Stepping Out of the Shadows
Aislinana at level 10 - a red-haired pigtailed mage with a simple wand and robe stands on a mountain.
This post was brought to you by sleeplessness, double meanings and the letter N!
I’ve been playing the game for a long time, maybe not as long as some of our readers, but as far back as 2005. For a few years now, every time I wanted to compare my growth as a mage, I always thought back on the stupid mistakes I made as a new mage at 30, or 40. I didn’t know intellect provided spell crit! I didn’t know mages wanted spellpower (although there was relatively none on gear at that point, and given Cataclysm, I was partially anachronistic) and I certainly had no idea about things like macros, strafing, and add-ons.
I hit level 60 very late in the expansion cycle (another term that was relatively unheard of at that point) and got taken on farm status raids like MC and eventually BWL by the giant raid our guild collective ran. I wasn’t a very “good” mage and didn’t consider myself a “raider” until BC. Karazhan, Gruul’s (where I was a mage tank and got to do something important for the first time) is where I really cut my teeth. It is the first time I had a taste of possibly doing good DPS or knowing what that might be. Or that I might have some talent or capacity for being decent. But I was hindered for a long time by still being “new” – we had two new raid teams at that point and I was arguably on the shakier of the two. Eventually I left that team out of frustration and followed my friend (who is now my boyfriend) at the time up to the better progression raid as a back-up. I remember being overwhelmed by some of the hardest fights of the game at the time – Kael’thas taught me about things like focus frames and macros for counterspelling a focus target. I was also held back quite a lot by my computer resources at the time. Trying to do Hyjal and Black Temple competitively was hard at 4 FPS. Survivability was also dicey and so I was definitely a liability to my raid. (Though I managed to do really well on Archimonde!) It made me feel sad and incompetent for a long time but I had fun, even as a back-up, because I felt if I kept showing up, kept proving my worth, they’d enjoy having me along eventually. It wasn’t until I got some loaned parts from my friend Adrine, and consequently had better frame rates and such that I could use more things like cast bar mods and do pretty good DPS. I wasn’t the best but my movement and understanding of fights was increasing. I even pulled threat on a boss one time. The entire raid was so shocked that we all had a good laugh. At that point though, it was fairly hard to get a main slot though – our caster slots were fairly well-filled so I remained just a faithful backup even throughout Sunwell.
Coming into Wrath meant two things: I was no longer a back-up and being responsible in a lot of ways I hadn’t needed to before. It meant I had to be there every raid day, for one. I also had to get on things like raid add-ons and all that jazz. But I levelled quickly to 80 and started doing Naxx as soon as I could. I started hitting Elitist Jerks, talking with other mages and compiling some idea of gear requirements. I got our first and only one of two Turning Tides we ever got in our guild. Part of this was motivated by remembering how long I went without weapon upgrades as a back-up. Part of this was gaining an understanding of what “BIS” meant.
This entire time I’ve been growing, changing and learning more as a mage. But it isn’t until now, at the end of Wrath, that I’ve actually felt like I’ve reached a place where I don’t think of myself as that scared, shitty back-up anymore. It’s taken that long to step out of the long shadows cast by other mages, other players in my raid and mostly my own fears and self-esteem. Funny how this happens only after starting a mage blog, being asked to given my advice on other mages’ gear as well as getting close to BIS 277 gear. For the first time in my entire WoW career, I feel…capable. And it is strange and exciting. Well, as exciting as feeling “good” in a video game does. I still don’t run a damage meter in-game (I only use World of Log parses) and I still don’t think I don’t like arcane that much but I can say I’m decent and capable at 2 PVE specs. I thoroughly understand boss mechanics and feel confident to explain them to people (except Yogg-1 light this week, oops.) I even have a really amazing computer now (for taking screenshots, of course.) This doesn’t mean I still don’t make mistakes though, I think I just understand why they occur better at this point!
I’ve enjoyed being a mage for so long, and I feel that Cataclysm will be yet another level of improvement. I doubt I’ll ever be as good at math as someone like Lhivera or as professional as Ataxus but for where I am at, I think I’m doing alright. I look forward to the challenges that await in the next expansion and I’m glad I’ll have all of you guys right here with me as I make mistakes and learn new things. It’s been a long, strange trip. I’ll just have to keep all of this in mind the next time I start feeling like being a jerk to newer mages or facepalming my head when I see someone gemming for intellect. The one thing I’ll note is that mages nowadays have a lot more help than I did back when I first started out and should avail themselves of it, I know I do! Other than that, I think I’ll be alright.
(My deepest apologies for my radio silence for a while, being an awesome mage also requires having less scary things in your real life going on.)
A Tree Grows in Beta – 31 Point Talents and Specializations
An image of the new 31 point talent trees for mages from beta.
On Tuesday, the latest beta build (build 12479) got rolled out along with some major changes – not only did Deepholm get opened up for level testing, but the new 31 point talent trees that the boards have been buzzing about since Zarhym dropped the bomb a week ago. My first thought on seeing the new trees was, “Oh my god, is that it?” (Insert “That’s what she said” joke here.) They really are very small, very concentrated. But are they enough? It looks like Blizzard really does want to pare down most of the passivity and go straight for novelty, fun stuff and power. But most people, like me, are definitely questioning how useful some of these talents will be.
At first glance, it looks like there are still a very straight division between “PVP” and “PVE” talents, with the exception being that you have to take some of the fun (or PVP-oriented) talents to flesh out a PVE/raiding build. While this might provide slight utility or benefits to raiders, it makes me wonder how useful they truly will be over the long run. Things like Improved Blink definitely have a place considering how high movement fights are right now in ICC, but will that change in Cataclysm?
MMO-Champion has provided a talent calculator for the new builds here, if you want to look for yourself: http://wowtal.com.
Let’s take a look at some of the talents and specialization aspects of the new trees.
RealID and Forums: Your Name, Please
Blizzard, I’m so beyond disappointed in you right that it physically hurts.
Today Blizzard announced that in the near future, with the release of Starcraft II and Cataclysm, no doubt, that RealID will be implemented on the forums to further display your real life name next to all of your posts. This has already created an outcry louder and stronger than any other in the Blizzard community in the past and revealed a hotbed of further cynicism and aggression towards RealID.
I had my misgivings about even the implementation of the RealID “friends list” feature because it seemingly had glaring security and personal privacy issues. I have even tried it out for the purposes of seeing how bad the system was and reporting it back to you, but this unfortunately came up before I could even address it. Blizzard purported not even a couple weeks ago that RealID was to be used for “real life friends” and people you could “trust with sensitive real life information.” So how does this fit into that scheme? It doesn’t, and it seems like this has all been calculated and figured out long before this went public. I’ve had some fun using the RealID system on my friends list, even with my concerns, even with people who aren’t my real life friends. While it felt a little weird exposing my real life name to some people that I had known only in-game, these were all people I had a vested personal interest in over a long period of time – cross-server buddies I knew from Elitist Jerks, guildmates who often played alts, and friends I knew strongly in other guilds via Wow Ladies. There were already some issues I didn’t like – the friends of friends feature being the biggest. I did have random people add me from X’s friends list and therefore thought I was a guildmate with X on another server. The conversations with a RealID and a third person I didn’t know exposed my real name to them. These were all minor, however, and at this time I’ve had no substantial problems with the service.
This however, is another kettle of fish.
I’m appalled at the idea that this is resulting from a systemic problem with flaming and trolls and that using personal accountability with real life names will somehow reform this. On the long, slippery curve to online transparency, a lot of people will have their liberties and privacy crushed, and many more people will be hurt than will be harmed before everything is said and done. While it is nice to think that the utopian online society has everyone being responsible because of their real names being used as tentative collateral in the social contract, it ultimately fails because of people with privilege. Privilege to disregard or not understand that there are still very few consequences for the aggressor and quite a lot of consequences for the aggressed. Anonymity is not only a glamor that one uses to express themselves on Internet, or a cloak by which to hide behind, but a form of security that some people quite desperately need for both their sanity and their personal safety. As we’ve seen in the past couple of years, the incidence of personal information being abused has gone up and there’s still very little protections for people who are caught up in this mess, despite the complete shift of the social media from anonymous to real life identification.
It makes me sad that Blizzard is participating in this with RealID. It speaks unquestionably of a privilege that Blizzard as a company has to not understand its players wants and needs, nor its support staff. For everyone on the general forums crowing about having a non-unique name, there’s quite a few who do. There’s quite a few people who’ve been the targets of Internet harassment and stalking (myself included), quite a few people who would have liked to use the service but now cannot. There’s also quite a few people who wish to use an Internet handle due to the fact that their legal name is no longer an option or appropriate to their identity. There’s quite a few people who are not legally allowed to have their name displayed on the Internet.
What happens to all of these people? Why were these people not considered? I can’t say that this is a vocal minority anymore, Blizzard. And it saddens me that you’ve gone so far now and done so little for the people who’ve gotten you there. By creating this use of the service, not only have they silenced the trolls, but they’ve also effectively silenced everyone else who cares enough about their identity and safety (and jobs! who knew!) to keep their real name safe. In their rush to be the next Facebook (despite being a stupid gaming company), they’ve made an incredibly stupid move. Whether or not I continue to support Blizzard, the company who’s been helping me through my own harassment, remains to be seen. This is an incredibly hurtful blow to their user base.
Empowered Fire Does Beta – In Real Time!
So the Blizzard finally lifted the NDA it has had on the Cataclysm beta, and that means the Empowered Fire can finally start talking about all the things you want to know about. We’re currently trying to get Metaneira in the beta with me, since I was lucky enough to be in alpha. Sorry that we haven’t been immediately on top of ALL of the information coming out of the various WoW media sites – updated talent trees, new spells and mastery, etc. There’s a lot of stuff to sort through and test but I figured out an awesome thing that we can do in the meantime and for the next couple of months – live beta streaming.
I set up a video account on Justin.tv, which will allow us to stream stuff that I do in beta and will be streaming at random times during the week, but mostly on the nights when I don’t have raids or during the day. If you want to know when a stream is going live, just go to our Twitter (@empoweredfire) and watch for updates on when and what is going on. If you want to ask questions or suggest something you want to see, use the hashtag #efdoesbeta or chat in provided stream page. This is all a new experiment so bear with me as I try to figure out how this all works!
First official stream event will be Tuesday, July 6th at 7 PM Eastern Standard time – Goblin Starting Zone.
I will be rolling another goblin mage and going through the first 10 or more levels so people can see how the starting zone looks.
Hopefully this is as exciting for you guys as it is for me, and cross your fingers that this works as intended. Be sure to check Twitter and the stream at random times to see when I’m just random streaming from Cataclysm Beta.
Switchin’ It Up For ICC Hardmodes
As the ICC buff continues goes up and up and raids wear on and on, more and more of the raiding community has been tackling hardmodes. I know this is definitely true for my raid team, as we’re now 10 out of 12 hardmodes in Icecrown. While I definitely favor FireTTW spec for my overall play, there’s definitely 2 fights where arcane is just that much better, if you need the burst. If you play arcane continuously, there’s also some fights where Fire might benefit you. The whole situation just comes down to understanding the mechanics well enough to know the pros and cons of the situation. Most of the real critical DPS checks have been lessened by the 25 percent buff on most servers and will only get easier as we approach 30 percent.
The two fights in question are Lady Deathwhisper and Saurfang hardmodes. Why do I go arcane for these fights instead of fire? FOR THE BURST, MON! Lady D and Saurfang both have adds or add phases that are critical to DPS down as ranged, and arcane definitely helps with that. While fire, in my gear, does better damage overall, you really can’t be some of the cooldowns that arcane has available.
Lady Deathwhisper Hardmode: One of the reasons I initially switched to arcane on LDW is just because having Living Bomb do splash damage on Mind Control targets was not cool, and omitting that portion of my spells from the fight was a huge waste of DPS. This fight really brings every mage skill into question, no doubt. What might you be doing besides DPSing?
Spellstealing – There’s a buff that goes up on a lot of the adds you will be DPSing down (Fanatics) and that is not only a boost to your spellpower, but also makes the adds easier to DPS since they won’t be healing themselves. You might also be spellstealing buffs that get applied to Lady Deathwhisper by her mind-control targets in your raid. Fun ones are things like Earth Shield, or Power Infusion. I’ve even stolen Focus Magic off of her.
Counterspelling – Interrupting her casts in Phase 2 when she’s throwing out Frostbolts and Frostbolt Volleys is pretty important and might give your melee a break if no one is on the boss.
Polymorphing – Being on top of crowd control in Phase 1 when your raidmates get mind controlled is very crucial. Polymorph is a strong CC for members of the raid who aren’t directly in melee range, as I’ve found most of the sheep get broken if they are anywhere near the melee blender on adds. So stick to things like your ranged or healers, melee if you absolutely have to stop that rogue with all their cooldowns up from ganking your priests mid-fight.
Blink and Frost Ward also come in handy for getting away from bad things (Death and Decay, Vile Spirits in P2) or reducing damage in P2 when she Frostbolt Volleys. Never hesitate to use secondary abilities.
Secondary abilities aside, arcane’s DPS just won out here just due to the fact that we were having some problems with splash damage injuring our mind control victims. When you are learning a fight, this is pretty important and killing off folks early usually means a wipe later on, if not immediately. So switching to arcane didn’t feel like a big deal. And considering the fact that we needed a lot of burst on adds, it made it the optimal choice. While the heavy movement of the fight means I do suffer a little bit, overall, the benefits to the raid are immense. If you’re not having problems with splash damage, it might be alright to stay fire.
Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang – I’m almost positive some raids could swing mages being fire for this fight but I opt for arcane just because I routinely tear up add DPS as arcane. Most strats that raids suggest for this fight have ranged taking individual Blood Beasts as their focus before splitting off to help other range. I tend to stand near the back of the semi-circle on the left hand side because it is fairly easy for me to grab aggro on my beast and do a lot of DPS before it ever reaches me. I then switch and help the other ranged on my side. Arcane is very, very useful in this because if you save your cooldowns for beast phases, you can pump out a ton of damage on them and make this fight got a lot smoother. Having access to more channeled casts and high damage quick casts makes this optimal as arcane. What I try to do is watch the cooldown timer for the Blood Beasts and stack up Arcane Blast so that I have as much DPS for the one or two casts I can get off on the beasts before they get pushed back and then continue on DPSing them down once they are back in range. This means I have threat on them right away and they don’t go snarling off at a healer or a closer DPS. Don’t be afraid to pop off arcane missles or even an Arcane Barrage to polish off Beasts that are on someone else and have little health left. Beasts hitting a raid member just makes the fight harder for your healers, as Saurfang gains more runic power and the raid member might die from the melee swings.
So now that we’ve discussed why switching to arcane as FireTTW spec on certain hardmodes is beneficial, let’s discuss why fire is so useful elsewhere in ICC.
MOAR Damage?: Fire tends to scale a little better with 264/277 gear, but it really is a toss-up. However, the stats on a lot of the good 277 tier gear and off-set pieces favor Fire in terms of hit/crit budgeting. Well-geared arcane and fire come very close to eachother most of the time though.
Range: This is a big reason why I love fire on most fights. Arcane just doesn’t have the range of fire, especially if you stick with 1/2 or 2/2 Flame Throwing in your fire builds. There’s really no substitute for having options in where you stand because your primary spells can hit from the 35 and 41 yard range. This comes in handy on things like hardmode Putricide and Dreamwalker.
Mobility: Given that fire has more and higher DPS instant casts (Living Bomb/Fire Blast/Pyroblast where applicable), the mobility aspect comes into play on fights that require a lot of movement. You just have better DPS uptime when you’re not in fear of losing your Arcane Blast stack, or clearing it off with Arcane Barrage in an attempt to gain some DPS during high movement portions of the fight.
Splash Damage: This is mostly in regards to Heroic Gunship (lol) and Lich King. Living Bomb’s damage on adds (such as Shambling Horrors, Valkyries) is pretty amazing and not only churns out more Hot Streak procs but does quite a lot of collateral damage on ghouls and other adds that are in range. What I like to do during LK is keep Living Bomb up on him as well as Horrors (which has a lot of splashing on Drudge Ghouls), and also use my trusty Living Bomb macro to DoT up all the Valks so that they splash onto eachother as they are travelling along the same vector. You get a lot of instant damage (including Pyroblasts) this way. And that can be crucial going into Hardmode LK attempts.
The long and the short of it is that while there are mage specs suited more for some of the fights, I’d opt to say that arcane and fire do roughly the same damage in the hands of people who play the class well and there is no substitute for gearing and speccing as you feel more comfortable with, especially this late in the expansion. However, the things I outlined are just some of the ways you can get a little bit of the edge on some of the fights you may encounter while doing ICC hardmodes. Hope you enjoy!
Blizzard Stamps Out Inappropriate Names in Arena Tournament
This is a rather small post and comes in a few days late, but can I tell you how happy it made me to see this blue post? Blizzard really making a stand on inappropriate names and team charters on the tourney realm is a positive first step towards hopefully having a lot tighter strictures on what things can be used as a name in World of Warcraft. The fact that it is directly targeting the PVP crowd in the tournament doesn’t strike me as odd – I’ve seen quite a few wildly inappropriate names pass by my screen in my limited time playing arenas. It feels like the incidence of this goes up just because arena teams are so much more proliferate and tend to gather people who have no problem cracking inappropriate jokes about other ethnicities, genders, and unfortunately sexual assault.
I can only hope that this careful eye oozes into the general server policing for guild names and such – I think a lot of us would be a lot happier not having to run around seeing people under the tag, “Sapped Girls Can’t Say No.” While GM time is quite limited right now with account restorations and other problems, the fact that this is going on at all gives me an indication that they do take this very seriously and might enforce it better in the future elsewhere.
Sunwell’d Again – Heroic Lich King World First
So the game so far is officially “beaten” by Paragon (Lightning’s Blade-EU) until Ruby Sanctum comes out. They took down Heroic Lich King 25M last week and the whole Warcraft world exhaled again. As the dust settled, the logs were reviewed and scoured, forum posts were made and people noted that there were entirely no mages on their kill. (Same goes for DPS shaman as well, but this is a mage blog, so that’s what I took notice of.)
Kyth over at Strat-Fu made this insightful post about the composition and their choices, and while I agree with her dissemination, I do not necessarily draw the same conclusions. I can’t say I have the same insight as a mage who has raided in the top 20 of raiding for the past couple of years. There’s a different standard for composition when you are gunning for rated kills, and expectations that far exceed what I’ve ever encountered or produced in raiding. So take my words with some casual salt, I might advise. But I feel raiding guilds leaving out entire classes from top kills is a failure of the system. Competitive raiding requires that someone gets the kill first and the edge that gets them there can’t be begrudged, perhaps. However, I feel that you can blame Blizzard for some of this. “Bring the player, not the class” has an odd and ironic sting to it right about now.
Zarhym considers ICC some of their most interesting and challenging content to date and I’ve heard that Heroic Lich King is on par, if not harder than old chestnuts of the past like Mu’ru and Yogg-0 Light in terms of pure ball-busting terror. So why do I feel that this assessment is inaccurate in terms of success? It is another case where Blizzard makes fights that specifically plays to a certain mechanic or set of mechanics from classes but leaves other classes in the dust in terms of competing. Thankfully, unlike Sunwell, mages are at least coming neck and neck with rogues and warlocks in DPS, but we still fall very short on high single-target DPS that doesn’t sacrifice multiple-target AOE (and vice-versa). This is the key to why Heroic Lich King firsts are not for us. Even our single target DPS up until now relied very heavily on Incanter’s Absorption if you wanted to remain competitive, which required taking additional damage and being effectively babysat by disc priests and paladins. I guess I just don’t agree with Zarhym’s crowing from a magely perspective. ICC has been a big fat lot of annoying nonsense as a mage. Sure, the fights provide a lot more interesting challenges, but I can’t help but feel that as a ranged DPSer, and mostly as a mage, that we were not the audience being catered to in this content.
I don’t want to sound incredibly unhappy, because I’m not. I’m sure some of this ICC rankling comes from the fact that our raid is incredibly melee-oriented. We have all the caster buffs we could want, for sure, but our strategies and perspectives tip heavily towards our melee. The fact that a lot of fights from their outset rely on ranged and casters to essentially hop-skip-jump around while melee are gleefully single-targetting the bosses makes me feel that this is not just isolated to my particular raid group. The Citadel has felt like one long list of half-fixes and short-sticks when it comes to mage DPS, mage strategies and most importantly, mage fun. We’re not being replaced by six shaman and 5 warlocks like Sunwell, but I feel we’ve gotten the rub in this patch.
So congratulations to Paragon on their kill. I’m pretty sure their mages aren’t crying about being left out because if you enjoy being in a guild like that, your raid comes before your individual participation. But I feel for the rest of us who probably would feel left out of their raid’s crowning victory over some of the hardest content in the game. And for no reason other than being a day late and a dollar short on cutting-edge DPS mechanics for fights in Icecrown. I feel it is antithetical to Blizzard’s motto to have fight mechanics that completely obliterate the need to bring a certain pure DPS class in order to edge out other guilds to a first kill. Is that competitive raiding trying to beat Blizzard at its own game or is that entirely Blizzard’s fault? That I do not know. I just hope raiding guilds don’t catch onto Staff of Conjuring, or we will all be out of jobs.
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!
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