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!
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.)
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
Stop the Frost Resist Insanity!
Even though I have many alts and things I could be doing, I often stand around Dalaran on my 80s, like ya do. One of my favorite things is to look for people wearing really stupid gear. You know, hunters in spellpower leather…hunters in defense gear…okay so hunters are really dumb sometimes. Anyways, one of the most glaringly obvious offenses, the one that really drives me nuts – mages in frost resist epics.
At first, back when Wrath started, you could have pawned it off that you just got fresh off a Sapphiron kill (Despite the fact that you didn’t really need it.) But time and time again, long past its scant usefulness, I see mages running around in the trademark azure blue of fail. Why do people do this? Even as far back as Burning Crusade, I used to see mages and warlocks in the epic arcane resist gear too. Is it the draw of the stamina? I’ve seen people trying to pass it off as PVP gear, but with no trinkets in sight. And every time I inspect them, there’s terrible gems of all colours, rarity and cuts. Epics do not necessarily mean better, people. I know none of you wonderful readers are in this category, being smart and logical people.
But really? Really? There’s nothing you could gem for, even with epic gems, that would really beat out solid blues over the epic frost resist pieces. Why would you sink the mats and money into something like this? Go make something else for your tailoring skill-ups! Stop thinking this is a good idea! Step away from the tailoring window, kiddo, and come with us.
Here’s a screenshot of an anonymous offender:
Well let’s see here. Epic gem with two green-rarity cuts. Mana per 5 enchant. Pure intellect cut. This is a hot mess, you know?
I feel bad that there are thought processes in players that lead them to believe that any and all epics must be good. It’s the same process that leads people to not understand what stats mages need! This is why I started this blog, but this is just beyond my understanding. These things take so much resources to create and they are so useless. If you want easy PVP epics, run heroics for badges and buy appropriate gear or go be a squishy arcane mage in Wintergrasp for a while. Save your time and gold for buying craftables from Ulduar or TOC, or just…you know, stop spending money and spend more time reading about mages first and plowing through dungeons and quests for gear. Because stuff like this makes you look like a moron.
If you see anyone like this, take their hand gently and link them this entry.
3.3 Looms On The Horizon
I think everyone can feel the growing storm clouds of 3.3 and how close we are getting to what is to be the last real content patch of this expansion. WoW.com this week effectively “called” that the patch, if no server problems crop up, will be dropping next week. Background downloaders have started sputtering to a start, whispers have grown to a din, and everyone seems to be effectively girding their loins. While there is quite a lot of criticism for how the raid content is being handled (with gating and smaller attempt pools), most people are just excited to finally get their chance to punch Arthas in the face.
So what have you been doing in the meantime, in the long wait for the endgame? I know Meta and myself have been pretty busy little bees lately. Everyone seems to have been up to something to occupy their focus if they didn’t wander away from Warcraft to Dragon Age or Left 4 Dead 2. Our raid team (which Meta is now a part of!) has been eagerly clearing hardmode content in Ulduar to polish off our meta-achievement for raid drakes and being punted by Algalon. I’m not entirely sure that we will get Heroic Anub’arak before the patch drops, but if we are successful this weekend, I at least should be zooming to Icecrown Citadel on a 310 speed drake at long last. Both Meta and I have been focusing on non-magey alts, I a ret/prot paladin, and she a boomkin! (A boomkin, gasp! This is mage sacrilege.) We also have been doing fun things like tons of heroics with friends, and running ZG every week on two sets of characters to get our mages raptors or tiger mounts. (No luck just quite yet on that front.)
I have also been daydreaming about what Icecrown will be like, because I’m a imaginative freako first and a mage second. I dream of us storming Icecrown and seeing all the crazy new bosses and being victorious. I know that for our guild, this raid instance will be the four-year culmination of our namesake and our “story” in the game. Seeing Arthas die will be both an ending to one chapter in our long lives together, but a start of a new one. It sounds all a little hokey, but we’re roleplayers, mannnnn.
As soon as 3.3 hits though, expect lots of amazing updates. We will also be correcting our guides to reflect any changes in the upcoming patch, especially the delicious scorch one!
Comment and tell us what your aspirations for Icecrown are, what you have been doing to kill off the boredom, or any other nattering you want to share!
It’s Turkey Time, Turkey Time, Turkey Time
The time of sharing and feasting has descended upon us here in Azeroth and it is time for the Pilgrim’s Bounty. I don’t know whether one of the holiday developers at Blizzard is a mage or not, but boy howdy, is this ever a holiday for us arcane types. Pilgrim’s Bounty is a holiday designed to make us mages filthy stinkin’ rich and I’m not going to lie – I am definitely close to purchasing a Traveler’s Mammoth. Do you want a cut of this delicious (Stormwind) cheddar? A guide to help you maximize some of the annoying achievements with your mage-ly skills? Then listen up, put on your pilgrim hat, we’re going turkey hunting.
First off – this holiday requires a lot of travel between the cities for the cooking dailies and the cooking one-time questline. While the quests lead you in a fairly direct fashion as to where you must go, they are still pretty far from eachother. You also have to travel to Exodar for the Pilgrim’s Paunch achievement. So obviously, this is where a mage’s portals and teleports are going to help out immensely. And while you’re doing this for yourself – why not make some money while you’re at it?
What I found best was offering up a portal to wherever you were personally going next and then setting up a raid to take donations/tips from people to take them with you. Just use /yell or /say to ask and see how many people you get. Also be on the lookout for people asking for portals at each spot. I’ve made quite a bundle from generous people – 10G tips, offering 5G for a portal somewhere. While it might seem good to have a fixed price, often people will be overjoyed to just tip you well. And you’re keeping in the spirit of sharing! (As we speak, I’ve made 90G while writing this article and standing around in Ironforge.)
This holiday is quite interesting and features Blizzard’s exciting vehicle mechanics, that I am sure confused quite a few people from the outset trying to sit at the table and getting the buffs to work.
But enough jibber-jabber! Onto the achievements, as there are quite a few. (Do remember that these are not for the What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been meta-achievement.)
HOW TO PLAY A MAGE
I don’t know about you guys, but I think we’re going to change our raiding guide to just have this video. As this is all you ever need to know about playing a mage. Ever.
Guki of Eldre’thalas – I don’t know who you are, or what you do, or if you even still play. But I salute you. We salute you.
I am going to finish crying with laughter now.
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