It's time again for another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that would like to present, once again, its multi-annual state of the mage address. My fellow mages, we are awesome.

First of all, you might be wondering why only 72 volumes. I'll be honest: it has to do with the great zombie apocalypse of 2037. I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say it severely impairs my ability to write. To be frank, the last 15 parts are pretty much just "braiiinns...warlocks....suuuuck...brains...braiiiins..." repeated over and over for a thousand words or so. After that, my zombie-self just loses interest. Some of you may wonder how those columns will be any different from the ones I write now. To you, I say bite me.

I've extolled upon the state of mages on three previous occasions. It's actually interesting to go back and look over those ancient texts from our current perspective. Oh, the silly things we were worried about back then! Fire PvP... ha! Spirit, less than useful? What a ridiculous concern! Oh... how far we've come.

Ignore my sarcasm. I'm not actually unhappy at all with the current state of mages. We are, as I stated in the opening blurb, awesome. Join me after the break and we'll look at where we are as a class in 2010.

2010 ushers in a fun era. Patch 3.3 puts us at the tail end of the Wrath of the Lich King content. There may yet be another patch before Cataclysm hits, but my guess is that it won't be a major content patch, and will more likely be the big pre-expansion patch, priming the world for the coming revamp. I don't anticipate another Sunwell-type patch, like we got at the end of Burning Crusade. Blizzard claims that toppling the Lich King is the capper for this go-round, and I believe them.

So what we see now, largely, is what we'll be getting for the rest of this version of WoW. We are who we're going to be as a class until Cataclysm reboots everything again. And for the first time I can recall in my career as a mage, I'm okay with that.

Arcane

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