Thoughts
Stepping Out of the Shadows
Aislinana at level 10 - a red-haired pigtailed mage with a simple wand and robe stands on a mountain.
This post was brought to you by sleeplessness, double meanings and the letter N!
I’ve been playing the game for a long time, maybe not as long as some of our readers, but as far back as 2005. For a few years now, every time I wanted to compare my growth as a mage, I always thought back on the stupid mistakes I made as a new mage at 30, or 40. I didn’t know intellect provided spell crit! I didn’t know mages wanted spellpower (although there was relatively none on gear at that point, and given Cataclysm, I was partially anachronistic) and I certainly had no idea about things like macros, strafing, and add-ons.
I hit level 60 very late in the expansion cycle (another term that was relatively unheard of at that point) and got taken on farm status raids like MC and eventually BWL by the giant raid our guild collective ran. I wasn’t a very “good” mage and didn’t consider myself a “raider” until BC. Karazhan, Gruul’s (where I was a mage tank and got to do something important for the first time) is where I really cut my teeth. It is the first time I had a taste of possibly doing good DPS or knowing what that might be. Or that I might have some talent or capacity for being decent. But I was hindered for a long time by still being “new” – we had two new raid teams at that point and I was arguably on the shakier of the two. Eventually I left that team out of frustration and followed my friend (who is now my boyfriend) at the time up to the better progression raid as a back-up. I remember being overwhelmed by some of the hardest fights of the game at the time – Kael’thas taught me about things like focus frames and macros for counterspelling a focus target. I was also held back quite a lot by my computer resources at the time. Trying to do Hyjal and Black Temple competitively was hard at 4 FPS. Survivability was also dicey and so I was definitely a liability to my raid. (Though I managed to do really well on Archimonde!) It made me feel sad and incompetent for a long time but I had fun, even as a back-up, because I felt if I kept showing up, kept proving my worth, they’d enjoy having me along eventually. It wasn’t until I got some loaned parts from my friend Adrine, and consequently had better frame rates and such that I could use more things like cast bar mods and do pretty good DPS. I wasn’t the best but my movement and understanding of fights was increasing. I even pulled threat on a boss one time. The entire raid was so shocked that we all had a good laugh. At that point though, it was fairly hard to get a main slot though – our caster slots were fairly well-filled so I remained just a faithful backup even throughout Sunwell.
Coming into Wrath meant two things: I was no longer a back-up and being responsible in a lot of ways I hadn’t needed to before. It meant I had to be there every raid day, for one. I also had to get on things like raid add-ons and all that jazz. But I levelled quickly to 80 and started doing Naxx as soon as I could. I started hitting Elitist Jerks, talking with other mages and compiling some idea of gear requirements. I got our first and only one of two Turning Tides we ever got in our guild. Part of this was motivated by remembering how long I went without weapon upgrades as a back-up. Part of this was gaining an understanding of what “BIS” meant.
This entire time I’ve been growing, changing and learning more as a mage. But it isn’t until now, at the end of Wrath, that I’ve actually felt like I’ve reached a place where I don’t think of myself as that scared, shitty back-up anymore. It’s taken that long to step out of the long shadows cast by other mages, other players in my raid and mostly my own fears and self-esteem. Funny how this happens only after starting a mage blog, being asked to given my advice on other mages’ gear as well as getting close to BIS 277 gear. For the first time in my entire WoW career, I feel…capable. And it is strange and exciting. Well, as exciting as feeling “good” in a video game does. I still don’t run a damage meter in-game (I only use World of Log parses) and I still don’t think I don’t like arcane that much but I can say I’m decent and capable at 2 PVE specs. I thoroughly understand boss mechanics and feel confident to explain them to people (except Yogg-1 light this week, oops.) I even have a really amazing computer now (for taking screenshots, of course.) This doesn’t mean I still don’t make mistakes though, I think I just understand why they occur better at this point!
I’ve enjoyed being a mage for so long, and I feel that Cataclysm will be yet another level of improvement. I doubt I’ll ever be as good at math as someone like Lhivera or as professional as Ataxus but for where I am at, I think I’m doing alright. I look forward to the challenges that await in the next expansion and I’m glad I’ll have all of you guys right here with me as I make mistakes and learn new things. It’s been a long, strange trip. I’ll just have to keep all of this in mind the next time I start feeling like being a jerk to newer mages or facepalming my head when I see someone gemming for intellect. The one thing I’ll note is that mages nowadays have a lot more help than I did back when I first started out and should avail themselves of it, I know I do! Other than that, I think I’ll be alright.
(My deepest apologies for my radio silence for a while, being an awesome mage also requires having less scary things in your real life going on.)
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
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.
Blizzard Stamps Out Inappropriate Names in Arena Tournament
This is a rather small post and comes in a few days late, but can I tell you how happy it made me to see this blue post? Blizzard really making a stand on inappropriate names and team charters on the tourney realm is a positive first step towards hopefully having a lot tighter strictures on what things can be used as a name in World of Warcraft. The fact that it is directly targeting the PVP crowd in the tournament doesn’t strike me as odd – I’ve seen quite a few wildly inappropriate names pass by my screen in my limited time playing arenas. It feels like the incidence of this goes up just because arena teams are so much more proliferate and tend to gather people who have no problem cracking inappropriate jokes about other ethnicities, genders, and unfortunately sexual assault.
I can only hope that this careful eye oozes into the general server policing for guild names and such – I think a lot of us would be a lot happier not having to run around seeing people under the tag, “Sapped Girls Can’t Say No.” While GM time is quite limited right now with account restorations and other problems, the fact that this is going on at all gives me an indication that they do take this very seriously and might enforce it better in the future elsewhere.
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?
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?
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.)
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