Neat Stuff
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!
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.
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?
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!
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.
Character Racial Changes Now Live – Pay Good Money for a New You
Blizzard finally rolled out the character racial change service today they’ve been promising for a while, and I know there’s a couple people out there rejoicing. Whether you want to take advantage of a racial you’ve had your eye on as a mage (Berserking? Hit aura? Diplomacy?), or just want a new butt to stare at while casting Frostbolt, you now can do it for the low, low price of $25USD. No word of when it is coming to EU realms, but it should be shortly.
And with a 3-day cooldown, no change is ever permanent (my boyfriend is threatening to change me into a draenei).
Will the ladies of Empowered Fire be race changing? In short:
(1:46:53 PM) Meta: race changes up
(1:47:39 PM) Aislinana!: yay…not doing anythign >_>
(1:47:43 PM) Aislinana!: coz I broke
(1:47:44 PM) Meta: me neither
(1:47:47 PM) Meta: also humans rule
(1:47:48 PM) Aislinana!: also gnomes rule
(1:47:50 PM) Aislinana!: hahahahahahah
(1:47:53 PM) Meta: /highfive
(1:47:56 PM) ***Aislinana! highfives
This is Hallow's End
Yes, it is that time of year again in Azeroth – full of tricks AND treats. Spooky monsters and shenanigans are around every corner, and sweets are bursting from the seams! I love this in-game holiday more than almost every other holiday in-game mostly because autumn and the REAL Halloween is so fun to me. Having it in Warcraft is just as good.
Achievements have damaged some of the really pure fun that Hallow’s End has brought earlier years, but I am not sweating it too hard, unlike some other religious achievement-doers I know. I’m one pet away from the Hallowed title on both my mage and my priest, and this is just from last year. Blizzard really likes making RNG factor heavily into this stuff, but this is no reason not to enjoy the spirit. Many guilds hold costume parties, and I always have an RP event or two to attend in this vein.
What I most like about Hallow’s Eve is the delicious, delicious vanity – I love wands, pumpkinheads, and candy that changes you into stuff! I’m a freak when it comes to carrying around vanity items in my bags so I can change into something different on a moment’s notice. My favorite thing right now is the Hallow’s End candy that turns you orange and huge. I love running around terrorizing people as a gnome on my Amani Warbear, Colbert, when we’re both giant and orange. Pair this with some Winterfall Firewater, and you have an amazingly scary gnome (or three!) on your hands.
However, this entry is not just all about me! Here are some (helpful) Tricks and Treats from this year’s Hallow’s Eve Event, for all you veteran and nooby mages regarding some of the festivities:
› Continue reading
Create Your Own Voodoo Gnome Army
OMG! Gnomes!
Step one: Roll a mage, level her to 80.
Step two: Run Zul’Aman until Tiny Voodoo Mask drops.
Step three: Get a stack of pygmy oil.
Step four: Drink the pygmy oil until you turn into a gnome. Pop Mirror Images. Pop the trinket.
Step five: Enjoy your very own voodoo gnome entourage.
Mr. Chilly Is Too Cool
Blizzard announced last week that coming on November 11th, all WoW accounts would have to be merged into Battle.net accounts, but that WoW players who had already done so would be getting a new penguin pet for their troubles later this week. I logged in happily today to find an Unhatched Mr. Chilly Egg in my mail.
Hello!
Please give a warm welcome to your new cool penguin pal!
I’m so happy you could give this sassy little spheniscidae a home.
–Breanni
I’m quite the unrepentant pet collector and my Pengu has been a steadfast companion of mine in raids and while out doing things, so having another penguin-y friend courtesy of Blizzard tickles me pink. I got to see this pet back when it was being tested in the WOTLK beta for the account merge feature they were using and I’m glad that it wasn’t just something they were fiddling with. Of course I had to grab a screenshot for all you folks not logged in yet:
Chilly and I hanging out in front of the Eventide Bank, natch.
The only thing I’m sad about all this is that they are changing Pengu’s eyes to not be evil and red in 3.3. That was the best part of him!
Hopefully that Blizzard implements a 100-pet achievement soon, I’m very close to getting it. Woo!
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