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.)

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best-mage-ever, elitist-jerks, mage-improvement, mage-thoughts

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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.) I’ve encountered more than a few, I’ve opened a ticket each time, and then I forget about it. But the names keep coming up. After poking around on the Blizzard help site, I found that one can report name violations via e-mail to a GM. And since I’ve been in the process of ripping all my CDs to my hard drive (meaning hours of sitting at the computer), I thought what the hell: I’ll report some names. The WoW Armory doesn’t allow partial searches or wildcard searches, so I made a list of special characters and started going at it.

What I found wasn’t encouraging. Even without special characters, I found toons named “Rapeher”, “Rapethemall”, “Rapeyou”, and “Rapemachine”. At least 115 names containing the word “rape” were found using special characters, and that’s without using every iteration of special character (e.g., I would search for Rápe but not Rápé, etc.) There were over 50 names with “cunt” (again, not every iteration); 20 with “fuck”, 45 “slut”, and 87 “bitch”. A good 25 were found with “whore” but at this point I grew tired of searching. Interestingly, my searches for “nigger”, “fag”, and “faggot”, even with special characters, came up with non-existent profiles. Is this because these names are more likely to be reported? Or is it because WoW GMs actually routinely scour the databases for these particular words? At any rate, I wrote up the names I could manage to gather along with the player realms, wrote an introduction about why I cared about this, and I sent it to a GM. (In hindsight, I should have tracked which names came from Alliance and Horde (glancing over it, it seemed about equal, though the slut and whore names were more commonly blood elf females), and track which ones came from PVP servers. I can’t help it — I’m a data nerd! I was not surprised to learn that my old server, a backwater PVE server with a steadily dying population, had more infractions than servers with notorious reputations like Tichondrius or Blackrock.)

Today, in game, the GM talked to me. S/he was extremely kind and sympathetic, and said s/he appreciated the work that I did in delineating the offensive names. S/he said that they can’t comment on actions, but encouraged me to continue reporting names through e-mail. And I would like to encourage our readers who care about it to do the same: sometimes it’s difficult to create a ticket when you’re PVPing in a battleground, but jotting down the name and the server and e-mailing a GM later? Much easier. Plus, you don’t get that annoying box on your screen for days at a time.

My next course of action is to — *gulp* — post a suggestion on the Warcraft forums, addressing what can be done to improve this problem. I can overlook the dwarf warriors named Gimmlii, the blood elf females named Brittneyspeers, or even random players with dumb names like Vhell. But there is something distinctly unsettling about playing a fantasy game with a character called “Rapemachine”. And it seems like it’s a relatively easy problem to, if not fix, certainly reduce. A couple of ideas:

1. Blizzard could implement a “Report inappropriate name” feature similar to their “Report spam” feature. It wouldn’t have to add the user to your ignore list, but it would generate a flag on a user’s account. Enough flags and a GM investigates. (The flag system would be an attempt to curb abuse; though knowing WoW players, an entire raid could turn on one person and all report that user’s name.)

2. Blizzard could run routine queries of their player databases, searching for problematic terms. Whereas I’m stuck searching for “ßitch’ and “ßïtch” and “ßitçh” and so on, their own access to player information has to be more efficient than our end on WoW Armory. (And if Blizzard employees can’t do wildcard searches on their own database, they’ve got other problems.) A few problematic words can be blocked at name creation, even ones with special characters. Stop the problem before it starts, and run regular queries to catch ones that slip through the cracks.

I know whenever this subject gets brought up, someone inevitably says, “It’s just a game, ignore it.” It’s not just a game, people: it is a symptom of a larger, systemic problem that crops up in every facet of life. A player who thinks it’s okay to name a character “Rapethemall” is not an individual who is likely going to espouse feminist ideals when he’s logged off. The names chosen mean something: whether they choose them to harass or belittle other users, or whether they are acting out of the ignorance from living in a society that reinforces the idea that rape is a funny thing to joke about, it is significant. And it needs to be addressed: it’s part of the larger problem.

The other common rebuttal to posts like this is to tell me to get off the internet if I’m so “easily offended”. This line of argument seems to imply that I’ve been absent from internet culture and that these words are new and scary to me. I’ve been participating in activities online for 16 years, so believe me: I’ve seen plenty of awful, hateful, vile things. Exposure to it doesn’t make it okay. And I fail to see why reacting to sexist, racist, homophobic language is somehow irrational or weak. Having an emotional reaction doesn’t shut off your ability to reason. Reacting to hate speech with anger, fear, or sadness doesn’t mean you can’t address the issue logically. And instead of retreating from the bad words on the internet, I choose to stand up and confront it. I tell groups I pug with that homophobic language is not appropriate. I gently chide guild members who slip up and use oppressive language. And I report people who break the Terms of Service of my favorite hobby.

No problem has ever been solved by ignoring it. Two of Blizzard’s core values are that every voice matters, and to play nice and play fair. So speak up when you see names that are obscene, derogatory, or hateful. We may not be able to get rid of all the rogues named “Backstabber”, but we can at least work at removing the more egregious violations of the naming policy from Azeroth. Let your voice be heard and let Blizzard know that we want all gamers to play nice.

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: wow-gm, wow-naming-conventions, wow-naming-policy

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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. And it seems that everyone in my circle of WoW friends — spanning several different servers and vastly different guild types — has at least one alt who is geared enough to do end-game content. A lot of us have two, three, maybe even four alts who could zone into ICC and walk away with T10 quality loot. In some respects, it seems insane: I know they’ve made leveling much, much easier with the addition of heirloom gear and an improved LFG interface, but those changes mean most of us are not spending most of our time on one character. Gnomeaggedon recently had a post where one of his alts taunted his mage for having more ICC kills, which really resonated with me: my warrior likely has better gear and far more ICC experience than my mage. Is it even fair to say my mage is still my main?

In BC, my off-nights from raiding were spent gathering mats for food and flasks, farming gold for repairs, and finishing up some painful rep grinds. Now I’m shocked to realize that I haven’t logged into Meta in over a week. There’s just nothing to do with her right now: I’m not raiding, I’m no longer interested in achievement-chasing, the few rep grinds I have left pretty much require me to suck up to a few friends to do old-world raids with me, and I’m kind of burned out. It’s your typical pre-expansion doldrums: except this time, I have several alts I can work on, and I simply love doing it. Rolling a second prot warrior (orc ladies represent!) has been amazingly fun and great for my ego: a good 80% of my LFG pugs include someone praising my tanking. I also plan on getting my hunter to 80 and swapping one of her profs to engineering so I have every profession at max level. Leveling is no longer the grueling experience it used to be, and getting those new toons geared is ridiculously easy — especially if you have a guild willing to carry your freshly-dinged ass through a couple of heroics.

A few people have heard me say that I’ve been debating switching “mains” to Kelaino, my Alliance prot warrior, but in a sense I already have. The one raiding commitment I’ve had in the past few months has been a 10 man on her. I’ll queue for heroics on her every day I sign in, simply because she gets an instant queue and I can control the pace of the group. She doesn’t have the achievements or shiny mounts or pets that Meta has, but she’s the toon I work the hardest on improving, the toon I spend the most time on, and the toon I know will benefit my friends most when Cata comes out. I’ll still level Meta, and I’ll probably jump into pug raids with her from time to time, but … the distinction doesn’t mean quite so much. She’ll always be my most beloved character (and I even received a FigurePrint of her as a gift), but she’s no longer the one that lets me most enjoy the content. And since this is just a game, I need to focus on what’s fun.

So what about you? Have you found yourself splitting your attention between several different characters? Have you found yourself doing raid weeklys on two, three, four different toons? Are your alts just as geared as your main? And do any of you see yourself entering Cataclysm with a new “main”?

Whatever I decide, I’ll continue blogging: I still love mage theorycrafting more than any other class, and I still very much care about issues of feminism and intersectionality in Warcraft. Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing guides for other characters: I’ve started working on a guide for warriors who want to start tanking heroics/10 man raids, and I may follow suit for paladins. Ais and I combined have 11 max level toons (four of which are the same class though we do different roles), so we certainly are no strangers to raiding in a different role or class. Maybe with the current Zeitgeist pushing focus away from all your energy devoted to one class, we should broaden the scope of our site. Or maybe I’ll end up missing hurling fireballs at my enemies and will go back to maging full-time. Either way, Empowered Fire will still be here.

NOW WHERE’S MY BETA INVITE, SERIOUSLY.

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: wow-alts, wow-mains

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Empowered Fire is very happy to have renowned frost theorycrafter Lhivera guest post for us on the changes happening in Cataclysm. See, we don’t hate frost mages!

The Frost tree is undergoing some pretty significant evolution in the Cataclysm beta. While there are still significant changes to come, I thought I’d provide an overview of the changes as they stand so far.

Damage: It Doesn’t Matter Yet

Before going into details, I wanted to address this subject that keeps coming up in discussions: it is far too early to start worrying about whether Frost’s DPS is going to measure up to that of Arcane, Fire and other DPS specs. Blizzard has not even attempted to balance the numbers at this point. That’s generally something that happens toward the end of beta, and we’re nowhere near that yet.

What’s going on now is the process of creating a rotation that both works and feels right, using the right number of spells and a set of expected talents. They’re trying to make certain that Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, Deep Freeze, Frostfire Orb and Ice Lance all fit into Frost’s DPS process gracefully. It doesn’t matter yet how much damage the rotation does, only that all these spells have a place in it.

If a spell performs too poorly to fit into the rotation, that’s a problem. If a spell performs so well that it drives other spells out of the rotation, that’s a problem. Getting them balanced with each other is the current task. Only after that, which may still be weeks away, will they begin worrying about balancing total DPS.

So You’ve Decided to Be a Frost Mage

At level 10, you get to select your primary tree. You immediately receive one passive effect and one active effect. Additional passive effects may be added later if needed.

Frost Specialization: This is our primary damage tuning knob. As of the current build, it is set to 25%, and simply increases the damage of every Frost spell (plus Frostfire Orb) by 25%. As we approach release, this number will almost certainly be adjusted up or down to bring our total DPS in line with that of other DPS specs. It can also be expected to be tweaked up or down over the course of the expansion to compensate for scaling differences.

Summon Water Elemental: You’re probably quite familiar with this spell already. But in Cataclysm, our Water Elemental gets a substantial upgrade: it is now a full-fledged pet. It lasts until killed, it despawns when you mount and respawns when you dismount, it survives transfer through instance portals, it even gets a full pet sheet in your character UI. It appears that Water Elementals will have randomly-determined names, like Warlock demons and Unholy Death Knight ghouls (currently, every Water Elemental is named “RandomPetName”).

Unlike the glyphed Water Elemental we have on the live servers, the new permanent Water Elemental retains its Freeze spell. It also has the new “Go To” command shared by all pets, which allows you to direct your Water Elemental to move to a specific location. All told, the Water Elemental will be a more integral part of our spec than it’s ever been before.

Mastery

In addition to the effects listed above, your Mastery bonus is also determined when you select the Frost tree. Unlike those effects, however, the Mastery bonus is not available until level 80, when you learn “Mastery” from the Mage trainer. This gives you 8 points of Mastery, which is increased by adding Mastery Rating on your gear.

Frostburn: Rather than quote the tooltip, which seems to confuse many people, I’m going to put it into my own words. When you hit a target with a Frostbolt, the Frostburn debuff is applied. The debuff lasts ten seconds. As long as the debuff lasts, every spell you hit the target with other than Frostbolt does extra damage. As long as you hit the target with a Frostbolt at least once every 10 seconds, the bonus will be active.

Many people wonder why Frostbolt doesn’t benefit from the debuff. The answer is that it’s meant to encourage you to cast spells other than Frostbolt. This requires increasing the damage of those spells relative to Frostbolt; Frostburn can’t accomplish that if it also buffs Frostbolt.

Significant Spell Changes

A few spells have changed in significant ways. These changes are partly designed to accommodate the removal of talents that affected them, and partly to make sure each has a place in our rotation.

Frostbolt: Frostbolt’s cast time has been reduced from 3.0 seconds, or 2.3 seconds fully talented, to 2.0 seconds. While coefficients seem to be very much in flux right now, as of the current build it seems to have the coefficient of a 2.5 second spell (71.43%). It will do less damage than it used to, but it casts significantly faster. It was necessary to reduce its per-cast damage relative to Ice Lance and Frostfire Bolt in order to make room for them in the rotation.

Ice Lance: Ice Lance has changed pretty dramatically. Currently, it does very low damage against unfrozen targets, with triple damage against frozen targets. Both aspects of this spell are changing: against unfrozen targets, it will do roughly twice the damage it does today, making it a more reasonable source of mobile DPS. Its damage is doubled against frozen targets rather than tripled; while the bonus is smaller, the total damage is higher because of the increase to its base damage.

Critical Strike Damage: A more general change is that all Mages (and all Warlocks) now get increased critical strike damage baked into the class. All of our spells now have a 33% damage bonus to total damage on crits, over and above the normal 50% bonus. This results in total crit damage of 199.5%.

The Talent Tree

There’s a lot of debate and strong feelings about the new, smaller talent trees. I won’t go into all the arguments here, but suffice to say that I like them. They still need some work, but they already provide more significant freedom of choice by far than the current, larger trees. Let’s look at the individual talents.

Early Frost: This talent simply reduces the cast time of one Frostbolt every 15 seconds from the base cast time of 2.0 seconds to 1.5 seconds. The effect simply resets every 15 seconds, whether you are casting or not. In PvP, this is probably intended to serve as a replacement for rank 1 Frostbolt (it’s not quite as fast, but it does full damage). In PvE, it’s a modest haste increase. It is not without problems, however; as it causes Frostbolt to hug the global cooldown while active, it can interfere with our casting rhythm, and in PvP it can interfere with closely-timed attacks when it activates at an inconvenient time. Ghostcrawler has hinted that this talent may change or be replaced, but that’s by no means certain.

Piercing Ice: A simple crit chance increase, valuable to every spec.

Shatter: While Shatter still greatly increases our critical strike chance against frozen targets, it now does so through a very different mechanic. Instead of simply adding 50% to our crit chance, it triples our crit chance. If your crit chance is 25%, it has exactly the same value as the live version. If less, then it has lower value; if more, it has higher value. This is an excellent change, as it greatly improves the value of crit rating to Frost.

Ice Floes: All the cooldown reductions from the old Ice Floes plus Cold as Ice are now rolled into a single 3-point talent, with the exception of the Water Elemental cooldown (but it’s permanent now, so that doesn’t matter as much). Cooldown reductions provide situational DPS increases; the fight has to be long enough to squeeze in an extra cast before it ends, but not so long that you would have received the extra cast anyway. But of course, it also provides more frequent use of utility spells.

Improved Cone of Cold: With the removal of Frostbite from the tree, this talent, along with the permanent Water Elemental’s Freeze spell, provides us with controlled ways to freeze targets for Shatter combos. And unlike Frostbite, they are safe in a raid build.

Piercing Chill: The obvious effect of this talent is that it allows you to snare three targets while casting Frostbolts at one of them. The first less-obvious effect of this talent, at least as it works now, is that this gives Frost a DPS increase in cleave situations. Each chill application has a chance to proc Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze. Three targets, three chill applications, and suddenly you have a 38.6% chance to proc these effects on each cast instead of a 15% chance. This may not be intended, and may be changed. The second less-obvious effect of this talent is that the chill effect is applied on cast instead of on hit. This is bad for soloing, because it means you pull your targets earlier than you would without the talent.

Permafrost: In Cataclysm, this talent retains its snare strength increase and its mortal strike effect. It loses its snare duration increase, and gains a healing effect for the Water Elemental, equal to 15% of the damage you deal. We’re not certain yet if raiding Mages will need this healing, and there’s been some good beta feedback suggesting that the healing be burstier (but less consistant) for PvP. And of course some people are not thrilled with the loss of the extra three seconds of chill duration, especially on Blizzard. I suspect, however, that this talent is probably pretty close to its final implementation, as Blizzard has said they want to tone down snares in PvP.

Ice Shards: Since this talent is no longer needed for increased crit damage, it now serves double-duty as a utility talent. For two points, we get 50% snare on our Blizzard and a 40-yard range on our Ice Lance. This is a strictly optional talent; Blizzard no longer benefits from a snare by proccing Fingers of Frost and getting Shatter crits (more on that shortly), so it isn’t useful for AOE DPS. However, on heavy movement encounters, some people may find the extra range on Ice Lance to be situationally useful.

Icy Veins: This talent is unchanged, except for the fact that only a Frost Mage can reach it now.

Fingers of Frost: Beta feedback played a significant role in making pretty major changes to this talent. It now has twice the proc rate (30%), procs one charge instead of two, but can stack to two charges. The only spells that benefit from and consume the charges are Ice Lance, Deep Freeze and Frostfire Bolt. This helps boost the power of these spells above Frostbolt, making them a much more significant part of Frost’s rotation. It also makes for a rotational feel much more similar to that of old-fashioned Frostbite-driven Shatter Combos, like we used while soloing; you cast from a Frostbolt into an instant cast, then start another Frostbolt, rather than casting two sequential instants. It makes for a much smoother, more polished feel to the rotation.

Improved Freeze: We asked for more interactivity with our pet, and we got it: hitting a target with the Water Elemental’s Freeze spell now applies two charges of Fingers of Frost. This guarantees you the opportunity to cast Deep Freeze every time it’s off cooldown. While neat and useful, there are a couple of issues. First, Freeze is a very expensive spell; it remains to be seen if the Water Elemental can actually afford to cast it every 30 seconds in a raid encounter. Second, using a reticule-targeted AOE spell on a boss to proc an effect on the master is kind of a bizarre pet ability. I hope to see this talent revised a bit before release.

Enduring Winter: This talent now combines the previous effect of Frost Channeling (10% mana cost reduction on all spells) with Replenishment. This is a really good talent, both because it’s a sensible combination of a raid buff and a selfish benefit, and because it gives a lot of flexibility in your subspec talent selection. You could go 3/3 Enduring Winter and skip subspec mana talents entirely, allowing you to take more utility or solo points on Tier 1 of Fire or Arcane, or you could go 1/3 or 2/3 Enduring Winter and mix-and-match with either Arcane Concentration or Master of Elements.

Cold Snap: No change. Always a staple.

Brain Freeze: For all intents and purposes, this talent is unchanged. It is more valuable, however, as the power of Frostfire Bolt has increased substantially relative to Frostbolt.

Ice Barrier: No changes to Ice Barrier.

Shattered Barrier: No change. Still a staple for PvP.

Reactive Barrier: This one’s controversial. The basic idea is simple: if your Ice Barrier is not on cooldown, and you take damage that reduces your health below 50%, Ice Barrier automatically casts. The skeptical point of view, which I share, is: how often will this really be useful? Yeah, it saves me a GCD. But how many times will it do so in a single encounter? It seems highly unlikely that it would be more than once or twice. So it’s probably not worth two points for the DPS gained by saving those GCD’s. OK, then, how often will it save my life? Well, our health pools are going way up. It seems unlikely that we’re going to be one- or two-shot from 51% by random raid damage. Yes, it can proc when stunned or otherwise CC’d, but that just doesn’t strike me as a life-saving result in very many situations. I’m hoping this one gets a serious looking-at and reworking, but it sounds like Blizzard wants to see it in action for a while first.

Frostfire Orb: This is a very unusual talent, in that the first point and the second point do almost completely different things. The first point changes the spell to Frostfire damage, which means it benefits from the +25% Frost damage passive bonus on the tree. The second point causes the Orb’s attacks to apply a very brief chill effect (though as it attacks every second, this can keep the effect up throughout the Orb’s duration). As a secondary bonus, the talent also (at two points) brings Frostfire Bolt’s chill effect up to 70%. The value of the second point is up in the air where PvE is concerned; if the spell is meant to trigger talented effects such as Ignite and Fingers of Frost, it could provide a healthy boost to the number of Fingers of Frost procs you see in an encounter.

Deep Freeze: No change. Still freezes things solid if it can, hits like a fast-moving truck if it can’t.

Conclusions

Frost’s rotation is shaping up to be considerably more interesting than it has been. We’ll likely be using:

• Flame Orb once a minute
• Frostbolt at least once every ten seconds to maintain the Frostburn debuff
• Water Elemental Freeze whenever Deep Freeze comes off cooldown
• Deep Freeze when Fingers of Frost is up and Deep Freeze is not on cooldown
• Frostfire Bolt when Brain Freeze is up, whether or not Fingers of Frost is up
• Ice Lance when Fingers of Frost is up and Deep Freeze is on cooldown
• And finally, either Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt as a filler, depending on how the numbers eventually work out

On top of this, Blizzard has put into place some significant tuning knobs that can help ensure that Frost’s DPS is competitive with other DPS specs throughout the expansion. We have good reason to be optimistic about playing Frost in PvE for the first time in a few years, and the way things look now, we should have a lot of fun doing so.

© Lhivera for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: frost, frost-beta, frost-cataclysm, frost-mage, frost-mages, frost-talents, Lhivera

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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!

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Post tags: mage-forums, mana-obscura, mana-obscura-forums

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An image of the new 31 point talent trees for mages from beta.

On Tuesday, the latest beta build (build 12479) got rolled out along with some major changes – not only did Deepholm get opened up for level testing, but the new 31 point talent trees that the boards have been buzzing about since Zarhym dropped the bomb a week ago. My first thought on seeing the new trees was, “Oh my god, is that it?” (Insert “That’s what she said” joke here.) They really are very small, very concentrated. But are they enough? It looks like Blizzard really does want to pare down most of the passivity and go straight for novelty, fun stuff and power.  But most people, like me, are definitely questioning how useful some of these talents will be.

At first glance, it looks like there are still a very straight division between “PVP” and “PVE” talents, with the exception being that you have to take some of the fun (or PVP-oriented) talents to flesh out a PVE/raiding build. While this might provide slight utility or benefits to raiders, it makes me wonder how useful they truly will be over the long run. Things like Improved Blink definitely have a place considering how high movement fights are right now in ICC, but will that change in Cataclysm?

MMO-Champion has provided a talent calculator for the new builds here, if you want to look for yourself: http://wowtal.com.
Let’s take a look at some of the talents and specialization aspects of the new trees.

This is a picture of the mage specializations page - arcane, fire and frost are shown.

When you first encounter your talents page, you have the option of viewing either the talent trees or the specializations page. You are asked to pick a specialization and that “locks” you into the benefits of that tree – a key spell (such as Arcane Barrage) and a small flavor text indicating to new players what the spec does. You can change this at the trainer along with your talents. Whether or not this replaces or augments masteries, I don’t know yet. Masteries have been removed from the UI panel as of this build but not sure if they are just there or removed for the time being. My thoughts is that specializations helps players focus on the 31 point tree of their choosing and allows more emphasis on the mastery. Mastery will replace most of the passive talents that were taken out of the trees in some form or another.

In this image, the three mage talent trees are shown. Fire spec is highlighted.

This is what the talents look like right now; shrimpy does not even begin to describe it. But are they underpowered? Many of the options are more “fun” things and actual abilities or additional powers to certain spells rather than just passive boosts to damage. There’s more general talents early on the trees so that side-specializing will be easy for people picking another talent tree. It doesn’t feel even close to being finished but I can see the design arc on this.  Overall the smaller build “feels” the same as what I have on live servers.

If you want a blow-by-blow of the talents in the trees right now, Sancus from <Ropetown> has written a very good chain of posts on the beta forums. What I’ve done so far though is gone through and put together some early raid builds for each of the trees. Note that a lot of this might be changed or fixed, this is not even close to finished.

Arcane: (31/02/08)

First off, you no longer have Icy Veins. There’s just no possible way to get the deeper arcane talents and still pull off Icy Veins. There’s some wiggle room with Master of Elements – I put the points in Incineration for extra crit on Arcane Missiles. The better crit talent is Piercing Ice and I doubt you’ll need Frost Channeling AND MoE for mana. But again, we don’t know how arcane’s mana management mini-game will be at this time. I also had to take Prismatic Cloak because Imp. Counterspell and Imp. Poly seem too PVP-specific or not very useful in many PVE encounters, but extra damage reduction would be marginally more beneficial. I do like Improved Blink. It may just well raise arcane mages to have less of a stigma with movement. I use Blink heavily right now in ICC encounters and having a haste buff would be interesting – it’d reward players for awareness and not take as heavy of a dip in DPS. Stationary encounters would be a toss-up.

Fire: (10/31/0)

Fire seems the tree most like its former raid builds. However, the overall push seems to make us into warlocks – we have a lot more DoTs but most of them are not cast. Meaning that there are some genuine concerns with how Blizzard is going to power our nukes. Sancus made an exceptionally good point – “Either mage dps is going to be ridiculous when multi-dotting, or it’s going to suck when there’s only one target. You need to be very, very careful with so many dps increases depending on dots that are frequently not under our direct control.” Are we going to retain our strength in Fireball, or just rely on Flashburn/Ignite/Living Bomb?

As for the build, we still have Torment the Weak, Clearcasting in Arcane, and have gotten back some of our fun leveling talents like Blastwave and Dragon’s Breath. Combustion is still there but easily the best incarnation I’ve ever seen it in, barring the one from Warhammer Online. I had to take Imp Fire Blast to get Living Bomb. Fire Blast is one of our lowest DPS spells, but it still helps with movement as it can proc Ignite/Hot Streak, as well as maintain our Flashburn DoT (which is only applied from direct damage.)

Frost: (08/02/31)

I will admit I haven’t the faintest idea with how a frost PVE spec would work in Cataclysm. The most obnoxious talent out of everything is Frostfire Orb, which is a bloated 3 point talent to justify using Frostfire bolt in a Frost rotation, even though you can’t technically have a frostfire build anymore. Frostfire Orb/Incineration is two talents that boost FFB and it seems pointless right. FFB has been relegated to a spell you use on resist fights or elementals. That’s it. As for the rest of the build, you side-talent into Arcane with ToTW and Netherwind Presence, and I dropped some points into MoE, although due to Frost Channeling and the fact that Frost never has mana problems, I am sure you could shift some of those points back into Frost for some of the survivability talents.

As stated by Ghostcrawler, arcane still needs another pass, but Frost definitely feels lean for what it should be doing.

How are you guys feeling about these new changes? Are you excited? I am not sure how this is all going to work out, once mastery goes back in. But we will keep you updated nonetheless. It still needs a lot of work.

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 31-point-talents, arcane-talents, beta-31-point-talents, beta-talent-trees, cataclysm-beta-talents, cataclysm-talent-trees, fire-talents, frost-talents, new-beta-talent-trees, new-beta-talents, talent-calculator, warcraft-talents

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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.

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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.

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: real-id, realID, realID-problems, realID-real-names-forums, realID-wow-forums

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Today Blizzard announced that in the near future, with the release of Starcraft II and Cataclysm, no doubt, that RealID will be implemented on the forums to further display your real life name next to all of your posts. This has already created an outcry louder and stronger than any other in the Blizzard community in the past and revealed a hotbed of further cynicism and aggression towards RealID.

I had my misgivings about even the implementation of the RealID “friends list” feature because it seemingly had glaring security and personal privacy issues. I have even tried it out for the purposes of seeing how bad the system was and reporting it back to you, but this unfortunately came up before I could even address it. Blizzard purported not even a couple weeks ago that RealID was to be used for “real life friends” and people you could “trust with sensitive real life information.” So how does this fit into that scheme? It doesn’t, and it seems like this has all been calculated and figured out long before this went public. I’ve had some fun using the RealID system on my friends list, even with my concerns, even with people who aren’t my real life friends. While it felt a little weird exposing my real life name to some people that I had known only in-game, these were all people I had a vested personal interest in over a long period of time – cross-server buddies I knew from Elitist Jerks, guildmates who often played alts, and friends I knew strongly in other guilds via Wow Ladies. There were already some issues I didn’t like – the friends of friends feature being the biggest. I did have random people add me from X’s friends list and therefore thought I was a guildmate with X on another server. The conversations with a RealID and a third person I didn’t know exposed my real name to them. These were all minor, however, and at this time I’ve had no substantial problems with the service.

This however, is another kettle of fish.

I’m appalled at the idea that this is resulting  from a systemic problem with flaming and trolls and that using personal accountability with real life names will somehow reform this. On the long, slippery curve to online transparency, a lot of people will have their liberties and privacy crushed, and many more people will be hurt than will be harmed before everything is said and done. While it is nice to think that the utopian online society has everyone being responsible because of their real names being used as tentative collateral in the social contract, it ultimately fails because of people with privilege. Privilege to disregard or not understand that there are still very few consequences for the aggressor and quite a lot of consequences for the aggressed. Anonymity is not only a glamor that one uses to express themselves on Internet, or a cloak by which to hide behind, but a form of security that some people quite desperately need for both their sanity and their personal safety. As we’ve seen in the past couple of years, the incidence of personal information being abused has gone up and there’s still very little protections for people who are caught up in this mess, despite the complete shift of the social media from anonymous to real life identification.

It makes me sad that Blizzard is participating in this with RealID. It speaks unquestionably of a privilege that Blizzard as a company has to not understand its players wants and needs, nor its support staff. For everyone on the general forums crowing about having a non-unique name, there’s quite a few who do. There’s quite a few people who’ve been the targets of Internet harassment and stalking (myself included), quite a few people who would have liked to use the service but now cannot. There’s also quite a few people who wish to use an Internet handle due to the fact that their legal name is no longer an option or appropriate to their identity. There’s quite a few people who are not legally allowed to have their name displayed on the Internet.

What happens to all of these people? Why were these people not considered? I can’t say that this is a vocal minority anymore, Blizzard. And it saddens me that you’ve gone so far now and done so little for the people who’ve gotten you there. By creating this use of the service, not only have they silenced the trolls, but they’ve also effectively silenced everyone else who cares enough about their identity and safety (and jobs! who knew!) to keep their real name safe. In their rush to be the next Facebook (despite being a stupid gaming company), they’ve made an incredibly stupid move. Whether or not I continue to support Blizzard, the company who’s been helping me through my own harassment, remains to be seen. This is an incredibly hurtful blow to their user base.

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 25 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: battle-net, battle-net-realID, blizzard-games-realID, blizzard-realID, real-id, realID, realID-fail, realID-issues, realID-problems, realID-real-names-forums, realID-wow-forums

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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.

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cataclysm-beta, cataclysm-mages, empowered-fire-beta, mage-changes-for-cataclysm

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