A History of Me

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.

Epic Failure

The time has come for me to explain the "success" of my arena teams.
Basically, the reason why they are so low is due to an unrealistic view of 70 PvP by my dear friend, Voxmortis. To put it quite plainly, Vox is an arcane mage. He has loved his arcane spec since he picked up this game, he is seriously in love with the sheer Pew Pew he gets from Arcane Missiles with only +500 spell damage (he has more than that now, obviously).
As both of us were getting levels, making our way to level 70, we each had different views about how the arenas would play out.
Vox figured he could play them just like he does in Battlegrounds; quite simply, drop the enemy before you're own survivability becomes an issue. I, on the other hand, recognized the danger of this philosophy of very small-scale PvP. I used to be fire spec when I hit Outland.
I quicky respecced to heavy frost at 62 on the (correct) assumption that frost would be the only viable spec in the arena. The last time I was frost was at 44, and so I figured (again correctly) that I would need the practice to be any good.

So I respecced early.

Vox did not.

So, once both of us were 70, we took a Paladin buddy of ours (Flirt) and hit the 3v3's.

I won't go into all the details, but basically, we got our asses kicked. Repeatedly. So, now, here we sit at the entertainingly low rating of 1320.
2v2 wise, the best record I've ever had running with Vox was 5-5 win-loss ratio.
By comparison, me and the Paladin have a 70% win ratio. We only lost when it was really late at night, and we were inevitably paired with ridicuously over-geared people relative to ourselves.
Our first loss was at the hand of a warlock in full Season2 gear. The dude had 14k hitpoints, over 450 resilience, and enough + damage to three shot the paladin.

Thankfully, Vox has recognized the error of his ways, pertaining to the arena, and has begun the horribly expensive and lengthy process of respeccing frost. He also plans on respeccing his tailoring (currently Spellfire) to match his new spec.
This will cost him money, time, and a lot of effort to get the mats together, simply to succeed in a competitive arena.
Needless to say, this is very upsetting for Vox, knowing his spec is worse than worthless in arenas. Playing the way he wants to is detrimental to the other members of the team.

And with 2.3, and the introduction of a personal rating system, it pains me to say that I will never play in an arena with Vox unless he is specced frost. It's like trying to run a heroic instance, and getting a shaman to tank for you. You're only setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.

Is it fair that Vox's favorite spec is ruinous in the arena? Is it fair that, for him to play the way he wants to, he is forcing his arena teams to be failing ones?

It's all simple math. To win at competitive arenas, you need to be able to take the hits. You need to be able to essentially "outlast" the other team. And this is a far larger challenge for the mage class than any other in the game. So much so, that you either spec frost or you fail.

I consider this to be a broken mechanic of the game. While there are those who say that you can spec however you want to do whatever you want, this isn't true. It just isn't.
Fire and arcane are PvE specs, with fire being slightly the better. Arcane is a little better than fire at PvP, simply because of the far greater burst potential.
Frost is the PvP spec, being a poor choice for PvE (barring solo'ing, where again it is the best). Frost beats out fire/arcane viability in any type of PvP, despite the huge nerfs frost has taken these last few months.

If you spec Fire and try to PvP, you will be a failure.

If you spec Frost and try to Raid, you will be a failure.



Please note that all the mage specs are equally viable in 5-mans. Fire/arcane provides some mad dps, while frost brings an incredible amount of control to these smaller instances.

Blogging about WoW is orginial, yes?

Alright, so I've started a blog.
You may be wondering "Why? Why would this guy make a blog?" "It's not like anybody's going to read it" "Pfft, just some myspace style emo kid"

I'll tell you why. In fact, I'll explain everything, all story-like.

I've been playing World of Warcraft for just over a year now. I have dabbled with every class in the game, and quickly realized that my favorite class was the Mage.
For some reason, a fragile caster class that takes an immense amount of skill appealed to me.
Having come from Neverwinter Nights, where you could beat the entire game as long as you had a fighter and could click on enemies, a class that required a great deal of skill to play was a welcome change.

Any idiot can play a hunter, tell the pet to attack and hit autoshot.
Any moron can play a warlock, just by pressing three buttons.
But it takes true skill to play these classes well. A hunter taking on 4 mobs at once, of a higher level, that takes skill. A warlock doing the Dun Garok quests solo, at level 28 with no voidwalker just for kicks, that takes skill.

From very early on, it was obvious to me the mage was going to be more difficult to play than the other classes. I tried a warrior, and the first 15 levels were just spamming Heroic Strike.
But a mage, on the other hand... I had Frost nova, I had polymorph, I had AoE's... all these different abilities that would allow me to take on five or six mobs at once. The slightest screw-up, such as using frost nova prematurely, would result in my death seconds later.
No other class provided this adrenaline rush for me within the first couple days of playing.

So I stuck with the mage. I got Improved Blizzard. I grinded 15 pirate mobs at once in Tanaris. I was PoM + Pyro spec at 49, downing flag carriers in seconds in Warsong Gulch (and dying myself mere seconds later). I grinded the elite mobs near the Dark Portal to level me to 58. I solo'd those elite giant things in Hellfire, as deep fire.
In every one of those cases, if I messed up, I was looking at a lengthy corpse run. It took me a good 3 hours before I stopped dying in Tanaris. My Pom + Pyro spec left me as a glass cannon with no cannon for minutes at a time. I'd kill those elites by the Dark Portal, only to be killed by a random non-elite while drinking. I'd kill one of those giants, only to be killed by a 59 hellboar.

Now that I have played around with the other classes, Mage is still my favorite to play. Sure, I can effortlessly grind 5 mobs at once with my warlock, in fact, I usually laugh maniacally as I do. Playing a Beast Master hunter is flippin' awesome, I can seemlessly take down elite mobs 5 levels higher than me.
But... well, there's never any real risk for me. The "OH SHIT" moments are very few and very far between. And, frankly, I live for the "OH SHIT" moments. I like to play WoW in such a fashion that virtual death is only a global cooldown away.
That is also why, at the very tender level of 26, I discovered PvP. By 29, I LIVED for PvP. It took me a month to level from 39 to 40. I was at level 49 for over two months. Heck, I even delayed dinging 70 just so I could play at 69, arguably my favorite bracket (no honor grinders or clueless e-bay). I also instantly signed up for 3v3's and 2v2's at 70... and failed miserably at them. (More in this later!)

So that's me. That's my general story.

Now, as to this Blog, my reasoning is very simple. The official Mage forums are a harsh place, filled with senseless trolls and flamers. A young, eager mage could go there, and be so thoroughly crushed that he'd reroll a retribution paladin, because there's less QQ on that end.

The forum Mages are a whiny, bitchy group of people who thrive by destroying others, flaming opinions, and all out destroying anyone who says anything positive. Every patch is greeted with yelling, screaming, tears, and gnashing of keyboards.

So I created this blog, so I can rant and rave in public, and in peace.