It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column known for its special five-alarm chili recipe. It's a delicate blend of three different conjured beans, spiced up with Fireballs, Scorches, and slow-cooked over a smoldering Flamestrike, loaded with lamb, bacon, and the occasional roasted monkey, glazed with a dusting of Frostfire, then lit aflame with a Pyroblast. And the secret ingredient? Warlock tears.

If there's one thing mages have been known for during the course of this fine game we all play, it's mass murder. We have at our disposal a wide array of spells that wreak havoc over a large area, perhaps more so than any other class. When it comes to killing things in large numbers, mages are remarkably adept. It's a role we embrace wholeheartedly.

AoE has evolved quite since the inception of the game. In vanilla WoW, AoE was a great way to get yourself killed in an instance, a method of attack that was mostly limited to solo farming and certain trash pulls. These days, with the ability tanks have to hold multiple mobs with relative ease, AoE has morphed into the go-to way to deal with multiple-mob pulls of all shapes and sizes. Crowd control has gone the way of Wand Specialization; it simply isn't required in most situations in Wrath.

Cataclysm is bringing with it some fairly sweeping changes to the way we utilize our AoE repertoire. The developers have stated their intention to return us to a time when we actually had to worry about things like crowd control and pull-sizes, and though we're not reverting completely, pulls on the beta certainly feel more like vanilla or Burning Crusade pulls than anything we saw in Wrath. Join me after the break and we'll go over how our AoE spells will work in this coming era.

We'll begin with some general changes, then move on to the arcane and frost trees. The fire tree demands its own column, really, and here at Arcane Brilliance, we always do what the fire tree demands. We'll hit fire AoE next week.

Damage reduction

The first change was also the most sweeping. Blizzard cut the base damage of all AoE spells in the beta by 50-60% for every class, pretty much across the board. The effect is pretty jarring. Seriously, if you're a newer player who has cut his teeth on the "go, go, go," rapid-fire, pull--everything, gib-fests that are standard in Wrath's random dungeon-finder, the first 5-mans in Cataclysm are going to dramatically alter your world-view pretty much from pull-one.

The mobs have more health, they hit harder, the encounters last longer, and the mass-group pulls of Wrath will absolutely get you all killed. Crowd control isn't an absolute necessity, but it does help. You won't see a repeat performance of BC, when the trade channel was filled with groups looking not for DPS but for CC, but you won't see groups turning down your ability to sheep things, either. Simply burning everything down at once, every time, just isn't the go-to option anymore.

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