Gear List? I ‘ardly Know ‘er!

I’ve been asked (repeatedly) recently for a gear list. Whether it’s for Heroics, 10 man or 25 man raiding, there are multiple somebody’s out there who want one.

Let me destroy your hopes right now. I will not, nor will I ever, provide a definitive gear list.

The reasoning is long-ish and suitably wordy to constitute a blog post. So here you go, you disappointed goons.

Before BC came out, it was fairly easy to provide a gear list. There were very, very few sources of quality gear, and even then most of it was crap. One could say, with absolute certainty, that a mage would need this hat, and this trinket, and everything else was total junk.

With BC released, it became somewhat more difficult. One could get quality gear from PvP and professions in addition to instances. Oh yeah, and thanks to a thing called “Heroics” and this new fangled “badge” mechanic, there were far, far more pieces of gear floating around.

Rather than saying “get this item”, gear lists leaned more towards the “get this, or this, or this, and this is good too, and so is this if you can afford it” style.

LK has gummed it all up even further. The amalgamation of Spell Healing/Damage into raw Power means that there isn’t even a genuine line between healer gear and caster gear.

Providing a gear list would be a monumental task, and largely pointless as anyone could get the exact same list with a modicum of effort on Wowhead.

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The Scion of Atlantis!

Spent the weekend without internet. What a horrible nightmare that was.

Now my e-mail is overflowing, my in-game mail is overflowing (or probably is, I had about eighty auctions listed when I was last logged in), my google reader has explodified, and the poor blog went neglected for the whole weekend.

Oh well.

You know, it snows and blizzards for weeks and weeks, no problems. As soon as everything starts melting, BLORT, internets gone.

The power even went out once!

It was quite a trying time. What does a WoW addict do when they can’t play WoW?

Well, after I attempted to reclaim the living room in the name of Thrall and cried myself to sleep and suffered a horrible nightmare involving a Blood Elf Shaman throwing jelly beans at me…

What a night. Anyway, I played Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is hot.

You know, I actually had a pretty awesome weekend. I mean, how many games am I missing, spending all my time in WoW? I should take breaks from WoW more often.

My subscription expires in a couple of days, maybe I’ll let it sit for a week or something, and play other g-

ATTENTION READERS.

THE BLOGGER HAS SUFFERED A FATAL MALFUNCTION.

PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED.

THIS IS A KNOWN ISSUE.

WE ARE WORKING TO RESOLVE IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

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Mostly About Gems

OMGZ new loots! Heroes’ Frostfire Shoulderpads for the win, baby! Finally something to get me out of those dinky Runed Whatever Spaulders of the Not Very Cool.

Uh oh. A gem socket. And it’s yellow… Haste? Do I need Haste? Or should I just stack that with straight spellpower.

Maybe I can get one of those spellpower/hit gems. Those don’t cost nearly as much.

Which is better then? 9 Spellpower, 8 Hit and 4 Haste, or just pure 19 Spellpower?

Well, now, wouldn’t it be great if there was a hard and fast rule about which to pick?

Before LK was released, these decisions were easy.

1) Are you hitcapped?

2) If “Yes”, spellpower.

3) If “No”, spell hit rating.

Such is not the case anymore. Things are different. Hit isn’t necessarily your top priority. Spellpower could be, or maybe it’s Haste. Or Crit. It all depends on your spec and your current gear level.

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Ponderable Ponderings

/ponder

BRK has been grumbling about hunter mana issues for a while, and this has got me thinking…

He gripes about how his combat decisions, and even spec, are up to the whim of another class (namely, their presence – or not).

This isn’t just true for hunters, and hasn’t been ever since Vampiric Touch was introduced into the game. As a mage, I’m very reliant on Replenishment and at least the 13% bonus spell damage debuff from somebody. A shaman in the group, the 5% crit boost from somewhere else…

All of those things add up extremely quickly. With them, the damage flies fast and hard, with truly massive crits lighting up the damage meters.

Without them… and even a casual observer can tell I’m crippled.

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“Good” Players

This is a Blog Azeroth shared topic. There’s a whole list of folk’ll over here who’ve already contributed.

A lot of good thoughts out there, presumably. I don’t know, I only subscribe to my blog and absolutely ADORE everything I write and shun everyone else.

Sometimes… sometimes, I look at myself in the mirror… and… and I whisper love songs to myself…

WHAT IS LOVE?!

Anyways.

In my book, the definition of a “good” player is more abstract than simple things like “not pulling threat” or “not rolling need on everything”. Sure, those are attributes that players definitely have, but that doesn’t necessarily make them inherently good.

That guy not rolling need on everything? Who knows, maybe he’s just lulling everyone else into a false sense of security, and then WHAM the damn rogue takes off with a hunter epic bow or something.

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On Keybinds and Stuff

A while ago I was asked to explain my keybinds, and how my RL interface works.

I had simple requirements when constructing the RL interface:

• Absolutely no keyboard turning
• All movement control (even mounting) on the mouse, if possible
• As few keybinds as possible, as “alt” is the only easy-to-reach modifier on the laptop
• All needed keybinds as close together as possible. The 5 or 6 key should be the farthest right I ever have to go in a combat situation

So, the first point.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who use their keyboard to turn. I fight them all the time in PvP.

I’m not going to say that anyone is a bad player if they keyboard turn. However, back pedaling via “S” or “D” is just plain stupid. If you backpedal… do yourself and everyone you play with a favour. Stop. Just stop.

Tanks are the exception. Tanks are allowed to back pedal. Healers and DPS? No. Cut that crap out.

I can guarantee that if you currently keyboard turn, you will become a faster, more efficient, and overall better player than you are now. It does take some getting used to, but persevere. It took me about ten hours to fully adapt to mouse rather than keyboard control.

Abandon wasd. Discard esdf. The only thing you have to lose is a bad habit.

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53/0/18, Redux

Lots of awesome questions in the last post about this topic, so I figured I’d answer them all in a new post rather than an obnoxiously long comment.

If there’s one thing I like to do, it’s to talk endlessly and needlessly about things I like.

First off, this type of build isn’t for everyone. It’s very… different from how most mages play. Think back over your mage career, and try to remember times when you almost never stopped to cast anything, instead relying completely on instants and constantly moving.

If you can’t think of anything, don’t worry. Very few can. The mage class hasn’t really ever been in this position before. Even high end arena frost mages busted out frostbolt every chance they got (which wasn’t often, but still).

Arcane, as it stands now, is all about mobility. Standing still and casting stuff just isn’t in the deal.

Picture yourself as a warlock. Run around constantly throwing out instants and the only thing you stop to cast is Fear Polymorph.

On with the questions!

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Snark of the Ancients

(Read the original post.)

If any horde are out there and wish to boycott this battleground, good for you. This battleground has been cleverly designed by Blizzard to cause the Horde to fail consistently.

The premise is simple. Alliance always starts on offence, Horde always starts on defence. Therefore, Horde will always lose.

Alliance have essentially abandoned Alterac Valley. This means that all the alliance who would normally be in AV are elsewhere, namely Strand of the New and Exciting.

All SotA battles start out the same way. Five or six Horde on defence, and fifteen alliance on offence. Additional Horde trickle in over the course of round 1, but it’s always too late to make a difference. Typically, alliance just rolls over everything and caps within three or four minutes.

And then psychology kicks in, dooming Horde to an eternity of staring at “Alliance Wins!”.

Let’s say you are given a task. You have ten minutes to do this task. Not a lot of pressure there.

Now, you are given the same task, except now you are given four minutes to do it. It’s the same job, nothing has changed. Except now the pressure is massively increased, because you have less than half the original time to do it.

This causes the Horde to experience a significant amount of stress and frustration. This quickly slips into a sort of berserker rage, rendering the player unable to think coherently.

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Friendly Fire?

What’d I do?! WHAT’D I DOOO?!

Warmage should be in an game title. Really. With requirements like:

• Exalted with Kirin Tor
• Heroic Malygos kill
• Complete extremely long quest chain that you get from Rhonin, culminating in a mage only Caverns of Time instance where you get to do a Sam Fisher impersonation against the Infinite Dragonflight during the War of the Ancients
• A thingy
• Some other thing
• Have Polymorph Pig and Turtle
• Possess quite a few PvP kills. Something like 50k. Can’t be a Warmage without going to war, can you?

Lukem also needs a name change. Just replace that “L” with an “N”, and then have this script where Mumplina is complaining about how he never shows up.

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53/0/18, or, ‘What the Hell Just Hit Me’

It’s a newish build that I’m sure will catch on in popularity with mages. Maybe. At least, it deserves to catch on in popularity.

By now, even people who are only peripherally aware of WoW have some inkling of what PoM Pyro is. They may not know the mechanics or actual spells involved, but they do know it translates to “uber move”.

Or, if someone says “I got PoM Pyrod”, everyone knows they’re actually saying ” :’( “.

Combining deep arcane with some frost hasn’t really been a viable strategy since the Burning Crusade was released, with one notable exception (40/0/21, anyone?) It certainly hasn’t been a popular combination for the PvP side of things in quite a long time.

Sure, occasionally the brave mage would combine AP + PoM with Shatter and then dual crit frostbolts in some poor fool’s face. The problem with that build is that it could only do that every 3 minutes.

The rest of the time the spec basically functioned like a deep frost build without any deep frost talents. This was because, of course, the arcane tree was horrendously bad at PvP.

Then along comes instant Invisibility, an Evocate that heals, Arcane Barrage, dispel protection, and the idea of a 3 minute mage being discarded in favour of a 2 minute mage.

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