Thoughts
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!
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.)
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
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!
New site? For me?
I promise I won’t break it this time! Welcome to the new digs, everyone!
Been doing a lot of virtual moving lately: importing the blog entries to the new site and server-transferring my mage so I can hang out with Aislinana. (Our mages stood next to each other in Dalaran for the first time last Friday. Ais informed me that Meta looks better “in person”; I replied that Print Screen adds twenty pounds.) Getting everything set up was a lot of work, but it still beats physically moving — mostly because I don’t have to pack up my books and old Nintendo games.
And just to get some comments rolling in on the new site: what are you up to this week? Still tackling ToC? Grinding out achievements? Working on alts? Let us know! As for the Empowered Fire ladies, we’ve been chipping away at Loremaster, though Ais is way ahead of me there. Meta dinged 80 eight months before she got the achievement for 2,000 quests completed. Ais had Loremaster of Outland already and then finished up Northrend and Eastern Kingdoms this weekend, earning The Seeker title along the way. Kalimdor will be the death of us both, though. Ugh, Silithus.
Please update your links and RSS feed, and let us know if anything’s wonky. Enjoy!
Vanity Pets in Store – What is Being Sold Here?
Ais and Metaneira's warrior chill out with Lil' KT and Monk.
This week has ultimately been the week for vanity pet news from Blizzard. First we have previews of the Perky Pug pet, Higgins, that players can gain from patch 3.3 by using Blizzard’s new LFG tool and interface. Then yesterday, we hear trumpets from the distance heralding the new Blizzard “Pet Store” selling their first vanity pets: Lil’ KT and Pandaren Monk. Both the pets are being sold in the Blizzard store for 10 bucks each, the monk having half of the sale going towards Make-A-Wish foundation. Metaneira was a generous soul and decided to gift both of us with a pair of the pets so that we could spend all afternoon making excited squealy noises and trying out the pets. So far, I’m a little more sold on the monk, who does simple but hilarious karate idle animations and also responds to /bow and /drink accordingly. Lil’ KT is equally cute but myterious, oftentimes frost blasting nearby critters. Sometimes even his daddy lich’s favorite pet:
However, the fact that both could be purchased from the Blizzard store raises a couple points that were definitely buzzing around the WoW community yesterday as readily as the high pitched squeeing. › Continue reading
Oh God I'm Not Raiding
On Monday night of this week, I informed my guild I was quitting. The decision was a long time coming: I wavered back and forth on it for several weeks, probably annoying all my friends in the process. My stress levels in real life were extremely high, and I found it spilling into my gaming time. While I’ve always taken raiding seriously, I have rarely experienced the steady stream of frustration, anger, and fatigue while playing that I have this past month. I found myself dreading logging on, even on nights where I wasn’t expected to raid. And when I realized that the real life stressors weren’t letting up, the answer became clear: I was going to have to quit. And that terrified me.
At first, I hoped that maybe quitting wouldn’t be the answer. I thought I could talk with my guild officers, let them know what was going on with me and why I was an emotional angsty jerk in raids lately. I thought I might work with them to come up with a solution: take a week off, take one or two nights a week off, something. But after four attempts to speak with officers (even signing on a full hour before raid time on two separate nights), I realized that it wasn’t going to work. They didn’t have the time to talk with me about what was going on and I didn’t think that talking was going to fix it. I screwed my courage to the sticking place and wrote a private message to my raid leader, explaining that I was going to quit and wishing them well.
I haven’t logged on to Metaneira since.
Epic Failures
I’ve been a bit quiet on the mage-front lately, probably owing to the fact that I haven’t raided on mine in several days — I’ve been spending more time leveling up my paladin and helping some guildies with Uld10 achievements on my warrior. And since I’m on the sit list for this week’s raids, it may be a while yet before I see some more arcane action.
I was talking to a guildmate about the truly epic failures we’ve witnessed in our time raiding: he mentioned the mage who blew an Immortal Naxx run by taking a hateful on Patchwerk (and I’ll just let that sink in for a minute); I joked about how our Raid Leader spent so much time talking about our heroic Anub strat that his character ended up drowning. (I guess he didn’t bother bringing his character above surface.) But in our joking, I wasn’t entirely fair: I didn’t mention my own ridiculously silly mistakes.
I’ll rectify that now… › Continue reading
Pix Pls?
Last night, one of my guildmates emoquit. Not really earth-shattering news in Warcraft, I know, but bear with me. Since he chose to do it immediately following a boss fight, there was some discussion about it in Vent and in individual party chat. After a bit, I disclosed to a guildmate that I wasn’t particularly sorry to see the person go, as he had, on a number of occasions, made me feel uncomfortable. This included rolling an alt on my old server to talk to me before I transferred, asking me where I lived and how “young was too young” for me, and pouting whenever I didn’t reply to his tells. I told him once that I wasn’t interested in dating him, and asked him to drop it, but it never quite stopped. And so when he left, I mentioned some of this to a guildmate. His response was, “That’s creepy. Why didn’t you tell an officer?”
Why, indeed. The fact is, the idea never occurred to me. I’m not typically one to hide my gender while playing (though I will if I’m on my prot warrior, but that’s another post): I’ll talk in Vent, I’ll occasionally correct someone who refers to me as a dude in pugs, I’ll talk about my deep and abiding love of the works of Joss Whedon. And so people have, largely, treated me like a woman. In Warcraft, that means anything from expressing doubt that I am (usually while demanding pics to prove it) to insisting that I must be fat and ugly. It also means I’ve been hit on by more than a few men: some of whom I was friendly with in guilds, some of whom I barely knew. Some of the come-ons were subtle (yet persistent); some were decidedly obscene. But what it really comes down to is this: as a woman playing Warcraft, I perceive being uncomfortable around other players as a normal state and not worthy of comment.
Now, I think the leadership of my guild would have responded positively if I had brought my concerns to them. After the person sent me creepy tells on my old server, I did speak to an officer about that, asking if it was some sort of weird hazing ritual. The officer assured me that that kind of behavior wasn’t tolerated, and if he found out it was a guild member who did it, he’d kick him. When the person who did it admitted it to me later, I didn’t pass that information along to the officers. Turns out I didn’t need to, but that’s beside the point. But I firmly believe that, had I told them I was feeling uncomfortable by his attentions and that he wasn’t taking the hint, they would have listened to me and told him to knock it off or else.
Ultimately, though, I wish it weren’t up to me or to my guild leadership to fix it. I wish I could enjoy my hobby without feeling uncomfortable around particular people who don’t take “I’m not interested” for an answer. But at least now I will make an effort not to let that feeling be a normal part of my Warcraft experience: I may have to deal with server outages and lag spikes in raids, but I shouldn’t have to put up with someone skeeving on me incessantly. And so if it happens again (and, let’s face it, it might), I will be more proactive about it. I will confront the person, I will talk to friends about it, I will talk to my guild’s officers if need be. If it escalates, I can put him on ignore, I can report it. But I do not have to accept it.
If I get comments asking for pics, I will punch a kitten. Swear to God.
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