Mind Boggling Stupidity

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.

This is Just Sloppy

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.

PoM Pyro For Nubs

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.

$15 A Month

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.

AFK!!!

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.

Inconvenience

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

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.