to be sure (Thorim, I'm looking at you), but with some adjustments, these are all instances where this change would be a perfectly realistic PvE DPS buff.

But PvE is not the area where the new Living Bomb would really shine. That distinction belongs to PvP, in no uncertain terms. Fire has never been the PvP spec of choice for Mages, but this change will make it far more attractive. It still isn't going to be a respected upper-echelon Arena spec, but the havoc it could potentially wreak in open combat situations, like Wintergrasp or the battlegrounds, would be spectacular.

[View Remaining 16 Paragraphs]