The internet's magiest weekly mage column, Arcane Brilliance would like to wish you and yours a very magetastic holiday season. Unless you and yours are warlocks. In which case Arcane Brilliance hopes the holiday season comes to your Christmas party and punches you in the face.

Every year, as the end of that twelve-month block draws near, Arcane Brilliance likes to take an unbiased look back at the events that captured our collective imagination. Heh. Get it? "I-MAGE-ination?" Holy crap Arcane Brilliance is clever. And indefensibly fond of bad puns.

So what did the year of our lord 2009 hold for those of us who prefer the scent of barbecued sheep to pretty much any odor ever and think strudel is a perfectly acceptable meal choice for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a meal I like to call the "Evocation's-on-cooldown-snack?"

Join me after the break for all the highlights, presented in vaguely chronological order.

The end of polymorph as we know it

As 2008 wound down and 2009 wound up, mages everywhere began hitting level 80, jumping headlong into end-game instances, and discovering one thing:

Nobody wanted us to sheep anymore.

At first, this was a nice change of pace. With Wrath of the Lich King in full swing, a new party dynamic was emerging. Tanks in this new expansion seemed fully capable of holding the attention of multiple mobs at once, and healers seemed fully capable of keeping them from dying despite the increasing size of these pulls. Mages might try to sheep something, but immediately find that sheep broken, and nobody seemed to mind the extra mob running amok. Great, right? We could concentrate fully upon the three things we do best: blow things up, then blow them up again, followed by drinking. It was the dawning of a new era where the only thing the DPS was expected to do was DPS.

So what has changed in the 11 months since? Nothing. I was in a Heroic Pit of Saron group last night, where the large pulls just prior to the ice tunnel gauntlet weren't going especially well. The priest suggested that perhaps he could shackle one of the mobs. The death knight tank seemed almost offended. It was as if the very idea of crowd control was an affront to his tanking abilities.

I know I'm not the only mage that feels like a part of me--the change-a-warlock-into-a-sheep-iest part, in fact--has died. Though not having to focus on a mob and keep that mob polymorphed does free me up to focus on my e-peen, a layer of the conjured pastry that makes up a mage is missing.

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