World of Womencraft
Editor’s Note – This will show me to start a post the day before and not finish it until well after midnight. IWD was yesterday. It is never too late to talk about though!
It was International Women’s Day. If you are like me, it might have not been a holiday you were innately aware of until recently. Maybe you live in a country that celebrates it as a national holiday. IWD celebrates the economical, political and social achievements of women everywhere and highlights some of the struggles women still face. As a woman myself who enjoys the freedoms of things like voting, personal safety and equal rights, I felt that maybe dedicating a blog post to the female gaming world might be in order. It might not be as important as the first woman to receive an Oscar for Best Director, or first Latina to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, but there are definitely some contributions and some women I’m highly fond of in the Warcraft community. Women have had quite a shift in perception in the gaming world and while we’re not 100 percent where we should be, the fact that more and more studies have been done showing us as a larger segment of the market share is a great thing. Warcraft has done a lot to get women into gaming and I feel that that is a good thing. It hasn’t always been easy – there’s still a very large pervasive gamer culture that promotes stereotypes about women, and takes casual attitudes towards things like rape, misogyny and homophobia. There’s also issues of harassment and general rudeness. I feel that it has been getting better, however. The more visible women are in games and the gaming culture, the more we can enjoy ourselves and enact change. Here is a short-and-by-no-means extensive list of some of the women who have made my gaming life a little better:
1.) WoW Ladies -
I’m gonna stay straight off that I do not necessarily ideologically agree with a portion of posters there. There’s a lot of attitudes and play-styles that occur there that I just do not participate in, do not enjoy and such. But the fact that a large, fairly non-homogeneous group of women can come together and have a fairly dedicated space to discussion of all things WoW-related is something I haven’t found in many other places. Livejournal may be the subject of jokes and whatnot, but it is still a crazy social network of blogging. WoW Ladies is where I’ve found many like-minded WoW-playing women and I’m glad for it. It is where I even found some people who I consider my close friends – including Metaneira. Having access to such a large audience of other women (and women-friendly men) has made me value maintaining more close relationships with women in-game. It is has proven quite rewarding and is one of the places that inspired me to start keeping a blog in the first place. We’ve helped a lot of mages on there and they still are the biggest chunk of our readers.
2.) Kyth of StratFu -
Meta and I are ridiculous Kyth fangirls. We both consistently look at her spec and advice and she’s definitely a paragon of smart mage players at the top of the raid game and deeply understands the mechanics of the game. It is wonderful to see someone so consistently intelligent about the craft of end-game and explain it in such an easy-to-understand way. Having someone to look up to who also plays the same class we do and is a female is really nice sometimes. Not bagging on Manly, Euripedes or Ataxus, but having the mage field not be entirely dominated by men is cool to see.
3.) The Women of Guild of Guilds -
These are the women I see every day, raid with, PVP with, and even roleplay with sometimes! My guild and our expanded guild collective are definitely friendly to everyone, but it is nice some days to be on a raid team that has a significant female portion. Not just healers, either. Our raid has historically always had this too – even back in the old 40man raid days. Our old main tank and raid leader (also one of my real life friends now) was female and one of the best tanks I’ve ever had the pleasure of standing behind as a caster. Over the years, we’ve had female tanks, female healers of all flavors, and definitely female DPS – including enhancement shaman, warlocks, hunters and mages. There’s all sorts of hardcore and casual female players in our little group and I’m proud to know all of them. Because of them and because of the maturity and female-friendliness in general, I have never once felt the sting of misogyny or harassment from other players while raiding or in guild chat.
4.) The Female WoW Blogosphere
From Hots and Dots, to Troll Bouquet, Tank Like a Girl, Borderhouse Blog, and Too Many Annas – the blogging world is filled with intelligent, verbose women who wish to share their gaming experience with the rest of us. I have quite a lot of fun reading all of their words and feel that have given me the inspiration and the support for us to continue what we’re doing with this little blog here. Another shout-out to Latoya Peterson from Jezebel (also Racialicious) who has written some of the most nerd-friendly, Warcraft-related gaming posts I’ve seen from a major non-gaming blog in a while.
5.) Evelyn Fredickson and Christie Golden
These are two women who have helped shape the Warcraft Universe alongside the Supreme Lore-Being Chris Metzen. If you haven’t heard of Evelyn, she is the Creative Development Historian and helps catalogue, shape and maintain the lore of Azeroth in media and in the game. She writes articles for the main site and has also published printed work for Blizzard as well. Her contributions to how the stories of our gaming world are presented are everywhere, even if you didn’t know who she is. Christie Golden is the author of the Arthas novel – one of the few pieces of Warcraft writing I’ve actually enjoyed (no thanks to you, Knaak) and a really interesting treatment of WoW’s own prodigal son. Both women have had a direct impact on the characters and World of Warcraft in such unique ways. Without both of them, we wouldn’t have as much lore to drool over.
There are many, many more women I could mention that have made up the entire population of Warcraft games, community and gaming but these were the ones I felt like mentioning today. Maybe you will do the same on your own blog or here in the comments. Celebrate the women in your life and the world today.
Where Have We Been?
Our deepest apologies, thoughtful readers. We have had at least a month’s absence from writing awesome posts and we are here to set things right. In-game stuff has been eating a ton of our time, plus assorted bad moods and job hunts. The impetus to write is weak in the face of such things as moodiness and Icecrown bosses, as it were. But I am here to give you a peek into what sorts of oddball things both Meta and myself have been poking around with.
1.) Raiding Icecrown Citadel, hating on some rogues.
Icecrown has been exciting, seeing new content, but equal parts frustrating because we have a melee-dominated raid. While we do not lack for buffs, our raid definitely makes boss strategies for our melee, who are some of our top DPSers. We’re struggling on getting ranged/casters more benefits out of this, but has been hard going. Tempers flared quite a lot, and Putricide was like pulling teeth some days. We’ve messed with our arcane specs quite a bit to compensate for things like pushback on Festergut but ultimately went back to making use of Incanter’s Absorption because of how many of the later fights have static damage pulses or lots of raid-wide damage to take advantage of. We rock Blood Council spectacularly hard though, which is nice. Arcane is still the best spec to use, but Meta and I both bust out our Nibelung staves and go fire for trash usually. Just for kicks. We’re closing in on Sindragosa and Arthas at the moment, so hardmodes await.
2.) 10 Mans…Anyone…?
Neither Meta nor I have a stable 10man. We’ve made some progress with other raiding mains who don’t have one either, and a bunch of alts and rotating people every week or so. We even downed Rotface the other night. It’s been difficult – one night a week or only 2 or 3 hours and not everyone is fully geared enough on their alts to make a lot of fast progress. Hopefully the Captain Chin (Wrynn) buff will help us at least poke at some new 10man content. Meta has been nice enough to tank on her warrior or paladin for these runs so I get a shot at a Muradin’s Spyglass.
3.) Trinketsssss…yess…pretty trinkets…
Neither of us has a Reign of the Unliving, Dislodged Foreign Object, and I still don’t have a Muradin’s. However, both of us now have the voodoo gnome trinket from ZA. Resulting in tons of voodoo gnome parades.
4.) Our Alts have been doing well though!
We’ve been having fun doing a lot of raid weeklies and goofing off with TOC10 and even Ulduar. We did so well in Ulduar the other week that now our alts have the Starcaller title. Fancy that. We also managed Tribute to Skill (not Mad Skill, but soon!) as well. Meta’s paladin came back from her Horde vacation, and my shaman started trying out resto and really liking it. We’re both pretty nicely geared right now, although both of us could more ICC 10 for sure. See #2 though.
That’s all we’ve been nosing around doing other than old Vanilla and BC content for RP gear and mounts. Should have an update on delicious mage changes though. Fire doing tons more damage? Say it ain’t so!
New Armory is Pretty Ballin’
I blame GotFrag.com for the title.
But I am easily seduced by new shinies and Wednesday night, Blizzard dropped a redesigned WoW Armory on us. Our raid almost ground to a halt as everyone rushed off to go check it out. There’s definitely some criticism out there of it but I for one am more intrigued by the possibilities it can bring. Let’s review, shall we?
1.) Design and Organization Is Clearer
From a design standpoint, the old armory was basically a rehash of the in-game character panel that you would look at for the most part. Even with the subsequent revisions to how dual-specs and achievement panels were displayed, they were crammed into the small space inside the gear panel. Now you have all the relevant stats and other chunks of data about the player in useful spaces around the page allowing ease of use and ability to read it in a concise fashion. First off, it has a giant splash bar that displays their faction, name, guild, server/battlegroup and achievement points. So half the reason people are looking at the armory in the first place have all that information right at the top. Then down below, it basically takes a lot of utility from certain mods (like the gear aura based on its rarity) and uses it for maximum visual impact. I know instantly how many blues/purples someone is wearing just by looking, and then I can mouseover for the details of which pieces they are. I can scroll through their stats (the stats that are predominant to the spec are also displayed first) and I can see their dual-specs quite easily now.
2.) Recent Activity is Detailed, Useful
This is easily going to cause the most contention amongst our readers or WoW players in general. The addition of the “Recent Activity” list to the Armory has caused outcry – people are saying the Blizzard is keeping up the Facebooks and Twitters of this world and no one needs that much data, replete with RSS feed capacity. I’m not as paranoid as some, even though I have had my bouts with stalkers. The Recent Activity is going to give us some huge parses of data that we already had but in a form that gives people an easier time of understanding it or using. The statistics panel on your Armory and in-game had all this information before but you would have had to pay attention to the original values of things such as boss kills to make any sense of it. I like that I can see that I completed parts of achievements I wasn’t tracking. It gives me a sum total of things I’m doing in-game. This is where people feel threatened – they don’t want people to know that they completed a quest, got a piece of loot. But it doesn’t update in real time (It updates on log-out instead.) It also doesn’t show anything that someone couldn’t find out if they really want to. My feeling about the fear is that the armory is going to provide us with information for a lot more positive uses than negative ones. I understand the controversy, but I’m surprised that Blizzard hasn’t made a way to set certain values or the entire list private except for trusted friends.
3.) The Modelviewer/Pose Feature
Proving once again that Blizzard knows what is popular amongst the constituents, they included a way to accurately view and display a person’s actual character instead of having to use Modelviewer or see the person in-game. I personally like this for nerdy reasons because I do a lot of WoW Model Viewer pictures of my guildmates and having accurate hair/skin/face data is really useful as I cannot remember all of these people. Night elves have five faces that all look the same, really. Again, people might get upset that people can visually identify their character now, but the pros outweigh the cons in this case. Also it is fun to see or display to other people your character’s “personality” via the pose feature. If you noticed the article’s header, you can see how sassy my gnome is. I think it is a really nice touch of flavor that Blizzard allowed people to show off their character’s personality and nice gear to anyone who happens to look them up rather than just dropping straight stats and activity as part of it. Now people can be a dancing undead or a lowbie saluting all those who wander across their page. You can also link your character’s pose to show others and view in full-screen in a variety of backdrops, which is cute.
4.) Armory Now Handles Account Data/Characters
Logging into the Armory used to only give you access to your in-game calendar or guild info but now it has access to the whole of your account, in terms of character data. Using Armory now allows you to “quick access” up to three of your characters at once via the little yellow person icon up by your name. It is useful for those people who have more than one well-geared main/alt, even if some of us have slightly more than three. I find this is really handy if I need to link my alts who are gearing up to someone to look over their gear.
5.) Bookmarking
Because you can never have too many armories saved when you need to see the specs/gear of mages who are better than you players you are interested in on a regular basis. I think this feature will be pretty well-used amongst those people who constantly compare gear of peers or friends in order to figure out what they are doing. I know I will be. I haven’t figured out what it maxes out at yet, but maybe all of you can find out and get back to me.
6.) Fun Anyone?
Try out a pygmy oil or Iron Dwarf boot flask, log out and wait 15 minutes or so. Instant gender change on the Armory for you!
All in all, I like that Blizzard is putting in the time and effort to create a huge bank of data that is not only useful, visually appealing and fun but gets people more interested in using it – I’d use the Armory for checking out recruits to our raid but I would imagine most casual players would never go to the Armory or log in. Now since you can customize how you look and get feedback about your in-game adventures, I forsee the Armory being more of a go-to in the future. I also invite all of you to use my Armory as one of your bookmarks and follow my ridiculous adventures across Azeroth (if you weren’t sick of me already). There’s also a Twitter site that Kadomi of Tank Like A Girl uses if you wanted to dump that into Twitter but I doubt you really need that spammed on your lists. Anyways, play with the Armory and drop us a comment showing off your mage!
Hey, frost mages!
Don’t say we never did nothin’ for ya. Lhivera has done some interesting testing based on information about (gasp!) warlock pets. It turns out that warlocks do more damage if they force their imps to cast by macroing the imp’s spell with their main nuke. Lhivera wondered if this would work for frost mages and the answer is yes: he noticed a 27% increase in his own pet’s DPS, which he estimates could boost his raid DPS by 3.8-5.5%. Not too shabby!
To take advantage of it, you’ll need to change your frostbolt to this following macro:
#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast Frostbolt
/use Waterbolt
Unlike /petattack, this command will not cause your pet to stopcasting and start over with every keypress (something I personally discovered doing Vezax hard mode, heh). So macro up, frost mages, and make Splashy work for you.
(And don’t tell Ais I helped you out. Getting punched by a gnome isn’t fun.)
Trinkets yes, pretty trinkets!
Haven’t been posting much — as Ais said, the holidays and some real-life issues have interfered. (All good things, though!) But it’s a new year and we’ve got some questions to field. All of these are about the piece of gear that frustrates me the most: trinkets.
I’m an arcane mage currently running with Illustration of the Dragon Soul and Abyssal Rune. Should I replace one of them with the Talisman of Resurgence?
The short answer to this is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Nearly every single arcane mage should have Talisman of Resurgence: the only exceptions are if you have some combination of Reign of the Dead/Unliving (heroic or regular – you can use both), Dislodged Foreign Object (ew), Muradin’s Spyglass, or Flare of the Heavens. You can use Rawr to figure out what would be the best combination for you, but for the majority of arcane mages, we’re gonna have Talisman of Resurgence in one of those spots. Getting the badges is easy: if you don’t have one yet, farm heroics until you have the 50 Triumph needed to pick it up. In this case, Abyssal + Talisman of Resurgence is the best combo of those three. Keep in mind that Abyssal Rune is a random spellpower proc, which means it could go off as you’re moving out of fire or right before you need to kite Anub’s spikes. I still think that even with inopportune procs it’s a better choice, simply because the passive haste is so good for arcane. Good news is, Abyssal Rune is pretty easy to get: it drops from regular ToC5.
How does the Talisman of Resurgence compare to the stacking haste from Talisman of Volatile Power?
Well… the Talisman of Volatile Power is a concentrated piece of crap. Let’s just assume you’re an arcane mage. The passive bonus on the trinket is critical strike rating, which is the worst caster stat available to arcane mages right now (aside from int and spirit — and even then it’s only about a .3 DPS scaling difference between crit and int). At first glance, the haste bonus looks nice: it increases your rating by 57 each cast, which is 1.7% casting speed increase. (Casting speed is not the same as cast time, mind.) Not too shabby! Where it falls apart is the 20 second duration of the effect. Let’s assume that you have 600 haste rating and are specced for Netherwind Presence. Your AB cast time is 2.01 seconds. You pop your trinket; the next cast is 1.98, then 1.95, then 1.93. As a player, you’re not going to notice the two to three hundreths of a second cast difference, but even tiny differences do add up. But the effect only lasts 20 seconds: it’ll take you over 15 to stack it to eight (assuming perfect execution and no lag). You’ll get maybe two to three casts with the full effect. The DPS increase from this trinket is just so teeny, even stacking it with other cooldowns.
It’s … it’s just not very good. Sundial of the Exiled is much better, even for an arcane mage. Forge Ember, a blue trinket from HoS, is better. I’ll say it again: if you don’t have Talisman of Resurgence, grind the badges and get it.
But, Meta, why is Muradin’s Spyglass good if it has all that crit?
Yeah, yeah, crit isn’t very good for arcane casters. However, the secondary effect of that trinket is a stacking spellpower buff. You can’t charge it up before combat (mages with Illustration could cast a couple of spells (Slow Fall or AE) before the fight began), but you’ll be running with 180 spellpower for the majority of the fight. Fire mages will especially delight in this trinket, as the ticks from Living Bomb will maintain the stack.
Unlike Reign of the Dead/Unliving, the heroic and non-heroic versions of this trinket (and Dislodged Foreign Object) cannot be used together. (This is per the 3.3 patch notes: “Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.”)
How do I weigh a proc versus a static bonus?
The short answer is that the average player doesn’t do this: you let someone else do the math and tell you whether an item is good or not. If, say, Nibelung drops and you have never seen the item before, you’re probably not going to be able to tell if the item is an upgrade for you. Even items with their proc spelled out, like Dislodged Foreign Object, are confusing: most players can tell it’s good, but they can’t tell you how good. Is it better than Reign? Is it better than heroic Reign? (The answer: I believe so.) And so the average player must do research before fights to find out what drops from what boss and then cross-reference those pieces of gear with math from trusted sources to see if it’s an improvement. Tools like Rawr help, but it takes a while for the procs to be accurately calculated and added in: Dislodged Foreign Object has yet to be modeled in the 2.3.5 release of Rawr. Blizzard seems to recognize the difficulty in eyeballing gear: we have multiple stats to juggle, procs that require a chunk of math to evaluate, and then just mind-bogglingly big numbers (think: a single weapon from Icecrown has more spellpower on it than my mage did total when I was doing Black Temple). Until Cataclysm fixes it (heh), most of us are left relying on others to do the mathy stuff for us.
That’s it for now, but if you have any mage questions, please feel free to ask either in comments, via Twitter (@empoweredfire), or shoot us an e-mail at empoweredfire AT gmail DOT com.
Mage Lang Syne
So it is the last day of the year, and I know many other blogs are doing retrospectives. But we haven’t been a blog for very long, really – certainly not for a year. I remember like it was only yesterday that I was leveling up Aislinana as fire, eventually frostfire bolt for eventual Naxxramas and generally being a nerd about mage stuff when Wrath came out. I’ve gone from being a noob in t6 gear and casting frostfire bolts to a sleek mage in 245/258 level gear with a new main arcane spec. I never thought I’d come this far or be this different. In my heart I don’t think I’ve really changed much – the talent points, the gemming, the spell rotations have, but intrinsically I’m still the same person. I’m a dedicated, hard worker who always looks to be better, to come farther than I have before. I have Metaneira and certainly this blog to thank for that – as well as MMO Champion (I love you, Beebs), Elitist Jerks (EJB represent), WoW.com, and mage theorycrafters like Manly, Euripedes, Lhivera, Ataxus, Kyth, Sancus (even though he calls me fat). An extra big special thanks to my raid team and guild for always supporting me – you guys have put up with me being a horrible mage for four years now. I love you all.
But mostly, I have to thank you readers for making this past (short) year of blogging so amazing – I never thought I’d be in this business of writing down words and having people read them. Or that I’d be helping out countless mages with my thoughts on stuff. So a big thanks to every single person who is out there reading these things now. I know we’ve been kinda quiet lately – personal life stuff, raiding Icecrown and definitely my copy of WoW collapsing in a heap haven’t helped much. But we will return in the New Year with more spicy words than ever – you can buy the whole seat if you want, but you’ll only need the edge.
Who knows what this next year of World of Warcraft and magecraft in general will hold. I know we will be there, together.
(It won’t be going frost. Screw you, frost mages.)
Quick hit: Mage T10 set bonuses
Yes, it is worth breaking the four piece T9 set bonus for two pieces of T10.
Goodnight, everybody!
Metaneira, This One’s For You
I found this on WoW.com’s “Moviewatch” column but I believe it succinctly speaks to how I feel about playing with my best bro gal, Meta. I know you weren’t playing during vanilla, but that’s okay, girl. You’re still old school to me. I’d still get you a Atiesh if I could.
Playing With Fire – Thoughts on the Icecrown 5-Mans
Blizzard has ignited a deep and abiding lust back in my heart – playing as fire spec. Ever since they released the three new 5mans, I have had an insatiable desire to flop back to my abandoned fire spec and blow everything up. Why is this? I guess it is finally time to do something other than run around in a room with no trash for once. Fire is pretty incredible for doing these heroics with – it doesn’t have quite the control that frost does for these places, but it definitely has the excitement and damage that I enjoy.
Ever since I switched from my “primary” spec to my “secondary” spec, it felt like coming home. It was a forbidden, sexy thrill. But let’s not forget about the instances, shall we? › Continue reading
First Impressions: Icecrown Citadel
Ais and I had our first peek at ICC this week. I think it’s safe to say we’re both enjoying the instance: I actually missed trash pulls and Ais is adorably geeking out over the lore. I’ve been a bit distracted during raids lately, but I thought I’d put together a few of my thoughts concerning the fights from the magely perspective.
Marrowgar
I stayed arcane for this fight, with good results: I was able to burst down the bone spikes quickly while doing solid damage to the boss. The only tricky things are the aggro reset after Bone Storms and the Coldflame, which is easily avoidable. (Pop frost ward if you find yourself taking a tick from it, particularly if you have Incanter’s Absorption.)
Lady Deathwhisper
Mages have a lot to do on this fight. In 25 man mode, random raid members will get MC’d, so be quick with a polymorph if you’re able. Depending on your raid’s strategy, you may be required to focus down adds or stay on the boss full time; either way, arcane is probably your best bet. Arcane has the superior threat reduction talents, which is very handy for DPSing down the adds (especially given that establishing and maintaining threat on them can be dicey): Ais stayed fire for this fight and found herself subject to a lot of unwanted attention. When Lady Deathwhisper empowers a Cult Fanatic, the mob will get a decidedly sexy spellstealable buff — these need to be purged off quickly, so you might as well get the benefit from stealing it. Apart from that, the fight is pretty straightforward: kill what you’re assigned to kill, avoid ghosts that are coming towards you, move out of death and decay. Piece of cake.
Faction Warships
I’m gonna level with y’all right now: I got my rocket pack and I promptly stopped listening to anything my raid leaders were saying. (Sorry Weazey and Gradar.) ZOOOM! My role was to stay on defense, so I flopped to FFB, cast living bomb on every single thing in sight, then spent my time doing Rank 9 and Rank 8 flamestrikes followed by blizzard. But, seriously: rocket packs. ROCKET PACKS. Um. I’ll pay more attention this week and report back.
Deathbringer Saurfang
All of the damage on this fight is physical, so buffing everyone with Amplify Magic is a good idea. Three of the four mages in my raid had 2/2 Magic Attunement so we split up the buffing responsibilities. I started out as FFB for the slow applied by the main nuke and so I’d have blast wave to knock back mobs close to me, but after one pull I swapped back to arcane: DPSing the mobs down quickly seemed more beneficial than kiting them around with frostfire bolts.
So, for the first four fights in Icecrown Citadel, arcane still looks to be the most beneficial. Fire or FFB will probably do better on Warships simply because of the AOE capabilities of living bomb explosions, but arcane will still do well enough. In short, arcane will do better on any fight where you’ll need single-target DPS or controlled burst; fire will do very well on any fight with multiple targets tanked near each other.
I think Ais and I have made it abundantly clear that neither of us are going frost any time soon. The buffs simply weren’t enough: simulations show it lagging drastically behind even frostfire bolt. Sorry, frost mages.
I hope you all enjoyed the first taste of ICC! It’ll be a while yet before we get more.
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