Naming violations in WoW
Earlier this week, a poster on WoW_Ladies made a comment about how she often reports names in violation of the naming policies using the in-game ticket feature. While it takes a few days for her to get an automated GM response, she would go back to the toons’ armory pages to see that nothing had changed. I’m sure most of us have found a toon’s name that was completely out of line; some of us ignored it and kept playing, some of us, like that LJ poster, spoke up and tried to change it.
The naming policies of WoW are multi-tiered. “Highly inappropriate” encompasses racial, ethnic, or national slurs; mentions of extreme sexuality or violence; references to sexual orientation (note: Blizzard prohibits names which “refer to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players” — meaning that even gay-positive names are in violation); or any name containing obscene or vulgar language. Interestingly, names which are designed to harass another user or a Blizzard employee fall in the middle tier of infractions: it’s apparently worse to name your toon “Sapphiclover” than it is to name it “Metaneiraisfat”. (Don’t register that name; it’s probably too many characters.) The other rules are largely ignored by the gaming population: no trademarked words, no references to famous people alive or dead, no phrases (e.g., “Iamacow”), no real world titles (so “Sirmixalot” violates two of those rules). Players are also encouraged to create names that fit within the gaming universe: naming your blood elf hunter “Legolas” doesn’t work in the world of Azeroth. But, again, people are pretty lenient about these: I think it’s safe to say that most quality players ignore anyone with a name like that as being subpar.
But let’s go back to the top tier of offenses — “Highly Inappropriate”. (Trigger warning: sexual, homophobic and racial slurs are used, as well as terms referencing sexual assault.) › Continue reading
What’s in a main?
I started playing WoW in January of 2008, following a pretty intense break-up. (Because the best cure for a broken heart is a socially crippling hobby, amirite?) Meta was the first character I rolled, the first character I got to 70 on, and the first character I raided with. I lucked out in that a guild on my server actually needed a mage in T6/SWP content: I was in the process of leveling up a resto shaman so I could be more appealing to recruiting guilds, but a guild actually took me to Black Temple instead of just summoning me to ZA to drop a table and then booting me from the raid. I worked hard to make sure I’d be a good raider: read pages upon pages of theorycrafting, redid my professions over and over (including leveling tailoring to max twice), picked up badge gear, and happily respecced to provide whatever buff my raid needed. Most people I knew in my raiding guild had a few alts, but very few of them at max level, and even fewer had toons that could manage anything besides half a Kara run. Having an alt who could do T5/T6 content was virtually unheard of on my server, apart from the top guild who’d take their own alts in on farm content.
After a few months on the raiding scene, I finally got my priest up to 70, but by then the 3.0 nerf was in place and I could take her COH-spamming butt into Kara and Mag’s with no problems at all. When Wrath hit, I leveled up my mage, got plenty of heirloom pieces, and managed to get my warrior to 80 before Ulduar hit. I started tanking Naxx 10 and 25 on my off-nights, and gearing her up past the first hurdle of getting def-capped for raids was no problem at all. Badge gear was even easier to get than at the end of BC.
Now we’re near the end of the expansion: Cata looms on the horizon. › Continue reading
New mage forums!
Our friend Gazimoff of Mana Obscura has started a forum community for all of us mages! It’s still in beta, but feel free to stop by, register, and start talking with lots of other mages. A lot of bloggers you may know have signed up, and we have the full gamut of players from alt mages who haven’t yet learned riding skill to mages who are bravely attacking hard mode ICC each week. So whether you’ve just rolled a mage and are learning the ropes or you’ve been slinging fireballs since Vanilla, come check out the forums and chat with us! Aislinana and I both signed up on day one, so you can see us there.
The forums are designed to be friendly and inclusive: all mages are welcome and any sort of discrimination or slurs are not permitted. (Well, we do make fun of warlocks.) I know I’m already loving the opportunity to converse with other mages I’ve followed and respected from everything about theorycrafting to keybinds to the ever-changing Cataclysm mechanics. Hope to see you there!
I guess it doesn’t bend that way!
I dunno what happened with the site, but I am aware that there is a problem. I’m looking into it. Unfortunately, my web prowess seems to have peaked around 1999 so if I end up replacing it with a Geocities look-alike with animated gifs proclaiming we’re under construction, well, you’ll know why.
Things in the works: more beta streaming and commentary from Ais, a post about warrior tanking for heroics and 10 mans, and a post about the evolution of a feminist gamer. Good stuff, we hope!
If anyone can offer me assistance, feel free to hit me up on the Twitter: @MetaneiraB. Until then, I’ll be randomly poking at buttons until I either fix the site or produce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Edit – Fixed! Another problem solved by my own ingenuity and hard work, and not at all by pure luck.
I’m still just Metaneira.
Real names on forums will not be going live.
I can’t express how grateful I am to hear this. Both Aislinana and I canceled our accounts yesterday in protest over the decision to link real names to our accounts when posting on the forums. Many, many bloggers, forum denizens, and even non-WoW players spoke out against the decision, and I’m glad that we were heard. (You know something’s big when your friends or relatives who only dimly know you play this game forward you links about the controversy.)
Ais and I are in voice chat right now, almost giddy. Yes, there are still major problems with RealID: there are still exploitable security holes, the friend-of-a-friend “feature” still causes concern, and while it works cross-games, cross-servers, cross-factions, it is not cross-regional (a shame since I have a couple of good WoW friends across the pond with whom I would trust my RealID info). But … yesterday we were mourning a game we loved because the security risk was too high a price to pay for our own enjoyment. So many of our friends and guildmates canceled their accounts within the past few days, people we had planned on playing with into Cataclysm. Now we feel we can do that again. Our guild will still be alive (and as Northrend Commonwealth, not Tatooine Commonwealth), we’ll still have internet dragons to slay. There are still issues with the system, and I’m still not comfortable with the whole “you got your Facebook in my video game” ethos they’re moving towards, but at least today I feel like Metaneira can go back home.
Ais will be streaming some beta stuff today, I believe (she stopped when I called her to cheer about the change), and I’ll likely be joining her soon. But right now we’re just figuring out how to re-up our accounts:
Ais: How do you un-unsubscribe?
Meta: I don’t know, I’ve never done it!
See you in Azeroth, mages and friends. Welcome home.
Enough about fire, let’s talk about the “empowered” bit.
Another long absence from Ais and me, but do not despair: your mages are still here, just caught up real world issues again. I’ve had the pleasure of actually running into readers of this blog in LFD groups, and I can’t express how happy I am that this site has been a help to others. If you’re Alliance in the Whirlwind battlegroup, keep an eye out for us. We love hearing from you.
We talk quite a bit about mages here, but the “feminism” aspect has been pretty quiet. It occurs to me that a lot of people reading this may be coming to the blog solely for the mage aspect, and yet some people don’t seem to get why we say “feminist” in the blog description. A lot of the flak we get for promoting ourselves as feminist is the same flak any person gets for saying that f-word, but I’ll take a few moments to go over basic tenets and terminology, dispel some misconceptions, and talk about how feminism interacts with WoW. Keep in mind that “feminism” is a word encompassing a lot of different beliefs and attitudes, and that even Ais and I do not agree on everything within the scope of feminist thought.
The Mini-Games of WoW
The World of Warcraft is, to put it mildly, huge. Not just geographically, but the sheer number of things that one can do within the gamespace is mind-boggling. Heroics, raids, questing, professions, battlegrounds, arenas, reputation grinds, achievements, leveling alts, making money off the Auction House… the list goes on. And if you talk to every player, I imagine each one will have one aspect of the game that they care about more than most, perhaps even something that you can’t comprehend. Most everyone I’ve talked to knows an AH guru: someone who watches the auctions and the gold roll in, having more money than he or she knows what to do with. Some people roll alts so often, on so many different servers, that they have yet to get a max level character. Aislinana and our friend Probata are currently working on The Insane achievement (something I’m staying very, very far away from, thanks). I know more than a few people whose goal is to have an 80 of every class, and Ais and I even have a guildmate who has fishing maxed out on every one of his toons. Some of these may sound like fun; some may sound like an incredible waste of time; but it’s the players’ 15 bucks a month and however people choose to spend their time in game is their business, provided it’s not spent griefing other players.
For a long time, I didn’t really know what my “mini-game” was. I enjoy leveling up professions: I gather all the mats at once, mail them to that toon, and powerlevel a profession from 1 to max as quickly as possible. (I did Enchanting from 1 to 400 in a day so I could enchant my rings, having decided Herbalism wasn’t a worthwhile profession for my mage.) I have quite a few alts, but a lot of them get stuck around 60-70: I lose interest as soon as I think about the grind of gearing them up for raiding, even though that grind is much, much easier now. I have a fair chunk of gold (though Ais and I both ended up getting a bit drunk and buying Traveler’s Tundra Mammoths one night, haha), but I don’t enjoy playing the AH. And I loathe questing: I started playing WoW post 2.3, when questing provided much more XP. Even now, Meta doesn’t have 3k quests done, and I’m not sure she ever will.
So what’s my game? As weird as it is to admit, it’s min/maxing. And not just at the level cap, where it’s almost expected. I mentioned earlier that Ais and I rolled low-level alts to play together: a human warlock for her and dwarf hunter for me. That hunter is now level 47, has seven pieces of BoA gear (enchanted where applicable), has dual-spec as a pure DPS class, and has respecced four times. Four. At level 47, with 20% XP increases. I buy scrolls for her. I enchant her gear. I carry elixirs of agility and intellect. I’m leveling up cooking so she can have a stamina buff. All for a level 47 hunter who, I hate to say it, ends up tanking almost all her LFD groups. (It was better when my ex-boyfriend was tanking on his warrior: now I usually just CC a mob, use my pet to taunt off the healer, and then multi-shot/volley my way through the rest of them, feigning death when necessary.) She is a formidable force in Warsong Gulch though: something about a female dwarf hunter riding a sparkle pony just drives the Horde into a frenzy. Still, hunters are slightly overpowered at my level and I can manage to take out quite a few of them. I’m tempted to switch my dual spec (currently BM) to a full PVP spec, complete with a PVP pet. (Though, ew, spider.)
When I first started playing Birna, I asked a hunter friend dozens of questions: what glyph should I get for leveling? Should I go BM or Marks if I’m mainly leveling through LFD? Should I put points in Rapid Killing even though I don’t have the Rapid Fire talent yet? The hunter kept telling me that she didn’t know, that she played the game at 80 and wasn’t sure what would work at my level. And I wasn’t satisfied with that. I know it’s a game, but for me, part of the fun is doing the best I can, at any level. It’s why I specced my second priest (Horde-side) discipline, because I knew I could shield everyone, glyph for holy nova, and top both healing and DPS meters for the first 40 levels. It’s why I wrote a leveling guide explaining how to best grind out a mage level by level. No, not everyone cares about playing the game this way. But I do: I love looking at talent trees, playing with unusual builds, trying to see if I can get procs to interact with each other in interesting ways. I love that I can pick out a mage build and then compare it to the smarty-pants on Elitist Jerks and find they’ve done the same thing I’ve done. (Or if not, that I can argue and re-check my math and spend more time tweaking it.) I like to think I have a fairly intuitive grasp on player talents, even ones I don’t play. (Except Death Knights. Holy crap, just put all the tanking talents in one tree for chrissakes.)
The way I play is not the way everyone plays; nor is it the way everyone should play. I do think that people should invest some time and effort into improving their character, though: WoW is a team activity and your not taking the time to learn how to play to the best of your ability wastes the time of other real-life people. But I also don’t expect every player to have spreadsheets on how to gear their level 54 arms warrior. Yeah, you may think I’m crazy, but, hey: I can proudly say I’ve done fewer poop quests than most of you have.
Min/maxing is my mini-game. What’s yours?
Raiding Guide: Updated!
Howdy, mages! Working on a couple of projects right now but I managed to (finally) update the raiding guide for 3.3.3! A lot of the “base” specs changed (arcane and frost), and I expanded upon the arcane spell rotation guide and added information about how the tier ten set bonuses affect your rotations. (Yes, even for you, frost mages! Turns out there was quite a few things that needed updating for you.) 10% buff went into effect last night, so make sure your specs and rotations are tweaked and get ready to be beaten on the meters by melee who never have to switch targets! Whoo!
Ais and I are keeping busy in-game: she’s been scheming with another mage friend of ours on how best to do the achievement which I shall not name, and we’ve both been leveling lowbie alts with a good friend’s new prot warrior: she has a warlock (I know, blasphemy) and I’m becoming quite attached to my dwarf hunter (shutup, “Find Treasure” is an amazing racial). Life is good in Azeroth, and in the real world as well: spring is here! I might actually spend time outside again. 
And if any of you are leveling up lowbie alts and see a struggling mage, feel free to point him or her to our site for the leveling guide. I’ll be tweaking it in the next few days to suit mages who are leveling through LFD as often as possible, so keep an eye out for that. Thanks!
On tanking, mages, and why rogues should die in fires
I know Ais has already apologized for the lack of updates, but I’m going to throw in another apology from myself. The past few months have been fairly hectic in that “real life” thing I occasionally indulge in: interviewing for new jobs, having a relationship end (and on the day before Valentine’s Day, too, which is good because I hadn’t met my dramatic irony quota that month), and generally trying to get more organized and focused. I’m doing pretty well now, though, and can invest more energy in projects like this site.
In game, I’ve been spending a lot more time on my tanks: my 80 prot warrior and my 80 prot paladin. Maybe it’s just making up for years of being squishy, but I love standing in front of bosses and protecting my raid. There’s still a lot of pressure in tanking: blowing your cooldowns at the right moment, making sure you’re positioning the mobs in the best possible way (I like to face them towards Ais’s boyfriend so he gets cleaved), and pushing buttons frantically to stay on top of the DPS who are just dying to rip aggro off of you. (Okay, the paladin tanking isn’t so much frenzied button pushing as lazily hitting them in order. I love my pally but warrior tanking is much more interesting and dynamic.) And yet, I don’t feel as stressed while tanking: no one’s going to spam Recount after a battle and point out how I did compared to everyone else. I can focus on being a member of a team, and working with everyone to achieve a certain goal. It’s a nice change of pace from DPSing on my mage, where I’m almost secretly hoping a rogue stands in fire and dies so I’ll beat him on the charts. I’m more than happy to give up ten-man raiding on my mage in favor of doing it on one of my shield-wearing girls.
But I do love my mage, and ICC has gotten better for Ais and me lately. I think the ranged DPS in our raid have really started working together to point out how we can make the fights a bit easier on us, and we’re beginning to function as a team. Tensions were high for a while, but I think our melee have finally realized that it’s not that half our raid is bad, it’s that the fights and our strategies for them were vastly favoring their playstyle. We’ve adapted some strategies, aired our frustrations, and I think we’re back to being a fairly laidback, happy group. (Until I watch someone keyboard turning to run out of Sindragosa’s death-grip, that is. RAGE.)
Enough about what I’ve been up to. Here’s a few of my thoughts about mage raiding in ICC:
1) Incanter’s Absorption is still worth it if you can get shielded reliably. In my raid, we’ve done crazy things where I’ll get fed shields on Rotface while I’m standing in the slime to DPS. The numbers I put out are nuts, but it just seems so gimmicky and stupid. I am actually looking forward to the nerf: too many mage mechanics are already dependent on very particular and often dumb things (Torment the Weak, I’m looking at you), and IA has always felt cheap to me. Is it fun to get shielded and watch your spellpower shoot up? Sure. But I don’t like sucking up to a disc priest and then standing in fire just to do more damage. (Note: this is no longer relevant after 3.3.3: IA is not nearly as valuable as it was since it only procs off of your own frost/fire ward and mana shield.)
2) Once you get two piece mage T10, your rotation may change slightly. The top DPS rotation still is stacking Arcane Blast to four and then using Arcane Missiles when Missile Barrage procs. However, the haste boost from consuming MBAM means that your less mana-intensive rotations aren’t that far off from the highest DPS rotation. If mana is a problem for you, don’t feel bad about using MBAM when it procs after the second, third, or fourth AB.
3) Four piece mage T10 is the most ridiculously awesome set bonus in the world. Other set bonuses look at mage T10 and weep, for they will never be so amazing. It’s especially fun when we do our weekly raid quests in Naxx and have a fight that lasts only 45 seconds—you just can’t touch a mage who blows Quad Core, Arcane Power, Icy Veins, and trinket(s), and who doesn’t have to worry about mana. I am actually really surprised it hasn’t been nerfed yet.
3) Yes, we’ve heard about proposed fire changes. I think that with the IA nerf, the combustion change (down to two minutes from three, thank goodness), pyroblast now benefitting from TtW, and the Glyph of Fireball change (instead of 5% crit, the cast time on fireball is reduced by .15 seconds), fire might be more in-line with arcane mages. Maybe. Arcane gives you controlled burst and amazing single-target DPS, which are both crucial in ICC encounters. Fire does well with multiple targets, but so far that’s only Gunship. (Dreamwalker has lots of adds, but they need to be burst down quickly and a lot of them won’t be up long enough for living bomb to explode.) But we’ll see: I know Ais is itching to get back to blowing stuff up with fireballs.
4) I hate trinkets so much. So very much. I lucked out and got a Muradin’s on my first ICC 10 run, but my guild has seen exactly one Reign drop in our TOC runs. Another one dropped on a pug Ais and I were in, and it went to a warlock in our guild—who then picked up the first (and only) DFO we’ve seen. I was trying to move away from the years-long feud between mages and warlocks and instead unite ourselves against rogues and DKs, but, man. *shakes fist at our warlock guildmate* I just know I’m going to be using Talisman of Resurgence until Cataclysm. (Of course, that’s not the worst of it: if I want to go back to fire for a boss fight, Rawr tells me I should use Dying Curse. *twitch* I’ll stay arcane, thanks.) Trinkets can suck my non-existent junk.
But, all in all, WoW has been treating me well lately. I love that Ais and I got Starcaller on our alts (especially since, uh, I might have been drunk at the time); I managed to get a Blood Queen’s Crimson Choker in my Sack of Frosty Treasures, which netted me quite a nice chunk of change; and we’re working on getting another mage friend of ours a Tiny Voodoo Mask trinket so we can do a voodoo gnome parade with -wait for it- 24 voodoo gnomes. (We’ll be glyphing for mirror image, of course.) Ais and I have done it with just the two of us and I will say that 14 pygmy gnomes RP walking through Dalaran will turn heads. I highly recommend it. I’m meeting new people, having fun goofing off on alts, and raiding doesn’t feel quite so tedious lately.
I hope our mage readers are faring well! How is Icecrown treating you?
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.)
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