Mages and the mystery of the (broken) Arcane Power glyph

As many of you possibly have noticed, the very awesome looking glyph of Arcane Power which should do the following:

While Arcane Power is active the global cooldown of your Blink, Mana Shield, and Mirror Image is reduced to zero. 

In itself, for an arcane mage, shaving off global cooldowns is a huge thing, so why not take it? And ideed this is a glyph we want. But is it working as intended?

The first thing anyone would do after equipping this glyph, is of course to create a macro that binds two important abilities together, Arcane Power and Mirror Image. Why not? Since it would be off the global cooldown, what harm could it do?

A such macro would look something like this

#showtooltip Arcane Power
/cast Arcane Power
/cast Mirror Image

And in essence, what it should do, would be to cast both Arcane Power and Mirror Image! But wait a minute - Try that macro out for yourself and you will notice that this macro actually TRIGGER a global cooldown.

This is because of the way blizzard handle's macro, and they handle them client side, and first checking if a glyph was activated together with Arcane Power AFTER the macro have finished, hence leaving you with a global cooldown less!

What to do, what to do? With this problem, is the glyph even worth something? - Yes it is! As i wrote before, the Arcane Power glyph is first taken into consideration after the macro have finished casting, and by utilizing a Blizzard macro system called "/castsequence", one is able to cast a sequence of spells, by numerous click on the same macro, and hence making sure the game have understood that Arcane Power and the glyph is active. A such macro looks as the following:

#showtooltip Arcane Power

/use Mana Gem

/use 14

/castsequence reset=5 Arcane Power, Arcane Blast, Mirror Image, Arcane Blast

This macro would basically present itself in two different situations assuming Arcane Power is ready.

1. Mirror Image is ready - Repeatedly click the macro untill the second Arcane Blast is casting, then return to your original Arcane Blast button.
2. Mirror Image is not ready - Repeatedly click the macro untill the first Arcane Blast is casting, then return to your original Arcane Blast button.

Video of it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOM0L9U8KAY

This is a very important thing to notice for an arcane mage, since losing a global cooldown during a dire situation, who really needs that?

This concludes the mystery of the Arcane Power glyph.

Mages and the art of speccing and Macros

I made a guide about how to spec your mage the best way possible for PvE encounters and also how the different specs compare to eachother (Updated as of 4.2).

Mages and the art of speccing

I also updated the macro section

Macro section

Keep updated on the various sub-sites on this blog, cause I will update all of them as soon as i can.

A welcome and what to come!

Hello.

I am Nitrak, a Goblin Mage on Tarren Mill @EU. I have now been playing mage for quite some time now, and i thought i would share some of my thoughts, gathered from experience, and alot of information sides, and gather them into something that is easy digestiable and understandable.

What i will try to do, is provide PvE guide's (and maybe the occasional PvP guide), for mages, with tips that i use to optimize my own mage, and my own dps. Both by commenting on gearing/reforging, playstyle and special tips on different bosses in the active patch.

Additionally i will make a section covering my PvE and PvP macro's and my Power Auras setup.

I hope you will get something useful out of this blog, please feel free to throw comments at: nitrak@wow.com or add comments below.