Critical QQ

Wordpress

2008-01-28T00:59:00.000-07:00

Moving to WordPress, as it is much more awesome.

New URL: http://criticalqq.wordpress.com/

Bear with me as I make a massive amount of changes, re-arrange tags/categories, set up Search bars, completely change the way the Blogroll works, add extra pages, set up RSS feeds, and all that joyous stuff.

PvP'ing as a Tank

2008-01-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

Arguably the hardest thing to do in WoW, attempting to PvP as a Protection specced character, the classic sword and board style, is an exercise in incredible frustration.
The hugest problems you have is the fact that your damage output is... well, embarrassingly low. You'll have all these people running around with 200 resilience, and you'll be like "Why bother? I have, like, 11% crit. I couldn't critically strike a critter if I tried"

The problem is simple, really. You cannot think to yourself "Ok, how the hell am I going to kill this guy?".

Ask yourself. Do healers see a hunter running up to them and think, "Holy crap, how am I going to kill this guy?" No, no they don't. They immediately look around for someone else who CAN kill the hunter, and then help them do it.

Quite bluntly, you cannot think only with yourself. You have to think about how you can interact with those around you to be successful.
Go read this post about tunnel vision.

The biggest key about being successful in PvP is realizing that you are not alone. There are other people around you, you don't have to kill that evil mage all by yourself. In fact, you most definitely couldn't. You have to start thinking with those around you.

If you are a mage in PvP, what do you do? You crowd control, you deal damage, and you stay at range. Thats what we're good at, thats what we do.

If you are a Prot Paladin, what do you do? You get up close, try to get aggro, and give the DPS people as easy a time as possible to kill the badguys.

Of course, PvP =/= PvE, but some principles hold the same. There is still such a thing as aggro, for example.
Aggro, essentially, means somebody wants to kill you. If you charge somebody and start hitting them in the face with an axe, they will want to kill you.
If a Paladin starts healing you, if the person your hitting is smart, he will switch to trying to kill the Paladin. The Paladin can wipe his aggro by bubbling, therefore rendering him invincible. Its temporary, but the enemy player will no longer be able to kill him. Hence, aggro wipe.

If you are a prot spec warrior, you cannot simply whip out a massive 2H mace and start hammering people. You aren't going to be good at it, thats not your role.
Same way as a rogue cannot suddenly switch to a ranged DPS role, or a warlock to thinking she can go around melee'ing people.

I mean, you can, but you'll fail. Quite miserably.

Let's take a completely hypothetical example.
Say you are standing at Blacksmith, there is a mage on your left, and a holy paladin on your right.
The mage is currently sitting down, and drinking.

Suddenly, you see a hunter come around the corner of the building, and target the Paladin. You are not in combat.

What do you do?

This should be easy. Your healer is in danger! Help him!

Charge the hunter, grats, you stunned him. Now the hunter, if he wants to kill anything, needs to get you out of the picture.
Act like a standard warrior, slap him with hamstring as soon as possible (the pet too, if you can), and start laying the smackdown, as best as you can. Whip out dual weilding swords if you like, and unleash a Devastate.
Suddenly your Frozen! Oh noes! Trapped! You trinket out, and then...
LOOK AROUND. NO TUNNEL VISION, REMEMBER?

Remember that mage who was drinking? Guess what? He just got Ambushed. Move yer ass over there and get in that rogue's grill!

Intervene, whatever, save the squishy!

Keep in mind that, if the mage is thinking like you, he will see that hunter out there, you on the rogue, and get around to sheeping the hunter at some point. If the mage isn't that smart, well... you did your job.

Ideally, you will tag the rogue with Rend and Hamstring as soon as you can. Keep that rogue stuck next to you, and a DoT ticking so he can't Vanish or anything like that. Keep that bleed effect up, and some of the rogues best tricks will be gone.
If the mage is smart, he's already running from the rogue, running through his own head what he can do here.
Loose hunter? Off goes a polymorph. Whirling around, he immediately starts hitting the rogue with everything he's got. Oh noes! You got blinded by something, and the rogue shadowstepped right behind the mage.
Trinket out, intercept to the rogue, keep on him. Give the mage as much breathing room as possible to unleash some more painful hell on the rogue.

The key is to be as ANNOYING as possible. Rogue pop sprint? Hit him with Concussive Blow, whatever it takes to keep him as pissed off at you as possible. Stay on the rogue until the mage can take over, like when the rogue reachs 30%, is rooted, and the mage is charging up a Shatter combo. Keep Rend up to prevent any last ditch Vanishes.

Same thing versus the hunter, when you have the opportunity.
Concussive Blow, devastate while dual weilding, hell, even stack up some sunders to piss him off.

Whether the made up WoW players did the right thing or not, doesn't really matter. The fact is, YOU are a TANK, so act like one.
You are NOT a mortal strike warrior.
You have a shield. You have Vitality for goodness sake. PLAY like a tank.

See a rogue suddenly leap out at your healer? Intervene! Intercept! Lay some quick movement impairing smackdown to give your healer time to get away.

See an enemy mage near you starting to cast sheep at your healer? Shield bash him!

And if people start hitting you with stuff, thats exactly what you want. You can take the damage, the Holy Priest behind you can't.

For Paladins, its exactly the same. Except replace Concussive Blow with Hammer of Justice, and Rend with Consecrate.

The hugest problem with this is that you will, in essence, depend a great deal on the people around you. And sometimes, they will not come to your rescue.

Sometimes, you will make the perfect setup for escape.
Like that mage earlier. You intervene, slap the rogue with hamstring + rend, and the mage promptly Ice Block. Great. Just great.
Even better is when the mage leaves the hunter unchecked, and the hunter goes off and starts trying to kill your Paladin.
Frustrating? Damn straight it is.
Yo gave that mage the perfect set up to get to range and unleash some delicious damage without having to blow any of his cooldowns, and he goes and immobilizes himself right next to the rogue.

And that happens, it really does.

But again, you really have no choice. You are a tank. You have to depend on those around you to do the damage for you, to heal you, to keep you up, and it is your job to protect them as best as you can.

A hunter trying to flee from a warrior? Hit the warrior with Avenger's Shield. Slow the brute down.
Intercept him. Throw down some Sunders, so the hunter can do more damage. Nail him with Hamstring, so the hunter can easily run away.

Warlock trying to fear your healer? Shield bash it, hamstring both the 'lock AND the 'locks minion, especially if its a felpuppy. Keep those evil things off your healer.

Keep this in mind. You have a specific role, according to your spec. You should know what it is, and play the spec. Do the best you can with the resources you have available, and try to work with the people/classes around you.
Some of them will know what they're doing. Some of them will recognize a perfect hamstring combo as the perfect opportunity to get the hell out of there.

Quite bluntly, you are a tank. Act like it.

Patch Notes? /rofl

2008-01-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

OMG! The patch notes for 2.4 have been leaked!

Let's see what kind of idiocy the guy who came up with these thought of...

-Ritual of Refreshment will now complete faster when activated by 2 additional players.

Uh. This isn't.... this isn't anything. Once everybody has clicked, it takes a couple seconds for the table to appear, but this is due mostly to lag rather than anything else.
This was a concern? By whom? Were people unable to ninja the mage bikkits fast enough? This isn't a patch note, this is nonsensical.

- Counterspell: The duration has been reduced to 6 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 20 seconds.
Counter spell, 8 second school lockout, 24 second cooldown.
Earth Shock, 2 second school lockout, 6 second cooldown.
Pummel, 4 second school lockout, 10 second cooldown.
Shield Bash, 6 second lockout, 12 second cooldown.
Kick, 5 second lockout, 10 second cooldown.

Starting to notice a trend here? Every "interrupt" spell thingy in the game can effectively lock down a spell school for anywhere from one third of the time to half of the time. Never more than half, never less than one third.
Putting Counterspell as a 6 second lockout with a 20 second cooldown will, unequivocally, make it the weakest spell interrupt in the game. This nerf would move it underneath the 30% effective interrupt line, making, quite literally, everything else a better interrupt effect.
Obviously, this could never happen. The QQ would be immense, and even a mages mortal enemies, the warlocks, would realize this.
Besides, it doesn't even make sense that, allegedly, the most powerful purist caster class in the game would have the weakest anti-spell abilities in the game.
Somebody didn't do their basic math... /wink

- Ice Lance now has a 6 sec cooldown.

Hahahahahahahahaha! Ahahahahahahahahaaa!!! *snorrrt* BAAAAAhahahahahahahahahaaa!

- Spellsteal: It is no longer possible to remove a Shaman's Ghost Wolf buff with this spell.

It never was, dumbass. I mean, yeah, it would be cool, but.... ya know, I even got all excited, went in game, and tried to do this. Not spellstealable.
I'm a sad panda now... you jackass.

- Arcane Power: The spell damage bonus has been reduced to 20%, from 30%, but the mana cost penalty has been removed and it now also increases your chance to crit with spells by 5% for the duration.

K... no. Just no. The entire Arcane Tree is built around the fact that mana consumption is placed on manual. An arcane mage can use up mana as fast as he likes, or as slow as he likes. Effectively, he is the only type of mage who can effectively "throttle" his DPS as required. You need look no further than Arcane Blast to see this relation between mana spent versus damage dealt. Things like a cast time are irrelevant. Its a straight up mana versus damage relationship. Arcane Power is one of the defining talents of the Arcane tree. More damage at the cost of more mana is exactly what the arcane tree is about.
And frankly... who in their RIGHT MIND would let mages have 20% increased damage, and 5% critical strike increase for NO ADDITIONAL mana cost?! Are you insane? The QQ over that would be, quite bluntly, utterly insane. It would take the mage forums a good month to dry out over those tears.

- Improved Blink has been replaced by Arcane Efficiency, a talent that reduces the mana cost of Blink, Counterspell and Spellsteal by 25/50%.

Well, this, at least, makes sense. Mages have been asking for a long time for a reduction in the mana cost of Blink and Spellsteal, which pretty much means Arenas only. Which means that only Arena mages would be interested in this.
However, due to its rather stupid positioning in the Arcane Tree, no arena mage will actually get this, although many will try and think of a deep-ish arcane spec that works.
Unless your partner is a resto druid, it won't work. Really. It won't. Don't even kid yourself. It won't work.

- Slow: The mana cost has been reduced by approximately 24% and the duration reduced to 12 sec, from 15 sec.

*Sings the Nobody Cares song*

- Master of Elements: This talent now also reduces Fire and Frost damage taken by 2/4/6%.

Someone just made this up off the top of their head, didn't they? It's like a more stupid version of Frozen Core.

- Dragon's Breath: The disorient effect will no longer break on damage over time effects.

Kinda a very real problem, considering how many fire effects have DoT effects. It breaks far too much, but in reality, we don't really seem to care much. It's basically a glorified spell interrupt. You can defend it, come up with all these crowd control examples, but seriously. Stop. Think. It breaks on damage, just like Repentance or Polymorph or any of those other things. How often do you really use Dragon's Breath to crowd control something for 3 seconds? If you answered "only when fighting elite mobs", you answered correctly. In any practical example of its use, its basically a massive "Inflict Epic Confusion Here".
And, of course, if you PvP, it's an incredibly useful spell interrupt. Like an Earthshock. Except its an AoE. And does more damage. And looks more awesome.

- Icy Veins: The cooldown has been increased to 5 min, from 3 min and no longer increases your chance to Freeze targets, but now gives your damage spells a 30% chance of applying a chill effect, reducing the target's movement speed by 50% for 5 sec.

Haha. This makes zero sense. I know Blizzard is going to make efforts to try and make every single spec viable for both PvP and PvE, and Icy Veins was an effort to make the frost tree more attractive raiding wise, with the bonus that it would allow frostbolt to become more effective in arenas. Until it was dispelled anyways.
This new version is idiotic. A Chill effect to all spells? Please, have some common sense. If your using it in an arena, its going to be on Frostbolt, which already comes with a guaranteed Chill effect. If you're using it for raiding, a Chill effect is like PoM Pyro'ing a bubbled Paladin. Utterly pointless, stupid, a waste of time.
See below for the cooldown analysis.

- Frozen Core: This talent now increases the mana cost of your Fire spells by 2/4/6%, but reduces the mana cost of your Frost spells by 2/4/6%.

The only people who would be interested in this would be raid frost mages, and possibly arena frost mages. Arena mages are already hard pressed talent point wise in the frost tree, and there literally is no points to spare for this. Even if they wanted to, the increased cost of Fireblast would be kinda silly, since that is the most expensive damage spell arena mages use.
Raiding Frost mages should be highly interested in getting it, as it will pretty much negate any point that Clearcast ever had.

- Ice Floes: This talent now also reduces the cooldown of Icy Veins.

So. With these rather stupid patch notes, the changes to Icy Veins are as thus. The intention was to make frost more attractive to raiders, and indeed, very few mages now run raids without the godly Icy Veins. Increasing the cooldown, as the previous note suggested, would make the spell far less attractive. Tossing in the Ice Floes thing here, and the talent really only becomes attractive to raiding Frost mages.
Meaning, essentially, that this would make the frost tree more viable for raiding in an arbitrary, nonsensical manner.
Look. Understand this. Frost does less damage than fire. Plain and simple. You cannot change this fact. It IS a fact. End of story. This is not going to change.
If you want to make a DPS tree more attractive to raiders, it has to perform well. The Frost tree is the lowest DPS spec mages have avaliable. Therefore, why choose it over one of the other specs? If a DPS class cannot DPS, it needs to have a reason for existing.
Take Ret Paladins for example. It is a DPS class that isn't... well, "on par" with the other DPS classes. However, it brings a level of utility to a raid, such as 3% improved crit rate for everybody raid wide.
Its stuff like that, that makes a tree attractive to raiders. Frost doesn't have that, and it must if Blizzard ever expects it to be a solid Raiding tree.

- Arctic Winds: This talent no longer increases all Frost damage done, but now increase the critical strike chance of your Frost spells by 1/2/3/4/5%.

This actually makes sense. Frost already loves its crit rating a bunch, and this type of talent change would start putting it on par with Fire's crit rate. However, this would actually result in a net.... nothing to frost DPS.
The current Arctic Winds is a 5% increase in DPS, all the time. This new Arctic Winds thingy would be a 100% increase in DPS, 5% of the time. Which, mathematically, works out to an increase of... 5% in DPS. Ha. Look at that. Nothing happens at all.
Of course, it would be awesome in any sort of PvP perspective, since mages are built around the whole Burst Damage thing in PvP. An extra 5% crit would be far more useful in a competitive arena than an extra 5% damage.

- Empowered Frostbolt has been renamed to Empowered Frost and no longer increase the critical strike chance of Frostbolt, but now also increases the amount of bonus spell damage that effects your Icelance spell by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Stupid. Whoever bothered to think up this stuff was an idiot.
If you all can remember, Ice Lance gains 14.29% of our bonus frost damage.
Lets say you have 800 frost damage. Ice Lance will get an additional 114 damage.
Now let's say this change is implemented. Ice Lance will get an additional 154 damage.

So. We replace an increase of 5% critical strike rate on frostbolt, for an additional 40 damage on Ice Lance, and 120 on frozen targets.
Arena mages might think its cool, as it makes Ice Lance hit a little harder than usual, giving them slightly more burst potential. On the other hand, they could just as easily lament the loss of burst potential from the Frostbolt nerf. It depends a lot on play style.
Personally? I'd lament the Frostbolt nerf.

Oh, yeah, and raid frost mages would literally freak. A loss of that 5% Frostbolt crit is, quite bluntly, a loss of 5% DPS.
Which, of course, conflicts entirely with the other Frost changes which were supposed to make the frost tree more attractive to Raiders. Than this, which makes it ugly again.

TL;DR version:

This "patch" is a fake, because it is filled with stupidity.

OMG!

2008-01-26T00:18:00.000-07:00

This is... like, the most awesome thing EVAR.

Blog Azeroth!

It's, like, basically all the big wig bloggers meeting together in this gigantic room open forum thing to chat about WoW.
We can do everything from discuss specific bloggy stuff, like how to do trackbacks on blogger, to what, exactly, is UP with the tooltip for Beastial Wrath?

It's like an asshat free version of the WoW forums, where everyone there is intelligent, respectful, and for the most part already kinda sorta know each other, or at least know OF each other.
For example, take BigBearButt. He probably hasn't the foggiest who I am, but I've been a reader of his since October. He totally stole my comment from here and used it in the title here. Either that, or we both think about hawt bear on bear action on a regular basis. Which, frankly, scares me.

Anyway... so, yeah. Blog Azeroth is the mostest coolest thing ever, and I already have it hotkeyed into my firefox.

And MOST importantly, I can access it from work, thus allowing me to spam and post there while going through the drudgery of my job. I would love to be able to post on my blog from work, but it hates me there.
I wonder if wordpress will work...

Speaking of wordpress, There is a very distinct possibility I will be making the jump over there shortly.
Gathering up all sorts of information, and then ~BAM~ I'll be a wordpress blogger.

Might even get my own domain and everything. I have more than enough cash for it.

Anyway, just like last week, my weekend is buggered to hell because of work again. Damn you FCC!
Won't be able to get a quality post out until Sunday, so expect more rubbish tomorrow.

Don't Be Shy!

2008-01-25T00:21:00.000-07:00

Drop me a line! Say hi! E-mail me! Send me questions anonymously by postcard!

Any and all comments automatically get sent to my e-mail, so rest assured (or paranoid) that everything you say can and will be read.

You can always e-mail me at:

criticalqq@yahoo.ca

E-mail me about anything. Questions on Spec? On gear? Instance strategies? Want me to constructively critique you? Your gear? E-mail away!
I can send a confidential reply back, post it up here on the blog if you wish (anonymously if you prefer). I might even extrapolate it into a general post about stuff.... of whatever. Ya know.

Special Projects

2008-01-24T02:14:00.000-07:00

Meet my hunter, Caresse (Named after one of... fuck it, THE most awesome female I know).
That lovely tiger back there is Snuggles.
Only level 36, I think I'm doing quite well.
285 RAP with Hawk up, 173 Agility, 9.46% Crit, and 147 Stamina (just shy of 2k HP).
Shot speed of 1.73, and YES for the love of all that is hunterage I have an up-to-date scope. (+5 damage, best I could find.)
Snuggles has Cobra Reflexes, Claw, all that good stuff. Growl is under manual control.

I also have over 1000 HKs. Oops.

Oh, yeah, and 17 gold.

As alts go, I'm doing great.

And yes, this will always be an alt. To be honest, only reason I'm leveling a hunter is so I can farm stuff for my mage.
Ever tried farming Primal Fires as a fire mage? It ain't pretty.

So. Get a BM hunter to do it for me. Genious? I think so. Especially since, for some queer reason, I enjoy killing random mobs as a hunter. Who knew?
So, Caresse will become my lovely mats farmer, happily churning out primal fires whenever Rip needs him some spell damage enchants.

Second, in the efforts of creating a smarter mage community, I am working on some ridiculously simple videos of magely basics, covering such things as focus sheeping, and not pulling aggro.
Look for them here as soon as I figure out what this "Codex" thing Divx keeps asking me for.

Also leveling another mage for the sole purpose of getting nice footage for things like how to kite without frost nova, and other such lunacy.

Obviously, I can simply write out these necessary skills, and indeed, have done so in the past.
But the way I figures it, and everyone always says, watching something is far better than reading something.

I promise, something more angry tomorrow. Or an anecdote. Something besides all these helpful contributions to the world...

OH YEAH!

Leotheras down! On to Karathress! And then everybody died a lot. Oh, well. Maybe next time.

And I swear, if Aetherial Circle (you know who you are) downs Leo within a week of this, you guys CREEP ME RIGHT THE HELL OUT.
Stop doing stuff, like, EXACTLY like Anathema does.

Good God, they both start with the letter "A"...

/conspiracytheory

Smite versus Fireball

2008-01-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

I had originally intended this as a reply to Mera's comment on raiding fire, but as I delved into the matter, I found that I had far too much information to divulge here.
The comment was thus:
"Actually, for base damage per second, smite is the base spell in the game."

Hmm... quite a claim you've made there, Mera.

In my old troll days, I most likely would have replied with "rofl, nub", but I am a respektible blooger now, and I should craft something intelligent to reply with.

So off I go to investigate this, comparing fireball to smite, to find out which of these spells is... I dunno, better I guess.

So. First off, untalented comparison.

SMITE
Rank 10
Smite an enemy for 549 to 616 damage. 2.5 second cast time. Costs 385 mana.

On average, Smite will hit for 582.5 damage every 2.5 seconds.
Therefore, per second, Smite will:
Deal 233 damage every second.
Cost 154 mana every second.
(1.512 damage per point of mana)

Pretty damn mana efficient, if you ask me. Looking at fireball now...

FIREBALL
Rank 13
Deals 633 to 805 damage, and an additional 84 damage over 8 seconds. 3.5 second cast time. Costs 425 mana.

On average, Fireball will hit for 803 (counting the DoT damage) every 3.5 seconds.
Therefore, per second, Fireball will:
Deal 229 damage every second.
Cost 121 mana every second.
(1.892 damage per point of mana)

Le gasp! Smite deals more damage than fireball!

Fireball is more mana efficient, but still...

Ok, let's talent up this biznatches, find out what happens when we "maximize" these two spells against each other.

(Please remember this principle. All talented increases to spell damage come AFTER the caster's bonus spell damage is applied to the spell.)

First, our test beds. We have a priest, specced to maximize his Smite damage. This priest has a spec like 33/28/0, or other some such madness, to get all the talents that make Smite more smitey.
Our mage here is specced the new classic 2/48/11 spec, to maximize his uber leet dee pee ess.
We are going to assume the following.
Both the mage and the priest have unlimited mana.
Both the mage and the priest have untalented 20% critical strike rate.
Both the mage and the priest have 1000 spell damage in their respective school.
Each has 300 spirit, but this is only really important for the priest, thanks to Divine Spirit.

For right now, we're only comparing Fireball versus Smite, and leaving Scorch out of the equation. Meaning the mage's fireballs will hit 15% softer than they would otherwise. We'll get to that later, I promise.

So. First off, let's improve our Smite.

Smite has a 2.5 second cast time (base), meaning it gains 71.42% of our bonus spell damage.
Which means Smite will get an extra 714 damage on top of its tooltip. Now, we're looking at 1263 to 1330 damage per Smite. One fifth of these will critically strike, meaning 150% damage. Smite can critically strike anywhere from 1895 to 1995.
Meaning that Smite, including critical strikes, will do, on average, 1685 damage per cast.

Now let's add in these handy little talents we have...

For Smite, the talents that make it awesome are split between two different trees. We have some in Discipline, some in Holy. We're going to assume that our Priest has talented to get all of them. Meaning, we have the following:

Self buff, Divine Spirit. Increases Spirit by 50 (this will come in handy later).

Force of Will. Increases Spell Damage by 5% and the critical strike chance of offensive spells by 5%. (Smite will now hit for 1299 - 1366 damage, and has a 25% critical strike chance)

Holy Specialization. Increases critical strike chance of Holy spells by 5%. (Smite now has a 30% critical strike chance)

Divine Fury. Reduces the cast time of Smite by 0.5 seconds, among other things, but we're only concerned with Smite. (Smite now has a cast time of 2 seconds)

Searing Light. Increases the damage of Smite by 10% (Smite will now hit for 1429 - 1503 damage)

Spiritual Guidance. Spell damage increased by 25% of the priest's spirit. Our priest, thanks to Divine Spirit, now has 350 spirit. 25% of that would be an extra 88 spell damage.

Surge of Light, just for kicks and giggles. 50% chance on spell critical that the next Smite will be free of cost, but be incapable of critting itself.

So. With all that, our new spell damage value is (1000 + 88)*1.05 = 1142.

Of that 1142, 71.42% of that will apply to Smite. Meaning Smite will gain 816 spell damage on top of the tooltip.
And then from there, Smite will get an extra 10% damage.
Right now, our damage will be 1502 - 1575 per cast.
We also now have a 30% critical strike chance, meaning Surging Light has a 15% chance to proc.
Let's factor these in, then...
Smite will crit for 2253 - 2363 damage. Averaging those in, Smite's relative damage will rise by 692 damage. Average in Surging Light as well, we get an additional 231 damage.

Meaning, fully talented, Smite will do, on average, 2425 - 2498 damage.

Therefore,

SMITE
Rank 10
Smite an enemy for 2425 to 2498 damage. 2.0 second cast time. Costs 385 mana.

On average, Smite will hit for 2462 damage every 2.0 seconds.
Therefore, per second, Smite will:
Deal 1231 damage every second.
Cost 193 mana every second.
(6.378 damage per point of mana)

Whew, that was long. But there ya go.

Now, let's get to fireball before my fingers fall off...

Fireball has a base cast time of 3.5 seconds, which means we gain the full benefit of our spell damage. Meaning our tooltip damage will be 1633 - 1805. Not including the DoT effect.

As to what we're going to do about the DoT effect. The fireball DoT does not stack, but it does "refresh" in the same way any other debuff would. Assuming we're chain casting these, means the DoT will be refreshed every 3 seconds. Meaning that we get 3 seconds of the 84 damage of 8 seconds, meaning we effectively get 32 damage of that in between fireballs. Bonus spell damage does not apply.

So let's look at our talents.

Improved Fireball, reduces cast time by 0.5 seconds (Fireball now has a cast time of 3 seconds)

Ignite. Critical strikes will now deal 40% of their damage as a DoT ability. (Fireball now, effectively, has 210% damage on any critical strike)

Master of Elements. Critical strikes will restore 30% of their base mana cost. (Mathematically, this means Fireball gets cheaper. We'll get to this soon)

Playing With Fire. 3% increase to spell damage caused. (NOTE THIS!! Spell damage CAUSED, not SPELL DAMAGE. This does not change our base spell damage, but changes what our spell actually hits for. Effectively, this means Fireball's damage is increased by 3%)

Critical Mass. Increases critical strike chance of fire spells by 6%. (Fireball now has a 26% chance to criticall strike)

Fire Power. Increases damage dealt by fire spells by 10%. (Another +10% damage for Fireball)

Pyromaniac. Reduces the mana cost of fire spells by 3%, and increases critical strike chance by 3%. (Fireball now has a 29% chance to critically strike, and is 3% cheaper)

Combustion. (Effectively means we get 3 guaranteed critical strikes with fireball every 3 minutes. We will mathematically add this in at the end)

Molten Fury. When the target is below 20% health, you deal 20% more damage. (Effectively meaning you deal 120% damage 20% of the time.)

Empowered Fireball. Fireball gets an additional 15% of your bonus spell damage. (Hurrah!)

Elemental Precision. Reduces mana cost of frost and fire spells by 3% (Fireball now is 6% cheaper to cast.)

Icy Veins. (Mathematically speaking, 20% more fireballs for 20 seconds every 3 minutes)

Now, let's see what all this does to our precious little fireball.

Like the priest, we're going to assume that we are self buffed, meaning we have Arcane Intellect and Molten Armor up, thus increasing our critical strike chance by 3.5%. Meaning our fireball now has a 32.5% chance to criticall strike.

Fireball will gain 1150 spell damage on top of the base value, and then that amount will be increased by 13%.
Meaning, our new fireball will hit for 2015 - 2209 damage, not including crits or any of that juicy stuff.
So let's toss them in.

First off, how to deal with Combustion. Combustion has a cooldown of 3 minutes, meaning we can use it once every 180 seconds. In 180 seconds, we woul cast 60 fireballs. Of those 60, normally 32.5% of them would crit, working out to 19.5 fireballs crit every 3 minutes. Combustion essentiall guarantees 3 critical strikes, so we can safely assume that it would add 1.5 critical strikes where previously it would have been a regular hit.
Thus, effectively giving us 21/60 fireball crits per those 3 minutes, giving us, mathematically, a revised 35% critical strike chance to fireball. Again, this is mathematically speaking.

Fireball will crit for 4232 - 4639 damage (this is already including the ignite damage) 35% of the time thanks to Combustion.
Average that back in to our base spell damage, fireball will now deal, on average, 3567 - 3761 damage every 3 seconds.

Bear with me, we're almost done. We have but two loose ends left to tie, and these are Icy Veins and Molten Fury.

First, Icy Veins. It will boost our fireball's casting speed by 20% every 3 minutes, essentially meaning every 3 minutes we get to deal 20% more damage. So, for 160 seconds we'll be dealing damage normally, and for 20 of those we'll be doing more.
Therefore, .111% of the time, we'll be dealing 20% more damage, which mathematically works out to 0.0222% more damage.
Factor that in, and fireball will now deal, on average, 3646 - 3845 damage every 3 seconds.

And now we get to Molten Fury. 120% damage, 20% of the time. 1.2 * .2 = 0.24, meaning thanks to Molten Fury, fireball will deal 24% more damage.
Factor that in, and fireball will now deal, on average, 4521 - 4768 damage every 3 seconds.

One last thing relating to mana cost. 35% of the time, fireball will be 30% cheaper. Mathematically, thats a 10.5% reduction to the mana cost of fireball.

I hope you stayed with me all this way. Let's see what fireball looks like now.

FIREBALL
Rank 13
Deals 4521 to 4768 damage, and an additional 32 damage over 3 seconds. 3.0 second cast time. Costs 355 mana.

On average, Fireball will hit for 4677 (counting the DoT damage) every 3.0 seconds.
Therefore, per second, Fireball will:
Deal 1559 damage every second.
Cost 118 mana every second.
(13.2 damage per point of mana)

FOR EASY REFERENCE

SMITE : FIREBALL
2462 damage per cast : 4677 damage per cast
1231 damage per second : 1559 damage per second
193 mana per second : 118 mana per second
6.378 damage per point of mana : 13.2 damage per point of mana

In conclusion. Fireball has greater DPS than Smite, and over double the mana efficiency of Smite, when considering talents.

Anyone want to wonder what this looks like if we toss in the Scorch debuff? I know I do. Let's math!

SMITE : FIREBALL (with Scorch debuff)
2462 DPC : 5379 DPC
1231 DPS : 1793 DPS
193 MPS : 118 MPS
6.378 DppM : 15.152 DppM

I think its fairly clear which spell is the better one here.

Raiding as Fire

2008-01-20T18:55:00.000-07:00

Quick Stats

Most Common Specs
10/47/3 - Clearcast raid fire
2/47/11 - Icy Veins raid fire
Gains 210% damage from critical hits.
Spell Hit Cap: 164 rating

Raiding as fire.

We're talking 47 points of awesome into the fire tree, and the others spent wherever you deem fit.

It's easy.

It's unoriginal.

And it works.

Fire is, and always has been, considered THE raiding spec for these reasons. It is easier to play than either arcane or frost, and is especially tailored towards a raid environment.

Let's break out ye old spec analogy again, shall we?

All three main mage specs for raiding (here we're discussing raid arcane, raid fire, and raid frost), play differently.

Arcane, essentially, specs the mage into a balls-to-the-wall Burst DPS spec, mana be damned. Going full bore Arcane Blast with cooldowns blown will put the mage OOM in a matter of seconds, but his DPS will be insane. Utterly insane. Until his mana bar goes limp.
Think of it like the spec designed to kill the trash in raids as fast as possible.
Picture it like a Drag Racer, designed to reach speeds of excess of 240 mph, but can only maintain this for a half mile.

Fire is the opposite. It specs the mage as far away from burst DPS as possible from mage, and essentially specializes the mage for boss fights. Thats why it's so popular, "the" raid spec if you will. Any fight thats under 10 seconds is a waste of a fire mages time. This spec is designed for the long haul.
Think of it like the spec designed to fight the boss mobs in raids efficiently.
Picture it like a massive trucking... truck... designed to reach speeds of no more than 80, 90 mph, but can maintain it for almost a thousand miles.

Frost is the middle ground here. It does not have the same amount of burst damage arcane is capable of, and it does not have the long haul power that fire does. It has better burst damage than fire, and has far greater longevity than arcane.
Think of it like the spec that tries to find a comfortable middle ground between boss fights and trash killing.
Think of it like a wee little Toyota sports car that can go 140 mph, and keep it up for a couple hundred miles.

So, in the effort of providing the information that will help you decide what car is best for you, I present: Raiding Fire.

Firstly, the spell rotation of a fire mage, ideally, will be endless amounts of fireball spamming. By itself, fireball produces some of the very best damage versus time versus mana spent of any spell in the game. A warlock's shadowbolt is the only competitor.
However, a fire mage has this nifty little trick up his sleeve, called "Fire Vulnerability" (the talent is called Improved Scorch). Essentially, every time you hit something with Scorch, they take an extra 3% damage from any and all fire spells and effects. This effect stacks up to 5, meaning if you hit a mob with Scorch five times in a row, that mob will take 15% more damage from any and all fire spells. This debuff lasts 30 seconds.
So, on any given raid boss, you want to build this debuff up to its full stack of five, and then simply refresh the debuff every 28, 29 seconds to keep it going.
Therefore, you will start each fight with Scorch x 5. Once the initial debuff is up, you'll be doing fireball x 9, Scorch once, then repeat.
Obviously, if you have enough spell haste to fit in 10 fireballs in that 28 second time frame, kudos to you.
Essentially, you want to get in as many fireballs as possible between the 30 second timer mark on the debuff, and about 2 seconds away from where the debuff would "fall off". You DO NOT want to lose your stack, so make sure you are casting Scorch by, at the very latest, the 28.5 second mark.

This is, however, depending on a fight where you do not have to move. On fights where you may be switching targets frequently, or moving around a lot, you'll probably want to refresh Scorch more often.
For example, say the Void Reaver fight. If he flings an Arcane thingy at you, cast Scorch one last time before turning and running. Again, losing the Scorch debuff stack is a horrible thing to happen, and will waste many seconds rebuilding it.
To put it bluntly, fireball has, and always will, provide greater DPS than Scorch could ever hope to achieve. Any time spent rebuilding the debuff is time spent not using fireball, which is time spent doing less than your optimal DPS.
You do not want to cast fireball while there is no Scorch debuff, by simple fact that you are losing 15% of your damage if you don't have it up.
If you take nothing else away from this blog, take this:

The Scorch debuff is KEY to maintaining DPS.

If you have other fire mages in the raid, great! All of you can contribute to building the stack as fast as possible, and then have one of them refresh it every 28 seconds while the others do only fireballs. However many mages are not casting Scorch will have higher DPS than if they were the only fire mage in the raid. The one on Scorch refresh duty will have his usual DPS, but the other mage(s) doing nothing but fireball will have higher DPS because of it.

Keep this in mind. The scorch debuff does not just benefit mages, but it also benefits other classes that use fire spells, namely Warlocks.
To be blunt, a full on Scorch debuff increases the damage a warlock deals with fire spells by 15% as well. So we can help out our soul-sucking children, even though they always use Curse of Not-Helpful.
Random Raiding Tip: there are a couple fights during raiding where a warlock must tank a boss. Leotheras comes to mind. Consider this: the warlock pretty much has to spam Searing Pain to get enough aggro to hold the boss. If a full Scorch debuff is present, aforementioned warlock will generate 15% more threat. Sound good? Of course it does.

But what about trash mobs? Attempting to build the scorch debuff, only to have the mob die at 4 stacks can be an issue. If you're guild already has very high DPS, then it might not even be possible to build the scorch stack before the mob dies.
Scorch is a precursor to actual strong DPS. It is not the DPS itself, but is foreplay to the real deal.

Unfortunately, you will have to use your brain about trash mobs. I know, what a cad I am for forcing you to think.

The general rule of thumb across the entire WoW universe is that anything that will be alive for 10 seconds or longer should be Scorched first.
You will have to get a feel for your guilds damage dealing strength to decide how much of a debuff you are going to place on the trash mobs, and it also depends a lot on how many other fire mages there are in the raid.

Let's use me, for example. Being the only fire mage in the raid, I'm the only one who can provide the Scorch debuffs. The DPS power of the raid is also very strong, so there is really little time to cast spells at a mob before it dies.
On the "weak" trash mobs, i.e. the relatively low health caster mobs, I bring scorch up to 3 or 4 stacks, then get off a couple fireballs before finishing with fireblast.
On the stronger trash mobs, the ones with high amounts of health, Scorch is brought up to the full 5 stack, the fireball spamming commences.
If there's two of you fire mages in the raid, there is no reason not to have the full scorch debuff up before hitting fireball.

Similar to frost, and any mage at that, cooldowns should be used the second they are avaliable to be used, with a couple caveats.

Fire produces more aggro than any of the other mage trees, and as such immediately using all your powerful cooldowns might cause too much aggro at the get go. As well, using Combustion at the opening of a fight will pretty much "waste" the cooldown, as most of your Combustion procs will occur on the initial Scorches, which 1) don't have a lot of damage and 2) will not have the full debuff up yet, so you will lose out on damage.

As fire, cooldowns should be used as soon as it is feasible for said cooldowns to be used for fireball spamming, once the Scorch debuff is fully stacked. Make sense?

I'd like to turn your attention to a fire tree talent called "Molten Fury". It increases the damage dealt to targets under 20% health by 20%. To put it bluntly, this ability can be incredibly powerful, but you have to take advantage of it.
Against most trash mobs, for instance, this won't really be noticed, as the mob will only be alive in that health range for a few seconds. On these types of mobs, at the end of a fight, try to time it so a fireball hits right when the mobs health drops under 20%, then finish it off with Scorch / Fireblast to get as much Molten Fury damage as you can.

On boss fights, whatever boss you are fighting is going to be under 20% health for a long, long time. To take full advantage of this, you are going to want to "save" your cooldowns for when said boss drops to 20%, for the sole purpose of stacking powerful cooldowns with Molten Armor.
The reason why "save" is in quotations is because you are not going to go the entire fight without using a single cooldown... right? You're going to be smart and use them about 3 minutes before the boss will hit 20%, right?
You don't want to not touch your cooldowns at all, you just want to make sure you have them avaliable when the boss hits 20%.

If you remember, at the top of the post, I linked the two most commonly used fire builds out there.
The fire tree is always the same, those 47 points there are pretty much solidified.
About the only one you could skip getting would be Dragon's Breath, since it has extremely situational raid usage, and really, its only there to look cool.

You should always have the two points into the Arcane tree for the threat reduction, for all those times where you have to Arcane Explosion spam. Talented, it is the most amount of AoE damage possible for the least amount of threat. All raiding mages should have it.
Also, at least 3 points in frost for Elemental Precision is mandatory. That increases your spell hit, which of course is absolutely necessary.

Choosing between the clearcast spec and the Icy Veins depends entirely on how deep your mana pool is.
Clearcast lets you cast for a longer duration, effectively 10% longer. Icy Veins gives you a boost to your damage dealt, a rather significant one, I might add. Stacked with other cooldowns and Molten Fury, the boost can be staggeringly high.
The downside is that each spell has the same mana cost, so your mana consumption will rise significantly.
As a general rule, if your mana pool is 8500 (unbuffed) or higher, go with the icy veins option
If you have less than 8500, stick with clearcast until your gear gets a little better.

The final, unused point can go wherever you want, it doesn't matter.

And that is how you raid as a fire mage.

Totally Forgot

2008-01-20T03:17:00.000-07:00

Hydross down, btw. Guild dropped him on Wednesday. Totally forgot to mention that.

I Finally Did Karazhan

2008-01-20T02:34:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I finally did Karazhan yesterday.

Now, I know what you're thinking... how does this mage go from regular instances, straight to Tier 5, then do Karazhan after?

Simple... I haz uber leet skillz.

Ok, no, seriously. I had the Tailored epic set, which means I have 3 extremely solid pieces that will last me a long, long time, and also a bunch of PvP epics that, while not optimal, are still light years beyond anything else you can start 70 with. So I didn't exactly hit 70 with crap all gear, I started with 7 epics ready to go, and quickly collected more. So there. Nyaah.

So, where was I... Oh, yes! Karazhan! We had damn fine group, so we one shotted all but two on our speedy four hour run.

Our group makeup was as follows:
Protection Paladin, an alt of the Guild master. Has the best gear possible outside of Tier 5 for Prot Pallies.
Two rogues, one of which was an alt. Both definitely on the high end gear wise, relative to Kara.
A healer Paladin, who had horrible connection issues, and as such we ended up 9-manning amost the entire run
Myself, setting things on fire and pulling aggro on everything. JOKING, never once pulled aggro.
A Resto shammy, also in overwhelmingly good gear. Except his mace, which is an embarrasment. He keeps running Kara in the hopes of getting ANY healing mace. 3 weeks of nothing. Poor guy.
Holy Priest, overgeared for Kara. Needs him some badges!
Feral Druid, off tank. Doesn't need anything from Kara besides badges.
A brand new 70 warlock, definitely in entry Kara gear. Sporting mostly quest blues at the moment, but has a couple nice epics. Like the Frozen Shadoweave Shoulders, for instance.
A brand new 70 hunter, mostly Kara entry blues, with a couple epics. Heh, guy had a rough night. Being a newbie at all.

We eventually replaced the Holy Paladin with another hunter (you might well know him as Ghostkid, one of my loyal readers), and went on our merry way through Karazhan.

Attumen got owned in short order

Moroes down even faster. The new hunter had some fun here, seeing as how it was like "K, you need to chain trap the one marked with a Blue Square. The whole encounter. If you fail, we all die." We didn't die, so mega props to him.

We cleared to Maiden, downed her no problem.

On we go to Opera. The Prot pally heads out on stage to see what it is, we get Romulo and Julianne. Bubble, run out, restart.
Down they go. Had some DPS issues, meaning me and the warlock were assigned to Romulo and seriously out DPS'ing the two rogues on Julianne.
They had some troubles keeping the heals interrupted, I think they kept kicking Blinding Passion by accident.
Or maybe it was the Devotion buff I got to spellsteal. I only got to do it once, damn priest kept dispelling it. Oh well.
Down they go, badges were had, off we go to Curator.

And here's our first wipe. Resto shammy's mana went kersplat, and the rest of us were basically... yeah, can't DPS Evocates when we're dead.
I had some serious issues with pushback on fireball that encounter. Gah. Like, took over 5 seconds a few times to get the damn spell of. The Flares lurved me, and they didn't die fast enough.
Oh, well, respawn, keep going, utterly destroyed Curator the second time.

Skipped Illhoof (we ain't doing that crap with a new warlock) and on to Shade of Aran.
Downed with few problems.
I got caught in Blizzard once, thanks to the chains, which held me up a bit. Frost Ward, then blink. Had to Ice Block once, I went the wrong way and ran into a Blizzard rather than out of it. lawlz.
Oh! And nobody moved during Flamewreath. Zero damage from that ability.
And the elemental adds were handled nicely by aforementioned new warlock. Kept on banished, and another chain feared the whole fight. Bravo, you don't suck!

Cleared out chess, I tried out being a healer. Healing is stressful when its on a 20 second cooldown. Eep. Was the most stressful moment of the night.

So, we were about ready to call it a night at this point. Meh, went after Prince, almost all of us needed something from him. Me included, I've desired that tier 4 hat for a long time. Just haven't bothered to go get it.
The mindblade would also be sexy. Oh, well, neither dropped.
Our second wipe was here. Off tank got nailed by enfeeble early, then got hit by an Infernal almost instantly upon trying to flee. Dead druid.
Next one dropped right onto the ranged.
So did the next one.
Wipe.
Second time, nobody dies, Infernals were almost a non issue (one did land directly on top of the melee), and the hunter picks up a Decapitator because it looks cool.

So, portal to Shatt, with plans to finish up Sunday night. I immediately take all my hard earned badges and go buy myself some new bracers.

Runed Spell-Cuffs

Snazzy? I like to think so. I've been coveting spell haste for a while now, and this is just the start. Scoring the Pantaloons next, and from there, grab some stuff from ZA if I ever manage to be on during ZA nights, and hopefully will get a speedy little fireball.
Or, at the very least, get Scorch to the point where it will be under the GCD enough so that it always throws my timing off when I get the whole "Can't do that yet" errors.

Won't that be FUN?!

On a related note, anyone have about 5 primal fires I can have? I need me some enchants.

Confessions of a Magi

2008-01-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

Even we, the elite of the arcane, masters of fire, have our dirty little secrets.

And where better to admit them then here?

We only drop Refreshment Tables in battlegrounds because we're too lazy to summon our own food and water.
Then, we click them as fast as possible, to empty the table in seconds. Then, we delete all the manna biscuits, besides the ~100 we need, and then blame the hunter next to us for draining the table.
At this point, we tell everyone else that its on cooldown, sorry they missed the biscuits.

The only reason we spec frost to level is because frostbolt makes a really cool noise when you shoot it.

We cast Blizzard on the melee in the Shade of Aran fight, and see how many panic and run out.

We go an entire raid casting only Scorch, because we're playing on a laptop and watching a Zombie movie with our friends.

We always spellsteal a Paladin's "Wings" because, quite frankly, they look better on a mage.

We all secretly wish we had rolled gnome mages.

We all have an inexplicable loathing of retribution Paladins.

If anyone gets mind controlled in a raid, we will do our utmost to kill that person as fast as possible.

If we see a warrior pop Spell Reflect, we cast Polymorph to get a free heal.

We ninja killing blows in battlegrounds with Fireblast.

We will gladly cast Pyroblast on level 1 critters to pad our WWS damage reports.

We all secretly lust for female dranei.

We all have warlock alts.

We love to ride at about 110-120% threat to make the tanks sweat.

We secretly love to be turned into Little Red Riding Hood.

When blizzard stopped letting us summon Portals to Capital Cities in battlegrounds, we mages wept.

Dropping somebody to 1% in a battleground, then casting slow on them and melee'ing them turns us on.

Wehn we meet hunters in a battleground, we take pleasure in killing the pet then running away. Ice blocking, jumping off a cliff, whatever, so the hunter cannot kill us. Then we do it again a few minutes later.

We heal the other side in battlegrounds.

We break our own sheeps and blame someone else. After all, what kind of mage breaks their own sheep? Right?

Restoration druids make us cry.

We use Ice Block at 1% just to be a prick.

We keep polymorph right next to the Arcane Power + Trinket + Presence of Mind + Frostbolt + Icy Veins macro, so people will know how awesome I am... by accident.

We spec to get Imp. Flame Ward, and then run around FRAPSing ourselves reflecting Fire spells.

We all break out into a cold sweat when we're low on Teleportation Runes.

We love to sheep sheep.

I'm Tired

2008-01-17T23:03:00.000-07:00

I'm tired. I'm sick. I cannot take another minute of this madness.

I am talking about Subtlety rogues, obviously.

Am I sick if losing to them? No, that is not the case. As class versus class, the dynamics haven't really changed.

What I'm sick of, what I'm tired of, is these subtlety rogues taking themselves seriously. I am sick of these rogues who run around battlegrounds pretending they have a real spec. I am sick of them using these... gimmicks.

I won't say I'm sorry for these somewhat harsh words, because I'm not.

These.... rogues... these so called Subtlety rogues, are annoying me to death.

In all honesty, the subtlety tree doesn't make sense. It seems to be an incoherent mishmash of stuff, that is better off as a collection of engineering trinkets.

Criticize me if you want, but it doesn't feel like I'm playing against an actual spec... it doesn't feel like an actual talent tree to me. Most talent trees in the game have a built in synergy to them.
Like the mages fire tree for example. Crit enhancing talents, and then talents that feed of crits.
Or, say, the arcane tree. Increases the mana cost and damage of abilities, and has an ability that does more damage the more mana you spend. It also has talents that increase intellect, and then a talent that increases spell damage based on intellect.
Y'see how this works?

And then we have the subtlety tree, which is like... people taped abilities to a dart, blindfolded themselves, spun around, then hurled the dart in a random direction.

I guess thats a little too harsh. After all, the talents do kinda make sense... I mean, it is a PvP tree for the rogues. I mean, it has to be. Look at all those survivability talents in there.

But, see, it's supposed to develop into something. Something awesome, something powerful and sexy. But the subtlety tree never actually... gets there.

Fire Mage: Check me out. I got, like, all this awesome crit stuff. And check it, whenever I crit, I do even more damage!
Rogue: Oh yeah, well, I can get more combo points after resisting your spell!
Fire Mage: Uh... huh... yeah, well, listen, whenever I crit, I also get mana back! And check this out... an active spell that vastly improves my crit rate! Isn't that awesome?
Rogue: HA! When I'm almost dead, I'm not dead, 'cause I can cheat death, you see, see? And then I take, like, no damage ever and I keep living for like an eternity and awesome, and you'll crit me for, like, 4!!
Fire Mage: Uhhh... what... what are you even talking about? Was that even a sentence?
Rogue: I CAN TELEPORT!!
Fire Mage: K, I'm gonna go talk to this warrior over here...
Rogue: GHOSTLY STRIKE!!
Fire Mage: What the... did you... did you just... what the hell?
Rogue: Can't touch this I am dodgy! I am teh MASTAH of Decepshun!

Exaggerated? Not by much.

Seriously, these subtlety rogues are getting on my nerves.

They are.... annoying. Really, really annoying.

Cheat Death is a really cool idea, but as far as I can tell, it just makes me angry.

Look, you're already dead. Seriously, stop trying. Stop fucking around, just lay down, and die. You think an extra three seconds is going to do anything? C'mon, man, you're just wasting my time, and yours.

And why, oh why did these rogues steal my precious Blink? I mean, c'mon, I'm a bloody MASTER of the Arcane! I can shoot fire from my hands! I set a damn dragon on fire with MY MIND, and now some petty thief has the same skill I do? What. The hell.
Was it really necessary to let rogues teleport? Was this really needed?
Yeah, rogues have mobility issues, but seriously... just handing them an exclusive mage spell seems kinda... unimaginative.

It's not like I hate them. It's not like I get ganked by them.

But they piss me off. It's one of those senseless things that gets you riled up for no apparent reason.

Its similar to waking up, and realizing somebody moved your slippers, and you get entirely pissed off.

"WHO THE %$^@ MOVED MY GODDAMN SLIPPERS?!"

There's no real reason...

But BLOODY HELL man these rogues piss me off.

A History of Me

2008-01-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

So I started off, a wee little troll mage running around, having played only one online RPG (it was a Neverwinter server, up to 20 people online at a time!), and never having played a spell casting character... properly, that is.

At Vox's suggestion, I attempted to level as arcane. Leveled to about 16 putting points into Arcane before I realized I always used fireball as my spell of choice, almost never touched Arcane Missiles.
So I respecced over to fire, and found it much more awesome. Impact was, like, the COOLEST THING EVAR.

At level 18, I wandered into one of those Warsong peoples on the vacation weekend. I thought to myself "What's PvP? I wonder if it's any good". So I tried it out. I was very sad.
My best ever attempt was dropping a rogue to 93% life before getting killed. I mostly got killed by everybody, couldn't get a spell cast off ever, and then got killed again. Ganked in seconds.

So I thought "this is stupid. Never doing this again", and went on my merry way, leveling up.

It was about here that I did my very first instance. Wailing Caverns, with a PuG group. We failed on the 6th pull in, wiping catastrophically. So I didn't do that again for a very long time.

Things changed at 29. Oh, how they changed. Namely, I got Burning Soul. Pushback resistance. Things changed a lot at 29. Those rogues who used to gank me? HAH! Eat fire, bitchez! And so it went. I was doing quite well at 29. I was never the best, but I was pretty good. Usually about 5-6 on the damage meters, about there.
I spent a good couple of weeks at 29, doing nothing but Arathi Basin over and over again. Vox was harassing the hell out of me. "Level up! Level up! Fuck, LEVEL UP!"

So I did. I leveled up. And at 36, gave PvP a try again. I discovered I was even BETTER now! All these new fire abilities was turning me into a god of damage. It took one and a half months to level from 36-40, because I spent so much time doing PvP.

Again with Vox harassing the shit out of me, I leveled up into the next bracket.

I have frost a try at level 44, and Blizzard promptly nerfed the tree into oblivion the next day. Went back to fire, and it has always been my favorite tree.

Lo and behold, 49 was the best bracket yet. At this point, I was glued to the whole idea of a glass cannon. I barely had over 1k hitpoints at this point, but had enough spell damage to consistently drop 6 or 7 enemies before I was killed, assuming nobody healed me ever, and I was always in the top 3 for damage dealt, and had a ton of killing blows (and as such as always gifted with heals every now and then). Almost 3 months were spent happily killing stuff at 49. Hell, the release of the Burning Crusade came and went in this time period, and I didn't even notice until I encountered a Dranei Shaman for the first time.

See, at 49, I had never, not even once fought against a dranei shaman. I had no idea what to do about them at first. It was like, this thing is running at me, holy crap Earth Shock, what the hell is that? Holy crap! What was that? Stormstrike? I got one-shotted! Holy crap! HOLY CRAP! They can heal themselves too? Fucking overpowered!

For about a week I got raped by shamans before I figured out how to kill them. After that, everything settled down back to normal. One of my PvP buddies turned into a blood elf, but other than that things went smoothly. I ganked, got ganked, and so on.

So, yeah, almost three months at 49 doing nothing but PvP. I had this little tight knit group of people I always PvP'd with. People like Nismofreak, Olintharg, and a bunch of others. PvP is what we did. It's just what we did. And we were hard core.
We even reached a point where we would all spec around each other, to get to the best possible fighting unit we could get.

As such, I found myself in the dreaded PoM Pyro spec. Well, it was at 49, so I was basically a one trick pony. Well, except for the fact that I had a ton of spell damage (for my level) and as such I could easily three shot most people.

Oh, yeah, and I did Uldaman a few times around here. Oddly enough, I was quite good at it, and I don't know why. I had done... like, Wailing Caverns once before, but for some reason I was good at instances. My sheeps were good, my DPS was good, and aggro was never pulled. Sorry, guys, I was never an instance noob.

I could go on and on here, I mean, me and these people played together for nearly three months. I kinda have a lot to say on the matter, given the chance. But this post isn't about 49 PvP, its about me.

So. I go on a band trip for a week and a half, get back, and discover all my friends had moved on. Every one of them was between level 53-58.

Was I disappointed? Yep, yep I was. I was very sad.

PvP just wasn't the same without them.

So, off I went, back to the whole leveling thing.

Meandered around WPL, and ended up at 51. Then I tried out the fabled Alterac Valley.

One month later... I had gained 2 levels from doing nothing but AV. So, yeah, level 53, and I thought "Ehh, better go back and do some real stuff".

Vox had hit 70, like, 3 months ago, I think.

Anyways, so, gradually leveled from 53-58. Took bloody forever. Then hit up Outlands, and leveled from 58-59 in the same amount of time it took to get to the Outlands from STV. No, seriously. That bloody fast.

So I picked up all these Outland greens and quest rewards, leveled as close to 60 as I dared, and went back to PvP.

Oh, it was glorious. I discovered the use of stamina for the first time. I was still very much a cannon, except I had fitted myself as an iron cannon. I was still able to 2-3 shot most people, and consistently was in the top 1-3 for health in the entire battlegrounds. This included Alterac Valley.

I mean, I had 4 items that were 59 greens "of stamina", so I was far ahead of the competition.

Ridiculously high stamina + ridiculously high damage output = WARLOCK MODE ON.

Averaged 1 death per BG versus ~50 kills. It was damn good times.

Oddly enough, I never actually did some serious PvE until halfway through my 60's. Before running Underbog with my guild at the time, I had almost never run actual instances. Zul'Furak (?) once, Wailing Caverns, and Uldaman a few times. That was the extent of that.

And then all of a sudden, all this Outland stuff. Instances up the wazoo.

Good times, really. Wiping in Underbog, wiping in Sethekk Halls, wiping in Mechanar, wiping on Murmur for 3 hours straight, yeah. It was fun.

Needless to say, thats why I am extremely jaded towards PuGs, even though not ALL of my experiences were terribad.

Well, whatever. Played plenty of battlegrounds on my way up from 60-69, and as was usual for me, dominated them all. What can I say? I was designed for slaughtering the innocent. It's just what I did.
At 64, I respecced for frost, fully expecting my beloved fire spec to be next to ruined by resilience, until my gear came up to par, and even then...
Needless to say, I was proven right. Fire is sad, and is largely self-defeated by resilience. A loss of ~12% (I forget what the exact cap is) ruins a lot of the damage fire depends on to be competitive. And entering 70 arenas with barely 7k hitpoints, and not even 100 resilience, its ruinous unless you max out your spec to try and cover it.

Regardless, spent a good month at 69 as well, so there. I had fun. Killed stuff, and had actually gotten 4 pieces of my 70 honor gear before getting that last level.

And at 70, promptly hopped onto some arena teams, and we generally had our asses kicked all over the place. But oh well, thats kinda where this blog started off, at the tail end of arena ass kicking. After that, my teams dried up, and some major changes occurred.

For one, I joined an excellent raiding guild (Hydross went down tonight, Grats to us!), and as such, a raiding spec was needed. I have used all 3 major specs now, and am happiest with fire. Go figure, huh?
Anyways, took my arena'ing to PTRs, and here I am. Raiding and PvP.

And doing a blog, because I'm that lame.

Why Polymorph Is So Damn Good

2008-01-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

1) Able to be used on both Beasts and Humanoids, it is an extremely effective crowd control spell, used everywhere from Wailing Caverns to Serpentshrine Cavern to Sunken Temple to Black Temple. So many mobs are susceptible to Polymorph, it is almost a universally good crowd control device.

2) It is spammable. Some crowd control abilities, like a hunter's freezing trap, come with cooldowns attached. Polymorph does not have a cooldown.

3) Polymorph is a crowd control spell that is brought to the mob in question. Again comparing to a hunter's freezing trap, polymorph has a 30 yard range, and as such can be casted at a mob that is still yards away. Freezing trap requires the mob to come to the trap, which requires a lot more precision and skill to use properly. Any dumbass can use Polymorph correctly.

4) The mob barely moves once controlled. A warlock's fear "controls" the mob, but it is still running about like an idiot. There is serious danger that other mobs will be pulled. A sheep doesn't leave the same 4 yard zone, and most importantly, if other mobs path over it, they do not aggro. Apparently, there is nothing suspicious about a cute piggy named "Incredibly Powerful Naga".

5) It lasts a very long time. Max ranked Polymorph lasts a hefty 50 seconds, which means in your average instance, you can sheep it, and then forget about it for almost a minute.

Raiding as a Mage

2008-01-13T21:15:00.001-07:00

The leap from solo WoW to group WoW can be a tough one. As you probably know by now, group play demands that you excel at what your class is good at, and completely ignore everything else.
When you, mage, go off to kill some mobs, you are providing the pulling, the tanking, the DPS, and the heals, all by yourself. Pull a second mob by mistake, and now you're doing the crowd control as well. You have to fill all of the classic group roles with you and only you.
This all changes when you group up with other people. Grouped up, you no longer have to tank, heal, pull. That stuff is not your responsibility, and you can safely ignore them and leave those tasks to the classes who excel at them.
You will never tank an instance. There are a couple bosses where you tank, but that is far out from the norm.
You will never heal an instance. It just won't happen. K?

For we mages are here for two things: dealing damage to the bad guys, and turning the bad guys into cute farm animals. Thats what we do.
You don't need to kite a mob, because someone else will be tanking it for you. You don't need to worry about people's health bars, someone else is taking care of that.
So what do you, the grouping/instancing/raiding mage need to know?

Synopsis of the 3 main specs in a raid.

Arcane, essentially, specs the mage into a balls-to-the-wall Burst DPS spec, mana be damned. Going full bore Arcane Blast with cooldowns blown will put the mage OOM in a matter of seconds, but his DPS will be insane. Utterly insane. Until his mana bar goes limp.
Think of it like the spec designed to kill the trash in raids as fast as possible.
Picture it like a Drag Racer, designed to reach speeds of excess of 240 mph, but can only maintain this for a half mile.

Fire is the opposite. It specs the mage as far away from burst DPS as possible from mage, and essentially specializes the mage for boss fights. Thats why it's so popular, "the" raid spec if you will. Any fight thats under 10 seconds is a waste of a fire mages time. This spec is designed for the long haul.
Think of it like the spec designed to fight the boss mobs in raids efficiently.
Picture it like a massive trucking... truck... designed to reach speeds of no more than 80, 90 mph, but can maintain it for almost a thousand miles.

Frost is the middle ground here. It does not have the same amount of burst damage arcane is capable of, and it does not have the long haul power that fire does. It has better burst damage than fire, and has far greater longevity than arcane.
Think of it like the spec that tries to find a comfortable middle ground between boss fights and trash killing.
Think of it like a wee little Toyota sports car that can go 140 mph, and keep it up for a couple hundred miles.

Raiding as Arcane

Raiding as Fire

Raiding as Frost

Dealing Damage

This will be your primary role in a grouping scenario. You're a mage, you're a purist DPS (damage per second) class.
Depending on your spec, you will have what is called a "spell rotation", a series of spell casts you use to do as much damage as possible. What spells you use depends entirely on what spec you use.
The goal of DPS is to continue casting, to continue dealing as much damage as possible for as long as possible.

Step 1: The Mana Pool

In order to cast spells, you must have mana to cast said spell. You should start each confrontation at full mana, so you will be able to continue casting for quite some time before going OOM (out of mana). During most "trash" (i.e. non-boss fights) your default mana bar will be enough to last you the entire fight.
However, during boss fights, this will almost never be the case. Your mana bar will run out, and it is your responsibility to keep your mana bar replenished, to keep you casting spells as long as possible.
You have the following options avaliable to restore mana: Mana Gems, Mana Potions, and Evocation.
What limits you fro having an eternal mana bar is the fact that these mana restoratives have cooldowns attached to them. Both mana gems and pots have 2 minute cooldowns, and Evocation can only be used every 8 minutes.
You have to be a little smart about when to use your mana restoratives, or you will find yourself with an empty mana bar rather frequently, especially if you are specced arcane. As a general rule, never, ever wait until your low on mana to use a consumable.
Let's say you have 3 mana potions, and no gems for some reason, and 9000 mp.
Now, these mana potions restore 2.5k mana per potion.
As the fight goes on, you want to use the first mana potion right when your mana bar hits the line where it will be almost completely filled.
In this example, you are going to want to drink the first mana potion at 6500 mp. Don't drink it any sooner, or you will have wasted mana. If you drink it at 8000 mp, you just wasted 1500 mana points. Don't do that.
Let's compare a mage who drinks intelligently, and one who drinks only when his mana is almost gone. (These numbers were picked arbitrarily).

Let's say each of these mages use 3k mana every minute. They each have 9000 mana to go through. Without using consumables, they will each be able to cast for 3 minutes before going OOM. Now, these mages are using Super Mana Potions, which for some odd reason, always restore the maximum 3000 mana.
The first mage will use his mana potions intelligently, using it whenever he can make use of it.
The second mage will only use it when he's OOM.
So. Here we go.

Minute One - Each mage has used 3k mana. Mage 1 uses his mana potion at this mark, restoring him to full mana. Mage 1 = 9000 mana. Mage 2 = 6000 mana.

Minute Two - Each mage has now used 6k mana total. Mage 1 has 1 minute left on his potion cooldown. Mage 1 = 6000 mana. Mage 2 = 3000 mana.

Minute Three - Each mage has now used 9k mana total. Mage 1 drinks another potion, the second the cooldown is up. Mage 2, being OOM, now uses his first potion. Mage 1 = 6000 mana. Mage 2 = 3000 mana.

Minute Four - Each mage has now used 12k mana total. Both mages have 1 minute left on their potion cooldown. Mage 2 is now OOM, and spends the next minute scuffing his shoes. Mage 1 = 3000 mana. Mage 2 = 0.

So you see the difference using the mana restoratives does. Use 'em smart.

Step 2: Threat

When you hurt a mob by setting it on fire or whatever, this causes the mob to start to get angry at you, and eventually, hate you so much it wants to rape your children then force-feed their corpses to you.
Now, in a group, there a multiple targets for the mob to choose from, and ideally the mob will choose the tank (the tank here defined as "Not You"). So, once the tank has "aggro" on the mob, meaning the mob is hitting the tank and not anyone else, you can feel free to open up on the mob in question.

How to Not Pull Aggro

And that's all there is to it! Keep your mana bar up, keep your threat bar low, and your DPS will soar.

Crowd Control

We're going to talk about the Almighty Polymorph here. While some disagree, polymorph is the best crowd control effect in the game. There. I said it. End of story. Able to be used on humanoids and beasts, the mobs it can crowd control far outnumber those it cannot. Why is polymorph so good?

Why Polymorph Is So Damn Good.

When you are assigned a mob to crowd control, it is your responsibility, and your responsibility alone, to make sure that mob stays sheeped and never, ever gets lose. Because of its incredible ease of use, usually you will be assigned to control a mob that is difficult for other forms of crowd control to handle. For example, that ranged caster than can wipe your entire party in 6 seconds if it was lose. Yeah, you gonna sheep that 'un.
Sheep your mob as soon as possible. Be on the safe side for the first few pulls to get a feel for the timing of how this particular group does their pulls. Sometimes the tank will pull with a ranged shot, sometimes a hunter will do the pulling, sometimes the tank will simply run into the mobs and face pull them. Get a feel for the timing, and get Polymorph to land no less than a second after the mobs get aggrod onto the tank.
For example, if your tank pulls with a crossbow, as soon as you see the shoot animation start, begin casting polymorph. If your tank is a Paladin, and pulls, start casting Polymorph as soon as the Avenger's Shield cast bar pops up. It will land shortly after the Shield hits.

Next, you need some way to keep track of your polymorphed target while doing other stuff.

Start of by setting up a focus. World of Warcraft let's you "save" a target, which is kept in a separate frame. When you type /focus, whatever you had targeted will show up in the focus frame and stay there no matter what you do with regular targeting.
If you are using UI replacement addons like pitbull, make sure you have a focus frame enabled.

Second, get a macro set up here. At the minimum, you need a macro that sets your focus, and one that targets your focus.

To set focus:

/focus target

That's all you need. It will put whatever your target is into the focus frame

To re-target focus:

/target focus

This will switch your current target to your focus.

Of course, you can make these macros as complicated as you like.
For example:

/target focus
/cast Polymorph

Or do something like this macro:

/clearfocus [modifier:shift]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]; [target=focus,dead]
/clearfocus [target=focus,help]
/stopcasting
/cast [target=focus,exists,harm] Polymorph; Polymorph

When you press this one, assuming you haven't polymorphed something already, your current target will be thrown into the focus frame, and you will polymorph it. Any time you press it again after that, it will simply recast polymorph on your focus. Once the polymorph mob is dead, simply press the same button when targeting something else to focus and sheep it.
If you need to sheep a new target, and your old sheeping target is still alive, target the new mob, and clock the macro while holding down the shift button. That will clear your focus, reset it, and then cast Polymorph.

Snazzy, huh?

Third, you need a timer of some sort that will keep a little counter bar somewhere on your screen that keeps track of exactly how much longer you have on sheep. Whether you get something like Cryolisis2 or natur enemy castbar, it doesn't matter. So long as it keeps track of the time on your sheeps. Personally, I use natur enemy castbar, but what you use is strictly up to you.
The addon you get needs to have the following:
- Countdown in seconds until the sheep breaks
- Visual bar, that flashes when the countdown is almost up
- An audial warning, such as Cryolisis2's "Bah Ram Ewe" thing

Etiquette

Before going into any instance or raid, make sure you know the rules of the loot. Fights over loot is a very common problem, that can almost always be simply cleared up by letting everyone know what the loot rules are.
If you're going to have an argument over loot, make sure you have it before there is any loot to argue about.

If you want to call "dibs" on a specific drop, do so at the start of the run.

During a raid, make sure you know how the guild's DKP system works.

Know if the Karazhan runs go with DKP or simply rolling on whatever drops.

And for the love of everything purple, DON'T LOOT IN COMBAT. Wait for everyone to be up on their feet, recovering, drinking, whatever, before looting anything.
Every single time you loot in combat, a GM kills a cat in the blood elf starting area.

Generally, most standard instance runs have everybody roll "Greed" on the Bind on Equip items, and boss loot is either "Need" or "Pass", if someone can use it.
Like, if a caster robe drops that will be an upgrade to both the warlock and mage, they both roll Need on it, and the rest of the party simply passes. This is usually how boss loots are dealt with.

If you win the roll, do the standard "woot!" or whatever in party chat, and toss on your new duds and /dance.
If you lose the roll, do a /cheer on the 'lock or whatever, tell them "grats" and ask them to /dance for you.
If they win the roll and you complain or otherwise act like a prick, just stop, And never, ever run an instance again with anybody ever. They rightfully won the drop, so you can just shut it and move on, you selfish bastard.
Going with this same example, let's say on the second boss some caster gloves drop that, again, both you and the warlock can definitely use.
You just won the robe, didja? Well, guess what. Your passing on these gloves, the 'lock gets to have them. Why, you ask? Because your a nice person right? This warlock is putting in just as much time as you are here. You already got an upgrade, time to let the warlock snag something too. You're not a loot whore, right? Right?

Mistakes can be made with looting, however, just like anything else.

Don't worry if you make a mistake in looting, every one slips up now and then. Don't shrug it off, though, either. Apologize if you are responsible, say it won't ever happen again, and then make sure it never does happen again. Then move on. Don't do something stupid like apologizing over and over again for the next ten minutes. Once is enough. We get it. You're sorry, you'll never do it again. End of story.

Same thing applies to other mistakes, like pulling the boss early or breaking a sheep. Apologize and move on with it. Find out what you did wrong, and strive to never make the same mistake again.

If someone else had a little screw-up, if the tank accidentally rolled need on a caster wand, or the hunter forgot to dismiss their pet before jumping off that retarded ramp (y'all know the one I'm talking about), DO NOT immediately assume that person is a jerk/moron/idiot/huntard.
Again, everyone makes mistakes from time to time. Don't ignore the mistake, obviously, just point out what happened rationally. That is, of course, assuming the person who made the mistake doesn't acknowledge it themselves.
If a warlock accidentally puts a Curse of Agony on your sheep, and they apologize on the spot, accept it and move on. No need to QQ over cursed sheep.
If they don't, point it out like so:

/p Hey, [Warlock], you put a Curse of Agony on my sheep back there. Try to avoid that in the future; makes it reeeeal hard to keep it polymorphed

Something like that. Toss in some smiley face emotes or winky face emotes as they fit your personality.
Usually this is all it takes, and the problem never arises again.

Of course, if they blow you off, say something like "shut up i didnt break it" or something like that, whatever you do, DON'T blow up at them. Consider:

Mage: Yo, druid, you accidentally tossed a moonfire on my sheep. Try to avoid doing that again, ok? Makes it hard to keep the thing sheeped when its taking damage.
Druid: huh? what r u talking about? i didnt break it

We have two reactions we can go with here.

Mage: Ok, fair enough, but somebody had a DoT on the mob I was supposed to sheep. You break it, you tank it, fair? Leave ma lambchops alone!

Good job! Now you've not only informed, pointed out the mistake, but also made a joke and showed the rest of the party you're a perfectly mature and reasonable person. Not an easy feat.

Mage: Oh for fucks sake! What is wrong with you@! I clrealy saw that damn moonfire there! Are you retarded or something? God, what a noob

Guess who looks like a jerk now. Thats right, you do. Don't be this mage. I've been there, it isn't pretty. Play the game with hostility, you will only ever generate more hostility. Play the game with friendliness, and you will generate more friendliness.

Homework

Before going into any instance / raid, do your homework. Find out what the instance / raid will demand from your class. Find out about any threat resets, any special tricks the bosses have. Spend at least a little time reading up on strategies so you aren't a clueless moron walking in through the entrance.
Any knowledge you can get going into an instance / raid will serve you very well.

Listen

This right here is the most important thing to do while raiding. The raid leaders themselves have done a lot of work putting this raid together. They've gone online, they've done research. They know the fights, they know the strategies. They know the timings, they KNOW THEIR SHIT.
LISTEN to what they say. When the raid leader speaks, you shut your fucking mouth and listen to what he/she is saying. If the raid leader says "ranged DPS move to the left of the pole at the 2 minute mark", your little DPS heinie is moving to the left of that pole at the 2 minute mark.
If the raid leader says "Ok, stop DPS now" you begin to do nothing. Stand there until you get the go ahead to keep DPS'ing.

The raid leader's job is to know the fight. So they go off and learn the fight. Then they pass on the pertinent information to you. They're focus is raid wide, and they need the raid to follow their directions in order for anything to be successful.
Stuff like what your spec is, what spells you use, your threat levels, thats all you.
Where the raid is at the 4 minute mark, the positioning of the melee DPS group, that is what the raid leader is for.

Do what they say, when they say it, and your raids will be successful.

Working Far Too Much This Weekend

2008-01-13T00:21:00.001-07:00

"Meowmix"

2008-01-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

That was the name of my 2v2 team on the PTR.

So. Me. A 17/0/44 frost mage (by the name of Spatula), and a 41/5/15 beastmaster hunter (by the name of Inda (pet's name was hizzouse)).

(Just mentally remove Ice Block from the talent tree, put Cold Snap there, and put Icy Veins where Cold Snap is)

We did quite well, I think, for the rather unorthodox matchup of Hunter/Mage, for a 2v2 anyways.

To be quite honest, this type of arena was practically a 3v2 effort. A beastmaster's pet is quite a deadly force, especially when sent after a squishy. We had some rather devastating combos as a team here, and our kiting power was unmatched.

Thought process behind my talents:

Maxxed out Imp. Arcane Missiles, for use as un-LoSable nukes whenever clearcast procced. Did that sentence make sense to non mages?
Anyways, Arcane Missiles is a spell that, once started, can only be stopped when its target is massively out of range. We're talking 50 yards away. Even if you run behind a pole, or something like that, you cannot stop them. They keep right on channeling away, pounding into you like the LoS whore you are.
Essentially, I would pop this any time clearcast procced on a spell, and would use it generally whenever someone, like a healer, tried to run away and prevent me from hurting them. In this way, I can keep right on nuking while they're trying to hide. Needless to say, very effective.
Clearcast is obvious, free spell casts ftw. And besides, what else am I going to take while trying to get to Improved Counterspell?
Magic Attunement was taken because I put Dampen Magic on the both of us before every fight. We don't have a healer, so we don't lose out heals because of it. So, effectively, we get a couple hundred damage shaved off each spell cast against us, which of course, is just plain sexy.
Now. Improved Counterspell. If you're serious about PvP, you will want this spell. It is devastating. It is horrible. Healers will cry in their sleep because of this.
Go on. Ask a healer you know. Ask them how they feel about a 4 second silence in rapid-speed PvP. See what kind of response you get.

The frost tree is easy. Maximizing my frostbolts, and other roots and cooldowns. Cone of Cold was never used as a damaging spell, merely as a snare (and thanks to frostbite, quite often a full out root as well.
Putting only 3 points into Winter's Chill was deemed alright by me. Disagree if you want, but here's my explanation.
The whole point behind Winter's Chill is to put pressure on the other teams' dispellers. When you sheep something, most likely their dispeller is going to try and get rid of that. Be it a Paladin, whatever, they don't want their buddy being useless meat. The point of Winter's Chill is to provide an additional "debuff", to make it harder for the dispeller to get rid of the Polymorph.
(PS, for arenas, use rank 1 Polymorphs. Zero point using higher ranks, they cost more mana for no reason)
You can max out Winter's Chill to get the full debuff, but as a team, we didn't feel it was necessary to do so. Being a hunter mage combo, we already had substantial annoying things at our disposal. Things like Concussive Shot, Freezing Traps, Polymorph, Counterspell; then factor in the pet's stun ability, Cone of Cold, and my very frequent roots. Already so much powerful crowd control going on, we didn't feel it was necessary to spend the points to add to what was basically a dispell fodder talent. That, and I really like Arctic Reach >.>

So, the hunter's talents seem simple enough to me. Maxing out the health talents, getting all the usual pet dominatrix abilities, etc. Beastial Discipline was gotten (is that a word? Getted, maybe?) because my hunter buddy didn't have Go for the Throat, and so would need the extra focus.
(Inda uses a kitty cat, therefore he can spam Claw as long as the focus is there. For further questions, go ask BigRedKitty, because this isn't a hunter blog, no matter how much my hunter alt craves attention)
Inda felt that getting Imp. Revive Pet was a good way to spend two talent points. See, he figured that in some battles people would go for his pet, in an effort to de-rail his build. So, he picked up the talent in order to recover really fast if that ever occured.
It never actually did, but whatever.
(Note: arenas are flagged as outdoors, thus Bestial Swiftness does work.)

So. Our combos. The most obvious one that springs to mind is the classic Warrior/Paladin thing.
First thing, the pet rushes after the Paladin, Bestial Wrath going full bore. Oddly enough, this caused the Paladin most times to blow his bubble right away? Was the Paladin new or not? Either way, it made for a guaranteed win for me and Inda, as we would simply kite the warrior for 10 seconds, then annihilate the Paladin very quickly. Turns out, Paladins don't last very long while Silenced and stunned, with no bubble to escape from their early demise.
Intimidation followed by a silence immediately after is a horrifying experience, I'm sure.
Meanwhile, Warrior rushes at me. He gets rooted. I walk away. He intercepts. I blink, then he gets hit with Concussive Shot. I whip out the water elemental, root him again, Shatter combo. Turn WE on Paladin as soon as bubble falls, toss a frostbolt/fireball on the Paladin, giggle as he tries to cast a heal and counterspell him. Paladin goes down, then the warrior meets his fate. Never touched either one of us after that intercept.

The arenas against Ret Paladins were incredibly sad. I'm sorry, but if I find out you're a retribution Paladin, I'm going to mentally picture the sight of two blood elf Paladins riding straight at me, dismounting, and bubbling the second their feet hit the ground.
Pure idiocy, that made for some ridiculously easy kills.
Even worse, these Ret Paladins would... well, never heal. When they did, which was very rare, I'd just counterspell them and be done with it. Never once saw a Flash of Light of these guys, just Holy Light.

One interesting team we came across was a pair of Marksman hunters. How do I know they were Marksman? Easy, I got chained with Silencing Shot. Our strategy was simple when it became obvious they wanted me dead. I simply ran away, abused LoS, and let my hunter buddy kill them off. Mostly I just harassed them, rooted them, then ran around a corner and first aided. It was all good fun.

At one point, we came across a Resto druid paired with a Soul Link warlock. That was a very odd fight, and we almost lost it, too. We only won because the druid had the exceptional bad luck to run straight into a freezing trap at a critical moment during the fight. Critical meaning that the warlock took enough damage to be unhealable once the Trap broke. Oh, the druid tried. Damn right he tried. Got off one Lifebloom, which the hunter promptly dispelled with Arcane Shot. Pure luck there, in my opinion. Anyways, warlock died because the next autoshot critted, and then we turned to the resto druid. At this point, we have a full health resto druid, me at 25%, and my hunter buddy at just under 50%. And one pet who's Intimidation cooldown will finish in 4 seconds.
Getting that druid down took a bloody long time. We were at it for a good 9 minutes before he dropped. Longest 9 minutes in my life.

And that rogue/warlock team... Gah, it was ruthless. They didn't focus on killing me, they focused on crowd controlling me. What I looked at was Deathcoil, then feared right after that. Trinketed out of that. Got spell locked right then, and I hit Ice Block. Sorry, couldn't restrain myself. It just had to. Immediately broke it, in an effort to save Inda who had just gotten hit hard. The rogue didn't even touch the freezing trap. (No flare, I berated Inda for that one.)
As soon as Ice Block broke, the rogue hit sprint and CloS, and rushed right at me. I got blinded, then he rushed right back to the hunter and kept ganking.
It was relentless. It really was. Inda was getting stunlocked to hell and back, dotted to hell, randomly feared, and the warlock had somehow managed to switch to a Succubus in the middle of this and was Seduce-nuking at the same time.
Splat goes Inda, and then the rogue immediately pops Vanish.

Well, I'm fucked.

And it went like this the two other times we fought them. Ruthlessly destroyed by this team. Dunno why, but thats what happened. Maybe I need to learn to play.

But the fact is, I could not escape from so many Crowd Controls so fast. Hell, the last fight I got sapped near the beginning.
How do you counter Deathcoil, fear, spell lock, blind, kidney shot, sap, and mace stun effects? It gets even worse when you see "Seduce" on your screen when you were just spell locked a couple seconds ago. Harsh times...

So that's some of my stories for my 2v2 arena on this last past PTR. Good stuff, we did pretty darn well, in my oh so humble opinion.

Oh, Yeah, Patch 2.3.2

2008-01-10T00:25:00.000-07:00

So as you may have noticed by now, patch 2.3.2 went live.

Let's go over the good stuff, shall we?

First off, there has been some major changes in the frost tree. Major, as in, 3 talents have been seriously moved around.

1) Trainable Ice Block.

Anyone who's spent some time reading this blog knows my thoughts about Ice Block. Bluntly, it is an incredibly useful skill that can be used to incredibly good effect in both PvE and PvP. In arenas, it is a necessary talent that literally any mage will need to be widely successful. Without it, the mage is at a very serious disadvantage survivability wise. Versus warlocks, for example, you gonna eat thems DoTs without an Ice Block. Ice Block is a cooldown that allows you to survive other people cooldowns. Spot a PoM Pyro headed your way? Ice Block. Spot a giant red raptor coming your way? Ice Block. And so forth.
PvE wise, it can be a major life-saver in an incredibly high amount of PvE encounters. Magtheridon? When the entire raid takes 6k damage at 30%? Ice Block. No damage for you!
Hydross got yeh Watery Tombed? Ice Block. No damage for you, or anyone standing near you.
Have three Cave'ins dropped on you at the same time in Gruul's? Ice Block. It'll save you for a bit.
Pull aggro on Illidan? Haha, you're fucked. No, seriously, Ice Block it onto the ungrateful warlock next to you. That'll show that snooty demon master a thing or two about Soul Link.

In conclusion, a very welcome addition, one that mages have and are going to continue rejoicing about for days to come. And to the following classes: Warriors, Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks, and Priests, the QQ was delicious, let's do it again some time. Maybe over lunch? I'll bring biscuits.

Cold Snap has moved to Ice Block's old position. Ok, cool, seems fine to me. Because....

ICY VEINS!! This new spell is bitching. Reeeeeal bitching. Need I go into detail? Well, too bad, 'cause Girl Meets WoW did it for me.

However, I would like to touch on this fact...

If you're raiding fire, you now essentially have two choices here. 10/47/3 (+1), the old spec; 2/47/11 (+1), the new spec.
Basically, you keep all the same fire raid talents, and just mix up where the other points are going. Frost? Or Arcane? Minimum of 11 points frost for Icy Veins, or 10 points Arcane. Do with the last point as you wish. Don't matter too much.

I heartily recommend everyone keeps putting the 2 points into Arcane Subtlety, by simple fact of the 40% arcane threat reduction. Will help with AoE fights, if they're called for.

The frost tree is practically garbage raid fire wise, you're only really there for 4 talent points. 3 in Elemental Precision, and 1 in Icy Veins. The rest, we could really care less. I put 2 in imp. Frostbolt, because the other option sucks so hard it makes Bill Clinto raise his eyebrows.
Tier 2, 2 points went into Improved Frost Nova, and the other 3 into the 15% chance to root. Imp. As I do a lot of random PvP in my spare time, stuff like rank 1 frostbolt does get used frequently, so the 15% root there is noice to have. 1 second snare, or a 1.3 second snare that has a 15% chance to root? I went with the latter.

Now, as to Icy Veins itself. To put it bluntly, you DO NOT want to spec to get this right as you start you're raiding career. Why? Because you're mana pool won't survive.
Putting 10 points into Arcane nabs you Clearcast, which essentially gives you a 10% mana efficiency boost. Icy Veins gives you a DPS boost, but at the cost that you are, essentially, using 20% more mana for those 20 seconds. If you're mana pool is a little on the low side, Icy Veins will see you going OOM disturbingly often.
Stick with Clearcast until you have at least 8500 mana with Arcane Intellect up. Shouldn't be hard, but there ya go. Once you have about that much mana, snag Icy Veins, have a sexy 3 minute cooldown, and make sure you're using your brand new mana gems often =D

Speaking of those brand new mana gems, they are some might fine stuff.

See, the top level gems now come with "charges". A single mana gem can be used 3 times, meaning that over longer fights, you don't have to downrank your gems, simply use the same best one over and over again.
Oh! And the amount of mana it restores has been buffed, too, so it restores the same amount of mana as Super Mana Pots.

The mage community has been complaining about mana efficiency for quite some time. To put it bluntly, we run through mana much faster than any other mana-based class, with the notable exception of Shadow Priests. Each mana using class has a way to restore mana, and up until these last couple of patches, the mages was the worst. We had an 8 minute cooldown spell that restored ~30% of our mana, and some rather crappy mana gems that could hardly rival the old school 60 raids style mana potions.

This has largely been fixed, thankfully. Evocation has been buffed right the hell out (shut yer trap, leveling mages, suck it up. What the 70's want, they get).
With the mana gem "fix", our mana pools are far more padded out then they were a short time ago.
And we have the druids to thank for it, I'm sure. Those crazy peeps have an unnerving ability to come to a forum, take all the gripes and QQ of an entire class forum, and condense it into a short, well-worded, intellectual, and excellently formatted post.

WTF, druids? WHAT THE FOOF?

Oh, and that means the PTRs are down...

Le sigh. Arenas then!

I was on a 2v2 for a while, paired with a BM hunter (Tauren, therefore "pre-made"). He was pretty good, we played 28 games, won 25 of them. To be fair, at least half of those involved a ret pally, so no surprise there. The 3 we lost were all the exact same team. Rogue and Warlock. Never encountered that kind of arena team before. Oh, well, we kept getting owned by those guys. Made me a sad panda.
Also went onto a 3v3 team with an Arms warrior and a Disc Priest. Very odd makeup, don't you think? Priest/Warrior/Mage... well, it was odd. Ended up with 1698 rating there, so no love lost, I guess. The Warrior was insane... only spoke Spanish. Made for some very interesting times.

Let me take the time to say this... Whoever that priest was, I love you. All of our wins were because of you, and your incredible skill. I am honored to have PvP'd with you. AoE fear bombs at precisely the right moments, heals that seemed to land the exact moment they were needed most... it felt like you were omnipresent.

Ehh, might do some more arena posting later. I might have to, considering that this might be the last arenas I do for a while. I have purchased the Orange Box, you see, and TF2 has consumed my mind.

A Disturbing Trend

2008-01-09T01:05:00.000-07:00

Ever since 2.3, I have noticed an incredible spike in the number of idiots playing hunters.

I'm sorry, BRK, but this has to be said.

Fact: Hunter is the easiest class to pick up and play, requiring no skill to do random stuff.

Fact: Hunter is the most difficult class to master, requiring outrageously high amounts of skill, foresight, and situational awareness to perform well in any group scenario.

Anyone who disagrees with this is a moron.

But this is a mage blog, isn't it? So why am I posting about hunters?

Quite bluntly, the idiot huntards won't leave me alone. And most importantly, they are posting incessantly on the forums, arguing about how powerful mages are, blah blah blah. And most of them don't have a damn clue.

[quote]in any raid I have been in, 10 man or 25 man, I either top, or stay near the top of the damage meters. I absolutly love the total disrespect that hunters get just because of the stereotype that bad players give us. Raid with a good hunter, you might discover you were wrong in your misconceptions of the Hunter. And yes, hunters are easy to level and do general pve grinding and such on, but it takes a good hunter to be a meaningful contribution to a raid.[/quote]

-- Proellum, [The Silver Hammer], Cenarion Circle

People like this are smart, intelligent, and have knowledge of their class and others.

[quote]Just shut the hell up you stupid idiot noob douche bag. Your a stupid used tampon, you smell and your ugly, plaese shut the hell up you stupid idiot crap face. You suck, your mom sucks, and your dad sucks. you are scum, the worst kinda scum, when scum eats horse crap and then craps that out - even lower scum comes along and eats that crap and then thats crapped out -- THATS WHAT YOU EAT you stupid idot douche bag, SHUT THE HELL UP.[/quote]

-- Night Elf Hunter, from Argent Dawn (name withheld to protect the innocent)

People like this should be taken out back, and quietly shot and disposed of.

Anyways, this whole thing is about the classic "hunters versus mages" thing, primarily in PvP.

Basically, this matchup comes down to who can pump the other with the most amount of damage in under 10 seconds. Hunter's attacks do physical damage, and hence are practically designed to kill squishy cloth-wearing classes. Toss in a pet, and some specific anti-caster abilities, and hunters can quickly become the bane of a mages existence.
On the other hand, a mage can simply rely on instant attacks and deal out a devastating amount of damage through things like fireblast and frost nova/ice lance. Like any other class, a mage can end a hunter very quickly this way.
Get two skilled players against each other, and it is a swift and brutal fight. Could easily go either way, but hell, there is going to be bloodshed.

But then we have a noob mage posting about how OP hunters are. And guess who comes by? Idiot hunters.

[quote]i've played on my friend's frost mage against my own hunter and was able to kill the pet with a few icelances and a fireblast, then all the was left was killing the hunter, with no pet he couldn't BW so i sheeped him and eat and drank back to full health[/quote]

1) A couple Ice Lances and a fire blast will do about 2k damage, assuming all 3 crit. This wouldn't even kill a level 40 marksman's hunter. If the mage rooted the pet first, then you're simply a moron because you didn't pop Big Red.

2) Grats! You sheeped the hunter, and then somehow left combat, while the hunter was still sheeped, and ate/drank for 30 seconds while the hunter didn't bother to break a 10 second polymorph that for some reason lasted 30 seconds.

Odd that said BM hunter didn't bother trying to use Beast Within until after the pet died. Mayhaps you need to L2P?

[quote]LOL...you are just making stuff up. Invisibility...LOL!!! [/quote]

I highly recommend you level to 70 before arguing about mage vs hunter in any meaningful manner. At the very least, look the spell up on wowwiki.

Some other helpful facts about Mages:

Fireblast has a cooldown. Even specced for it, it's 6.5 seconds.
Not all mages have Ice Barrier, just most of them.
Ice Lance does not hit for 2k damage on un-frozen targets.
A Beastial Wrathed pet cannot be sheeped.
Frostbolt has a cast time.
Polymorph has a cast time.
Fireball has a cast time.
Pyroblast has a cast time.
Presence of Mind is a 21 point talent. In the Arcane tree. Its the one on the left.
Mages are not immune to Scattershot.

To those hunters who know what they're doing.

Thank you. Now, if you could get your moron friends to stay away from me, I might stop the QQ about hunters.

Powered by Wowhead!

2008-01-08T23:58:00.001-07:00

I USED to have proper pop-ups working here.

Then they stopped for whatever reason.

Let's try this again.

Malistar's Defender

A Dull and Flat Elven Blade

Elven Gems

Edit:

Invisible elf gems!

Primordeal Essence

2008-01-08T03:13:00.000-07:00

A PRIMORDIAL ESSENCE?!?!?

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!

HELLLLLZ YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally, after all this time, I can go gouge my eyes out in peace.

Theory of PvP? Mobile Fighting!

2008-01-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

A deep mind for deep thoughts.

This whole thought process was sparked by a comment I left on Galoheart's website.

To reiterate here, World of Warcraft can actually be divided into two separate games. One of which is the PvE, and one of which is the PvP.
These two worlds do not interact with each other, much as players and developers alike would love to say they do. They don't.

One version is the technical detail, the precision, that goes into player versus environment. This is pitting live, human players versus artificial intelligence, and in WoW's case, its almost always not intelligent, just scripted. Not a criticism, just a statement of fact, is all.

Then we have PvP, where it is a player versus another player. Nothing is scripted, little is preset. It's simply players killing each other in a competitive environment with the tools they have.

PvE does not mesh with PvP. PvP does not mesh with PvE. You can have one or the other. A player character does not react to "aggro". A prot warrior cannot use taunt to save his healer. A hunter cannot use disengage to drop aggro. In PvP, a PoM Pyro would be a great opener, dropping a huge amount of damage right at the start. In PvE, this is called "suicide".

But I need not go into depth here.

Quite bluntly, PvE and PvP each require completely different talent specs and gear sets to be successful in each.

If you're a heavy disc priest sporting 400 resilience, you are going to be a very poor raid healer.

If you show up to an arena with your epic Tier 5 healing gear, able to keep a tank up solo for an entire boss encounter, you're going to be annihilated by a rogue named Zephirotth.

You can find hybrid specs, you can put points into both PvE and PvP talents... but in most cases, this will leave you sorely lacking in both spots.

Take mages, for example. In order to be successful arena wise, you must put hefty numbers of points into frost to be widely successful. You won't go anywhere in a competitive arena as a raid fire mage, except for a quick and speedy dirt nap.
Likewise, if you try and raid as PvP frost, you will find yourself being out DPS'd by the main tank.

So. Now that we've got that out of the way.

The developers at Blizzard have made substantial efforts to attempt to make every class viable in both PvP and PvE. Not at the exact same time, but the tools are there. The tools to be successful in PvP are present, so there is no reason you should suck, as long as you know how to use these tools.

Let's generalize.

There are two "classes" of classes in PvP. There are the melee attackers, and the ranged attackers. That's all there is to it.
Some classes attack/heal from range, other classes attack from point blank.

Each of these generalized classes need to have certain tools to be successful.
Still speaking generally, the melee attackers are restricted by the fact that they must be, well, in melee range to be able to do anything. This means, to be successful, the melee class needs to have these 2 key tools:
1) A way to very quickly close with a target;
2) A way to keep that target close.

Warriors, for example, can charge to a target, thus getting to point blank range swiftly, and can use hamstring to keep the target close.

The ranged attacking/healing classes require pretty much the opposite tools. They need to have:
1) A way to very quickly leave melee range;
2) A way to keep their target away from them.

Druids, for example, can swap to a movement form and quickly run away, and can also flat out root their target, preventing him from moving.

These abilities can be further generalized as ways to "control" the encounter. This is the essence of player versus player combat in any and all games. CONTROL.

If you do not have control, you get killed. If you have control, you are the one doing the killing.

Think about it. If you're a warrior rooted to the ground, while your target stands about forty feet away shooting burning arrows into you, who's in control here?

If you're a rogue, plunging your daggers into some poor priest's behind while he sits there, writhing in pain, due to the sword you shoved into his kidney, who's in control?

And if that same priest suddenly unleashes a Psychic Scream, and melts your brain while your running about, guess who regained control of the situation?

This is the greatest principle behind PvP in WoW: keeping control of both your movement and your opponents.
You want your opponent's movement to be as hindered as possible. Have them moving slower, in the wrong direction, or not at all is very much desired.
Keeping yourself moving as fast as possible, always in the correct direction, and at a standstill as close to never as you can manage, this is what you must strive for.

Turning to mages now. We are one of those ranged attacking classes, depending on our ability to flee our melee attackers to win in a fight.
In my rather humble opinion, mages are an extremely well equipped class in the war of mobility, and every spec adds at least one more tool. Let's go over them, shall we?

Frost Nova. This is an AoE that roots all targets around the caster. Natch, an 8 second root is an incredibly potent ability, and rightfully so. This leaves our opponent motionless, leaving them helpless while we can safely get to range.
Blink. A spell that simply fires the mage 20 yards forward. It breaks any and all roots, as well as stun effects. It is an incredibly potent spell. Breaking movement impairment affects on yourself, as well as instantly gaining twenty yards on your opponent... it's probably the best tool you have on the mobility front.
Frostbolt. Simple. Damaging spell that also slows the target down to 60% of his base movement speed. This spell is most effective if the mage is specced into the frost tree. Namely, it will do more damage, take less time to cast, can root the target outright, and can reduce the movement speed down to 50%.
Polymorph. Turns the target into a cute farm animal. This is a pure form of crowd control. The target cannot move, and cannot use any abilities.
Frost/Ice Armor. Only bother with this pre-Molten Armor. When you get hit with a melee ability, the target is almost always slowed, and if specced frost, can be rooted some of the time as well. Use this for PvP up until Molten Armor becomes avaliable.
Slow. This is a spell that is at the end of the Arcane tree, and is the only snare/root the Arcane tree has. Many do not like this spell, seeing as how it is rather lacklustre for an end tree talent. Nevertheless, it's here, an excellent kiting tool right up until it gets dispelled. Excellent to use against other ranged attackers/healers, as it vastly increases the amount of time they spend casting. It also increases the time between a hunter's ranged attacks, so there ya go.
Impact. An extremely handy talent, it adds a 10% stun chance on any and every damage-dealing fire spell. Stuns are extremely effective in PvP, and these are no different.
Blazing Speed. Essentially, it makes you run real fast, as well as dispelling movement impairing effects. A very nice ability, it is limited by the fact that it is random. Maybe it will proc and allow you to escape from hamstring, maybe it won't. If it does, it is a golden ability that will have your enemy in fits of rage.
Permafrost. Increases the effect of the mages slowing effects. With this, spells like Frostbolt become more powerful.
Frostbite. 15% chance that a frost slowing effect will instantly freeze the target. Basically a frost nova that procs at random.
Water Elemental. A handy little minion who deals extra damage for you, and also comes with his own rooting ability wired in.

Anyone see the natural synergy that the frost tree has? Go take a look at the talents in the frost tree. DO IT RIGHT NOW!! You see whats in there? More powerful snares? More root spells? The chance to proc an additional root? And of course the incredible high power frost spells have against rooted targets?
See why mages go frost for PvP? The spec is designed for it.

So when should we use these abillities?

With all these tools at our fingertips, knowing when to use these abilities requires a cool head, and knowledge of the class you are fighting to avoid doing something incredibly stupid.

If a warrior charges you, and you frost nova and blink away, that same warrior is simply going to intercept and start beating on you again. This is not smart.
Blinking away from a rogue, and then watching them sprint + cloak of shadows and run straight at you again is also not smart.

The first step is to familiarize yourself with the classes you are fighting. Learn what other classes have to control mobility. Go check out an ability list on wow wiki if you must.
Learn that warriors have Charge. Know they cannot use it while in combat. Realize that they can Intercept in combat. Learn what its cooldown is.

This can be the hardest part about playing a mage in PvP combat, is knowing what abilities your opponent is going to use, and how to counter them. So let's quickly run through them, shall we?

WARRIOR

Remember, only EVER use blink AFTER the warrior has intercepted. NEVER BEFORE. EVER. If you blink and he has the spell avaliable, he WILL use it and you WILL be anally raped. That's just how it works.
When going into combat, try your best to prevent them from charging. Open with ice lance to get them in combat before they can charge.
When the warrior first closes to melee range, either by charging or simply walking up to you, use frost nova then and simply walk away from them. Get off a frostbolt and/or Shatter to do some damage and get them snared.
Don't forget about Cone of Cold. If things get intense, use it. It is a better snare than Hamstring.
Use the water elemental liberally. Its root effect can be targeted, meaning you can root a warrior thats so far away it isn't even a threat yet.
And Blink right after Intercept. It'll blow there MIND.

DRUID

Notorious escape artists. Spam them with snares/roots as much as possible, laying it on thick with instants. The goal is to wear down their mana, so as to render them unable to shapeshift.
Treat Feral Charge the same way as a warrior's intercept. Wait for them to use it before you blink.
Mobility wise, they will most likely break anything and everything you throw at them very rapidly. Hit them with something new every time they shapeshift. If they shift out of frost nova, nail them with cone of cold right away. Pop a water elemental freeze on them ASAP. Pray for a frostbite proc.
An excellent strategy is to silence them, then Shatter combo the druid. That will force them into caster form to get heals off, which is your cue to unload with everything you have. A druid is vulnerable while in "normal" form, and really cannot take very much damage at all.

ROGUE

Your biggest enemies here will be cloak of shadows and sprint.
CloS removes all magical effects, and gives them a 90% immunity to all spells while it is active. You have little choice but to simply flee when they use this. Hit them with at least one ice lance during this time to prevent them from leaving combat. Once CloS fades, get them re-snared/rooted ASAP.
Sprint, by itself, is not a huge threat. Once they use it, hit them with a snare/root of any kind to defeat the running boost.
The true threat here comes from when CloS and sprint are used simultaneously. At this point, you CANNOT run, because they will catch you. This, is when you Ice Block. Tag them with ice lance first to give you the full 6 seconds to out of combat. You must break ice block early, or the rogue will stealth. Alternatively, have the elemental out to keep them in combat, letting you remain ice block for the full 10 seconds if you wish. Get them resnared/rooted right as you come out of ice block. CloS will be gone at this point. Also, you can use blink upon emerging from ice block, and land a snare from there. With CloS/sprint burned, the rogue will have almost no means with which to get at you.
Dealy Throw is not very deadly. A simple snare, simply ignore it. It is not a threat. If your spells get interrupted, oh well. No big deal. Deal with it like you would a counterspell or shield bash (?) or whatever reason.
Shadowstep is an interesting development, and would be the bane of you but for one, slight problem on the rogues side. It does not break snares or roots.
Obviously, if they CloS then shadowstep, you have a problem. Well, one that can quickly be solved by Ice Blocking, but whatevs. Usually, the rogue should end up behind you, rooted to the ground. If they aren't, root them ASAP, or use blink then root them. Blinking from a rogue is usually their cue to hit sprint or something, so try and refrain from using it until after CloS, at the least, has been burned.

SHAMAN

Shaman are embarassingly easy in the whole mobility department. They have only two ways to keep you close. Frost Shock, which is a "meh" snare, and Earthbind totem, which is another snare, with the added difficulty that they already have to be in melee range for it to be useful.
As a class, shamans are going to have a lot of trouble fighting you as a mage. They will never have an opportunity to use earthbind on you, since they should rarely actually close to melee, if ever. If they do, blink, and their totem is officially useless.
Frost shock will be a hard use for them. If they use it, they'll have a standard snare on you, and will be unable to earth shock your casts.
Mobility wise, spam them with roots, stay out of the earthbind.

PALADIN

Paladins really only have the one way to affect your mobility. Hammer of Justice, we all know it. The uber paladin stun. You can blink out of it; do so. They will have nothing left at that point.
Also, beware of them Blessing of Freedom..ing... themselves, rendering them immune to roots and snares. It is highly worth a spellsteal attempt or two to snag it. Otherwise, wait it out and immediately root them again once it has expired. The cooldown will be ruinous to them once they have used it.

Please note that I have only covered stuff that has to do with Mobility here. Stuff like counterspell has been ignored, as that has nothing to do with mobility.

Questions? Comments? That's nice, I don't care.

I'M KIDDING!! Jeeeezzz.....

Edit: can someone tell me why the line spacing is all buggered up after the list in there? I can't seem to find anything HTML wise, the only stuff in there is the <> tag at the start, <> and < /li> throughout, and the < /ul > tag at the end.

Schnell! Schnell!

2008-01-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

Part Dos of my epic posting about spell haste rating.

First off, I'm going to address some of the concerns brought up in the comments on the last post. Delos, the whole 15.?!?? haste rating = 1% only applies to attack speed haste rating. It is not the number for spell haste conversions, but for melee peoples like rogues and warriors. For them, its a whole new can of worms, since auto-attacks don't actually have a cap on their haste ratings.

For spellcasters, its still 21 haste rating, sadly.

And again, I cannot stress this enough. There is NO STAT that should deter you from spell hit rating if you are under the cap. Simply put, there is no stat that is better than spell hit for DPS increases. Get spell hit capped before you even start caring about the rest of the stuff.

And Megan is definitely right. Spell Haste is a wonderful stat for PvP.

I've talked about it before. Mobility is one of the most important things to have in a competitive environment. If your spells take less time to cast, thats less time you're sitting there, self-snared. The GCD be damned, if you have a Paladin casting .8 second Flashes of Light...
Well, its self explanatory. Good luck stopping that cast from getting off.

Anyhoo. Part two.

Spell Haste, if you thought it was confounding before, check out the madness it does to Arcane spells.
Obviously, the easiest example is Arcane Missiles. This channeled spell normally takes 5 seconds to go through the entire spell, and adding spell haste, rather simply, reduces it accordingly. 10% haste rating will reduce it to a 4.5 second, 30% to a 3.5 second channel. And so on. Exactly like we talked about with fireball, an exact DPS increase.

Arcane Blast... is weird. Due to its varying cast times, it has varying returns from spell haste.
Devoid of "Arcane Blast Buffs" the spell has a cast time of 2.5 seconds. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the 20% haste from Icy Veins.
Devoid of the buff, the spell drops to a 2 second cast speed. Pretty darn good, right there. That's a flat 20% increase in spell damage right there.
But then... Arcane Blast gets faster. 1 buff would normally shave off some time, giving us a new cast speed of 2.17 (the buff note itself is wrong, ignore it. The tooltip states 2.17, and it is far more accurate than the 2.2 the buff claims it is).
So what's 2.17 with a 20% spell haste? That will give us a 1.74 cast time. All mighty fine at this point, still a flat 20% DPS increase. Woot!
So now we have two stacks of the buff. We're now looking at a base cast speed of 1.83 seconds. Toss in the 20% spell haste... we get a 1.46 cast time.

Uh oh. See what just happened there? We dipped into the GCD is what happened there.
With two buffs, that 20% spell haste rating is NOT giving us a flat 20% DPS increase anymore. By dipping into the GCD, we're actually ONLY getting an 18% DPS increase.

Well, shucks.

So, 3 buffs of Arcane Blast now, giving us a new base cast time of 1.5 seconds.

Guess what else lasts 1.5 seconds? Thats right the GCD. With 3 buffs of Arcane Blast, spell haste of any amount has proved itself utterly useless.

So that's Arcane Blast. If you're speccing Arcane, take it with a grain of salt. Arcane Missiles chugs happily along, and Arcane Blast does fine most of the time.

So now we get the "misc" spells.

We're talking stuff like Portals, Evocation, Blizzard, things like that.

Surprisingly, these spells all behave exactly the same way when it comes to spell haste.

The following spells behave, under spell haste effects, exactly like we've discussed before:
Arcane Missiles, Fireball, Arcane Blast, Frostbolt, Flamestrike, Scorch, Pyroblast.

All other mage spells are either instant, and thus are not affected at all, or fall into the "Misc" category.

Which I guess is mislabelled, as they aren't really miscellaneous, just a wee bit odd in their own right.
All these misc cast time spells, Portals to capitals, Blizzard, food summoning spells, etc, benefit from static spell haste effects only. By that I mean, if you have bracers that give 25 spell haste, all these spells will have that cast time reduction. Evocation, for example, will only last 7.88 seconds rather than 8. You still get the exact same amount of mana, it just doesn't quite last as long as a spell. For example, with a static buff of 10%, that 10 second portal to Shattrath will only take 9 seconds (And no, it still does NOT become an instant cast when you use Presence of Mind. At least, not on the current PTR build).

However, these same spells do NOT benefit from buffed spell haste effects. Things like Bloodlust, that buff cast speed, have no change in the cast time of these spells.
Only the static stuff like the 45 spell haste on them pants will.

Think you can pop Icy Veins and have an Evocation that lasts 6.4 seconds? You are sadly mistaken.

On a related note, when is Presence of Mind going to cause Evocation to be an instant cast? Hmm?

Schnell!!!11shift

2008-01-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

Today we're going to talk about spell haste, and interject every now and then with a random phrase in German.

Like so!

Ich möchte essen kinder kuh.

So.

Spell Haste then.

It is a mechanic that effects the cast time of any given spell. For example, a 3 second fireball. If we have some spell haste, it will cast faster, taking less time to do the exact same effect. For example, we can reduce fireball to 2.8 seconds, or 2.1 seconds, depending on how much spell haste we have.

To put it quite bluntly, spell haste is an incredibly useful stat and you should kill all who stand between you and spell haste.

Think of it like spell hit. It is incredibly useful, as point by point, it provides a greater increase in DPS than the other spell stats.
Up until it gets capped, anyways.

Yes, thats right. Spell haste has a "cap", a point where any more spell haste is completely wasted.
Quite bluntly, there is a mechanic in play that you cannot change, no matter what you do.
You see, the "Global Cool Down" is a period of 1.5 seconds, that starts when you cast, or begin to cast, most spells (Some, such as Counterspell, do not incur the GCD, but are still restricted by it, in that they cannot be used while the GCD is still resetting). The GCD effectively means that you cannot cast more than one spell per 1.5 second time slot.

Let's say, for example, you cast Scorch. It starts the GCD, and it takes 1.5 seconds to cast. 1.5 seconds later, it goes off, you do some damage, and the GCD has reset, and you are allowed to cast another spell. If the next spell you cast is Fireblast, it goes off instantly, and the GCD begins. Thus, you are sitting there unable to cast any spells for the full duration of the 1.5 second cooldown.

In this example, spell haste would be a wasted stat. The mage cannot cast any spells faster than 1.5 seconds, therefore a 1.5 second cast time is the "cap" for spell haste.
Note that spell haste does not effect the length of the GCD. It is always 1.5 seconds, no matter what, end of story, tod für alle menschen.
Therefore, any spell haste is wasted on any spell that has a cast time of 1.5 seconds or less. Spells such as scorch, and any instant, gain nothing from spell haste. These spells are considered "haste capped". Dies ist wichtig.

But... there are some spells that are "outside" the GCD; spells that take longer than 1.5 seconds to cast. These spells benefit from spell haste, and they tend to benefit a lot. The longer the initial cast time of the spell, the more benefit the spell gets from spell haste.

Take, for example, or 3 second fireball (Feuer-Ball!!!) that we mentioned above. Every percent of spell haste you get, it reduces the cast time by whatever percent it is. Very straightforward.

If you have 1% spell haste, that means that your fireball will cast in 99% of the time. Thus giving your fireball a new casting speed of 2.97 seconds.

If you have 10% spell haste, that means that your fireball will cast in 90% of the time. Thus giving your fireball a new casting speed of 2.7 seconds.

You see how this works?

If you have a 10% spell haste on that takes 2 seconds to cast, it will still cast in 90% of the time. However, 10% of 2 seconds is only .2 seconds, not .3.

So the 3 second spell gains a larger benefit from spell haste than the faster spell. On Pyroblast, a massive 6 second cast, a 10% cast speed reduction would shave off a full .6 seconds, giving a new cast time of 5.4.

And yes, before you ask, spell haste rating does affect channelled spells. That 5 second Arcane Missiles you're so fond of? Slap a 20% spell haste percent on there and you get a 4 second Arcane Missiles. Each pulse comes faster, and thus resulting in more damage in the exact same amount of time.

Again, there is the cap of 1.5 seconds. The cap is different for each and every spell, however. For fireball, this cap will be at a spell haste of 50%, thus cutting out half the cast time of fireball, so giving our fireball a 1.5 second cast time.
If we have it at a 60% spell haste rating, fireball will have 1.2 second cast time, but we'll still only be able to cast the spell every 1.5 seconds. There's that GCD bugging it up again.

So look at it this way. Spell haste means your casting spells, outside the GCD, at a faster rate. Meaning you're doing more damage in the exact same amount of time.
And that dear mages, is the exact definition of DPS, isn't it?

If you have a 5% spell haste value, that means you can cast 5% more fireballs, therefore meaning you have 5% more DPS, right?
Well, not quite. Considering an infinite fight, yes. If you cast forever, you will see a flat 5% increase given 5% spell haste value.
But it's not that easy, is it? Mobs die, sometimes you have to move, and considering fire spec, you have to refresh that oh so precious Scorch debuff.

So. Let's assume the following.
You have max scorch debuff. And then you chain cast fireball. Thusly, you can cast 9 fireballs, which uses up 27 seconds to do so. Then you refresh the scorch debuff, and repeat.
Let's introduce 10% spell haste here.

Now, each fireball casts in 2.7 seconds, rather than 3. The Scorch debuff must be refreshed every 29.9 seconds (it lasts 30), or you lose the debuff.
If we cast 9 fireballs with the new cast time of 2.7 seconds, that brings us to 24.3 seconds used. Hrm. Well, look! We can fit another fireball in! So, with 10% spell haste, we can now cast 10 fireballs in the exact same amount of time! (2.7 x 10 = 27 seconds)

Mathe ist mir ein ekel.

But what if we have only 2% spell haste? Those 9 fireballs are going to use up 26.46 seconds to cast, taking 2.94 seconds each. If we try to cast a 10th fireball, that will take 29.4 seconds to do, and we'll lose the Scorch Debuff.

So. Spell haste only truly shows its worth once we reach a point where we can fit a new spell into the previous alloted span of time.

Have I bored you out of your skull yet?

Ok, I'll make this quick. On longer battles, spell haste has certain "threshold" levels. Using our fireball example, 2% spell haste will give you practically no benefit, and no real increase in DPS. However, 10% will give you a very powerful benefit, and will in fact net you a mighty powerful 10% increase in DPS.
On shorter fights, ones that you will, for example, not need to refresh scorch because it will be over too fast, that 2% spell haste increase will indeed grant you that 2% DPS increase.
If you're simply chain casting frostbolt, you will always get the exact DPS increase, because thats the only spell you ever really use. No spell rotation means everything is incredibly straight forward.
Arcane is incredibly awkward and complicated in this regard, and I will have to return tomorrow with that info.

Number wise, from a caster perspective, 21 haste rating = 1%. You know those new pants, (Pantaloons of Arcane Annihilation) that have 45 haste rating? That will give you a 2% haste rating right there.
Find the spell haste, get the spell haste, adore the spell haste. It is a golden stat and you will love it.

Any major haste effects, like a Shaman's Bloodlust and Icy Veins, should be worshipped like the pagan god's they are. The DPS increase from these abilities, however long they may be, are incredibly powerful. How can you say no to a 20% DPS increase from Icy Veins? How?!

Simple. You cannot.

Welcome to 2008

2008-01-03T04:40:00.000-07:00

Year of the internet-not-working-so-I-can't-do-shit.

Seriously, no internet is full of epic suck.

Resolutions!

2007-12-31T23:13:00.001-07:00

As seems to be the fashion on New year's, I'ma gonna do a New Year's post.

Let's reflect on the past here...

So. I started this blog, enjoy it quite a bit, and even seem to be gaining some solid popularity out here in the cold and hard blogosphere.
Look at me go! I'm blogging about WoW! And doing ok at it! And I even provide useful information every now and then!

RESOLUTION TIME!!

So where do I go from here? So far, I seem to have 3 types of blog posts. Posts where I yell about stuff, swearing up a storm and shouting in text form.
Then, I have the posts meant for nothing but sheer amusement, such as my wildly popular Urinal post.
And then I actually have the useful posts, like my somewhat disorganized 'World of Magecraft' stuff.

So what do I do? Each of them seem to be popular. I have readers who love my rants, I have readers who come here occasionally for the helpful information I occasionally provide, and, of course, everyone loves my amusing stories. I'm a bloody comedian, dont ya know??

I suppose I could become El Magi de Serioso : |
And be all helpful posts and become a well-respected blogger widely known for his magely wisdom.

Or maybe I could simply become a ranter, and essentially become a troll that has a blog. Wait, what?

Or go the amusing story route, and become the Dave Barry of WoW.

I say... let's do all of them ^_^

I'll expand on the Magecraft guides, and set it all up with a linky bar and more specific titles, a la BRK's hunter training list.

Then, once I have all that out of the way, we can rant and amuse to our heart's content, and still have plenty of useful posts linked so I never degenerate into some useless turd of a blogger.

That way I never get stuck doing utterly pointless rambles, like this post.

In Game Goals!

- Get my hunter leveled up to Outland capacity, so I never, ever need to farm primal fire on my mage AGAIN.
- Replace all those stupid blues my mage still wears. Either something from Karazhan, which I STILL haven't run, or with some welfare shinies from the honour (Canadian spelling, bitches) system. Whatever works.
- Save up gold to get an Epic Flyer mount
- Get the kodo PvP mount, which is the only PvP mount I'm missing
- Get a warlock twinked out for the 39 bracket. Underworld Band ftw!
- Finally get around to leveling my poor neglected Alliance toon. That little dranei has sat at level 4 since February
- Remember to add Icy Veins into my uber cooldown macro when I get that
- Figure out how I can spec back to raid fire, and somehow get out of all the Al'ar runs my guild does

HAPPY NEW YEAR LEMMINGS!!

P.S. Snuggles the wrathful tiger says hi.

Raiding as Frost

2007-12-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

Quick Stats

Most Common Spec
10/0/49 - Clearcast deep frost
Gains 200% damage from critical hits.
Spell Hit Cap: 164 (126 for Frostbolt)

So. Raiding as frost. Can it be done?

Yes, yes it can. And well, I might add.

All three main mage specs for raiding (here we're discussing raid arcane, raid fire, and raid frost), play differently.

Arcane, essentially, specs the mage into a balls-to-the-wall Burst DPS spec, mana be damned. Going full bore Arcane Blast with cooldowns blown will put the mage OOM in a matter of seconds, but his DPS will be insane. Utterly insane. Until his mana bar goes limp.
Think of it like the spec designed to kill the trash in raids as fast as possible.
Picture it like a Drag Racer, designed to reach speeds of excess of 240 mph, but can only maintain this for a half mile.

Fire is the opposite. It specs the mage as far away from burst DPS as possible from mage, and essentially specializes the mage for boss fights. Thats why it's so popular, "the" raid spec if you will. Any fight thats under 10 seconds is a waste of a fire mages time. This spec is designed for the long haul.
Think of it like the spec designed to fight the boss mobs in raids efficiently.
Picture it like a massive trucking... truck... designed to reach speeds of no more than 80, 90 mph, but can maintain it for almost a thousand miles.

Frost is the middle ground here. It does not have the same amount of burst damage arcane is capable of, and it does not have the long haul power that fire does. It has better burst damage than fire, and has far greater longevity than arcane.
Think of it like the spec that tries to find a comfortable middle ground between boss fights and trash killing.
Think of it like a wee little Toyota sports car that can go 140 mph, and keep it up for a couple hundred miles.

So, in the effort of providing the information that will help you decide what car is best for you, I present: Raiding Frost.

Firstly, your spell rotation will look something like: Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt.... you get the idea.
Frostbolt is your spell. Use it, love it, bind it to every key on your number pad and mash your fist against it.

Secondly, USE YOUR FUCKING COOLDOWNS!! I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH!!
Get a giant USB "Big Red Button", bind "Summon Water Elemental" to it, and every time that cooldown is up, YOU PUSH DA BIG RED BUTTON.
Get some spell damage trinkets, and spam the HELL out of those things. When Icy Veins gets released, HIT THAT MUTHER TRUCKER EVERY FRIGGIN CHANCE YOU GET.

The power of Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt is rather limited.
A lot of the true power of Frost's raid DPS is getting the absolute most out of your cooldowns.
The Water Elemental is a significant source of DPS, about 350 DPS when you, the frost mage, have around 750 spell damage.
If you don't take advantage of it, you are a magnificent moron. USE IT. LOVE IT. Trash pull going down and you need to spam sheep? Summon Elemental, send it after one of the other targets, sheep your mob. You get some nice DPS.
Standard trash pull, expected to go for a minute and a half? Summon your Elemental, sick it on something. When it expires, Cold Snap and get it right back out again.
350 DPS is a lot to lose out on, simply because you're too lazy to push a button.
Quite bluntly, a water elemental will account for a good 10-15% of your total DPS when you actually use it. Did you do 200k damage in a boss fight? That coulda been 220k if you had used the water elemental.
Timing the water elemental will be the hardest skill to raiding frost. It has low health, and no ways to protect itself. Therefore, literally any AoE effect will pretty much kill it outright.

Similar to fire, frost also has its own debuff. Whereas the Scorch debuff increases all fire damage by 15%, the frost one increases the critical strike chance of frost spells by 10%.
Just like the fire version of the debuff, you want to have it up as much as possible (yes, the water elemental gains the 10% improved crit as well).
However, you don't need to cast something besides your standard nuke for this debuff. Keep right on frostbolting away, it will build on its own.
However, due to the lower duration of this debuff (15 seconds) it will be harder to keep it up and running at all times during movement fights.
Keep in mind that Ice Lance does refresh the debuff, so use that whenever movement is required. Never, ever use an Ice Lance when a Frostbolt could be used instead. The damage difference is so huge, that spending a GCD on an Ice Lance when you could be casting a Frostbolt is a serious waste of time.
Only use it when movement is required, and you simply do not have the time for a frostbolt.

There is an interesting thing to note about frostbolt. It is, mathematically speaking, one of the oddest spells a mage has. It has two unique quirks that no other spell has. First, it receives what the mage community has dubbed a "ghost hit" from elemental precision. Namely, frostbolt receives a total of 6% spell hit from the talent rather than the 3% everything else gets. This is most likely due to the second quirk.
Most spells can do one of three things when they are casted at a mob. They can "miss" (which will show up on screen as "resist), be resisted in the technical sense (do partial damage), or hit, doing full damage.
Frostbolt is, mathematically, a binary spell. This means it can only do one of two things. It can either hit, or it can miss.
Non-binary spells can kind of hit, landing what is caused a "partial resist", whereby some of the damage is shrugged off the mob you casted at.
Like, if fireball is partially resisted, instead of doing the 2200 damage its supposed to do, it will do a measly 1100 damage. You get the picture?
Frostbolt CANNOT do that. It can only hit and miss, and cannot be partially resisted. Which means that when you cast frostbolt, it is unaffected by level based magic resistances.

(Level based magic resistance is thus: when mobs have a higher level than you, they have an innate spell resist to anything you cast. Mathematically, a level 73 mob (like a boss mob) will have a resist value of 24. This works out to about a 6% resist rate. This level based spell resist cannot be overcome by any means. GG, spell penetration.)

While both arcane and fire magic will see ~6% of their spells be resisted or partially resisted because of this level based magical resistance, frostbolts will never see that. They will always, mathematically speaking, hit 99% of the time.

Frostbolt, oddly enough, does NOT proc Judgment of Wisdom, that handy Paladin buff that some paladins toss on mobs so the casters can snag some more mana.

Anyways, there ya go. Raiding Frost. Make sure you have the Frozen Shadoweave set, and go kick some ass.

No Time!

2007-12-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

Too much crazy arse stuff at work this week

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Quality Post Tomorrow!

Sorry, I'm Chair Spec

2007-12-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

Alterac Valley

"maeg tabl now kkthx"
"Sorry, I'm Chair Spec"

Standing Around Orgrimmar

"plz giv watr"
"You say plz because please takes too long to type. I say no rather than yes for the same reason"

"hey can i hav sum waters?"
"Sorry :( I'm fire specced, can't make water atm"

"yo mage water?"
"/afk"

"need 3 stacks water"
"Sorry, food specced"
(NOTE: This didn't actually work)

*Opens trade*
*I put 500 gold into the window*
"/afk"

"hey i need some food"
"Sure thing." *Invites to party* *Makes portal to Thunder Bluff*
"Click for food"
*Leaves Group*

Standing Around Shattrath

"can yo make me some water?"
"/cast Invisibility"
*Run and hide*

"i need a coupla stak s water"
"Thats nice"

"hey, can i have some Water?"
"There's actually a secret way to make your own water. When you throw a snowball at any fire elemental mob, when you loot the elementals body, it gives you water of whatever rank the elenmental was"
"REALLY"
"Yeah! I just found that out yesterday! Go try it out!"
"Alright, thanks man!" *Runs off to flight path*
*20 minutes later*
"YOO FUCKING ASSHOLE"
"/lol. Pwnd"

Arathi Basin

"Yo mage, make us a table"
"Sorry, guys, it has a one hour cooldown :( Can't do that yet"
(NOTE: the other mage in the BG whispered me: "i fucking love you")

Me on my Hunter Alt to a 70 mage on Orgrimmar

"Oh Mighty Master of the Arcane... May this worthless pile of pixels beg of you for but a small drink, so that he may quench his unworthy thirst upon your Holy Nectar of the God's Themselves?"
(NOTE: Shamelessly stolen from the forums, it works incredibly well. Have never, ever been turned down with this proposition)

Clarification on the Ret Paladin thingy

2007-12-27T20:59:00.001-07:00

As I'm sure I've explained in the past, I no longer play on arena teams on the live servers.

Quite simply, I do not have the willpower to spend hours making enough gold to allow me to swap between arena specs and raiding specs on a weekly basis, or whenever it is called for to do so. It qould quickly cost me a fortune, a fortune I'd rather spend on stuff like consumables so I can actually raid... more better... more goodly... and yes...

HENCE.

I play arenas almost exclusively on the PTR's, which has some very odd, and some very zany things that come with it.

The first odd thing about PTR's is that you can transfer your character over, and whatever items he has on him, will come over.
For example, I can borrow 6000 gold from various people, log out, transfer my character, log in, give all the gold back, and have a character on the PTR who has 6000 gold waiting for me.
Thus making for some... dare I say it... fucking weird economics.

Oh, yeah, and being able to open the AQ gates is really cool. I do it every time. Or try to.

The second odd thing about PTRs is that sometimes... sometimes people make pre-mades. Sometimes you can make pre-made toons, pre-built 70 characters that come in all sorts of fanciful epics.

What this means for a 70 player is a chance to try out another class, and see how it plays.
I, for example, have discovered I absolutely loathe playing a rogue, and yet have immense amounts of fun playing a resto druid. Who knew?
Anyway, the horrible downside of this are people who are, like, level 30 on the live server, and really have no clue how the game works.
These are the people you see in Shattrath, a 70 mage in Arena S2 gear, proudly wearing spirit gems, asking in trade "WTF ARE [Badges of Justice] for?!"

So when pre-mades are allowed onto the PTRs, some very, very interesting things occur.

One of those interesting things are total and complete PvP nubs trying to do arenas with their complete and total nub friends.

One of the most common sights I see are Retribution Paladins, running around in S2 gladiator gear, weilding that big arse sword. Without fail, these people seem to be blood elves, and they all seem to band together and spend their talent points by committee.
Their ret trees look like someone scribbled over it with a crayon, and they attempted to use said scribble as a way to spec into the tree.
Oh, yeah, and the S2 arena gear is atrocious for Ret Paladins. Absolutely horrendously budgeted pieces, with the itemization trying to cover strength, intellect, stamina, spell damage, resilience, and melee crit rating together, resulting in a bunch of sad, decrepit plate pieces.
And we all know how awesome crit rating is... on PvP gear...

So. Let's combine these facts.

We have a bunch of poorly specced Ret Paladins running around, in poorly itemized gear, who have no fucking CLUE how to play their class.

You get the picture yet?

Yes, I realize ret pallies can be a dangerous foe when played well... like, if they're covered in various S3 gear and Black Temple gear, they can beat me. When I'm not frost spec. *cough*

But these Paladins are not skilled. They're gear is barely passable, their spec is laughable, and not one of them has ever played a Paladin past level 4. You can tell.

On live servers, I've been beaten by... 3 Paladins. Once in AV, by some hardcore dwarf dude from Black Dragonflight coated in S3 super gear and Black Temple ret gear.
Once in AB by some hardcore dwarf dude from Black Drago... wait a minute...
The guy from EotS was ALSO some hardcore dwarf dude from Black Dragonflight!

Ok, so it was the same guy.

Thought I'd post this here

2007-12-27T00:13:00.000-07:00

Did this up for my guild, so's peeps would have an idea of what mages do raid-wise, specific to Anathema anyways.

It's occured to me that this guild has not had much exposure to mages as a class.

When me and Vox joined, you guys had... what, Sequel?

So I figured I'd put up this post here, in an effort to (briefly) explain how mages work, and most importantly, how us mages currently affect our current raids/dps make-ups and such.
Any wacko with half a brain can say "Mages does DPS, yuh" but feh.

First off. This guild already has incredibly strong DPS capacity. We have multiple hunters and rogues that consistently do incredibly high amounts of damage, and a couple other caster types who make me feel all sad and happy at the same time (I'm looking at you, Abby and Mord).
Frankly, we could drop a DPS group entirely and we'd be fine, damage wise. I mean, we have, what, 4 minutes to spare on average for Void Reaver?
In this regard, Anathema does not really need to have us few mages go all out balls-to-the-wall, because we already have the DPS there. We aren't filling in any holes, because there simply aren't any holes to fill.
You need look no further than some of our random WWS stats pages to see that the magey DPS is always on the low end of the list.
I can QQ all I want, mage DPS is gimped, blah blah, cry, whine, bitch, warlocks are better, blah blah I want some fucking pie.

CONSIDERATION THE ONE

Polymorph. Anyone who says this crowd control spell isn't amazing is a moron. Is it limited? Yep, sure is. We can only farm-animal certain types of mobs. Are those certain types of mobs present in fast numbers, and powerful, practically begging to be turned into a harmless, cute little animal? You bet they are.
This is, for this guild, the biggest reason to bring along some mages to a group. It's all about the crowd control. Y'all could give a damn about damage, y'all just want some fucking lamb chops.
And that's fine. I'm happy being a sheepbot. If it means people get phat lewtz, people have fun, then I'm more than happy. Job well done, grats Shego on Invincibility Ring. Whatevs. I's cool.

CONSIDERATION THE TWO

The nature of a mage's damage is far more focused on burst damage than, say, a warlock or a hunter. For example, warlock Curse of Ouchie does 2000 damage over 15 seconds. Nice, sustained DPS. A mage's Bolt Spell of Hurt does 2000 damage THIS BLOODY SECOND, AND EVERY BLOODY SECOND UNTIL THAT COCK-SUCKING NAGA BITCH IS A DAMN CORPSE. And once it's a corpse, we gaze sadly at our empty mana bar.
Simply put, mages are far better at burst damage. We have incredible burst damage. Popping all trinkets and standing there spamming Arcane Blast can easily net over FOUR THOUSAND DAMAGE PER SECOND. But we can only keep that up for.. ohhh... 10 seconds?

Put another way, this means that the mage, as a class, is designed to swiftly and brutally kill "trash". Trash mobs are practically designed to be killed by mages. The encounters don't last long, thus allowing mages to reach our full blown burst potential, mana dumping and burning something down with frightening speed.

Put us up against a boss, and we struggle. We cannot burst DPS, because thats not what the boss requires. A boss fight requires constant, steady DPS, something mages do not do very well. We run into mana issues very quickly, and usually have to do dick-all about a quarter of the time just so we actually can have any sort of mana left partway through the fight. Running OOM when the boss is only at 70% is a very, very real possibility.

I'm going to deviate a bit here, and discuss the two most common raid mage specs there is.
Essentially, its the old Arcane versus Fire argument.

Put bluntly. Arcane maximizes the burst DPS a mage is capable of doing. Arcane Blast spam has the highest burst damage of... well, anything. Like I said above, its a shit-ton of damage really, really fast, but we can't keep it up for long. It is godly for trash. Those little flappy bird thingies before Al'ar? We can mana dump into those things, and deal upwards of 20k damage in 10 seconds, in random blues we purchased from the Auction House. Again, after those 10 seconds, we have zero mana.
And against boss fights, the arcane tree is at a serious disadvantage. It does not have the staying power of literally any other DPS class/spec that exists.
I consistently run OOM on Lurker, repeatedly. I chug every potion I can as fast as I can, and using any and all mana gems whenever possible, AND scale back on my DPS just so I have a chance of bursting the adds down in any type of respectable manner.

Put bluntly. Fire spec specializes the mage towards fighting long encounters. First off, the Scorch debuff is designed for encounters that last at least 30 seconds, the longer the better. The main nuke for the fire tree is a helluva lot cheaper than its arcane equivalent, by almost half. Whereas the arcane tree keeps up a 4k DPS for about 10 seconds, the fire tree keeps up about 900-ish DPS for about 7-8 minutes, 12-13 depending on where evocation is used.
It does not have nearly as strong burst damage as arcane, by simple fact that the tree cannot bring its full power to bear until the scorch debuff has reached its maximum strength, which effectively means the combat must last longer than 7.5 seconds, AT LEAST, for the fire tree to start doing some hefty damage. On most trash, I usually don't even manage to make it to 4 stacks before the mob gets killed.

Holy crap, this is getting long winded.

Anyhoo, one more consideration to make here. Arcane is a spec that performs good, no matter what gear level you have. If you're in a bunch of crappy quest greens, it will perform good. If you're in some excellent Tier 5 epics, it will perform good. If you have the bestest, most amazing AWESOME sweet gear in the game, it will perform good.
Contrarily, in poor gear, fire performs poorly. In good gear, fire performs goodly. In excellent, bestest most amazing AWESOME gear, fire performs most excellent, AWESOME bestest GODLIKE DPS.

I had a point here...

Ahh, yes. Look at it practically. Arcane provides a ton of support to the guild for trash clearing. It has the highest burst damage possible for an offensive caster, and has a couple of highly important talents for polymorphing.
First off, Presence of Mind. Essentially gives an instant cast polymorph, allowing a marked-for-piggy mob to bite the bacon in the same amount of time it takes for me to push the "0" button on my number pad. As well, the improved + spell hit means that few sheeps are resisted. I say "few", because, statistically, 1% of the time something will go horribly wrong.

It was said in, I think, a Botanica run that me, as a mage, was better than some other PuG mage the group had. (I believe this was the run where Erol tried magnificently to get killed by worms, and thanks to the awesome that is T-man, only managed to get killed once). It was commented that my sheeps occured faster, and that I was doing more damage.
Could it be that I was a better mage than random PuG mage so-and-so? Most definitely. But I had an advantage in my spec and utility over that other mage.
Namely, my sheeps were going off faster because they didn't have a cast time. My damage was higher because I could mana-dump during pulls.
The strengths of my spec was a huge factor in the percieved better-ness of me.

Holy fucking hell this is long winded.

So with Arcane spec, as a mage, I am effectively sacrificing my ability to function in boss fights to make the trash pulls far more easier. I am deliberately taking away from DPS talents so my sheeps can be instant, thus preventing many headaches.
And I can do this, because we, as a guild, do not need the DPS on boss fights as much as we need some bloody farm animals.
If we were constantly falling flat on our faces because of enrage timers on boss fights, I would definitely spec back into fire to give us the extra fire power we need to take said bosses down.

You want some numbers? I can do that too.

Assuming cookie cutter mage (600 INT, 200 SPI, 250 crit rating, hit capped, 1k spell damage all schools, fully raid buffed.)

Cookie cutter Arcane/fire spec (50/11/0)
Mage average DPS over ten minute fight: 1193

Cookie cutter Fire raid spec (10/48/3)
Mage average DPS over ten minute fight: 1380

Almost 200 DPS difference between the two, and these numbers are assuming standard raid rotation with an infinite mana supply.
If mana is finite (which it is), the fire spec will still be casting long after the arcane spec has gone home and had a nap.

Hopefully, assuming y'all took the time to read this, you're a little more savvy about the inner workings of raid mages.

If you want your mage to be a utility sheeper trash annihilator, we'll spec arcane and suffer the hit to boss DPS for it.
If you want your mage to be a boss DPS'er, the sheeps will have a cast time, and our trash damage output will be lower.
Now you know.

@ Ret Paladins

2007-12-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

Please. Stop trying.

You rush at me, and try to hit me with your big ugly sword. Does it hit for a lot? I bet it does.

Do you know what I see when I see a Retribution Paladin rushing at me?

I see a warrior. Who doesn't have charge, or intercept, or any way at all to close with me once I get away the first time, assuming you EVER catch me for the first time.

What I see is a crummy melee class that only has two stuns, one of which breaks on damage, both of which can be blinked out of, both of which are, at best, a mild annoyance that can be recovered from. If you could spam Repentance, that would be more serious. But you can't. Your stuns are too far apart to be of any use.

What I see is a Mortal Strike wanna-be that can heal. Meaning, I have a spell-school that I can COMPLETELY LOCK DOWN and prevent you from doing any abilities. Like healing. Or bubbling yourself to prevent your rapidly impending death.

In short.

I see a melee class that cannot close to melee, has incredibly unreliable stuns that I can break in my sleep, and has the ability to let me lock out ALL of their abilities with a single button push.
I see a Warrior with all the necessary mage fighting abilities removed from the class.

Actually, you know what? Keep right on trying.

You Retribtion Paladins are causing my arena team's rating to skyrocket.

And I'm paired with a beast master hunter, for fucks sake.

Embarrasing Mages

2007-12-24T21:50:00.001-07:00

So, reading around the blogosphere, far too many blogs reference crappy mages.

Like, FAR TOO MANY. We're talking everything from Big Red Kitty to Lightshield reference poor mages at some point.

Sometimes repeatedly.

What happened, mages? Why are so many of you so poor that we're reduced to being called "that idiot mage with PoM Pyro"?

You know what?

It's cause we have nowhere to go for answers. You want advice on specs/gear? Who do you turn to? You can't go to the mage forums, you will be flamed incessantly and repeatedly.
Even the idolized mages have a bad habit of outright flaming people, or at the very least, saying stuff in a rude manner.

It's no problem to say things bluntly, but do you really have to be rude about it too?

If someone puts spirit gems into their pants, you say to them "Hey. Spirit is useless. Put some spell damage gems in there instead. It'll go a lot further. Here's some math to back you up."
Then we educate the mage, make him a better person, and have essentially flashed him a smile.

Saying "You fucking moron, why the hell would you socket that with spirit?! Are you mentally retarded?"
Does that help? Well it gets the point across, sure. But now you've made him feel like an idiot, you have left him with a bitter feeling, and established yourself as a total asshole. That's not too good for the reputation of the mage community, is it?

So I think I need a goal here. I think I need to go about actually providing a useful database on magery, and provide a friendly environment (well, relatively) so that magey nubs can ask questions without getting flamed.

Well, I mean, you might get flamed anyways. Anybody can comment here.

It's just, I'm on your side. And no flamer can survive the wrath of Euripedes. If all else fails, I know a guy who specializes in Trojans.

And if you ever visit this page, I know your IP address.

Consider yourself warned.

Mind Boggling Stupidity

2007-12-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

So I've spent the weekend, desperately attempting to enjoy PvP.

What was once one of my favorite things to do, and something I was good at to the point where it was my pride and joy, has become a quagmire of idiocy and moronity.

Quite simply, I cannot take it anymore.

I'm done. I simply cannot do another battleground at 70.

Wondering why I'm upset? I bet you are. Allow me to iterate my frustrations for you.

1) The introduction of the PvP dailies was, in my opinion, a great idea at the time. It still is a great idea, but the fear that it would attract people to battlegrounds for the sole sake of getting money has proven to be incredibly true. Battlegrounds are plagued with utter nimrods who haven't the slightest idea of how to play their class. These are the same types of people you see with one fantastic epic PvP piece, and the rest are random greens and quest rewards. And not good ones at that. When you see a hunter, with a turtle pet standing at its side, spamming Aimed Shot while getting beat on from behind by a rogue, something is wrong. Even more so when you realize its a blood elf who's tossed spirit enchants on all their gear.
I still think its a wonderful idea, to give the PvP'ers a source of income doing what they love. But its attracted endless reams of ruthlessly undergeared people, who have obviously never seen the inside of a battleground before.
Even worse are the (still) rampant AFKers. Its just they're smarter now. I've seen close to two dozen separate toons running path bots, to run them across a pre-set path through a battleground. I've even seen a rather high tech one that would automatically cast lifebloom every 60 seconds.
And its in battlegrounds that used to be AFK free. Eye of the Storm, Arathi Basin, ruined because there's 3-4 people standing in the starter area. I've even seen an AFKer in Warsong Gulch!

2) The pre-mades. Ever since the new daily quests, alliance pre-mades have sky-rocketed. Whereas before, they were a rarity, now its almost expected the opposing team would be a pre-made. I've run 15 Eyes this weekend, of which all 15 have been against an alliance pre-made. We did win one of those 15, so yay horde.
Arathi Basin gets five-capped against horde unnervingly frequently, but this is largely due to the horde players not having a FUCKING CLUE how to play that particular battleground.
Warsong... is embarrasing. Don't speak to me about that.
Even Alterac Valley has seen pre-mades, mostly from Andorhal. The closest we came was 377 : 0 reinforcement wise.

3) The boycott. If you didn't know, the Alliance on my battlegroup (stormstrike) have been running a boycott of Alterac Valley. It's to the point where the average queue time is an hour and a half.
Why are alliance boycotting? Lemme go ask them myself!

"We have TRIED to use these strats (well, some of us). We cannot get anyone to listen. Over and over we will tell people to cap IB, or that some need to stay and defend, etc.

However, these are constantly met with "I WANNA WIN, ZERG DREK" or "ZERG GALV".

We are TIRED of this. We constantly lose, and nobody on the Alliance will listen to the team strategies. There is 0 teamwork. Stop acting like you are all high and mighty because you clicked a button on the right instead of left when creating your character.

This is why we don't queue. Sick of trying hard as hell to get people to play as a team, only to have nobody listen, play a 40 minute game, and get no reward.

Then you call us pitiful cowards for doing this? Not only is that unbelievably stupid, but it only makes more people want to not queue, just to spite you."

There you have it. Alliance couldn't win, so they simply stopped.

Which sounds just great. Fine. You can't win AV, because you're players are terrible. Ok, no problem. I feel your pain. Oh, god, do I feel your pain.

Because now, I'm in the same position. I cannot get anywhere in PvP, because either my teammates were born with fetal alcohol syndrome, or I'm fighting a pre-made. Either way, horde gets destroyed, I get next to nothing honor wise, and I didn't enjoy any of it.

" What is the reason the horde are QQ'ing so much here about AV?

Are they not winning in other BG's and getting any Honor?

Is AV the only place they can get honor?"

says the little gnome rogue Peaquop from Stonemaul. Why would you say that, knowing full well I do nothing but fight endless alliance premades?

On the bright side, most AV's that DO come up are fine. In general, Horde dominates, in general ending up with 300+ reinforcements to zero. It's fun, its lucrative. Its just waiting two hours is bothersome.

If horde could actually play the same way in the other battlegrounds, I wouldn't be having this problem.

Horde is naturally adept at following instructions in AV. "Defence meet at Galv" "Need support Tower Point", and so on, is always followed up on rapidly, with efficiency and effectiveness.

Remember those AV pre-mades I mentioned? Even then we managed to hold our own for quite a while, managing to hold the graveyards for not one, not two, but 8 waves of attacking alliance before we lost it and fell back to the next.

Then stick those same people in Eye, Arathi, or Warsong. Its like someone threw a mental switch from "Intelligent warrior" to "total fucktard".
Most players seem to just mentally throw a stupid switch, stop listening, and go off randomly doing their own thing, get killed, and call the rest of us idiots.

So.

I'm done.

I'm through with battlegrounds until alliance figures out how to play AV, or horde stops being a bunch of morons. Most likely, this means I'll never play a BG again.

Excuse me. I need to go play some arenas on the PTR. I have Ret pallies to annihilate.

Cast Times

2007-12-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

What is a cast time?

Cast time is the time needed to cast a spell before it takes effect. Essentially, it is time that you "spend" devoted entirely and utterly to whatever ability it is that you are using.
Let's take, for example, fireball. It comes with a base cast time of 3.5 seconds. This means that you "spend" 3.5 seconds standing there, doing absolutely nothing except fireball. If you want to do something, like run so you don't die, you have to stop the fireball. You have to stop casting, which means you wasted time, and move, which spends more time on moving, thus taking away from time that could be better spent casting a spell, and therefore being useful.
Every time you are forced to move, and do nothing, that is time spent where you are useless.

Having instant cast abilities/spells counteracts this, by letting you do stuff while moving.

Let's look at this from a PvE point of view first off. We're going to deal with a fire mage for this.

Big Angry Boss Mob is engaged. Every 20 seconds, he hits every ranged DPS with a ground-targeted spell. Therefore, every 20 seconds, the ranged DPS needs to move, or get killed. At each of these intervals, our mage will be moving for 3 seconds to escape painful death.
Let's say it takes 5 minutes to kill Big Angry Boss Mob.

If our fire mage was allowed to do non-stop DPS for that entire time, our mage would put out 1449 DPS, giving us a total damage dealt of ~434700.

But now let's consider the movement thing. We have the first 20 seconds unfettered, but after that we need to move. After the first 20, we're going to be moving for 3 seconds, and only able to cast for 17 of those seconds.

This gives us 4 minutes 40 seconds of interrupted casting. Working out to 14 cycles of movement, this means that we are not casting for 42 seconds.

Before, we had 5 solid minutes of DPS time. Now, we don't. Now, we have 4 minutes and 18 seconds of DPS time.
In this amount of time, we only deal out ~373800, working out to be 1246 DPS.

So you see what happened? Our damage and DPS gets slammed because we have to move, therefore spending time moving rather than hurting. We lost just over sixty thousand damage because we were moving.

This is one of the things that is considered a "challenge" feature of raiding. Many, in fact most, raid/instance bosses require us mages to move. Everything from Prince in Karazhan to Mother Whatserface in Black Temple. Tier 5 is the worst, with every single boss requiring movement of some sort.

And that hurts mages a lot. Let's go with the classic mage versus warlock.
When a movement is required, a mage runs. He is spending this time moving, and not on doing damage. His time budget is totally used up by movement. A warlock, comparitively, is still fairly gimped DPS wise, but actually has useful (and not mana-intensive) DoTs/abilities that can be used.
Thus, the warlock can refresh corruption (or whatever), while moving. Thus, only part of their time budget is used by movement, and part is used by damage. Put bluntly, classes that can still deal damage while moving (rogues are an excellent example, as long as they stay in melee range) severely outclass those who cannot. Like mages.

So. Raid bosses force us to move, which makes the encounter harder. This reduces our damage output, which makes the encounter harder.

Genius? Or just arbitrary difficulty generated because thats just how the mechanics work?

To Dual Wield, or Carry a Big Stick (part I)

2007-12-19T00:51:00.000-07:00

It's an argument that plagues pretty much all casters.

"Which is better? Staff or the MH/OH?"

And the answer is almost always vastly different, depending on who you ask.

Some will say the staff, because it has better stats.

Some will say the MH/OH, because it has better stats.

Make sense yet? I thought not.

THINKING CAPS ON EVERYONE!
Obviously, we need to dig deeper.

Ok, so the staff options is very self explanatory. Its a 2H weapon, it comes with stats. There ya go. Take, for example, this little puppy here.

[Gladiator's Mage Stick]

Plenty of purty stats. Nice stamina, a goodly amount of spell damage, and so on.

Now let's compare it to an equal level MH/OH combo:

[Gladiator's Mage Pointy]
with
[Gladiator's Book Thingy]

Oooh, purty darn purty too. So let's compare the raw stats, shall we?

The staff will have 3 more stamina and intellect than the MH/OH combination. This is what I refer to as "raw stats". The staff has more of them. The staff also has 21 Spell Hit, and 33 spell crit, which the MH/OH are missing entirely. I call these stats "caster stats"
The MH/OH combination has 10 more resilience than the staff, and has 16 more spell damage than the staff.

From this, we establish our base-line principle. Staffs have higher "raw stats", where as the MH/OH combinations have more "caster stats", by which I almost always mean more spell damage.

Continuing here, the weapon loot you get from PvP differ a lot from the stats you gain from PvE equivalents. The relationship between their stats are, quite simply, different.

The relation in PvP weapons are always the same like this. The staff always has slightly more Stamina and Intellect, has more spell hit/crit, and less resilience and spell damage.
Oddly enough, I would recommend getting the staff as a PvE weapon, considering the spell hit/crit stats are very nice for PvE, but very close to useless in PvP. The MH/OH combo really is not lacking in stamina/intellect (falling no more than 3 points short at its hugest gap), so you will not be missing out on any "PvP" stats by getting it. Extra resilience, and extra spell damage.
If you're going with PvP weapons, hit up the staff for PvE, and the MH/OH for actual PvP.

This is terribly short, because my interent hates me.

Part II tomorrow!

AFK Players

2007-12-17T02:05:00.000-07:00

This is a list of known, and repeat, AFK players that I have encountered in my battlegroup.
(This encompasses Horde side only, as I cannot take seriously the members of the Alliance past a threat that must be terminated)
The following players should be reported on sight, for they are assholes.

Warcrak, Level 70 Blood Elf Warlock - Manïfest Destïny, Scilla

Derrid, Level 70 Tauren Warrior - Veritas Invictus, Archimonde

Fätty, Level 70 Tauren Druid - Apathy, Andorhal (Something really fishy about this one. Has almost the full set of Gladiator's gear, but the rest of his gear are random stupid greens. AND he has NO PROFESSIONS. I smell an e-bay)
**UPDATE** He was active in Warsong Gulch. Even ran the flag. Did not, however, deny being afk in EotS.

(Will be updated every time new and annoying AFKers are found)

(Updated as of December 28th)

So You Want Some Mage Bikkits

2007-12-17T00:56:00.000-07:00

Have I talked about this before? I don't know if I have, but here goes.

ALRIGHT, ALL YOU FUCKTARDS IN BATTLEGROUNDS WHO WANT SOME MAGE BISKITS. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Ok, seriously. All you people in Arathi Basin, Eye, whatever, who ask for mage biscuits, and get alarmed and outraged when none appear, you guys need to know some things.

One. You are not entitled to this stuff. When you say in Alterac Valley /bg "wtf no mage table?", guaranteed I will never, ever summon a table for the rest of the night. You piss me off. What makes you think you deserve to have mage biscuits? What gives you the sense of entitlement that I would spend hundreds of gold to be able to get this spell, and give them away to some fucktard like you I've never met, and probably will never see again? Just shut up and buy your own damn food and water.

Two. What makes you think mage food/water/bikkits are free? Do you have any idea of the amount of gold we sink into this convenience? First off, buying the second highest food/water ranked spells costs us 5 gold apiece. Thats 10 gold just to get the prerequisite to being able to buy the food and water books.
Care to take a guess at how much these books cost?
Lemme check my Auctioneer addon, an brilliant, incredibly handy tool that no self-respecting mage, or any WoW player for that matter, should go without (spikes the camera).
The top ranked food book costs, on average: 180.9g (B.O.), 120.1g (starting bid)
The top ranked water book costs, on average: 226.5g (B.O.), 143.2g (starting bid)
So let's see. 10 gold to get the prerequisite to the books, bare minimum of about 300 gold to purchase said books. Combine that with the spell costing 9g to even purchase, and about 16 silver (or more, depending on reputation) PER SPELL, thats a ton of cash.
So... explain this to me. Why would I spend well over 300 gold to give you free food? Just attempt to explain this to me.

"Cause you'd be helping a temmate".

Yeah. STFU and petition Blizz to allow friendly fire.

And don't try and pull soe bullshit about it being free to cast because of the "Free spell" thing before battlegrouns. I still put down 2 of the dusts for every summon. Which is still 16 silver.

"Oooh, 16 silver, thats so much /sarcasm"

No, its not a lot of money. But why on earth would I spend ANYTHING on you?

So, yes. I have a problem with people asking for biscuits in battlegrounds. I spent a lot of money to get to the point where food/water are never a concern for me or my raid group.
I did not spend a lot of money so that some random scrub I meat from Andorhal can have some free food.

And to those people who /w me "Hey can I have some food?"
Don't get outraged when I say "Sure 3g a stack"
Remember. I paid gold so you can have the privelage of asking me for food. It will never, EVER be free.
Unless its downranked. In that case, its so bloody easy I'll give you 5 stacks for free.

For those who are wondering, I paid 120 gold for the food book, and 135 gold for the water book. Not bad, considering.

This is Just Sloppy

2007-12-15T02:33:00.001-07:00

I am talking about, of course, the current itemization of Mage gear.

At best, the budgets on our gear is spent haphazardly and inefficiently.

Let's look at why, shall we?

All DPS casters require Spell Damage. That's our job. It's what we need gear for. So, we all stack spelldamage.
But wait, mages need something else too. We need to have Spell Crit rating as well as spell damage, because we are the only offensive spellcaster in the game that fully utilizes spell crit. Amongst the cloth wearers, anyways. Priests and Warlocks, really don't need it, or want it. Do they have spell crit? Sure, sometimes. But a very hefty amount of their abilities are unaffected by crit rating, and most end up skipping the stat entirely.
When a piece of loot falls that has stamina, intellect, spell damage, crit and hit, what type of loot is it? It's obviously mage loot.
If almost the same item falls, except where the crit is moved into additional stamina, it's obviously warlock loot, except the priests are going to give 'em a run for their DKP.

In the same way that something can be labelled as "Hunter loot" or "Rogue loot" based on the stats, cloth stuff with spell crit on it is almost always "Mage loot".

So. That gives us mages a stat that the other clothies could care less about. Because of spell crit, our items will always have less stamina, less intellect, less spell hit, and less spell damage.

This isn't too bad. I, personally, do not feel this is a problem. Mages likes us our spell crit, and we have multiple talents that take totally unfair advantage of it. (Ignite anyone?)

The problem is not with spell crit. The fact is, items of a certain level have a set budget. Given a piece of cloth gear, the 'lock version will have slightly higher stats everywhere else because the mage version has spell crit. Normally, I wouldn't complain here at all.
But the problem is where the rest of the budget goes...

See, mages are cursed with a horrendous stat called "Spirit". Spirit restores mana when you are not casting. By that fact alone, totally useless for mages. A mage who is not casting is a mage who is failing at being a mage.
"But Euripedes," you say, "high end raiding has a lot of movement. Therefore, while running away from spouts or Voidreaver 'splosions, couldn't you restore mana then?"
Well, sure we could! Absolutely! We could restore maybe 50, 60 mana every 5 seconds while running around like little girls! If we spend 15 seconds running in this fashion, we get enough mana to cast an extra Scorch!

In other words, it's simply not worth it. Not even close.

What makes it even worse is the fact that Spirit is detracting from other stats. It is using up valuable budgets that could be spent on useful stats, like + spell damage, or even stamina.

There are two mechanics a mage has that takes advantage of spirit. Mage Armor, and Arcane Meditation.
Arcane Meditation is only taken by arcane mages, which we have proved before is not a spec that is well loved in raiding. And no fire mage or frost mage would even consider putting points into Arcane for this. It's just not worth it to take the points from DPS talents in other places, to stick points here to get some mp5 from a stat you'll be avoiding like the plague.
It's just nonsensical.

And Mage Armor... is laughable. It really is. Pre-TBC, it was used by any and every mage, the mana regen was far better than some extra armor crap. But with the addition of Molten Armor, Mage Armor is obsolete.

Ask any mage. Would he rather get a little mp5 from a stat that he winces at every time he sees it on gear, or get 3% crit rating?

Would you rather have 40mp5, or 3% crit?

Any mage will always say 3% crit. Hands down. Not even a question. Mana regen is a stat mages don't care about, and don't want. ESPECIALLY if it detracts from our DPS, which any level of spirit (and mage armor) does.

So. Let's recap.

Spirit is useful to arcane mages, who would still choose any other stat over spirit.

Spirit is useful to mages running Mage Armor, which is totally obsolete once you have Molten Armor avaliable.

What does this mean to you, the random reader of this blog? A mages ability to DPS is directly reduced because useless stats we do not want are consistently added to our gear. Thus, classes such as warlocks have a serious gear advantage, by simple fact that their gear is always, always better than ours.

And as an extra slap in the face?

Spell penetration is added to a lot of "mage" loot. This stat is even worse... I'd rather have spirit than spell penetration.

Where spirit is very rarely useful, penetration is always useless.

Please. Clean up my mage gear.

Deep Fire: Battleground Domination

2007-12-12T22:46:00.000-07:00

How to leave a swathe of destruction in your path as Deep Fire.

I am not talking about Arenas here. Frost is still the best there, in my humble opinion. We are talking about PvP anywhere except Arenas. Battlegrounds, World PvP, whatever.

The blunt fact is, Fire is good at battlegrounds. Fire is damn good at battlegrounds.

1) The Theory

Ok, this right here might be the most contraversial part of this post. Let's take a broad look at this. Mages do damage. Fire is a tree that amplifies the damage dealt. It increases damage, and crit rating, etc. If you look at a raiding mage, a standard spell rotation is to Scorch up a target to max debuffs, then fireball spam away. Most of a fire mages DPS comes from these fireballs. Max out Emp and Imp Fireball, and the damage is riding high.
However, we cannot cast Fireball in PvP. Well, ok, we can, but it is highly NOT recommended to do so (explained below). Therefore, sans fireball by the very nature of PvP, fire mages lose out on a spell that is their greatest source of damage.
Therefore, in a PvP battleground, compared to other classes, on a straight up DPS scenario, fire mages are way behind the average. Warriors, hunters, rogues, et al, do not lose a major source of DPS because of the mobility issue of PvP. They can still use their heaviest hitting attacks, and pump out plenty of damage.
Can fire mages match that? Of course we can, in fact, fire mages usually find themselves at the top, or near the top of the damage chart in battlegrounds. But the fact is, out of the classes involved in PvP, we do not have the same DPS potential as many other classes.
For example. At ~800 damage, Scorch hits for 750. Two of those in the time of a fireball cast is 1500 damage. In the same time span, fireball will hit for about 1700 (2200 if scorch debuffs are present). Fireball does more damage, but effectively roots you to the ground. Which is very bad.
As a fire mage in a battleground, you will not come close to matching the DPS of pretty much any other class in the game. Even kitty druids can school you in this department.

HOWEVER.

The theory of PvP is not to DPS. DPS is not your job as a mage in PvP.

So what are we there for? If not to DPS, then what?

Quite simply, we are there to purt the hurt on people. "Huh? Isn't that DPS?" Nope. Not in PvP anyways.

See, in both PvE and PvP, each class/spec has a "job" that they do. Mages are there for Crowd Control and DPS in PvE. In PvP, we are to disrupt the enemy team, and significant Burst Damage.
For burst damage, we have plenty of Ice Lances we can rely on. I mean, plenty of Instant Casts we can rely on. Fireblast, Ice Lance, Blastwave, Arcane Explosion, the list goes on. We have a very hefty arsenal of PvP spells we can use.
Now, the job that I think we mages are the best at doing is shutting down and destroying healers. Can we kill other classes? Sure, but we're best at removing healers from the picture, either permanently or temporarily. Failing that, we can make their lives miserable.
Think about it. A 10% chance for stun every fire spell? Ability to unload plenty of burst damage? On ten targets at the same time? And able to counterspell the first heal they cast, locking them out for 8 seconds? Even outright silencing them? Perhaps sheeping them and destroying their allies whilst they can do nothing?
It's a beautiful thing.

2) The Spells

In PvP, the faster you can get stuff done, the better. Due to the nature of PvP being fast as hell, you want to avoid casting anything that's going to take longer than 2 seconds to get off. What this means... NO FIREBALL. Sorry, mages, you're going to be skipping that spell in this here PvP.
Spells like Scorch, and any and all instant casts will be used and abused by you. Fireball, Pyroblast (unless you have PoM), skip them. "Why?" you ask. Simple.
One of the hugest things about PvP is mobility. You want to stay mobile, and keep your foes as immobile as possible. As a mage, if you let something get to melee range, you are going to get hurt. Seriously. Like, a lot of hurt. If you are sitting there, for 3 seconds, casting a fireball, you are not mobile. You are stuck there, essentially rooted to the ground. Thus, you become an instant target.
Second, if you're PvP'ing, you have Impact. No question. Impact is a 10% chance to stun on any fire spells. The more fire spells you cast, the more stuns that occur. If you cast a fireball, that takes 3 seconds. You have a 10% chance to stun in those 3 seconds. You can cast two scorch's in that time frame, thus giving you two chances to inflict a stun. Thus, 20% chance to stun in those same three seconds.
Blastwave and Dragon's Breath are essential tools of the trade. Blastwave is just nasty, and DB has the capability to shut down a group of people. And it hits really hard. Harder than Blastwave.
Fire Blast should be used as much as possible. Use it as a finisher, opener, or every time the cooldown is up. Spam it.
Counterspell is extremely deadly. Use this every time you can, especially on healers. 8 seconds is an eternity in PvP, especially for a healer type. It can also be used to blanket paladins/ice mages to prevent those "Immune" abilities.
Abuse Polymorph. Everyone hates it. See a healer? Sheep it. See a rogue? Sheep it. See a druid in caster form? By gum, sheep it! Polymorph forces your opponent to either be useless for 10 seconds, or to use a major cooldown to escape. Thus being vulnerable to something else. Like cyclone. Or fear. Or even frost nova. Teamwork, people.

3) The Spec

Right now, this is an excellent PvP spec. Icy Veins has no home in a deep fire PvP spec.
Improved Counterspell is ESSENTIAL. You MUST have it. A 4 second silence is incredibly cruel, and incredibly deadly to any class that casts spells. From paladins to to druids, it is deadly as hell. Try to remember when you got silenced at some other point. Think of those thouhts. "Oh, hell." "Shit!" You are useless when you are silenced. Ask a healer. ^_^
What you do with the other 15 points in the arcane tree is up to you. Generally, get clearcast, and the rest put anywhere. Get Imp. Arcane Missiles if you plan on doing the whole "Clearcast/uninterruptiblemissiles" thing.
In the fire tree, you MUST get the following:

Impact (Stuns? You cannot skip this)
Imp. Fire Blast (More instants = more damage without sacrificing mobility)
Burning Soul (spell pushback. Duh)
Blastwave (Instant AoE? Just say yes)
Fire Power (10% more damage. Kinda duh)
Blazing Speed (Incredibly useful mobility tool)
Dragon's Breath (Instant? Stuns? Fuck yes!)

The rest are up to you. Generally speaking, crit rating is not nearly as important in PvP, due to the survival mechanics of Resilience. You will suffer an immense loss to your crits, depending on your opponents gear. Talents like Incinerate/Ignite are far less awesome if your target has 300 resilience. Do I recommend you still take them? Yes, I do. They are still good talents, just not as good.
Obviously, you have to take Critical Mass and Combustion, so you can get at Dragon's Breath.
The scorch debuffs are a tossup. Generally, your target will not be able to stay alive long enough to get th true benefit from them.
However. It's something that has to be dispelled. If a Paladin tries to dispell Curse of Agony, but hits this instead... heh, thats cool. If you think about it, each scorch will hit harder, and makes dispellers pissed off.
Skip MoE.
In general, anything that gives a percentile increase to fire damage should be taken. Even Playing with Fire.

PvP as a fire mage is NOT about surviving. It is about killing off the other guy before they can kill you off.

Your play style has to be frantic. You have no time to waste. When you die, leave the enemy survivors in as bad of shape as possible. Blastwave, DB, do something to make your presence felt before you die.
And always REMEMBER:

KILL THE DAMN HEALER.

Ok Stop Math

2007-12-09T20:51:00.001-07:00

So why is it, then, that people spec arcane? Why is it that when fire is so obviously the best DPS spec to get, why do people go arcane? What is it that compels people to spec into it?

Well, Arcane gives the illusion of DPS. When you first shoot something as Arcane, you see tons of damage. When you fire up your cooldowns and spam Arcane Blast, all you see are huge numbers that go unrivalled.

Quite simply, Arcane has the best burst DPS of any mage spec.

So let's run our standard test, 500 Intellect, 1k spell damage, hit capped, 200 crit rating.

And compare Arcane/IV with Fire/IV over DPS 1 minute, all cooldowns blown :P

Arcane/IV
Max DPS: 1613.07
Average: 946.43

Fire/IV
Max DPS: 1248.55
Average: 1138.13

In a single solid burst, fire gets its assed kicked. Running with all cooldowns, Arcane beats it out by almost a good 400 DPS!!
But as the fight draws out, Arcane's DPS starts to falter, and fire stays consistent.

And that, right there, is the difference.

Arcane can has much higher burst damage than fire could ever do, but fire has sustained damage that is better than arcane could hope for.

And thus concludes my random posts comparing fire and arcane. For the time being, anyways.

Thinking

2007-12-08T00:54:00.000-07:00

.... about moving over to Wordpress.

So many wow bloggers have done that already.

Gonna goof around a bit on wordpress over the weekend, see whats what.

".blogspot" could very well become ".wordpress" in the near future.

More Math!

2007-12-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

Today I am going to compare the DPS capacity of an arcane mage with Tier 5 compared to one without.

First off, the set bonus from having two pieces of the Tier 5 magey gear increases the damage dealt by Arcane Blast by 20%.

So let's have a looksie at some math, kk? We're going to do 50/0/11 arcane/IV spec.

(Assuming 550 base Intellect, hit capped, crit rating of 200, and + damage of 1k for each school. Essentially rough approximations of where mages would be at given average Tier 5 content)
For this DPS test, we will use this spell rotation: Arcane Blastx3, Arcane Missiles, and then a frostbolt. Starting the next Arcane Blast timed just so to get the minimum cast time, and ending the spell at the end of the rotation to get minimum mana cost at well.

DPS without Tier 5 set bonus : 919.56.
(If we blow all cooldowns and simply spam Arcane Blast, and mana be damned, we achieve a maximum DPS of 1631.35. We can only keep it up for about 15 seconds, but there ya go)

Now, if we get two pieces of Tier 5

DPS with Tier 5 set bonus: 1008.70
(Again, if we blow all cooldowns and simply spam Arcane Blast, and mana be damned, we can achieve a max DPS of 1957.62. Again, we can only do that for about 15 seconds)

So. If we get two pieces of Tier 5, thats a DPS increase of 9%.

9 Bloody percent. That is incredibly huge.

If the number doesn't seem that big, consider that if you simply spam Arcane Blast, you're looking at a DPS increase of, in essence, 20%. (Math shows 17%, but that is still huge).

Consider that with icy Veins in the game, that a ton of mages will be dumping eleven points into Frost for, essentially, a 3% DPS increase.

Jumping that number by 9% is just absolutely incredible. You simply cannot say no to that.

Or can you?

Comparing Arcane/IV DPS to Fire/IV DPS, considering Tier 5. Let's see what happens.
And for shits and giggles, lets assume you have The Lightning Capacitor.

Arcane/IV DPS: 1068.97

Fire/IV DPS: 1130.15

Wait.... what?

Why is fire still ahead of the game by 5.5%?

Simple. Fire mages have Molten Fury.

/smug

There's Someone From Texas Reading My Blog...

2007-12-06T00:16:00.000-07:00

WAS IT YOU, GHOSTKID? WAS IT YOU?!@?!?111

Euripedes' Shopping List:

28 Spellcloth
10 Primal Might
Far Too Much Primal Fire

Essentially, I am looking to complete the Spellfire set and, perhaps, get the Spellstrike set.

Before I go any further, let me say this...

If you are playing a mage, and you intend to do serious Raiding of any sort, you MUST have tailoring!

No ifs. No buts. Just shut up and get the damn profession.

The Spellfire set you get from tailoring is just that bloody awesome. To put it bluntly, you are GIMPING yourself if you don't have it. Same goes if you're raiding frost, get the Frozen Shadoweave set.

Nothing in any heroic or 10-man instance holds a candle to the crafted sets.

You will not see a single drop from Tier 4 that will come close to your crafted set. If I ever catch a mage wearing the Chest Piece from Tier 4 or 5, I will slap them.

And in Tier 5, any and all "upgrades" are questionable. Generally, anything in Tier 5 content that drops will be, at best, a decent side-grade. And also keep in mind that anything you do replace means that the set bonus is broken. Not too bad for Frozen Shadoweave, but it is extremely painful for Spellfire users.

Keep your set together. Only drop Spellfire/Shadoweave when you have a solid upgrade for each piece, that is worth losing the incredible damage and set bonuses for.

Most likely, you will still be wearing these crafted sets right into Tier 6 content, where you will finally be able to find stuff that is actually, clearly, an upgrade.

And if at all possible, search high and low for someone who can make spellstrike. It, too, is an incredibly useful set, and also has an extremely useful set bonus.

You will be farming primals for a long time. Get used to it, the gear from tailoring is spectacular on a million and one levels.

Also, Anathema dropped Void Reaver again. Some more Tier 5 tokens went out (obviously we didn't get any), and yours truly really shined, for once.

For a mage wearing primarily PvP gear, without even a complete spellfire set, being on spam sheep duty, and spending most of the first 2 minutes of the Void Reaver running around, I think I did pretty damn well.

WWS STATS

8th overall in the whole raid for damage done.

My DPS isn't as great as the other mages, but I attribute that solely to Void Reaver forcing me to do pretty much nothing for the first few minutes of the encounter.

It was basically "/cast Arcane Blast. Run away. Run back. Start casting Arcane Blast. Run away. Run back. Run away again. Be forced to run in a circle because he targeted me again while I was running away. Run back. Start casting Arcane Blast. Run away."
And so on.

There was about a good 130 seconds where my DPS was about 8.

Ahh, well.

Arcane is working for now, but when 2.3.2 hits, and most importantly, whenn spellfire/spellstrike sets are achieved, I'll be bidding arcane fare well.
Need to get me some action with the Fires of... Fire. /cough

Zen Have a Nap!

2007-12-05T01:19:00.001-07:00

Time to Theorycraft!

But I am le tired...

Zen have a nap!

ZEN THEORYCRAFT!

So, I'm going to use this primarly to theeorycraft. This is entirely for myself, and I am studying the effects of crit rating on theoretical DPS numbers given a variety of specs. The specs that shall be tested are as follows:
Arc/Pyro - Deep arcane, and deep enough into fire to get Pyroblast
Arc/IV - Deep arcane, and deep enough into frost to get Icy Veins
Arc Frost - Deep(ish) arcane, and about 21 points into Frost for the awesome crit talents and Icy Veins
Fire - standard 10/48/3 thing
Fire/IV - Deep fire, but with 11 in frost to get Icy Veins
Deep Frost - Water Elemental deep in frost

On with the Theoriorizing!

We shall be making the following assumptions:
Base Intellect of 500.
No buffs at all outside of self buffs. (Arcane Intellect and Molten Armor)
Hit capped in all scenariors.
Base spell damage of 1000 for all schools.
Assuming Fight Duration of 9 minutes (considering raid boss fights, this number is about damn average)

At a crit rating of Zero:
(Produced DPS numbers)
Arc/Pyro = 903.17
Arc/IV = 922.30
Arc Frost = 997.88
Fire = 1044.40
Fire/IV = 1066.21
Deep Frost = 1052.75

HIGHEST DPS = Deep fire with Icy Veins. Deep Frost is beating out Deep Fire at this point.

At a crit rating of 100:
(Produced DPS numbers)
Arc/Pyro = 930.88
Arc/IV = 949.44
Arc Frost = 1036.01
Fire = 1082.90
Fire/IV = 1105.52
Deep Frost = 1086.17

Highest DPS remains Deep fire with Icy Veins. Arcane is getting it's butt kicked.

At a crit rating of 200:
(Produced DPS numbers)
Arc/Pyro = 976.59
Arc/IV = 958.59
Arc Frost = 1074.13
Fire = 1121.70
Fire/IV = 1145.13
Deep Frost = 1119.59

Fire with Icy Veins is still the highest DPS. Deep Fire has overcome frost for DPS.

At a crit rating of 300:
(Produced DPS numbers)
Arc/Pyro = 986.30
Arc/IV = 1003.74
Arc Frost = 1112.26
Fire = 1160.79
Fire/IV = 1185.03
Deep Frost = 1153.00

Let's do another, at 400 crit rating:

At a crit rating of 400:
(Produced DPS numbers)
Arc/Pyro = 1014.01
Arc/IV = 1030.88
Arc Frost = 1150.38
Fire = 1200.17
Fire/IV = 1225.24
Deep Frost = 1186.42

Hmm. No matter what the crit rating is, Fire is always on top. At about 1k spell damage, mind you, which is about where Tier 4/5 ish mages will be.

Let's do something ridiculous, and do 2ooo crit rating, just for fun:

At a crit rating of 2000:
(Produced DPS numbers)
Arc/Pyro = 1388.32
Arc/IV = 1398.61
Arc Frost = 1673.18
Fire = 1767.90
Fire/IV = 1804.83
Deep Frost = 1593.93

Why did I do all this?

Mostly I was out to prove that no matter what you're crit rating was, fire would still be the superior damage dealer. And I was hella right.
Assuming identical gear, and the only variation being the amount of crit rating, which would come out on top? Fire, or Frost?
The numbers speak for themselves. Fire wins.

And Arcane cannot even contend.

CONCLUSION:

No matter what your crit rating is, Fire will STILL be able to output more damage than Frost.

And before you ask, yes, this does take into calculations the Water Elemental, the new Icy Veins, Winter's Chill, all that good stuff.

Fire wins. 'Nuff said.

PoM Pyro For Nubs

2007-12-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

In the old days, back when level 70's were still fresh and the majority of us were still getting boned in Hellfire or goofing off in Nagrand, the mage forums were alive with cries and screaming about PoM Pyro.
Specifically, the Arcane Power + Presence of Mind + Pyroblast + Damage Trinket that was causing mages to output incredibly high numbers with a single spell. Especially when the thing crit. (See above picture)
Many, many people called for nerfs, for cooldown to Pyroblast, for anything and everything to lower the damage that mages can output.

Idiots, the lot of them.

The forums have quited down about this issue, but roughly once or twice a day, a new thread pops up complaining about PoM Pyro, complaining about being one shot, on and on and on.

Now, I hate to take the standpoint of many other trolls, but I don't really have a choice here.

Y'all are idiots. Seriously, L2play, nub.

You will only ever get hit by incedibly high amounts of damage from PoM Pyro in the following situations:

1) You are an idiot, and do not know how to play or gear for PvP.

2) You have yet to spend enough time gathering resilience, and you are squishy and mine eyes. And when thou art squishy, thou gettest squished.

First off, every class in the game has options to survive / become completely immune to a Pyroblast. You might not always have these options avaliable to you, but then again, the mage is not always able to PoM Pyro you for insane amounts of damage.

Druids have little choice but to take the damage and hope for the best. Bear form can take an incredible beating, and you always have the options of Heal over Time spells. If a druid's reaction time is fast enough (which it will be if your any good at PvP), you will be able to shrug off a Pyro without much, if any, difficulty.
Of course, if you're a Bad Druid, you will get rofl-stomped

Warriors have a load of hitpoints avaliable to them, and most of them will simply raise their eye-brows at Pyroblast. Spell-reflect is also avaliable to be used, and quick warriors can knock up a spellreflect on a PoM Pyro fast retro-actively.

Paladins can bubble, and are usually in the same boat as Warriors HP-wise. No, you will not always have bubble avaliable to you, but you will always be able to heal yourself. And when our Counterspell is on cooldown, there is shit all we can do to stop you. The fact is, you're a Paladin. You can survive a Pyro. Not a problem.

Rogues can CloS. Oh, look, no damage. And don't complain about that being on cooldown. It's 1 bloody minute. You have that sucker ready to go, don't you? I have never, ever fought a rogue (since CloS became trainable, mind you) that was not able to pop CloS while fighting me. And if you're Subtlety spec (I see you little blink-stealing buggers), then you probably won't be killed by Pyro anyways. The laws of gambling and cheat death are in your favor.

Fellow mages can shield themself, Spellsteal Presence of Mind, Arcane Power, whatever, Ice Block themselves, even silence the other mage to prevent a Pyro. There are a lot of options avaliable to cut down on some of the damage, avoid the damage for a while, or completely avoid it.

Warlocks are strange in that some of them can take the damage, some can't. Some will be totally immune to fire damage for a while, some will simply be impossible to get high damage with (Soul Link, dontchaknow?), and some will simply deathcoil/chain fear/pinkhearts you when they see major cooldowns being used. Or spell lock you. Or simply eat your Arcane Power/Presence of Mind. Warlocks quick on the uptake will be like "What is this mage doing? Arcane Power? /sigh... spell lock... deathcoil... hrm, that was fun, wasn't it, mister wasted 3 minute cooldowns?"
Some warlocks simply will not have the reaction speed/spec, and will eat a lot of damage. Which they'll usually shrug off anyway, use a health stone, or fear / drain life you. Whatever they're into, I guess.

Priests are one of the more vulnerable classes to a successful PoM Pyro. They only have one lousy bubble, which even in its buffed form, can be knocked aside rather quickly. Specced into Disc, the priest will be hurting the mage substantially as well, but thats not much of a consolation when you suddenly eat 4k damage. A priest practically has to be disc spec to survive a PoM Pyro, because Pain Suppression / Improved MiniBubble are simply that good. Holy is pretty much boned, as is Shadow. Its certainly survivable, they are just a wee bit more vulnerable than other classes.

Shaman can have a lot of trouble with PoM Pyros. They only have one reliable way to avoid it, and thats Grounding Totem. Which the mage will probably shoot an Ice Lance at. /shrug. Without that, you are naked to the massive damage. At this point, only earth shield and praying Counterspell is on cooldown can save you. Thats no fault of your own, its just you class doesn't do good againt Mages.

Hunters are the worst off class versus a PoM Pyro. They're only defence, Feign Death, is little more than a distraction that might buy a second, or two if the mage is slow on the uptake. The only real defence hunters have is to try and keep the mage locked down as much as possible. Scatter shot, Wyvern Sting, Intimidation, even Arcane Shot and hope it dispells something important.

But even if you don't have the cooldowns ready to go, even if you don't have any real defences against a PoM Pyro, it should not be hard to shrug off the damage if you have any level of decent gear.
You're here to PvP, right? Then pick up some stats that are suitable for the job.

Pyroblast taking too much out of your hitpoints? Get more stamina. Pyroblast critting you for 7k? Grab some resilience, and watch that crit damage steadily fall.
Watch that 7k turn into 4k, assuming it crits at all anymore.

If you get the right gear, and all those shiny 3 minute cooldowns and 21, 31, 11 tier point talents will amount to is hitting for 2-3 thousand damage, and maybe critting for 4000-ish. Assuming it crits at all. And seriously? Thats not very much damage at all.
Literally any PvP spec (besides healers) can easily deal out that much without a lot of effort.

And just for speccing to get PoM Pyro, that mage is squishy as hell. We pay through the nose to get a crap load of damage, and watch it all amount to practically zilch thanks to Resilience.
A single Holy Light spell from a Paladin in any decent amount of healing gear will be able to heal up the entirety of a PoM Pyro.

In conclusion.

Stop whining. Learn to Play. Get some fuggin' resilience. PoM Pyro ain't that great, when you bother to build even a half-assed defence against it.

Ok, No More Roleplay

2007-12-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

That was ugly. Really, really ugly.

Awesome things that have happened.

We got the Spellfire Belt
We finally reachd max skill in wands
Reached the Hit cap as arcane
Six months after getting it, my epic red gem of +12 spell damage has a home
Dinged 30 on an alt
Got epic boots!
Reached over 20% crit rate unbuffed
Hit Honored with the Sha'tari Skyguard
300 Resilience in PvP gear. Woo!

I Try To Roleplay

2007-12-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

After many months of playing a troll, I wondered what it would be like to roleplay one. Hmm....

"Yo, mon. I am Euripedes, and I am a mage. The forces of the arcane, and the elemental powers of fire and frost are at my control. I can destroy you in a blaze of fire at a whim. I can become immune to anything and everything, including gravity. I can even turn the most potent enemy into a cute wittle piggy.

So why, I ask, is the Darkspear tribe in such a horrible condition? Why is our entire society degraded into a tiny little hovel at the bottom of Durotar? We are trolls! We are strong! Why do we not take action?

*sigh*

I suppose there is something to be said for sacrificing oneself for the greater good. It is no longer about the Tribe, it is about the Horde. We have a Warchief now. We have blood brothers now, outside the tribe.
We are scarred peoples. The trolls used to weild far and widespread power. Our history is one of bloodshed, of betrayal, and death. Our empires were torn to pieces by the elves, by the humans, by even other trolls. We, the Darkspear tribe, have fallen very, very far. But we will have our revenge. Of all the members of the Horde, we are the only ones to not have a land to call our own.
The orcs are even more scarred than we trolls. Their entire race, used, abused, and tossed aside like a ratty rag. Yet they saved us. We owe the orcs a great deal for our continued existence, and it is my pride and honor to fight and die beside them.
The Tauren are an honorable people, and I have a great deal of respect for them. They have solid societal and shamanistic values that have grounded the Horde, at least on Kalimdor.
The Horde of the East is a thing entirely different. The Undead, I can sympathize with. They've died, for Zul's sake, died and continue to fight on. But I do not trust them, and I will never trust their motives.
And the blood elves... traitors to their own kind. The remnants of the high elves, shunned by the Alliance for their dealings with Lady Vashj, among other things. As far as I'm concerned, they are not true members of the Horde, just lost elves with nowhere else to go.
And I cannot stand them! They are self-important, condescending pricks! What gives you damned elves the right to look down on me? What gives you the right to think yourself higher than me? You do realize that the land your precious Silvermoon was Troll land? You do realize that all you pansy ass elves are descended from trolls?
This world, it used to be ours. You, you damn elves, are nothing but the ungrateful bastard children of trolls long dead. And I will suffer your superiority no more.

But I do not hate them. I merely cannot stand them.

But the Alliance.... /spit. Conniving shitheads! The Night Elves have hunted us for centuries. They do not care. They show no mercy. They slaughter us all, given the slightest opportunity.
I hate them so... I will kill them. I will maim the men, rape the women, torture the children. They will scream. They will beg. And I will never show mercy. They will die, humiliated, and in incredible pain. They deserve no better.

And the humans.... *hisssss*. They are even worse. They will suffer even more. They will watch themselves burn, they will watch their loved ones suffer and due in front of them. It is merely justice. They have done the same to trolls, now they will suffer the same fate.
They will not die alone, but surrounded by their friends and famiy. They will watch their cities burn, watch their children fed to our Mounts, watch their wives tortured, watch their husbands ruthlessly maimed and left bleeding in the burning streets to die.

The dwarves and the gnomes are damned for their decision to join the Alliance. They will die and burn with the rest.
The gnomes especially. I HATE GNOMES!! How is it POSSIBLE for a race that annoying to develop? How can they go day to day without killing themselves? They are a cursed people, annoying as hell. They deserve nothing better than death out of spite. Stupid gnomes.

And the Dranei... what the crap are they? A bunch of self-righteous morons who worship "the light". The light? What the hell? You would base your entire civilization off a source of illumination? What is wrong with you?
Just stay out of my way so I don't have to kill you.

Fucktards, the lot of them. Nothing but a bunch of fucktards."

I was banned from the server. Something about breaking the ToS or something... I think it might have been the whole raping elvish women part.

Void Reaver has Down's Syndrome

2007-12-01T01:15:00.001-07:00

Get it? Oh, I'm such a hysterical douche bag. Gucchi, don'tchaknow.

So, yeah. Anathema downed Void Reaver Thursday night. My jello sex buddy Sequel snagged some Tier 5 shoulders, and is hot and ready for some Tier 5 pants. Or, you know, something else Tier 5.
For those not in the know, the 2 piece set bonus from Mage Tier 5 gear is called "Cheating". It increases the damage dealt by Arcane Blast by 20%. For an arcane mage, this means... wait for it... a 20% increase in damage dealt.

Ok, ok, I exaggerate. But lemme put it this way. For an arcane mage, this set bonus is similar to:

For Druids: Increases stamina, spell damage, and healing done by an amount equal to the number of times people made fun of feral druids when the level cap was 60.
For Hunters: Increases the chance your Arcane shot will instantly kill your target by 10%
For Paladins: Gives you a 30% chance after saying the F word to become immune to all types of damage as long as you can continue saying the F word.
For Priests: Mana pool is changed to the infinity symbol.
Rogue: Gives a 30% chance for you to deal forty thousand damage to all targets within 100 yards whenever you smile maliciously. This damage causes no threat.
Shaman: All heals and damaging attacks automatically increase themselves to be the highest in the raid group.
Warlock: Curse of Agony stacks, doesn't cause threat, and no longer triggers the GCD.
Warriors: Stamina increased by fifty five thousand percent, and Mortal Strike now one-shots whatever is targeted, whether or not the ability is actually used.

So you see how awesome that set bonus is.

Anyways, I have to say that being there, being a member of the raid that took down Void Reaver, for the first time for this guild, is pretty damn sweet. I mean, sheesh, how many times to you get to be there for a guild's first kill? Of a Tier 5 boss?
Sure, its Loot Reaver, but c'mon! This troll hasn't even seen the inside of Karazhan yet.

In other news, the Blog is going to get a facelift, me thinks.

Going to add an official blog roll or something, maybe switch over all the linky type stuff onto the right hand side.
Some colors getting changed, maybe an entire new template. And *gasp* maybe even my OWN somewhat customized template!

And the World of Magecraft's are going to be revamped, and are going to have some additional stuff added to them. Maybe even some real theorycrafting and math added.
And of course, far more pointful. Stay tuned!

$15 A Month

2007-11-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

It comes with raiding guilds. It just does.
It's called drama.
Where people freak out, yell things on Vent, and TYPE THINGS IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

There is no avoiding it.

Anathema downed Lurker last night. Again. It took several tries before it went well, and on the second last attempt there were some pretty big freakouts.
A couple people flipped about people not getting their asses in gear, blah blah blah, and just generally getting mad at other people in the raid for not holding up their end.
Then there was the following response:
"GUYS ITS JUST A GAME"

This is a typical response to many of the people who complain about people not doing their job.

It is just a game. It is meant to be played. Have fun, enjoy what you're doing, don't flip out because a mage forgot to polymorph so and so, or a rogue pressed the Envenom button too early and ate a stormstrike that the elemental shaman was supposed to have.

And so on.

You have some valid points there. It really is a game. You really are supposed to have fun here. You're paying $15 or so per month to play, so enjoy every minute of it, amiright?

But you're forgetting something.

This is WoW. World of Warcraft. It is not an RPG, it is an MMO. A Massive. Multiplayer. Online. RPG.

You know what that means?

That you are not the only person here paying $15 a month. There are at least 24 other people around you paying the same thing.

See that orc up front in the heavy armor? He's paying $15 a month to get the stuffing knocked out of him by everything from giant ogres to oversized jellyfish who shoot lasers from their eyes. Why does he do this? Why does he pay $15 a month to get shitkicked repeatedly? So everyone can have fun and enjoy awesome loots.
See that little troll at the back? The sexy one in the tight fitting dress? She's paying $15 a month to keep everyone else alive. When the orc in heavy armor gets hit, she's there to save his life. When something goes wrong, when some crazy ass naga goes around bitchslapping warlocks, she's there. Why does she do this? Why does she pay $15 a month to live a high stress job of any wipe being initially blamed on her? So everyone can have fun and enjoy awesome loots.
See that Tauren at the back there? the big guy with the giant tiger named "Fluffles"? He's paying $15 a month to shoot arrows into the bad guys. When the bad guys die, the tank stops getting bashed. When the bad guys die, the healers don't have to heal anymore. He's paying $15 a month because its damn fun to kill stuff.
To quote Shatha: "When I'm having fun, I want to kill stuff. When I kill stuff, I'm having fun."
That Tauren, he's here for murder.

So explain to me the logic that this is a game and you can do whatever. Explain that.

If you're a tank, and you bust out a 2H weapon, and die, and then everyone else dies, you just wasted everyone else's time. Everyone else does't think its hilarious to watch a tank get one-shotted. You may have enjoyed your $15, but everyone else did not enjoy their $360.

If you're a healer, and you start trying to DPS, then everyone else dies. The tank dies, the other healers die, and you die. Again, you just wasted everyone else's time and money. Their $360 a month, wasted because you wanted to have fun with your $15.

If you're a damage dealer, do the job right. Don't pull aggro. Do your job, and hurt the enemy. Do your crowd control properly. Everyone goes home happier, and you don't waste anyones time. Pulling aggro at the beginning of a fight with a 4k crit is NOT your job! Do it near the end, where you don't put everyone at risk by pulling aggro from the tank.

Learn your job. Do it well. Don't be an asshole. There is at least $375 a month at stake here, play it like you mean it.
And everyone, not just you, can have fun. And there will be phat lewtz for all.

World War One, all over again

2007-11-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ever since 2.3, there have been some major changes to Alterac Valley.
These changes, I think, were supposed to make it more strategical, and try to end the endless zerg rushing of pre-2.3 AV.

The very first iteration of AV was a monstrosity, filled with random NPCs, and even a random rampaging Troll. It has undergone many, many changes, streamlining the battleground into a PvP battleground again.
However, it is one that requires a great deal of execution compared to the Old AVs.

Pre 2.3, you got honor when you killed stuff. Thats it. So everybody bum-rushed everyone else, got tons of honor, and churned out thousands of honor.

Now, things are different. Do you still get honor from killing stuff? Damn right you do. 62 honor for killing the Captain, destroying a tower or bunker. You also snag a hefty 83 honor from killing the end general.
!BUT!
At the end of the game, your team is awarded 41 honor for having intact towers, and a living Captain.
So you lose honor when a Tower is capped from your side. You lose honor when Balinda/Galv get killed.
Furthermore, when one of your towers is capped, you lose 75 reinforcements. And when a captain dies, there goes 100 reinforcements.

In essence, the new AV requires a solid defence now in addition to a powerful offence.
If everyone from your team zergs forward, you lose honor when Alliance kills your stuff. But, if no one goes on offence, then you don't get any honor from killing stuff.

The old Horde adage was "Defence is for pussies". The whole horde mentality was one of simply swarming whatever needed to be done. In AB, for example, nobody would defend Lumbermill, because if alliance capped it, horde would simply zerg it back. I participated in this many, many times while leveling up, and witnessed 5-caps at 29, 39, 49, 59, and 69.
In warsong, traditionally horde would not have anybody on defence, and simply attack the alliance. Any defence the alliance had (which was generally 4-8 people) were simply steamrolled, and we killed the alliance flag carrier on our way back. That was how warsong was played. Alliance would put up defence, horde would annihilate defence, horde would win.
Over and over again.
Pre-70, thats how the game is played. I cannot say this is true everywhere, but on Stormstrike, if horde ever devoted more than 10% of its avaliable resources to defence, we would lose. Guaranteed.

But times, they did a-change.

And now AV is unfriendly to pure offence strategies.

So. You need to have some folk on defence, and they better be some damn solid folk.
Don't misunderstand this. You do not win an AV by having Defence. You delay your opponents victory through defence.
All defence serves to do is slow down and hinder the enemies attack, while your own offence pushes through to ultimate victory. At absolute maximum, half the raid group will be on defence. ABSOLUTE MAX. You need a minimum of 20 people on offence if you expect to be victorious in any kind of timely manner.
So, where do we devide who goes on defence, and who goes on offence?
First off, the people on offence will be fighting a lot of NPC's, while those on defence almost never will, and will almost exclusively be fighting other players.
Thus, people with PvE builds and gear should go on offence right off the bat, and those with PvP builds and gear are better suited to playing on defence.
Second, there are some very nice talents/abilities that lend themselves specifically to a role in AV. Rogues, for example, have been longstanding examples of excellent Tower-cappers. If you can "Ninja" a graveyard or Tower, you are an incredible asset to a team.
Any and all AoE fears are incredibly useful on defence. Priests and warlocks can ruthlessly upset the offence of the opposing team. In the same regard, a Druid's Cyclone ability can be devastating if you cyclone the main tank of the other team.

You get the idea.

So where do we stand, as mages?

If you're in Karazhan gear, play offence. You have better PvE skills, and will be far more useful to an effective offence.
If you're sporting S2 arena gear, you're better off on defence, as you'll be more suited to the heavy PvP combat that comes from playing that side.

And now to specs.

If you're arcane, you are very well suited to playing on Offence. Solid DPS and raid power, coupled with the brief PvP potential from those 3 minute mage abilities, will make you perfectly suited to playing Offence. When your offence runs into the enemies defence, you can pop those powerful abilties to steamroll them, and get right back on to killing Archers/whatever.

Fire spec is kindof a tossup. In general, you're better of on Offence, putting those handy damage abilities to good use. However, abilities like Dragon's Breath are incredibly potent, and can seriously shut down the offence of an enemy. A 3 second AoE stun is ridiculously powerful. Use it wisely, you can make a huge dent in, for example, enemy healers. Dragon's Breath can also be used on offence, and, indeed, Blastwave + Dragon's Breath can often single-handedly break a stalemate. The sheer amount of devastating damage seriously weakens your opponents, allowing your teammates to take them down quickly.
You will often die rather shortly after unleashing Blastwave/Dragon's Breath on a collection of alliance/horde, however.

Frost is an amazing defence build. No if's or but's about it. Slows, roots, what's not to like? You can frustrate any advance easily. The whole makeup of frost is mastery of kiting, and doing massive damage while the enemy is rather strictly controlled. In essence, it is perfect for defence. And if some brilliant people are defending with you, you can be unstoppable.
In old AV, I've witnessed 3 frost mages and a pair of warlocks stall the entire alliance offence for a good 45 minutes. Endless roots and fears kept them at bay for a very long time.

TL;DR version: play to your spec and gear. Prot warrior with 19k hitpoints? Go on offence and help tank stuff. Shadow Priest with 12k hitpoints and 500 resilience? Go on defence, and be the shade that wouldn't die. Resto shaman in Tier 5, with mp5 so high it makes Holy Priests cry? Go on offence, and spam chain heal. Resto druid sporting S3 gear? Stay on defence, you will piss a lot of people off.

And if you find yourself in one of those stalemate AVs, where the whole fight is essentially btoh sides rezzing and killing each other every 30 seconds?
I feel for you.
Attrition battles in the new AV really, really suck.

AFK!!!

2007-11-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

I experienced my very first AFKers in Arathi Basin today.

I was shocked. I was horrified.

I burst into tears at this heresy. Here we were, 11 horde strong, trying to fight off 15 alliance. For the entire battle, alliance held 2 bases, and horde held two bases, and there was always one or two nodes that were in conflict. Sometimes alliance would get three, sometimes horde would get three.
Sometimes Alliance zerged mine, and at one point alliance was capping everything except blacksmith.

And these ungrateful bastards sat in the starting room, getting their daily quest done for doing nothing at all.

Did I spam "AFK" report them? Darn tooting I did. I even went to the /bg chat and said "Report those damn AFKers"

To which some twisted soul replied "type /afk report to see the interface".

After he said that, three people on horde side promptly left the battleground

/slap

So that puts horde at 8 versus 15.

I took off my clothes and danced naked at farm.

7 horde versus 15 alliance.

Did we lose? Yes, we lost rather horribly at that point.

Was I happy? Damn right I was.

Some jackhole AFKers aren't getting a daily quest done on my watch.

The Ultimate Raid

2007-11-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

Sure, you may have cleared Serpentshrine Cavern. You may have beaten the Eye, finished Hyjal, and even managed to take down Illidan himself.
But are you ready?

Are you ready for the ULTIMATE test of your mettle, your abilities to withstand such incredible and chaotic forces, and yet still maintain control and do your job?

I am, of course, talking about the World of Warcraft Forums.

The official WoW forums are known to cause serious injury to ones ability to think coherently, and have been proven to cause a loss of all basic motor skills.

Here are some Gems of comments I found from the Mage forums. Whether they are said in all seriousness, or as a joke, well, take a guess! That makes it so much more fun!

Make ice block able to crit!
in a world where a zombie can summon and then launch bolts of ice from their hands, gravity is the least you have to worry about. (In response to someone suggesting that Ice block should be able to crush someone if the mage uses it while above them)
You mean this level 62 Paladin didn't hit 2500 in every bracket and then come post about it in the mage forums? (It was a keylogger)
I could macro a Nintendo controller to play a 23/38 lock to maximum efficiency.
Did anyone actually read my post? (to which the response was) silly bunny, this is the mage forums! no one ever reads well thought out posts!
Oh pray do tell, how long does your CoC last ?
NEW AND EXCITING METHODS OF EXPLOITING STUPIDITY!
I swear, she told me she was 18!

Ehhh, not much of a post. But I laughed.

And its my blog. So whatever.

How To Not Pull Threat

2007-11-23T22:20:00.001-07:00

A very real danger to any DPS class is the risk of pulling aggro from your tank, and thus getting yourself horribly squashed, and potentially wiping the party.
If you have mad DPS, but keep pulling aggro and getting killed 15 seconds in, you are useless. Worse than useless, you are a liability to the party.

Don't be the warlock who opens each fight with a Shadowbolt crit of 4k.

Don't be the Boomkin who starts off every boss fight with a Starfire crit.

And please, for the love of all that is Mageness, don't be the mage who fires off PoM + Pyro the same second the Paladin first hits the mob.

So, here are some strategies on mitigating threat, and how to work with your tanks to avoid being a dumbass.
You may not always be able to avoid threat, but you can mitigate it.

The most obvious way to avoid pulling aggro is to put points into whatever talent reduces the threat your spells do. For Arcane, its Arcane Subtlety (40% reduction), Fire mages have a 10% reduction through Burning Soul, and Frosties have a 10% through Frost Channeling. There is no reason not to get these talents, and the Fire and Frost versions are painful to go without.
Give your tank a little bit of a head start. If there is a hunter in the party, misdirect will give your tank a huge boost to their threat, but it still won't be enough if you drop three crits in a row right off the bat. As Arcane, ease slowly into the fight with Arcane Missiles, and ramp up from there. Does AM hit hard? Why, yes, it does. But, as a channeled, its threat is more spread out than any other Arcane spell. An excellent opener. As a note, though, the Arcane tree has rather low innate threat, so you can simply open as normal with Arcane Blast. As a frost mage, don't worry about it. Chances are pretty good frostbolt won't cause any problems, and if it does, well, the target is slowed and so easily controlled. You can Ice Block twice as much as anyone else. If you do ever run into aggro issues, ope with an Ice Lance or two to start the crit debuff with generating practically zero threat. As Fire, open with Scorch. Scorch does not produce a lot of threat, even when it crits, and has an added perk that practically requires you to open with it. The whole increased fire damage thing? Yeah. You gimp your own damage if you don't have that at max debuff at all (or almost all) times. If there is still aggro issues with opening with Scorchx5, then downrank. Rank 7 works very well for avoiding early aggro, and has the added bonus that it still tossses up the debuffs. Wait to use fireballs for at least 10 seconds.
Get an enchant. A new enchanting formula for your cloaks and capes reduces all threat by 2%. Far, far better than the 20 Spell Penetration alternative... unless you're one of those kinky mages who likes Agility.
Don't be afraid of using Invisibility when it is needed. Whatever threat you have, it cuts it in half. If you use it around midfight, or a little earlier, it effectively means that it is impossible for you to pull aggro, no matter what you do. Take, say, Mechano-Lord Capacitus in heroic mode as a fire mage. Full Scorch debuff, then fireball away, and let the crits flow. When you hit about the 110% aggro mark of the tank, hit invis, let 6 seconds go by, cancel it, and keep right on fireballing. You'll be at the bottom of the threat list, blasting out thousands of damage in a single fireball.
If you suddenly snag aggro, Ice Block. This option will become avaliable to any and all mages soon, and its an instant aggro dump. You get all that threat back, however, but its ten seconds where you were doing nothing and your tank was furiously getting aggro back. However, don't dump the aggro on the poor Holy Priest next to you. That's just uncalled for. Dumping aggro in the Hunter next to you is acceptable.
Do something else. Mana running low? Evocate. Took some AoE damage in a fight like Grandmaster Vorpal or Thespia? First-aid yourself. An add pop up that needs to be taken care of? Sheep it if you can. Healer suddenly pull aggro from a flesh monster thingy in Arcatraz? Take care of the situation, and save your healer and tank a helluva headache. The latter option is especially good for frost mages. A non-elite mob that can be rooted? /scoff
And above everything except #1, KNOW YOUR TANK. If its a Warrior, give them a bit to get at least one or two sunders up before you damage the mob at all. Same with druids, except its called Mangle or something. It looks like a little slashy mark on the debuff bar. In the case of a Paladin, you can start right away, but start low. Use a downranked spell a time or two. In the case where multiple mobs are being tanked, Warriors are the most sensitive here. Do not attack ANY mob until the warrior has put at least two sunders on it. Again, same with druids. Paladins it doesn't matter too much, so long as you let Consecrate do its work for a bit. A good rule of thumb: on the main mob, let about 8 seconds of continuous casting go by on the main mob. Fire can judge this the best, as the perfect time is when Scorch reaches max debuffs. Then, unload with some AoEs. Flamestrike, Blastwave, Dragon's Breathe, whatever, you'll be good to go. Paladins are the best AoE tanks in the game, revel in it.
Get an addon that shows people's threat levels. Omen is arguably the best one out there. It's pretty, full customizable, it keeps track of aggro on multiple mobs, and is backwards compatible with threat meters like KTM.

Patch 2.3.2

2007-11-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

Arena season 2 doth draw to an end, heralding the start of a new season of bloodshed and gnashing of teeth.
Less than a quarter moon's cycle from now, a new season of slaughter will begin.
And lo, in this season of killing, a voice descended from the heavens, and did announce in a blue voice:

"I am Eyonix, your Lord and Master. I speaketh thus!
There are a few nice improvements we're making to the mage class in patch 2.3.2 (a small patch that will be on the public test realms soon) and we wanted to share them with you. First, we'll start out with two changes affecting all mages. Ice block will become a core ability, trainable by all mages at level 30. Additionally, conjure mana (rank 6) will restore 1800-3000 mana and will now have three charges, meaning you can use it three times before having to create a new one.

To be sure we're clear here, yes, the same cooldown will still apply between usages. :P

Cold snap will be moved to Ice block's position in the talent tree and its cooldown will be reduced. As a side note, it will no longer reset the cooldown on fire ward. Moving in to Cold snap's spot will be a brand new ability called Icy Veins. This new ability will decrease casting time for all spells by 20% and increases the chance that chilling effects freeze the target by 25%. It's an active ability, lasting 20 seconds and has a 3 minute cooldown."

And there was much rejoicing.

Ok, first off, I would like to say the following.

TRAINABLE ICE BLOCK BITCHEZ!!

So. Let's have a look at how this all plays out.

First off, the change to mana gems is very, very nice. Blizzard apparently does listen to the community, and the mages issues with mana seems to have been heard rather nicely. They already fixed evocate, a joyous change that was only dreaded by those mages that stacked spirit (/mock).
And now they're fixing mana gems. Making them restore a far heftier chunk of mana, and giving it multiple charges.
Oh, God, multiple charges. That is a very sexy mana gem now. Now if only I could trade them to the healers in the raid group, I'd leap for joy. As it is I can only bounce up and down happily.

Ok, now to the meat.

Icy Veins.

Mmmmm..... tasty.
20% reduction in cast speed, and 25% increased chance for freezing. Will this be QQ'd about by other classes? Hellz yes it will. Will mages rejoice? Hellz yes we will.

Let's look at it practically.

Let's say you cast Frostbolt. It has a 2.5 second cast time, and a 15% chance to freeze the target it hits.
Activate Ice Veins, and that frostbolt now has a 2 second cast time, and a 40% chance to freeze. Therefore, in a 20 second window, you can cast 10 frostbolts, rather than 8.
And of those ten, roughly half of them will freeze your target to the ground.
And every time that happens, you can unload with a Frostbolt/Ice Lance shatter combo.

If Blizzard renamed this ability from "Icy Veins" to "God Mode", I wouldn't be surprised.
This ability, used right, is incredibly powerful.
Look at it this way:

This ability makes you do more damage. As well, any damage you do has a high chance of letting you do even more damage. And every time you do even more damage, you have a high chance of being able to do more damage. And so on, and so forth.

I'll give you a paper doll example.
Let's assume frostbolt hits for 1500, crits for 3000. Ice Lance hits for 1000, and crits for 2000.

Say you see some random mob. You activate Icy Veins and fire off a frostbolt. It hits the mob for 1500, no root. 2 seconds have gone by.
So you cast frostbolt again. This time it roots. (1500 + 1500 = 3000 damage so far) 4 seconds have gone by.
You cast frostbolt again, and add Ice Lance at the end to get a shatter. They both crit, for a total of 5000 damage, putting your total damage dealt at 8000. 7.5 seconds have gone by.
You cast frostbolt again, it hits for 1500 (Total damage is now at 9500). 9.5 seconds have gone by. Freeze procs again.
Another Shatter combo. Frostbolt doesn't crit, Ice Lance does, but frostbolt procs Freeze again.

Now, at this point, only 13 seconds have gone by. You have dealt 13000 damage (thus putting your dps at 1000), and your target is rooted, ready to be struck with another Shatter combo.

So you see the power this will have?

It won't be quite this good in PvP, as you have to take into consideration that your opponent will try to ruin your fun. As well, you have to factor in diminishing returns into the whole root equation.
Realistically, after the first freeze, the second and third ones will only let you have time to get off a single Ice Lance. And the fourth will be immune... until 15 seconds from the first has gone by.
Since the ability lasts 20 seconds, you will be able to get a full on Shatter combo in at the end, and at the beginning. And a couple Ice Lance thingies in the middle.

Now, toss in Water Elemental anf Frost Nova into here, And you could easily be looking at keeping your target perma-rooted for almost 20 seconds.
(Permafrost, W/E's Freeze, and Frost Nova all have diminishing returns, but they are all on different timers at this time.)

When this hits the PTRs, I will be spending a LOT of time there.

Hell, I'll probably spend the cash to do this on live servers too. 'Cause it is, quite simply, that good.

And if you're a mage trying to do Arenas without speccing frost... after Icy Veins gets introduced, you have no choice. You must be frost... you just have to. No if's or but's, your speccing frost if you expect to get anywhere.

And to the rest of you... I hope your Paladin's Blessing of Freedom isn't on cooldown.

Arenas on the PTR

2007-11-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Anathema and the joy that comes from raiding and shooting fireballs at Lootreaver, I will probably NOT be spending a lot of time within arenas on the live servers.
I will most likely be doing my competitive arenas on the test realms.

Here is my thinking:

Respeccing every week or so from raiding fire, to PvP frost would cost a fortune. Can I make up for it with dailies? Yep.

OR

I could remain fire on the live servers, hit the honor cap, borrow 2k gold, copy my character over to the test realms, give the gold back, and spend all that honor and get a ridiculously awesome geared out dude on the test realms. Even better, I can copy myself four times to have 8k gold ready to go, if I wanted.
And... here's the kicker. I've already done the latter with the PTR's for 2.3.

I partnered up with a Blood Elf (female, obviously) for some hawt two on two action.

[Random rogue build that I could never even pretend to understand] + [Frost mage] = 1803 rating.

Thats right. You heard me. 1803 rating.

Don't believe me? I would gladly show you proof, except I can't, because for some extremely odd reason, whenever I hit the screenshot button, the screen simply freezes, and I need to reboot my PC. Natch, the pic is gone. Hoo boy I'm going to get some flak if I ever post that on the forums.
Trolls ftw. (SCREENSHOT OR IT DIDNT HAPEN)

Anyways, where was I?

Ahh, yes.

So, on the 2.3 PTRs, our team was called "What Would MacGyver Do" after a T-shirt the rogue thought was hysterical.
His rogue, rather appropriately, was called "Cárcelcebo", which is Spanish for "Jailbait". Directly translated, he tells me, via the google translator.
Obviously, my name was far more simplistic, "Spade". Named after the technical term for a shovel.

Anyways, our strategy was simple. Since "Cebu" (as I called him) was always stealthed, I'd open combat... in some way, and he'd go from there. My job primarily was to tank, at least until someone started targeting him. At that point I'd rush in and save the day, giving him a chance to Vanish or some such rogue thingy.

For example, one of our earlier battles was against a Warrior/Paladin team. Natch, the warrior rushed me, and Cebu went after the Paladin. It takes a good 7 seconds for the warrior to realize his healbot is being shitcanned, so he intercepts Cebu. At that point, I bust out the water elemental, and root them both. Thus letting Cebu to run off... leaving both the Paladin and warrior deliciously rooted. Being 17/0/44 specced at the time, I silenced the Paladin, and dropped a Shatter combo, and that was done.
NOTE: Cebu always ran with Crippling and Wounding poison up. Thats just what he did.

In general, our fights went very well. I'd always take the opening hits, and then Cebu would kill something. Almost every single fight went that way.

For example. Warlock/Druid team. He opens up on the resto-druid, correctly guessing the warlock was soul-link specced.
Natch, with Wounding poison, the druid is turned into a sad panda and is quickly slaughtered. The whole focus-fire thing is just awesome, especially when your partner is smart enough to tab target + Blind the warlock. We kept that poor warlock out of comission the whole time we killed the druid.
I sheeped him first off, which he trinketed out of. Then got blinded. When he came out of that, his fear was counterspelled by yours truly.
Poor little impotent gnome warlock.

As a side note, frost mages love soul-link warlocks. We really do. You know why? Because of that damage sharing thing, Ice Lance doesn't break Frost Nova. Meaning, of course, that I can Frostbolt + Ice Lance + Ice Lance + Ice Lance before the thing breaks.

Meaning that I do more damage to you when you have your damage reducing skill active.

Feel free to cry. You won't be the first.

Some other notes.

Enhance shammies were almost scary with 2.3. It's almost a return of the juggernauts of the pre-TBC era. Scary-arse, relentless killing machines.
This is not due, too much, to intrinsic changes to the Enhancement tree. Quite bluntly, excellent shamans, who were resto up to this point, gave Enhance a try. Now, all these shamans are very good players, which means their nigh-unstoppable as enhancement, simply because they're damn fine players.

Retribution Paladins are actually a threat now. In one battle, I was gang-rushed by two of them, and before I knew it, had taken three crits of almost 2k damage. !BOOM! There goes half my health to a fucking Paladin.

Did we still win? Yes, we did. Did I, personally, survive? Yes, I Ice Blocked, and let Cebu (who prided himself on his skill of slaughtering Paladins) kill one of them while I was blocked. It was an awe-inspiring sight, really, watching a Paladin be killed off in less tha ten seconds. Poor guy didn't have a trinket, I think. He sat all the way through Kidney shot...

Anyways, a quick rundown.

Warriors were, in general, easy for me to kill, but almost impossibly hard for Cebu. In the arenas, he'd mostly annoy them while I killed them, and run away like the little girl his elf was whenever they targeted him.
A couple times, he was ham-stringed and killed by them. It made me laugh. He called me a jackass.
/shrug

Druids are a tough class to beat as a mage. Well, when they're played properly anyways. Insant HoTs, the ability to break/be immune to any and all CC effects makes them a dangerous foe.
Fortunately, for a rogue, a druid is pretty much a non-issue. /gank, /rinse, /repeat.
I'd usually just frost nova/rank one frostbolt to annoy them while Cebu did some creepy animal molestation thing involving a pointy object.

Hunters were... interesting. It fully depended on skill. Poor hunters were rapidly, and rightly so, annihilated by the two of us. Good ones were infuriatingly hard to kill for Cebu, but only a moderate challenge for me, depending on spec. In general, one good ambush from Cebu and a Shatter from me would spell the end for them.
At least a dozen times, though, Cebu was killed by the hunters while I was otherwise occupied running away from a BigAngryPet, Ice Blocked, or silenced. Once, I was even Wyvern Stinged and caught without a trinket/iceblock or anything else. (That was a survival hunter/affliction warlock combo... ridiculously hard on the CC-breaking abilities).

Mages were... well, it made me sad, actually. Our strategy came to this: sheep the mage, then start opening fire on the other guy. Cebu would rape the mage. If the mage was any good, I'd chuck a silence on him and wait for Cebu to get around to killing him again whilst I harassed the other guy. Usually I'd start casting polymorph on the other guy as soon as it had gone through on the mage, simply due to the fact that I expected the rogue to break sheep right away. I was wrong only once, when a fellow troll mage was arcane-specced and didn't have a trinket.
Feh, Cebu killed the poor guy in about 4 or 5 GCDs.

Paladins were generally easy. I'd kite them, Counterspell when needed, and let Cebu sit on their heads and sing merry Irish jigs about revenge.

Priests were also laughably easy to kill, no matter the spec. We would ALWAYS focus fire the priest, and it would ALWAYS die really, really fast. Apparently, Water Elemental Freeze + Shatter combo + Ambush + Rogue resisting AoE fear (or trinketing out of it) leads to a very dead priest. And that is, of course, assuming the poor priest even gets a spell off. Generally, he had been kicked/counterspelled or even Blood Elf Racialed into impotence.
I pity them. I really do.

Rogue fights were hysterical. We developed a strategy, whereby if nobody was visible when we started, Cebu would walk almost right behind me. Usually, it would go like this:
Random rogue Ambushes Spade!
Cárcelcebo Ambushes Random Rogue!
Spade uses blink!
Rogue realizes he is basically fucked!
Rogue fights are generally determined by who gets off the first blow. That's just the way it is. So when a rogue fights another rogue, it's very similar to a knife fight in a phone booth, where the second rogue gets to shoot the first one with a musket first.

Shamans were almost a non-issue. Both me and Cebu can quickly shut them down and kill them. They died fast and often.

Warlocks varied a lot. It kinda depended how the fight started with one of them. Generally, if I fail to land a shatter early in the fight, it's going to be tough. On the same token, if Cebu didn't get to use an opener from stealth, we're far, far worse off. Teams with warlocks we lost to on a very frequent basis. A warlock could keep Cebu crowd-controlled a long time; he'd have to blow trinket and CloS just to touch the damn thing a few times. Of course, when Cebu touched things, they died really fast. If Cebu was given at least 4-ish seconds uninterrupted on the warlock, we'd most likely be victorious.
Generally, we would quickly kill the warlocks partner and try to keep the warlock subdued (counterspelled, kicked, blinded, anything and everything).
Makes the fight soooo much easier.

A Spartan way of Life

2007-11-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

So.

Fire in PvP.

I've been specced fire on the Public Realms for a couple weeks now, and I feel it is only fair that I provide a somewhat more in-depth analysis of how it plays out at 70.

Well.... where to start?

The first thing you notice is that the damage you can unleash on hapless foes is... ridiculously high.
Like, we're talking I three-shotted a fellow mage in Arathi Basin. With fireball, fireblast, and Dragon's Breath.
We're talking I fight a rogue, and they pop sprint and run for it. To slow them down, I hit Dragon's Breath... which outright kills them.
We're talking a fireball/fireblast combo that drops a hunter from 100% life to 20%.
We're talking sheeping a warrior, killing the paladin in 6 seconds, then slaughtering the warrior in another 8.
We're talking a stalemate on the alliance bridge in AV, where a bunch of hunters/healers are bunched there holding off the entire horde offensive. And Blastwave/Dragon's Breath scattering them like flax. And netting me over 20k damage done in 3 seconds.

If that isn't a good enough idea, it's effortless to top the damage charts when you're in the game. The damage fire dishes out is at an unholy level, and I found myself the #1 kill target within minutes of each fight.
In a Warsong Gulch, I fought middle with a warrior and a holy priest. 66 honorable kills later, the alliance stopped trying to attack us. Needless to say, I was top of the damage meter, beating the number two slot by... get this... 202k damage.
I was even responsible for killing 5 alliance flag carriers, who made the fatal error of trying to "Go Tun".

Quite simply put, Fire is devastatingly power of you leave the mage alone for 2 seconds or longer. And even then, it still kicks ass.

Also, sheeping something and getting off a full-cast Pyroblast is an incredibly evil and fun thing to do. Especially when it drops half their health in a non-crit. L2Trinket, imo.

The second thing you learn is that you are incredibly squishy. Like, we're talking three shotted by a dual-weilding warrior squishy.
A geared Season 2 Warrior killed me in under 4 seconds.
That's how squishy a fire mage in PvP is.

But to be fair, we have better survivability than arcane mages, because Dragon's Breath, quite simply, is a godly spell. About 1k damage on non crits that stuns for 3 seconds? AND it's an AoE?
I fully support renaming it "Summon Warlock" because it can be that devastating. It can shut down 5 or 6 healers at once, and do enough damage to them that they won't be healing anyone else for a while... or ever.
As fire, there is no end to how badly you can fuck with a healer. First off, you have a ton of damage. Then, every fire spell you cast has a 10% chance to stun. Third, you have a ton of damage. Second... err... fourth, you have a spell that interrupts, stuns, has a chance to stun more, and does more damage. Oh, yeah, and Counterspell, which prevents any healing spells from being cast for 8 seconds.
Now, go find a Holy Priest. Make it your bitch.
Paladins are also acceptable. Please be sure to Spellsteal Blessing of Freedom and Frost Nova the hapless Paladin.

The tl;dr version: Dragon's Breath is a sadistic spell, that causes emotional anguish among anyone and everyone who gets struck with it. Used properly, it's like an AoE deathcoil with a twenty second cooldown.
Used wrong, you look stupid.

A critical problem with any non-frost build is the lack of a certian reliable crowd-control breaker.
Every mage has access to Blink and (unless you suck) a trinket. That gives every mage two reliable ways to break things like fear and stunlocks. But... thats not enough.
What if you need blink to escape Intercept? What if you escape Kidney Shot with it, but then find yourself Blinded seconds later? Hmm? What then?
Quite simply, to be better able to survive this highly unfortunate situations, you want, nay, NEED to have a third reliable stun-key (opposite of stun-lock... get it? Oh, I'm so classy!).
And that skill, that tool, is the godly Ice Block.
Damn, I'm like a priest for that ability.
I should go form the church of Ice Block or something.

I cannot believe how incredibly awesome that ability is.

And I am finding hard to believe how I survived without it.

TRAINABLE ICE BLOCK KTHXBY!!

Also.

HADUKEN!

Vanity

2007-11-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

I'd like to take a break from our usual Magery programming, and discuss !!!FASHION!!!

The Dungeon sets for mages prove to be mostly an exercise in sadness.

Dungeon Set 1 (or Magister's Regalia) is a futile attempt to try and visualize a high level armor set. It's garish red and purples produce a horrendous effect that seems designed to hurt loved ones in the ugliest possible fashion. Seemingly concieved by a four-year-old, it would fit in very well... worn by the evil Wizard in a children's story book. An excellent clown suit, by the way. Definitely a set to get for the cynical!

By comparison, the Dungeon Set 2 gets everything right where D1 got everything wrong. It has the same visual skin, but the colors transform it from something garish to something (shall we dare say it?!) SEXY! D2 has a much darker ambience to it, and the dark blues mesh SO WELL with the deep purples of the Set. The Sorceror's regalia oozes "Cool" in the same way a diner hamburger oozes grease when poked with a spoon. You know you shouldn't.. but you just can't resist the calories! *Giggle*

Now, for the D3 sets, there are actually two varieties, and seem almost as disparate as D1 and D2. Incanter's is just... AWEFUL. It seems to try and snag the dark ambience of D2, but completely loses the effect by adding ORANGE of all things into the mix. Orange is a very difficult color to pull off, clashing with pretty much any color imaginable. The Incanter set fails admirably, and ends up looking, regrettably so, "Fugly".
Mana-Etched is a HUUUGE turnaround! The colors are a PERFECT match, and the pattern on the robe and the shoulder piece gives it such a smooth feel. It is visually appealing, with one excpetion. What is UP with that headpiece? Like a mini-UFO flapping around up there. This ruins the effect on anything except gnomes. On gnomes, its just ADORABLE!!

So now let's hit up the Tier gear! (OMG RHYME!).

Tier 1 follows the same type of design as D1 tried, but actually manages to pull it off. Whereas the colors on D1 were terribly matched with the pattern, the T1 gear actually fits! The pattern offsets the disparate colors rather nicely, generating a sense of controlled chaos with the viewer. The headpiece and the shoulders combined is just... Haaawt. It works. It so does. Definitely feels a lot better on females, it just feels... off on a male character.

T2 (not the movie, jerkwad) goes in a whole different direction. It is all about deep blues and purples, generating a very... well, magely effect. The feel of Netherwind is one of the magically endowed, and actually feels a bit... overdone. It's like one of those parties you go to, where one person is juts trying WAY TOO HARD to fit in that it becomes extremely awkward so that everyone gets uncomfortable, and so the person tries even harder, and the situation just gets totally out of control until everyone is shifting and mumbling and the person trying is near tears and the music starts playing Achy Breaky Heart, but then someone starts quoting the Bee Gees, and then it all goes to hell... very, very Awkward. Like that sentence!

T3 kinda/sorta follows the route that T2 went. Its obviously high-end gear, and looks the part. BUT. It manages to pull the whole "I'm a mage, obviously" thing without overdoing it. It just fits so perfectly together, that you'd be a fool to think it doesn't look awesome. I do have one gripe with it, however. The way the headpiece shows up, it looks far to much like a wee little snow parka. Just looks wrong.

T4 is a miracle in clothing engineering. It has only two simple colors, some easy blues combined with some dull gold shadings, mixed with a smooth pattern. It just feels so RIGHT! It's simple, it's sleek, it's sexy. It doesn't say anything, it just glances at you sidelong, demurely, inviting you in to touch it. Like a kitty!

T5, too, is an excellent design. It goes a much darker red and black route, but keeps the same sleek feel of T4. It builds on it, though, adding a feel of simple elegance. It adds complexity, but without looking like it did. A wonderful visual set, it's simply lovely in design and execution.

And then we see Tier 6... something went wrong here. We seem to have gone backwards. This set has the potential to be attractive, but goes about it all the wrong ways. Like a woman putting on far too much mascara and lipstick, and wearing a push-up bra and wearing a tank top four sizes too small. It has the right intentions, but just. Didn't. DO. It right. The effect is one of desperation, leaving the viewer with a sense of "I'm cool right? RIGHT?! Say I'm cool!"

And that is Mage Fashion for this week! I hope you'll join me some time in the future, where we discuss the ramifications of blood elf hairstyles on the Mage PvP gear!

World of Magecraft, Volume IV

2007-11-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry this was so long in coming.

Now, for this issue of Magecraft, we are going to assume that you, lovely mage, have just reached level 70. So now what?
Well, first off we're going to go over the standard builds for level 70 mages. You'll see these referenced on the forums as "10/48/3" and "LOL 17/0/44 nub", and other such enlightening and pointless verbiage.

Commence buildshop!

(Disclaimer: the following talent specs are cookie cutters. This means that they are intended as an excellent place to start your own theorycrafting about where talents should go. They are meant as an outline to end-game specs rather than an end-all. Of course, these specs are cookie cutter for a damn good reason.)

These are the three specs primarily used for PvE.

The Raiding Standard
10/48/3

This is an extremely popular end-game build, and one that yours truly uses for any serious group PvE. This build capitalizes on the heavy innate damage and crit rate that comes from the fire tree. By stacking full Scorch debuffs, it essentially gives any person using fire spells a 15% boost to their damage! This turns your fireball spell into an incredibly powerful weapon (even more so now that 2.3 has scrapped the damage co-efficient). This build scales extremely well. Obviously, it gets better the more spell damage and crit rate you have, but because of the nature of the fire tree, it gets more returns than any other spec from those stats. Flat out increased damage, and Ignite provides a ton of damage that only gets more powerful the better your gear gets.
Master of Elements and Clearcast gives you very solid mana-efficiency, and elemental precision is an absolute must for the hit rating.
A very solid raiding build, and comes highly recommended by me. Remember, make sure you have max Scorch debuffs at all times. Make sure to refresh it with a scorch at least every 25 seconds, so that nothing stupid happens and you lose the whole stack.
Drawbacks: A hefty chunk of the damage you can deal is left up to random chance (crits, and thus ignite).

Arcane Raiding
50/11/0

Note that the random point spent in Magical Attunement can be put pretty much anywhere. It doesn't matter, its kind of a silly leftover... thingy.
This is the alternative build to a Fire raiding spec; this is the arcane raiding spec. Arcane is... an unusual spec, to say the least. Let me put it this way... the damage that can be dealt by a fire specced raiding mage is limited by two things: cast time and crits. Those are the two ruling factors for a fire mage. The same holds true for frost. But with arcane, your damage is limited by how much mana you have. Take Arcane Blast as a perfect example. It's cast time is reduced at the same rate as its mana cost goes up. Hence, you are limited by the amount of mana you have. In addition, as an arcane mage, a percent of all your Intellect becomes spell damage. What does this mean? You make your mana pool bigger, thus letting you cast longer. It also increases your crit rating. It also increases how much spell damage you have, which gets ridiculously powerful with Arcane missiles nabbing an extra 45% of bonus spell damage.
Quite bluntly, if you stack endless amounts of Intellect and Spell Damage, you will make tanks weep.
This Arcane spec also has the unique property in that it is the only Mage spec where Spirit is actually useful. Combine the (improved) Arcane Meditation with Mage Armor, and spirit looks very tasty indeed.
Drawbacks: Lack of range leaves you standing within several bosses AoE effects. You will have to be fast and clever to avoid these without hurting your DPS. Oh, yeah, and it goes Out of Mana faster than a Moonkin with 600 spell haste rating.

Frost Raiding (LOL spec)
10/0/51

A highly contraversial spec for raiding, by simple merit that it has the least amount of innate damage than any other PvE spec. A lot of the burst damage from frost comes from being able to "freeze" the target, and thus gain Shatter abilities. Sadly, most of the end-game raiding mobs are immune to being frozen, and only one boss in the entire game can be rooted. Due to this mechanic, frost is sorely lacking in the DPS department. Frost emphasizes control, controlled burst damage and survivability above all else. For raids, it is a poor choice. However, it is an excellent 5-man Instance spec, due to those same reason. Very few mobs in 5-mans are immune to freezes, meaning frost can gain some very respectable damage from this type of PvE. As well, the control the spec offers is highly useful for Heroics, adding a very nice cushion for screw-ups. Hell, any mob that can be rooted or slowed is solo-able by a frost mage.
Again, you'll see we put 10 points in Arcane. Couple Clearcast with Frost channeling, and frost will have mana long after the other specs have run OOM.
Drawbacks: Lowest damage output of the three cookie Mage specs.

Now, for PvP, things get a little different.

PoM + Pyro!
48/13/0

Like any non-frost spec, this build simply will not hold up inside an arena. It is used to its best effect in Battlegrounds, and can only perform well in 5v5 arenas if played very well.
This is the PoM + Pyro spec that is QQ'd about endlessly on the mage forums. It has the best burst potential of any build in the game, provided some jackass shaman doesn't Purge you. You'll be seeing a lot of the kind of super-heavy damage Arcane puts out, as long as you continue to have hefty amounts of Intellect and Spell damage in your PvP gear. And, of course, if you pop the classic PoM + Trinket + Arcane Power + Pyro, you'll be seeing that single spell crit of upwards of 4k damage. Against people without Resilience, it is entirely possible to get close to one-shotting them.
Prismatic Cloak and Improved Blink are not necessary to take, but, seriously, where else are you going to put them? They are very nice survivability talents, and will help you nicely in Battleground scenarios. If you adore Arcane and Arathi Basin, this is the build for you.
Drawbacks: You are so squishy, a Ret Paladin will most likely two-shot you. You also have the least PvP control capabilities of either the fire tree or frost tree.

Scorch Spam
17/44/0

The PvP Fire build. Before we start, note that the points currently spent in Emp. Fireball can be spent roughly anywhere. In PvP, you generally won't be using Fireball; you won't have time. Once you enter the brawl, or the brawl comes straight at you, you'll be using fireblast and Scorch almost exclusively. PvP changes too much, too fast, to warrant a 3 second cast. Otherwise, snag all the usual increased fire damage stuff and crit talents. Skip "Playing With Fire", and shove points into Blazing Speed. A contraversial talent, you will fall in love with it while fighting warriors and rogues. Yes, it has a relatively low proc rate, but when it procs, it's basically a huge "Fuck you" to the melee classes. Combined with Impact/Molten Armor, it basically gives you a 20% chance at a "I win" moment when anyone hits you in melee. And you'd still have all the usual Blink, Frost Nova type tactics to rely on. Dragon's Breathe is also annoyingly awesome for pretty much everyone. The 3 second stun can ruin a casters day, especially a healer.
Now, lets look at the Arcane side here. Put points into both Clearcast and Imp. Arcane Missiles. Whenever clearcast procs, hit Arcane Missiles for an uninterruptible, un-LoS kitable, powerful burst spell. Once Arcane Missiles starts casting it will complete even if the target runs out of range or breaks LoS. And it won't cost you mana to do. This is a common tactic for many PvP mages.
Also, getting the Improved Counterspell is just cruel. It is an excellent way to kill Paladins and Priests. Get it. Love it. It is sexy.
Drawbacks: Very squishy, and smart use of your Instants and Counterspell will quickly make you the "KILL FIRST" target of... well, everyone. That, and you'll probably be on top of the damage charts, thus making you an even higher priority target.

For any Frost PvP talent, you MUST have the following talents:
5/5 Improved Frostbolt
5/5 Ice Shards
2/2 Improved Frost Nova
1/1 Cold Snap
5/5 Shatter
3/3 Frost Channeling (shocker, I know, but you desperately need the mana efficiency. There's so little Intellect on PvP gear, you cannot afford to go without this talent)
1/1 Ice Block
1/1 Ice Barrier
5/5 Arctic Winds
5/5 Empowered Frostbolt
1/1 Water Elemental

The following talents are very useful, and you can pick and choose them at will. I highly suggest testing them, and seeing how they work out for you.
Frostbite
Permafrost
Piercing Ice
Arctic Reach
Improved Cone of Cold
Ice Floes
Winter's Chill

Personally, I can't bear to play without Improved Cone of Cold. I use it a lot as a direct damage spell, so I need to squeeze all the damage I can get out of it. If you're the type who uses it as a snare and nothing more, by all means skip it.

So. For speccing frost fore PvP, there are basically two other trees to use in support. You can either pick Arcane or Fire as a backup.

17/0/44 - Remember the whole Clearcast/Arcane Missiles thing? Yeah, same here, coupled with Improved Counterspell. Pick and choose your frost talents as you wish.

0/8/53 - This takes almost all of the awesome frost talents, and pairs it with Impact and the fastest cooldown Fireblast avaliable. Impact is excellent in PvP, since you'd better be running with Molten Armor. Stuns are good, learn to love them. The rapid Fireblast is also very important, the more you cast it, the better.

40/0/21 - An interesting spec, this combines a lot of the burst damage of the Arcane tree with some of the survivability of the frost. It allows for such neat tricks like PoM + Frostbolt. And, of course, combining Arcane Power and a Shatter combo will see Ice Lance critting for... well, an extremely high amount. Difficult to pull off, but this spec can be incredibly awesome. And you don't lose Ice Block, either.

0/14/47 - Also known as "ADD" spec. It goes deeper into fire than 0/8/43, to get the improved fireblast/scorch crits, and Burning Soul. The idea is, that when your frost tree gets shut down for some reason, you drop scorch's until its back up. Your damage dealt doesn't slow because of this, but you do lose mobility.

0/27/34 - The very strange Elemental Spec. Essentially, it combines Blazing Speed with Ice Barrier, to gain... a very odd spec. It has strong control and survivability, and some very interesting burst damage from fire. If one tree gets shutdown, its very easy to switch to the next. Being able to Ice Block and Blastwave at the same time will confound the shit out of your opponents.

And thats it! Those are the specs most people end up using.

My buff! MINE!

2007-11-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

Top Ten list of the coolest things that I'e done because of spell steal.

10. Blessing of Freedom from a Paladin, and then watched in amusement as a Warrior hit me with hamstring 4 times with Hamstring. I can only imagine his utter confusion as "Immune" kept popping up on his screen. Poor guy.

9. Snagging Ice Barrier from a mage... that just spellstole it from me a couple seconds ago.

8. Nature's Swiftness from a Shaman. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?

7. I first found out about a warlock's Fel Armor (it is called Fel Armor, right?) when I spellstole it in AB. Warlocks have an armor they can fire up to increase spell damage by 100? What the crap? I want that! So I had it for 2 minutes. And bloody hell, I want it all the time! What a godly buff...

6. In what I presume was a very strange glitch, I spellstole Shadowform off a Priest. Say what you like, the fact was, I had shadowform for 2 minutes, and the priest in front of me changed from a dark glowy elf to a plain old elf.

5. While fighting a warlock, he sacrificed his precious Voidwalker to gain enough time to get a Felpuppy out. I spellstole it, counter-spelled the summon, and wiped the floor with him. I love making gnomes cry. I really, really do.

4. Fighting a Discipline priest, and spellstealing Pain Suppression. I'm pretty sure I caused that little dwarf to cry himself to sleep... Oddly enough, spellsteal seems to snag this buff almost every time a priest casts it.

3. In a 2v2 arena, I was against a Warrior/priest combo. When the warrior rushed at me, I hit spellsteal instead of Ice Lance (d'oh) and snagged Shadow Resistance. Later in the fight, once the warrior was dead, the priest saw his chance to one shot me with Power Word: Death. It critted me for... 4. Thats right. Power Word: Death critted me for a grand total of 4. Best partial resist ever.

2. Presence of Mind from an Arcane mage in AV. Even worse, I didn't notice I had spell-stolen it. So I hit sheep in an effort to waste his cooldown. Imagine my shock when I cast an Instant Polymorph. I hit spellsteal again. Arcane Power? I wet myself laughing. Needless to say, I slaughtered the arcane mage.

1. Ice Block from a Dranei mage that was lagging. Thus letting my Paladin arena partner to get the killing blow, while I sat utterly confused in a block of Ice, staring in utter bamboozlety at my Ice Block button, which wasn't on cooldown... Why does this take the #1 slot? Because a Holy Paladin got the winning blow of arena match. THAT is made of so much awesome, I cannot imagine putting it anywhere else.

Courtesy of Bill Nye

2007-11-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

Consider the following.

Tonight was patch night. 2.3 goes live, and the forums go wild.

Trainable Ice Block is in the code, but it is not implemented. Sadly, the devs are delaying this until 2.4, most likely to "rework" it to suit being a trainable skill. Warlocks were crying long and hard about how incredibly overpowered it would be that all mages would have Ice Block. Complain they did about how pointless there DoT spells would be against mages in PvP.
Somehow, they all failed to realize that any mage above 1650-1700 rating is Frost specced, and thus will have Ice Block. Thus rendering a warlocks DoT spells pointless.
If you're complaining abotu the arcane/fire mages having Ice Block and ruining your arenas... well, you're obviously bad enough at PvP that NOT ONLY are you unable to reach a bracket where EVERY MAGE has Ice Block, no matter what, but you have trouble fighting mages in the first place. I hate to say it, but... seriously, learn to play your warlock.
HOW is it possible for a decent 'lock to have difficulty versus a mage? You can strip our buffs, silence us, effectively CC us for seconds at a time while still damaging us, and our only defence against your cheap, effective, instant cast, no cool-down attacks is on a 4-minute timer that we need to spec for, that even with an 8-minute cooldown (that we need to spec for), we still have to wait 30 seconds to use again.
And did I mention that you guys have far more hitpoints than any mage does?
Nonetheless, you're whining is fruitless. We WILL get Trainable Ice Block, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Healers everywhere are cursing under their breath at the incredible boon to dps raiders that was axed for this patch. I've covered in previous posts how incredibly awesome Ice Block is in any raid/instance environment.
It solves a lot of headaches, makes the healers job far easier, and reduces a great deal of strain from the raid as a whole.
If you can't understand that, you've never been in a situation where a squishy was at risk.
If you aren't frost, your survival options are as follows:

So you see the problem?

Coefficient taxes are gone, thus resulting in a very nice boost for frost and fire mages everywhere. I've already done the testing (FINALLY!) on Dr. Boom.
With a flat +damage of 500, Fireball's DPS went up by almost 100! And a +100 dps increase in Fireball is nothing to sneeze at.
Keep in mind that excludes crits, and only takes into account a lousy spell damage of 500. Oh, and the Scorch debuff was not stacked, either.

Ritual of Refreshment is nice, but I would deeply appreciate a better name, and maybe a graphic that doesn't look so... futuristic hard trance refreshment table. It seriously looks like their should be a large fat man in the background DJ'ing up some music that goes something like "NNtz NNtz NNtz NNtz NNtz"

And here is something incredibly overpowered that I think might get hotfixed and/or nerfed.

Are you, the blog-going reader, aware that Polymorph does not require the mage to be facing the target he is Polymorphing? There has to be Line of Sight, but the target can still be Sheeped even if it is 25 yards directly behind the mage.

Thank you.
For considering the preceding.

Dungeon Sets, for Mages

2007-11-12T23:00:00.000-07:00

Today we're going to discuss Dungeon3 sets that are avaliable to mages. Upon hitting 70, there are 3 different sets a Mage can choose from.
They are:

Mana-Etched Regalia
Incanter's Regalia
Oblivion Raiment

These are the three DPS-caster sets avaliable from the 5-man Dungeons. Incanter's and Oblivion are avaliable from regular instances, whereas Mana-Etched is avaliable primarily from Heroics (with the excpetion of the head).
Judging by the set bonuses (NOT boni, to the idiot who typed that), we can tell who these sets were designed for.
The Oblivion set grants 45mp5 to your pet, and adds 180 additional damage to Seed of Corruption, when it detonates. Note that the 45mp5 to the pet only works on warlock pets. It does not (and I have tested this on PTRs) work for a Frosties water elemental. This is obviously a warlock set.
Incanter's shaves 0.25 seconds off the Flamestrike cast time, and gives you a chance (roughly 20%) to proc 100 spell damage for 15 sec. when you are hit while mana shield is active. Obviously geared towards Mages.
The Mana-Etched set, however, is friendly to pretty much any offensive DPS caster. Set bonuses are: +35 spell hit, and any harmful spell has a chance (roughly 2%) to give you 110 spell damage for 15 sec. It's a mighty fine set whether you're a Mage, Shadowpriest, Warlock, or even a L4z3r Ch1ck3n... I mean, Boomkin.

So. You, as a mage, should spend hours getting the Incanter's set, amiright? Because it's tailored for you?
Not so fast, there, hotshot. Let's do some number crunching first. Let's ignore the set bonuses for now. We're going to ignore Mana-Etched for the time being, as we can assume it's superior to both Incanter and Oblivions

First off, the Incanter's. It will give you a total off:
120 Intellect, 110 Stamina, 84 Spirit, 150 Spell damage, and 61 spell crit. For socket bonuses, we have +4 spirit, +3 spell crit, and +4 intellect.
Oblivion will give you:
123 Intellect, 157 Stamina, 174 Spell damage, and 32 spell hit. For socket bonuses, we have +5 spell damage, +6 stamina, and +3 spell hit.

Let's say you choose Oblivion over Incanter, based on pure stats. Assuming that you gem everything color-coded, this will net you:
-1 Intellect
+53 Stamina
-88 Spirit
+49 spell damage
-61 spell crit
+35 spell hit.

If you're Arcane, the choice is simple. Incanter's all the way. You don't need the spell hit, you can take advantage of the spirit. With the talents the arcane tree offers, you will find yourself liking the Incanter stats more than the Oblivion.
For the rest of us... the choice is hard. It really is. Spirit is a non-factor for a any fire/frost mage, and we depserately need the spell hit at this point in the game. As frost, the choice is clear. Crit rating is close to pointless, a frostie will gladly skip the crit rating for the hit. For fire mages, the choice is tough. You will need the hit rating, after all, your cap is 13%. So you need a lot. On the other hand, you benefit from the crit rating far, far more than any other mage spec that exists.
Let me ask you this, though...
Can you crit a target if you miss it entirely? No? I thought not. So, to sum up, if you're Arcane specced, you will get more mileage out of the Incanter set, whereas the rest of us will do better with Oblivion.
And even if you are Arcane, you might still decide for Oblivion. After all, it has more spell damage and spell hit. And if you get most of the spell hit from that set alone, that frees up gem slots for other stuff... like, spell damage gems.
And if you're looking for a beginner PvP set, look no further than Oblivion. It is an excellent set for starting out at the 70 PvP bracket. You will adore the stamina it provides.

So. What about the set bonuses, you ask?
Well, the Oblivion set bonuses are useless to you as a mage... because... well, its a warlock set. So, that leaves the Incanter's set bonus.
SPOILER.
They suck. They really, really suck.
.25 seconds off Flamestrike? Yeah... thats... absolutely horrendous. Flamestrike is the worst AoE in the game. It has a long cast time and a very small area of effect. It doesn't even do that much damage. A single Arcane Explosion does 60% of the damage (excluding crits) in a larger area, with no cast time and less mana.
And the mana shield proc thing? Just... wow. Horrendous. It requires you to take a hit to get a chance (albeit a good one) to get more spell damage. That doesn't even make sense. First of all, Mana Shield is a terrible spell, and should only be used, if ever, while running away from something. And if you're running away from something, you need more spell damage because...?
Alternatively, if you snag aggro in an instance, pop mana shield, take a hit, then the tank gets it back, you could use the spell damage proc to down the mob faster. Well, except for the problem that you already took aggro, and more spell damage means you can take it back even faster. Oh, and you lose plenty of mana by popping mana shield. And you'll probably still take damage because the mob hits so damn hard.
And if you're frost, you will never, ever have mana shield anywhere near your action bars.

In short, the Incanter's set bonuses provide just as much benefit to you as the warlock's set bonuses.

It's a non-issue, the set bonuses. They're all useless.

Oh, and do I really have to say it? Mana-Etched is better than either of these sets, and looks far, far better to boot. And it has spectacular set bonuses to boot.

In summary.

Skip Incanter's. Get Oblivion. Have sex with Mana-Etched.

And We're Back!

2007-11-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

I didn't post on Sunday. Do I fell guilty? No, not really.
A good friend celebrated his 18th, and I went and got pleasantly drunk. By pleasant, it means I can remember most of the stuff that happened, but everything is coated in a warm, fuzzy feeling. It makes all my memories somewhat fuzzy as well, though...
Some stuff sticks out. Like a blonde chick named Cheryl. And a bowl of phenomenally good Poutine. And being run over by a tank in Halo3.

But I digress. Quite simply put, I don't have enough enough to say to warrant Daily Updates. From now on, I am going to update 4 times per week. Schedule for that TBA; for sure, Mondays and Saturdays will be update days. The other two update days will PROBABLY be Wednesday and Thursday. We shall see.
BUT. Seeing as how I promised daily updates, we're going to need to find someone/thing to fill in on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. I'm hoping to rope Vox into a regular gig as "That Crazy Sumbitch Wit Da PewPew". We shall see.

Also, I added a new html template thingy to my blog... let's see how it works:

[Gyro-balanced Khorium Destroyer]

Heh. That seemed to work nicely. Let's try some other stuff:

[Robe of Oblivion]

Kek ^_^
Ma links is no longer borked.

Actual update coming later.

SRSLY!

2007-11-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

Ok, so this is a serious post again.

I would like to talk about trainable Ice Block, and the possible repurcussions that would entail, if any.
For those not in the "know", the following forums are in an uproar about mages getting trainable Ice Block:
-Mage forums (duh)
-Warrior forums
-Warlock forums
-Hunter forums

The other forums don't really seem to care. The rogues are bust theorycrafting in thread after thread about the new Hemorrhage, the Shamans are awash in utter disappointment, Paladins are still yelling and screaming at each other about retribution, and the priests seem strangely occupied about racials.

The warriors are anywhere for entirely outraged from a PvP standpoint, the warlocks are QQ'ing endlessly about the might of the mages (this made me laugh, long and bitterly), and the hunters somehow think we'll be incredibly overpowered if we all have Ice Block.

Which leaves the mages rejoicing about PvE, and really not caring about the PvP.

"LOL WUT?" you say. Yes. Thats right. For the majority of mages, having Ice Block as a trainable ability will impact basically... nothing for us PvP mages.

Yes, I've said it before, I'll say it again. Ice Block is a game breaking talent. Without it, you are guaranteed to fail on a competitive level.
But if you do have Ice Block, that does not guarantee that you will not fail.

To be successful in an arena, you need to be able to outlast your opponent. You need to counter their specials, and have the durability to survive the ones you cannot avoid.
Every mage having Ice Block will not impact the other specs a great deal in the arena.

Even with Ice Block, you lack the control frost mages have. You do not have the ability to kite, you do not have multiple and rapid sources of frost novas.
You do not have Ice Barrier, and the mana-chugging protection that gives you.
You do not have the water elemental, a sickeningly effective killing tool when used effectively.
You do not have ridiculously powerful Ice Lances, one of the best burst damage spells a mage has. Specced for it, Ice Lance IS the best burst damage spell a mage has.
You do not have Cold Snap, allowing you to Ice Block twice in a match, and have a water elemental out for a full minute and a half.

Put bluntly, frost is a dozen-trick pony. And with Ice Block, you get one small trick to surviving.

"But Euri!" you whine, "If a PoM + Pyro mage can get Ice Block, then he can nuke my ass to hell and back and live right through it!"

Let me ask you something. When was that last time you got hit with a PoM + Pyro. Did it hurt? Of course it did. You know why? Because your resilience was shit.
Sorry. That was uncalled for.
Let's be realistic here.
Mages are essentially a glass cannon. Little survivability, lotsa damage being fired out. We die fast a slug that gets dropped in a bucket of salt, but damn, we'll hurt you just as bad as that poor slug.
We are the definition of squishy. Pretty much anything can kill us, if they gain the upper hand for even a few seconds.
A fire mage dies very fast in a tense situation. An arcane mage even faster. Simply put, a mage cannot take the hits. This is part of the foundation of the class. worldofwarcraft.com outright says so on their Mage Description page.
Challenge: Staying Alive.

So. Unless we're frost specced, we're easy to kill. Ice Block will hardly change that. Will it add to the survivability of non-frost mages? Most certainly. Will it mark the dawn of a whole new era in PvP combat? Not even close.
All it means is that the super-squishy mage will live 10 seconds longer. Thats all.
Once Ice Block is gone, the mage is just as squishy as before. Just as easy to kill. And now his survival trick is gone.

And to you people complaining about how this will effect the arenas, ask yourself.
Search your memory. Do it.
When was the last time you saw a Mage in the arena that did not have Ice Block?

Think about. Any and every moderately successful mage in any arena has Ice Block. Making it trainable will train nothing.
Every mage that PvP'd had Ice Block before... now we'll all... still have Ice Block. In competitive arenas, this change will do little besides let the arcane and fire mages move up about 50 points in rating. Some might even be able to crack 1600 now.

So, please, for those of you QQing about how this will completely change the Arena dynamics, please be quiet. This will change nothing.

Trainable Ice Block, however, will provide some major changes in a completely different part of WoW.
Yes, I'm talking about PvE. Ice Block is an immunity to everything, and a way to temporarily dump aggro.

You accidentally pull aggro on Quagmirran? Ice Block.
You get hit by Watery Tomb while fighting Hydross? Ice Block.
You get turned in a wee little girl with a Red Hood while fighting ol'granny? Ice Block 10 seconds from the debuff.
Moroes Garrote you? Ice Block. Its gone.
Get caught in the open when Ikiss blows that massive Explosion thingy? Ice Block, and you'll live happily ever after.

The uses for Ice Block in a PvE environment are many. Used correctly, it will save your healers a lot of aggravation, save your ass, and the collective ass of everyone around you.

Mage Tanking

2007-11-08T23:39:00.000-07:00

Todays post is an exciting one. Patch 2.3 is bringing many, many goodies to pretty much every class to the game. Blizzard is working very hard to get this game as balanced as possible.
The roles for every class is being expanded.
For example, paladins, once solely relegated to tanking and healing, are able to now fill the role of DPS in raiding content.
Shamans, too, are seeing buffs to their casting trees, allowing them to serve is utility mages and utility rogues.
Now, every class in the game is able to fulfill multiple roles in a raid.
As of 2.3, the mages horizons will be expanding beyond the classical DPS role.

It is with great pleasure that I bring you the reworked Arcane tree.
Since WoW came out, the Arcane tree has widely been considered the worst tree mages have avaliable. So many talents considered useless in so many ways.
Well, cheer up mages! Blizzard has heard your pleas!

Everyone give a round of applause to the new Tanking tree for mages!

The following changes have been made to the Arcane tree:

Arcane Subtlety has been renamed to Arcane Blatantly. Instead of reducing the threat caused by Arcane spells by 40%, it increases the threat generated by 40%.

Wand Spec has been outright scrapped, in favor of a new 2 point talent. Now, it increases the Stamina of the mage by 25%, and is renamed Arcane Stamina. Arguably the BEST tanking talent ever.

Magic Absorption keeps the same name, but instead of increasing spell resistances by 10, it increases the mage's armor value by double the mage's + spell damage value.

Magic Attunement stays the same, but now also increases the effect of "Mana Shield" by 50%. Mana Shield has been completely reworked, in Patch 2.3. Rather than absorbing damage and taking it from the mana pool, it now summons a Shield in front of the caster, fully absorbing damage equal to the Mage's total mana value. However, it now comes with a 10 second cooldown.

Arcane Fortitude now increases the mage's armor amount by 200% of the mages intellect.

Improved Mana Shield now reduces the cooldown of Mana Shield by 1 second per rank.

Arcane Mind has been renamed Arcane Constitution. It now increases both the mages Intellect and Armor values by 3% per rank.

Prismatic Cloak decreases all damage taken by 5% per rank, buffed from 2%.

Empowered Arcane Missiles no longer increases the mana cost of Arcane Missiles. Rather, it increases the threat generated by Arcane Missiles by 5/10/15%.

Mind Mastery, in addition to its usual effect, also decreases the cost of all arcane spells by the same amount.

Slow has been changed to a AoE effect, affecting all targets in a 15 yard basis. It also causes a very large amount of threat.

So there you have it! Arcane has been significantly buffed, allowing mages to be able to tank and still deal significant damage.

Now, as to how to tank.

First off, you won't have to struggle to find defensive gear. Blizzard has been kind enough to re-itemize all the Tier gear to support mage-tanking, with significant values for Intellect, Stamina and armor. Unlike most tanks, mages do not have to worry about stats like Parry and Dodge. We only have to worry about armor mitigation and our mana pool.
Because Mana Shield absorbs damage based entirely on how big your mana pool is, you want to have as much mana as possible. Also, as your armor increases based on intellect, a bigger mana pool means you have more armor.
So, the only real stats a mage tank needs to worry about is Stamina, and loads and loads of Intellect. As a mage tank, you should be whoring as much Intellect as possible. But hey, the re-itemization will help that significantly.
Take, for example, the new Tier 4 Chest Piece, "Aldor Constitution"

Constitution Robe of the Aldor
404 Armor
+40 Stamina
+66 Intellect
3 Blue Sockets
Socket Bonus: + 5 Stamina
Increases damage done by magical effects by 24.

TANKING TIPS:

Always run with Ice Armor up. You will love the increased armor value, and the slowing effects from it will let you get control over any mob that some other douchebag in the party pulls very rapidly.

Arcane Missiles are your best friend. They do a lot of threat, and a lot of damage, which means more threat. Relative to its threat, it's a very cheap spell to cast, and is uninterruptible. The perfect tanking spell.

Spam Mana Shield whenever the cooldown is up. It will make your healers job that much easier, and makes up for the lack of block, dodge, and parry skills that mages lack.

Threat generation is not an issue for a Mage tank. You have tons of threat generation already, and it is nearly effortless to pull aggro away from another idiotic member if your party.

I hope this has helped you out, and given you a few tips on how to tank as a mage.
Rumor has it, that Arcane Blast is being reworked into an Instant cast that forces the mob to target the mage for 8 seconds. We can only wait and see if this happens in 2.4! Or, maybe, it might sneak into 2.3 if we're lucky.

Divine Intervention

2007-11-07T22:40:00.001-07:00

Patch 2.3 is rapidly becoming one of the BEST patches mages have seen in.... ever.

So much is being addressed, so much is being fixed, its exciting to the point of me cheering audibly at work, earning the glares of my supervisor.

I've already talked about all the other goodies, like AI's cost being reduced, the reworking of evocate, co-efficient tax being removed, etc, BUT THE NEWS JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER AND BETTER.

First off, here's something huge.

Remember the coming nerf to Ice Block, with Hypothermia going up to 45 seconds. REPEALED.
That's right! Hypothermia is back to 30 seconds! Good news for all mages!
Are you excited yet?
I'd like to point out I said "Good news for ALL mages". Anyone take a gander at why I would say all mages?
Anyone?

I have three words for you.

TRAINABLE ICE BLOCK.

Read it again.

Thats ok, I can wait.

Done salivating yet?

I am NOT kidding here. Ice Block IS TRAINABLE. Every single mage will now have access to this spell.

I've established many, many times before how Ice Block was pretty much a game-breaking mechanic for magery in arenas. Without it, you're guaranteed to get killed off by something stupid, like Beast Within.
Now we all get it.
CAN I HAVE A HELL YES??!?!?

Sure, the most viable spec for arena will still be frost, but its no longer exclusive to frost-specced mages. With Ice Block, this will let fire, and even arcane mages, a fair chance in the arenas now. No, you won't be seen at the same level of frost mages, but you're given a very good fighting chance now.

Voxmortis, rejoice, you can stop sucking so bad now.

So, lets recap. In 2.3, mages get:

1) A better Evocate
2) Better gear (through Zul'Aman)
3) Better arena survivability, and the arenas open up fairly to all mages
4) Improved Vendor status
5) No nerf to Ice Block
6) More damage
7) Better Ice Barrier and ward spells

So... yeah. Pretty much the most awesome patch EVER.
The loss of Detect Magic is kinda dumb, but that does nothing at all to overshadow the sheer awesome of this patch.
And to you arcane mages complaining about TLC and MSD.... I don't care. I've never been arcane, I never will be. I have little experience with end-game arcane (yes, I do have some, thanks to the magic that is PTRs), so I cannot offer an opinion on that.
Perhaps a guest post about it is in order?

Also:

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[███TANKADIN████████]►
[☼|☼|☼|☼|☼|☼|☼|☼|☼|☼]

Inconvenience

2007-11-06T23:22:00.001-07:00

Today I would like to gripe and complain about the annoying things of the Mage class.
This is not a discussion of any serious troubles, gamebreaking mechanics, whatever. Just some very annoying things.
You'll notice that a fair amount of this gripes are getting fixed in 2.3. Hellz yes! Not every patch is bad.
Goodbye minor annoyances and inconveniences, hello game-breaking mechanics!

MANA GEMS
What the crap is up with mana gems anyways? This seems to me a brilliant idea that was very poorly executed. The highest rank of mana gems Mages can get costs 1670 mana, and restores anywhere from 1136 to 1364 mana. If anyone cares, this means the max rank of Mana gem has a chance of restoring LESS mana than the next rank down (which restores 1000 to 1200). It just annoys me that I could use the down-ranked version and get more mana back.
And besides, a Super Mana Potion can restore more than double what a mana gem does (1800-3000 for the potion). And another thing. A warlocks healthstone restores far more hp than our mana stone. Sure, you can argue that a healthstone costs reagents, which it does, if you're not making it in the arena, or any battleground come Patch 2.3 (which has been officially announced, btw).
Result: Annoying! Useful, but annoying.

EVOCATION
At 60, and any level below that, Evocation would restore the entire mana bar in 8 seconds. Now, at 70, it almost restores 30% of my mana bar. Mages have so little spirit most of the time (the whole useless stat thing), and so evocate does so little. Of course, this gets a little fix in patch 2.3, to 60% of our mana bar. Very nice buff for most of us high level mages (heavy spirit mages (lol) in mage tier gear might see it as a nerf), generally a huge nerf for all the low level mages. My gripe is simple. You'd think that, for an 8 minute cooldown, it would do a little more. I still like it, mind you, I just don't like how it used to be so awesome, and got progressively worse every level I gained.
Result: Very annoying! Getting far less annoying in the next patch.

VENDOR
No, this is not going to be a gripe about people "always" pestering mages for food/water/ports, whatever. This is about the current mechanics that food/water brings to raids. Frankly, standing around summoning food/water for 5-10 minutes before a raid was incredibly annoying. I'd do it, sure, 'cause raids are awesome. But it was still annoying.
Anyways, thanks to Blizzard, this inconvenience gets the boot
Result: Used to be a serious peeve. Patch 2.3 gets this fixed. Win.

ARCANE INTELLECT/BRILLIANCE
My only annoyance here was the very high cost of these spells. They cost a fortune to do, and a mage can easily blow through his entire mana pool buffing two parties. Again, this gets fixed. Woot!
Result: Annoying enough that I would never bother to buff anyone besides myself with this, except in Instances/raids. No reciprocal buffs for you, So-and-so from Black Dragonflight! Reduced mana costs = win.

WANDS AND THE GCD
A warrior's white damage attack doesn't trigger the GCD. Neither does a Rogue's. Or a hunter's. In fact, every basic attack function except wands is exempt from the GCD. So why doe mages, warlocks, and priests get the stupid end of the stick, and be forced to endure a silly GCD for using a wand? There's probably no good reason to have wands on a GCD, and no reason to not have them on a GCD. It's just annoying.
Result: Yup. It's annoying.

USELESS TALENTS
Ok, this is a complaint that every class has, but seriously. Why have talents that you'd have to be brain-dead to take? I mean, c'mon! Why would you put talents like Improved Fire Ward and Frozen Core here? Nobody is ever going to take them. They just clutter up our trees with empty boxes. I guess you could use them as a way to laugh at people who take them?
Result: Annoying. Really.

SPIRIT
Spirit on Mage's tier gear just friggin' pisses me off. Worst itemization ever. If you're fire, it's pointless. If you're frost, it's pointless. If you're arcane, you have one talent that takes advantage of it, and I'll bet you secretly wish that spirit was more spell damage. Don't you?
Result: Annoying and sad at the same time, since you have to have it to get the good mage gear.

HEALING PATTERNS
There are nine classes in the game. Every one of them can either heal themselves, or reduce the amount of healing done to their target. Except Mages and, until recently, hunters. Admittedly, rogues and warriors have to have a specific debuff to do it, but thats still a step ahead of mages. If you haven't heard, Hunters are getting a "Mortal Strike" as well. Last I heard, it was the same effect being applied onto an Aimed Shot. Could someone correct me if I'm wrong? I have severe allergic reactions whenever I try and read any Hunter related information.
But seriously, why are mages singled out here? And don't tell me "CS nub". Warriors can interrupt heal spells, so can everyone else, and most of them do it better than mages. Kick anyone? Ever heard of Earthshock? It's not game breaking, I mean, I can see the argument that all classes were not made equal or whatever, we all have different strengths and weakness and whatnot. But its... annoying to be the only class that just can't. It makes it impossible to kill a druid that can figure out how to cast lifebloom and rejuvination on himself.
Result: A pet peeve.

INVISIBILITY
Another really clever idea gone the way of being totally and utterly useless. This spell just plain sucks. It costs a lot, has no inherent use, and you can't do anything, or have anything done to you.
Result: It sucks. Fix it or remove it. Please. Pretty please.

CO-EFFICIENT TAX
10% off our base spells if we pick up a talent? Why, yes! I would like to spend 5 talent points to DECREASE the amount of damage I do! -2% damage per rank sounds pretty good!
Result: Sheer stupidity, and getting eradicated from the WoW code, as it rightfully should.

ALTS
Due to the ability of mages to port themselves pretty much wherever they need to go, and the whole free food/water thing, it occasionally makes playing an alt impossible. I take these things for granted, having had them since Day One.
Result: I have been spoiled by arcane magic.

GNASHING OF TEETH
All the fucking whinos on the WoW forums. You people suck.
Result: /ignore ftw!

TIME ZONE
The fact that when I post on Tuesday, the post will go through on Wednesday, due to time zone differences. So it will look like I neglected my blog for one day. BLUZZARD! FICX THIS!!!!11
Result: !!!!111shift

PALADIN TANKS
I have the somewhat creepy desire to play a Paladin tank. I don't know why. I really don't. But it's there, and I don't know how to get rid of it. Like a second head, it's always there... breathing softly in the background, just out of my eyesight.
Result: YOU'RE ALWAYS HUNGRY! THAT'S WHY WE'RE SO FAT!

Assholes, Large and Wide

2007-11-05T23:18:00.000-07:00

Anyone who spends any time on the internet will run across these people.

The folk who senselessly flame away at someone, instantly dismiss their ideas as stupid or irrelevant, or outright attack the other person with abusive language.
These people rapidly incite anger and hatred amongst most people they communicate with.
They have many names.
"Trolls"
"Flamers"
"Asshats"

Whatever name they go by, they make life miserable. If you run afoul of them, they will attack your opinion, your ideas, and you.
I fondly call these people "assholes".

I was once an asshole, not too long ago. I trolled the mage forums. I attacked "nubs" for being clueless. I used to relentlessly attack people in trade chat, general chat, whatever.
I'd outright abuse and attack anyone who said something wrong, or asked for help.
I used to be one of the assholes who'd jump into general chat with the witty remark "L2thottbot" when someone asked where the herbalism trainer was.
When I ran with a mage who stacked spirit with his gems, I'd verbally abuse him until he left the party in tears.
I used to make any and every effort to ruin the time of alliance. At 60, I was running around in Ashenvale farming wool. I saw two mid 20-ish people at the summoning stone for Blackfathom Depths. Obviously going to summon some party mates. One of the two was flagged for PvP. I proceeded to one-shot the guy. And laughed. And waited patiently. The poor guy was obviously new, as he respawned long before the PvP flag faded. I annihilated him in this way 5 times before he stopped rezzing. The whole time the second party member stood there, waiting. At the fourth kill, he went /afk, and then logged out. That alliance group never did the Instance run. I laughed heartily at how I had single-handedly ruined their play time.
That is how I used to play the game.

No longer. No more.

I've changed, and it's for the better.

When someone asks where the herbalism trainer is, I direct them to the nearest city guard, tell them to select "Professions" then "Herbalism", and I tell them that the trainer will be displayed on their map. I will even give them some quick instructions on how to open the world map to clearly see where the trainer is.
When I see a mage with spirit-stacked gems, I let them know they're wasting those stats, and tell them they should be stacking + spell damage, hit rating, whatever. I'll even link them a couple of good gems to use, if I have them in my bag.
While running a lowbie guild-mate through SM, there was a couple flagged alliance there. I waved cheerfully and carried right on. Even helped them clear to the instance entrance.
At 70, I was farming for Firewing signets at firewing point. A little 61 gnome mage comes by, frost spec. He tries to do the escort quest. It quickly becomes apparent he will be unable to kill the mobs; he's getting overun and losing health fast. The old me would have /lol and /cheer until he died, at which point I would have slaughtered all the mobs and laughed at him some more. The new me jumped right into combat, rooting all the mobs he had aggrod, Cone of Cold, etc, effortlessly killing six mobs that were beating on him. I even took the time to make sure he had tagged every one of them before I started attacking them, on the off-chance he could snag a little XP or lewt from them. He used /thank. I /salute, and went back to my grind. I was happy. He was happy.

Call me a carebear if you like, I'm fine with it.

The old me would have seen me happy, and the gnome frustrated and angry. The new me saw me happy, and the gnome was happy.

BUT.

I am not nice to everyone. Not even close.

Remember those assholes I was talking about? They are my new targets.

When someone asks where Thrall is for a quest, and someone replies "L2thottbot, nub" I will whisper directions to the person looking for Thrall, and attack the "L2" player. In public. Trade chat even, if possible. I show no mercy. I will not stop. If you try and argue back, chances are good you're feeding me ammunition, which can and always is used against you to devastating effect.

There are those who make people's lives better. They're brave, they post on contaversial topics. They try to provide information, and do they best they can. There are those who are new, who shouldn't be shunned. They should be helped, given info, whatever, so they can have a fun experience. This is WoW, it is a game. If you cannot have fun here, if you cannot get along with others, please. Heed this advice.

GET. THE. FUCK. OUT.

Leave the rest of us in peace, so we never have to read the mindless drivel your keyboard produces.

There's a relatively new blog on wowinsider.com, called Bloodsport. Just a columnist trying to pull of an arena specific blog, about class balance and all sorts of goodies. The fellow did up a brief matrix chart, giving a rough idea of where the classes match up.
The first comment, from Zechleton. "I read the Warrior line in your matrix and stopped reading. Obviously clueless."
Zechleton, might I humbly suggest you drown yourself in a lake? You'll be doing everyone a favor.

Again taking from WoWInsider, this post briefly dealing with mages and 2.3.
There were plenty of comments here, it started off as discussion about the upcoming patch.
"agree with 11 & 13. PLEASE replace the writer of "Arcane Brilliance" his game knowledge is trivial at best." - Anonym, 7:53 PM October 15th
"This article needs to be done by someone who does more than read the patch notes. Can't you find somebody who can spend an hour a week reading the Elitist Jerks mage threads and churn out a summary of what they read there?" - Rudi, 8:02 PM October 15th
"Get someone to write that knows what the heck they are talking about. This is crap" - simplehiker, 8:58 PM October 15th

I would like to thank you, and all commentors like you, for your insightful and valued input. You have successufully identified a problem, and given helpful and constructive feedback.

If you didn't notice, that was sarcasm. You have done NOTHING but attack the person who wrote the post. You criticize the downward spiral of the quality of posting, you attack the person writing the blog as an unintelligable buffoon with little to no knowledge, and... hmm, thats it. You want to do the job? If you aren't being satisfied, go get the damn information by yourself. You say someone can get the information in seconds? THEN WHY DON'T YOU? Instead you complain and gripe, like the brainless fucktard you are.
You think these people spend their time catering to you? It's a hassle for someone to go out of their way to give you some information. Did you see what happened with the warlock blog? That poor woman receieved so much flak, the blog stopped. Nobody posts. Sorry, warlocks, you don't get a WoWI blog.
Do you want the same to happen to mages? Do you?

Get off the internet. Remove yourself from this planet. Do whatever you have to do to prevent yourself from interacting with any part of Society ever again.

World of Magecraft, Volume III

2007-11-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

Here you are now, leveling up your mage. You've picked up your professions, and have a good idea of what kind of build you'd like to use. But where do you put these talent points when you're leveling?
This section here is a brief guide on where to put your talent points while making the grind to 50.
We're only going to cover you're first 40 talent points, since by level 50 you should know how to play the class. I'm also going to cover the stats in the game, as they pertain to spells, and mages.

While leveling your new mage, there are two routes to go. You can either go with the fire tree for leveling, or the frost tree. If you choose fire, you will be able to quickly take down a target mob. You will be able to move from one target to the next rapidly, quickly downing mobs one-by-one. You will have trouble taking on multiple mobs at once, at least until you get Blastwave. There is little to no room for error leveling as a fire mage; if you screw up, you're dead.
If you choose frost, you will not be able to take down mobs nearly as quick as fire. A fire mage can usually 3-4 shot an equal level mob; as a leveling frost mage you will probably take more than 5 spells to get the same job done. However, you can take multiple mobs on at once, with little of the difficulty fire has. You also have a very large margin of error. If a fire mage accidentally pulls 5 mobs instead of the one he was looking for, he's close to screwed. A frost mage will pull 5 mobs on a regular basis.

Take your pick. Rapid killing one-by-one with almost no margin for error, or slower killing with a very large margin of error?
Please, don't pick arcane. It is terrible for leveling, and doesn't get any good until much later in the game. It has no inherit kiting ability, which fire gets very early on and frost always had. It cannot match the damage output of fire early on, and you will run OOM (out of mana) much faster than either frost or fire.
Save yourself some grief. Say no. You gain nothing by trying to level as arcane, except a hard time.

Also, be aware that all mage trees are "top-heavy". That means all the good stuff is deep in the tree, and not at the beginning. Thus, while leveling, don't split trees. Stay focused, and keep putting points into the same tree as you level.

Your first 40 points - FIRE

Level 10-14 - Put your first 5 points into "Improved Fireball". This is your base attack spell, and you will be using it constantly. Cutting down its cast time means you get more damage off in less time. Self-explanatory. It gets even better at level 15.

Level 15, 16 - Put your next two points in "Flame Throwing". This increases the range of your fire spells by 6 yards, and you will adore this. Mages do best attacking at range; you're hurting the mob while it's not even touching you. Range means you do more damage, and take less damage. Coupling this talent with Imp. Fireball will give you an extra fireball to cast at a mob before it even reaches you.

Level 17-19 - Put three points in Ignite here. You may not crit that often at this low level, but when you do, the extra damage helps you a great deal. And you're a mage, get all the damage you can get.

19 PVP BUILD - No. Just no. You will get horribly slaughtered again and again.

Level 20 - This is where there is some argument as to where your tenth point should go. Many suggest putting your next two points into Burning Soul, so you don't get your spells interrupted anymore. I say, at this stage of the game, you shouldn't be letting mobs beat on you anyways. You already have a 41 yard range and frost nova, why are you letting them hit you? At this point in leveling, your spell rotation should be something like : Fireball, Fireball, Fireball, Frost Nova, Fireball until dead. No mob should survive 5 fireballs. Maybe six if you're taking on something 4+ levels higher than you. In case of unlucky resists, thats what Fireblast is for. You don't need to pick up Burning Soul right this second.
HOWEVER, Pyroblast is an excellent spell at this stage in the game. It won't stay this way forever, but in your twenties, Pyroblast is vastly more powerful than fireball. Open every fight with it, attacking at maximum range. Pick it up at 20, it will give you a very nice damage boost at the start of fights

Level 21, 22 - This is where you pick up Burning Soul. Now you have an amazing opener ability, and an ability that will let you keep right on casting in the face of adversity.

Level 23, 24 - Finish off Ignite. Now your spell criticals will do almost half the damage again whenever you crit. If your opening Pyro crits, you will be seeing a tremendous amount of damage at this stage in the game.

Level 25-29 - Now you're going to want to pick up Impact. Incinerate and Improved Scorch are just not that useful when leveling. Nothing will stay alive long enough for Imp. Scorch to stack, and you should only be using scorch/fireblast at this stage of the game as an "OH SHIT" button. Fireball is still your best spell. Impact will give you a 10% chance to stun a target upon being hit with a fire spell, and it is an excellent talent for leveling. It will keep your target at range that much longer. giving you time to fire off more spells before your target can do anything about it.

29 PVP BUILD - Remember those 5 points you put into Imp. Fireball? Well, put them into "Incinerate" and "Improved Fire Blast" instead. Viola! You have the best possible PvP build for mages at 29.

Level 30 - Pick up Blastwave.

Level 31-33 - Put 3 points into "Critical Mass". This is where we start seeing some more powerful abilities in the fire line. With an increase of your crit chance, you will be seeing Ignites far more often, which means even more damage.

Level 34 - Put a point into "Master of Elements". It will add to your mana-efficiency, which is a very good thing while leveling. The higher your crit chance, the better this talent gets. And you're crit chance will only go upwards as you level, so get it, and enjoy a little extra mana.

Level 35-39 - Shove all five points into "Fire Power". 10% more damage from fire spells. Thou shalt not go without it.

39 PVP BUILD - Same thing as the 29 build. Put the points from Imp. Fireball into Incinerate and Imp. Fireblast. 39 is a really good bracket for mages, we really come into our own here. We do fine at 29, but we're better at 39. Pwn some nubs, 39 is a great bracket to be in. And if you're a twink, even better, because you can put all those new enchants from TBC on your gear. Before you ask, yes, you can put the Sunfire enchant on the Staff of Jordan if you really, really wanted to. A twink mage at 39 can easily be a god of fire damage.

Level 40 - Get Combustion. Even more crits for you!

Level 41-43 - Put 3 points in Pyromaniac. You get a little bit of mana efficiency, and even more crit chance. You'll be pumping out a lot of damage at this point in the game.

Level 44 - Put a second point in Master of Elements. You will be critting a lot at this stage of the game, get a little extra mana back.

Level 45-49 - At this point in the game, you should have bonus spell damage on your gear. At bare minimum, have at least 100 of the stuff. Shoot for 200+. As such, pick up Empowered Fireball, and get all the more damage out of your main spell as you can.

And that is that. Congratulations on making it this far, you should have an idea of how a fire mage works at this point. Feel free to mix it up, try a 49 PvP build (another really fun bracket). Or put 10 points into Arcane for Clearcast. Its up to you, and 70 is the limit.

Your First 40 points - FROST

Level 10-14 - Put your first 5 points into Improved Frostbolt. Same reasoning as Imp. Fireball, you use this spell a lot, use it even more, and get even more damage out of it.

Level 15-17 - Your next three points should go into Frostbite. 15% chance on any chill effect to freeze the target. So thats... 15% chance on every spell you cast to root the target. Frost is all about control and leeway while leveling, this makes your time even easier.

Level 18-22 - Put 5 points into Ice Shards. You won't be critting very often at this point in the game, but when you do, it will hurt a lot. Most importantly, this talent is going to come into its own in a huge way in a few levels.

Level 23, 24 - Put 2 points into Imp. Frost Nova. By itself, this will give you more leeway in controlling the encounter, just in case something goes wrong and you need another frost nova right away. Most importantly, this talent lets you take Shatter next level up.

Level 25-29 - Put all 5 points into shatter. This is a godly talent, and seeing as you freeze your target in place a lot, you will be critting quite a bit. And remember that Ice Shards we took a few levels ago. Yeah. You will be critting very hard, and often.

Level 30, 31 - Put 2 points into Arctic Reach. You don't need the range as much as fire does, thats why we left it until here. But add the range, and this will give you even more manuevering room when taking on random mobs. You already have a chill effect, a faster casting time than fire's main spell, a 15% chance to outright stop your target, and now you're adding even more range. Life is good. Mobs shouldn't even be able to touch you.

Level 32-34 - Put 3 points into Piercing Ice. Its 6% damage, it's kind of a no-brainer. We didn't take it earlier, because we need to turn you into a god of kiting. Which you are now, so go ahead and take the extra damage. It won't have much of an impact of you take Piercing Ice before Arctic Reach, I just prefer to widen the margin of error first. If you're still sucking and still getting hit by mobs, get some more kiting help. Skip Piercing Ice, and put these three points into Permafrost instead. You shouldn't need to have Permafrost while leveling, but hey, if you're that bad at kiting still, take it and get better.

Level 35-37 - Put 3 points into Frost Channeling. A 15% reduction in the cost of frost spells is huge, and it will keep you up and casting for a much longer time. It's the best mana reduction talent in any mage tree, so get it and love it.

Level 38 - Get Ice Block here. We're going to add some powerful special abilities to the frost tree here. Start with Ice Block. The biggest uses this spell has is letting you wait for the frost nova cooldown freely, and wiping any stupid disease effects or whatever a mob throws on you. Not very important at all for leveling. But, we need it for Ice Barrier, which is simply awesome.

Level 39 - Get Cold Snap right now. This is your "OH SHIT" button as frost. Other specs and classes have them, but this one is yours.

Level 40 - Get Ice Barrier. You may have noticed that the frost tree doesn't have any spell interrupts. This is why we needed to get you good at kiting. But, now we have this little handy spell, which will keep your pecious cast bar ambling towards completion rather than failing.

Level 41, 42 - Put 2 points into Ice Floes. Now that you have all these special abilities kicking around, get this so you can use them more often. Feel free to cry that it doesn't reduce the cooldown on frost nova even more. I know I did.

Level 43, 44 - 2 points into Arctic Winds, to add some much needed damage to your frost spells. You're probably jealously looking at fire mages and their large damage output at this point. Go ahead and treat yourself to a little more damage.

Level 45-49 - All five points go into Empowered Frostbolt. Like the fire side of things here, you should have at bare minimum 100 + spell damage. Make your main spell even more powerful. The fact that it also increases the crit chance of frostbolt by 5% is just free candy on the cake.

And grats, you've made it to level 49 as a frost mage. Ding 50 and snag the water elemental, and rejoice. You are a kiting god, and as long as the mob can be snared/rooted, you can kill it without even being touched. Congratulations, now go grind on some elite dragonkin.

STATS

You see it all the time in noobie zones. People asking in General about what stats are most important, you see it on the forums sometimes too. So let me summarize everything up here for ya. These are the stats in the game that effect mages, and what you need to know.

INTELLECT - This is the core stat for mages of any kind. Each point of intellect gives you 15 mana and a 0.0125% chance to crit. No matter what you plan on doing, you need a mana pool. And for a mana pool, you need Intellect. Its basic knowledge, but there it is. Intellect is a very important stat
STAMINA - This is a core stat for every class in the game, however, its emphasis for mages is somewhat lower than most other classes. As ranged DPS, we have very low natural stamina, and little real need for it. For anything other than PvP, stamina is not very important for mages. In PvP, of course, stamina is very important and you need a lot of it. However, no matter what you do, you never need to worry about it. For PvE gear, it will come with its own stamina regardless, and you'll have enough hitpoints to get by just fine. For PvP, any and all PvP gear already comes with stamina, so you still don't need to be concerned about it. If you get PvP gear, you will get stamina, and lots of it, by default. It will not hurt in the least to toss some Stamina gems into your sockets, if you are that high of level.
SPIRIT - Spirit just isn't a very good stat at all. Literally any other mage stat should be considered more important than spirit, even spell penetration. See, spirit will only regen mana every 5 seconds while you're NOT casting. If you're not casting, you're not doing your job. Healers (especially priests and druids) have all sorts of strange tricks with the "5 second rule", but we mages do not. You should be casting almost all the time. Try to avoid spirit in favor of pretty much anything else.
ARMOR - Armor is of little importance to mages, with just a few grains of salt. In PvE, its pointless and kinda stupid. If something is hitting you with physical damage, something is very, very wrong. In PvP, armor is somewhat more important, since many classes will be trying to hit you with physical attacks. But, like stamina, this is not a stat you need to concern yourself with. If you're wearing PvP gear, which is the only place armor is useful, it will come by itself on the gear.
RESILIENCE - Another defensive stat that is only good if you PvP. Resilience reduces the chance that targets will critically hit you, reduces the damage of critica hits, and reduces the damage of Damage over Time (DoT) abilities. 1 Resilience gives you a crit chance reduction and DoT damage reduction of 0.0254%, and a crit damage reduction of 0.051%. As a whole number, 39.4 resilience will reduce crit chance/DoT damage by 1%, and crit damage by 2%. Similar to stamina, PvP gear will come with this stat on it. Unlike stamina, Resilience is well worth stressing over and stacking with gems and such. You should shoot for at least 200 resilience before taking yourself seriously at high-end arenas. 300 is a good average, 400 is roughly where you want to be at the highest competitive level. If you have a yellow socket in your PvP gear, it should have a resilience gem in it.
SPELL DAMAGE - Damage from spells is the lifeblood stat of mages everywhere. The more spell damage you have, the harder your spells hit. This stat should be treated as the most important spell for PvE of any kind, and a very important spell for PvP (alongside stamina and resilience). You should be looking at all times, at any level, for gear that increases spell damage.
SPELL CRITICAL STRIKE RATING - This used to be a contraversial stat in the old days. More spell crit means more spell damage, right? Well, not quite. Spell crit is a very complex stat, and depends a great deal in circumstances. Lets start with the nature of a critical spell. A spell hits for 100% damage. Barring talents, when it crits, it crits for 150% damage. Therefore, 1 spell damage = 1 spell damage, and 1 spell crit = 0.5 spell damage. In a flat scenario, spell damage is twice as good as spell crit. However, there are so many other factors that can be included. First off, there are abilities that only proc in critical strikes. Take Ignite for example, which does an additional 40% of a spells damage. With this talent, a spell crit will actually do 210% of the spells base damage. Therefore, for a fire mage, spell crit = 2.1 spell damage. Again, though, that is a flat scenario. There are many talents that affect crits in the mage trees. Both frost mages and arcane mages can increase the damage spell crits do, and as was already mentioned, fire mages add a DoT after a crit. By itself, spell crit is a very nice stat, giving mages a chance at some very high damage. With talents, point-per-point, it is better than flat + spell damage. For arcane, spell crit is 1.75 spell damage; fire, spell crit is 2.1 spell damage; frost, spell crit is 2 spell damage. HOWEVER. That ratio is assuming that you, the mage, actually crits. Let's say you're a fire mage with 25% chance to crit. This means that you crit a quarter of the time. Now, every spell you cast, assuming no misses will benefit from your + spell damage. However, only a quarter of those spells will benefit from your spell crit rating. Thus, in this scenario, spell crit is only worth 0.525 spell damage. With this in mind, that essentially means that if you are a fire mage, + spell damage is better point per point than spell crit, unless your crit chance is within a few percentiles from 50% chance. Thus, as a general rule, spell damage > spell crit. As for PvP, spell crit is a terrible stat. Anyone who is anyone in pvP will have plenty of Resilience on their gear, which totally negates your crit rating. And if you try and stack crit rating for PvP, you're sacrificing other, more important stats for it. Just say no. There is one very important stat we need to discuss. But we'll get to that in the next point.
SPELL HIT RATING - Lets say, just for ease of use, that you are level 70. You shoot a fireball at a level 70 target. There is a 4% chance that fireball will "miss", showing up as "Resist" on your screen. Spell hit reduces the chance you will "miss" with spells. There is always, ALWAYS a 1% chance your spell will miss, no matter how much spell hit rating you have. Thus, there is a "cap" to spell hit rating. Against an equal level opponent, the spell hit cap is 3%. With 3% spell hit rating, you will almost always land your spells. This is why, if you wanted to, you could have ~3% spell hit rating for PvP and nobody would gripe at you. It IS the hit cap against fellow players, after all. But, if you have either spell hit talents, you don't need any of it. Against higher level mobs, this stat ramps up exponentially. Let's say you, a 70 fire mage, attack Illidan Stormrage. Now, he is a skull-marked boss, but the game will calculate him at level 73. Meaning, there is a base chance to miss Illidan Stormrage with spells of 17%. 1% you cannot get rid of, but the other 16% you can mitigate through talents involving spell hit. To be an effective raiding mage, you will need to gather 16% spell hit rating to avoid missing these boss mobs. Frost/fire builds with elemental precision will need to stack 13% spell hit, while Arcane mages will only need to stack to 6%. For PvE, spell hit is an incredibly important stat. If you miss a spell, that means you did no damage at all. To hell with your +spell damage and +spell crit, you outright missed, you get nothing. At end-game, spell hit should be something you stack to the hit cap as soon as you can. Spell hit is also more important than spell crit, but only to a point. If you're an arcane mage, you only need 6% to your hit rating. If you have 6.7%, that .7% is a total and utter waste, and you can feel free to put spell crit there, if you wanted to.
SPELL PENETRATION - This stat is... well, silly. It's supposed to be the PvP version of spell hit, but it's situational to the point of being sad; you shouldn't even consider trying to get this on your gear. Spell Penetration reduces your targets resistances to your spells, as in those little numbers in the top-right corner of your character panel. Here's a quick example. Say you cast a fire spell at a Paladin. The Paladin, for some inexplicable reason, has 40 fire resistance. You have 25 spell penetration. As such, the resistance "check" to see if the Paladin resists your spell will be calculated as if he had a fire resistance of 15, rather than 40. As such, spell penetration is useful in the following situations: against druids, paladin aura buffs, and priests against shadow spells. Thats it. Of course, its very handy if you fight some joker who's wearing a bunch of resist gear. But when do you ever see a warrior running around in a battleground in full fire resist gear? Spell Penetration is a pointless stat, don't ever go out of your way to get it. As a side note, spell penetration has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER in PvE. Any resistances calculated for NPC characters are a flat rate, and cannot be changed by spell penetration. A raid boss, for example, will always have an innate spell resistance of 15. And you cannot overcome that.

Ranked highest to lowest (Very Important, Important, Useful, Meh, Stupid, Worthless)
This is the quick version:

INTELLECT - PvE = Very Important, PvP = Important
STAMINA - PvE = Useful, PvP = Very Important
SPIRIT - PvE = Stupid, PvP = Worthless
ARMOR - PvE = Stupid, PvP = Useful
RESILIENCE - PvE = Worthless, PvP = Very Important
SPELL DAMAGE - PvE = Very Important, PvP = Very Important
SPELL CRIT RATING - PvE = Useful, PvP = Stupid
SPELL HIT RATING - PvE = Very Important (up to the cap), PvP = Meh
SPELL PENETRATION - PvE = Worthless, PvP = Stupid

And so concludes Volume III

Random Saturday Musings

2007-11-04T01:17:00.000-06:00

There's a quest in Shadowmoon Valley to kill Ravenous Flayer Eggs. The troll animation for attacking it is "Slap! Backhand! Slap! Slap!" The slaps look like not-so-friendly thwacks on the bum. I always knew there was something... alternative with them trolls

Turns out, I really, really miss playing as a Fire mage. I haven't two-shotted an equal level mob in so long... I forgot what it was like. I really, really missed the damage I can do, and I really, really miss those fantastic crits. Oh, fire spec, I have transgressed against thee, can thou find it in your Burning Soul to forgive this lost sheep? Welcome me back into your glorious embrace, of fire god of the uber pwnage. Cleanse me of the curse that is frost spec, and enlighten me in your ways of burning everything flammable.

Just like frost mages, fire mages can also solo group quests. Its easy, really. Kill the mob as fast as you can, and hope you're alive to loot it. Damned if I care if I'm alive, so long as I get my loot!

10/48/3 spec + Essence Infused Mushroom + Full Imbued Netherweave set = I never run out of mana. Seriously. Never. When grinding as frost, I would stop every now and then and drink. As fire, I only ever stop to eat. Because... I take damage as fire. I take quite a bit of it. Things hurt me. They really do.
On that note, I miss Ice Barrier. /sniff

I hit 666 gold today. I celebrated my triumph by running around shooting stuff with fire spells. Wait a minute... I've been doing that all day.

Does anyone else have a feeling that spirit is a dying stat for mages? Seriously, think about it. Evocation used to run off of spirit, now it restores a base percent of mana.
The arcane talent Arcane Meditation is recieving a buff, increasing the mana regen a very hefty amount. What does this mean to the average mage? I'm glad you asked.
As of right now, spirit is generally a very poor stat, unless you are specced arcane and have the handy little Meditation talent. For the rest of us frosters and flamers, spirit is a stat that only effected Evocation. Which is why so many mages carried around spirit sticks/wands for use during Evocate only (Now with evocate effecting mana, we're going to carry Intellect sticks/wands instead). So, with the change to Evocate, spirit is a completely and utterly useless stat for everyone except arcane mages.
This means that you, loyal fire mage raider, have pointless stats on your Tier 4, your Tier 5, and yes, your Tier 6 gear. Didja hear me? That spirit is weighing you down, and forcing you to be worse than you could be by the simple fact that Blizzard didn't give you good gear.

HOWEVER.

If anyone has bothered to check out the new loot in Zul'Aman, you might notice something... something a little strange.
Check out the cloth drops from Zul'Aman. Look at them. Revel in them. Envy people who have them.
Then look closer... go on look. Go find the gear. LOOK at it!

Then let me ask you something... do you see any spirit? I bet you don't, do you?

Thats right mages! Zul'Aman gear is totally and utterly devoid of spirit!

So what does this mean?

Mark my words. Spirit mechanics and the whole idea of Spirit is going to go through some very major changes in the coming patches.

Something is cooking, only time will tell what.

VOLUME III OF MAGECRAFT GOING UP TOMORROW