BOOM here comes the BOOM ready or not, haha how you like me now?!

LK has, so far, been the best expansion in history for mages. Multiple specs viable for both PvE and PvP, and patch 3.3 is gifting us with a PvE viable frost spec (or close enough for most people), and a fire tree that’s viable for PvP.

Wait, what? Hell yeah, fire for PvP.

Been paying attention to the PTR notes? No? Forgot? Here’s a ‘fresher:

• Mana cost of DB and BW slashed, they’re cheap as dirt now.
• Firestarter, that talent everyone ignores that gives you instant flame strikes when you use DB or BW, now also makes that flamestrike cost no mana.
• Burning Determination now grants you immunity to the next silence or interrupt effect.

Fire already has other talents which edge it close to being a great PvP spec. Fireblasts that can stun, Living Bomb on unlimited targets, instant pyros whenever you crit twice, blazing speed, a disarm and anti-execute damage reduction.

In case you missed it, the Scorch effect applies all five stacks immediately as of 3.3. No need for the glyph at all. Hurray for raiding fire mages! The glyph is still around of course, providing a 20% boost to scorch damage. Bah, says the raiders, no one will ever take that.

Of course no raiding fire mage would take that! What kind of raider takes a PvP glyph?

That’s right. PvP glyph.

So here’s what I’m thinking. If you’re going fire for PvP, you can’t rely on either fireball or frostfire bolt. Those casts are just far too long to be effective. Frost can get away with a long cast time because of their ample roots and snares, but fire doesn’t have that option.

Solution? Don’t use a long casted nuke. Use a short one. In this case, Scorch.

Scorch is fast, deals reasonable enough damage, and bumping it’s damage by 20% is meaningless for raiding, but very powerful for fire PvP.

Scorch doesn’t hit that hard, yes, I know. But you can cast two of them in the same time it would take you to cast a single fireball, and you don’t have room for Improved Fireball or Empowered Fire in a PvP spec anyways without making very serious sacrifices.

Besides, with an additional 18% (23% once you’ve scorched at least once) to scorch’s crit chance from fire talents, it’s primary duty is fueling hot streak procs.

Interestingly, this means a fire PvP spec relies less on cast times than any other mage spec. Scorch and polymorph, both base 1.5 seconds, literally everything else is instant cast. A fire mage can probably afford to drop haste gear completely in favour of crit gear, and gem spellpower everywhere.

Fire PvP mage with over 50% scorch crit chance and 3k spellpower? This is happening.

Consider this open dialogue. Me thinking via type. Specs linked are purely speculation.

A spec somewhere along the lines of 17/54/0 seems the obvious choice to me. Magic Absorption, possibly Arcane Fortitude, dispel protection, Spell Impact (to ramp up scorch, fireblast and blast wave damage) and Imp. Counterspell seems to offer more than the frost tree does. Going the arcane route, TtW isn’t necessary, as you wouldn’t use any of those spells in a deep fire/arcane build. Scorch would be your only casted nuke.

Mana talents might not need to be taken. Fireblast and Pyroblast would be your most expensive abilites. Scorch is cheap, all of your utility abilities are cheap, and any flamestrikes you cast are free anyway. Burning Soul, too, wouldn’t be needed.

I’d have to play it in action, but on paper it looks like spell pushback and mana just won’t be issues.

The only glaring issue is the lack of a snare. Fire has reasonable control by itself, but your two major control abilities are tied to a 30 second and a 20 second cooldown.

Could there be merit to a deep fire spec that uses the frost tree? We have frostbite, a 20% MS effect, icy veins, and the tantalizing temptation of getting Shatter with a fire spec. Would it use rank 1 frostbolt or try frostfire bolt? Using FFB has it’s merits, the possibility is there for some horrific shatters. Imagine FFB/instant pyro into a frozen target.

IV would be a neat way to get around FFBs lengthy cast time, as would using rank 1 FrB to get off a quick snare. The fire side would also provide BW’s knockback, DB’s disorient, a stun, disarm, and a movement speed boost which might provide the breathing room necessary to allow for a long cast nuke.

Of course, using FFB would also open the possibility of using the FFB glyph, giving FFB a 19% crit chance from talents and the glyph alone. Get 25% crit on gear, and you’re looking at near 94, 95% crit chance on frozen targets before factoring in resilience (roughly 85% crit chance against well geared opponents).

This being FFB, we’d have Burnout, Ignite and Ice Shards all stacking together for nightmare proportioned crits. You’d have to get Empowered Fire in a FFB build, too, so where would you take those points from? World in Flames maybe? Flame Throwing?

What glyphs, then? Evocation is a given, and in a FFB spec so is the FFB one. Using the arcane/scorch build, the scorch glyph is obvious, so in either case it’s the third glyph slot that’s a question mark.

If mana turns out to be an issue, glyph of mana gem? I use it currently in my arcane shatter built, it works extremely well. Glyph of poly? Glyph of IV for added defense against melee in the FFB build?

Or just screw the theatrics and get glyph of living bomb?

Last week I was over at a friend’s house apartment, for parties and stuff I guess (WHO THE HELL BURNS POPCORN? COME ON!), and near the end of the evening ended up playing some WoWzors.

It being the AV holiday weekend, and my paladin still needing a few honor pieces, I queued up for that and away I went, smashing faces in and so forth, whilst me and a couple other WoWheads discussed PvP balance.

We were initially talking about arena matrixes, and discussed how well unholy DK/ret/disc would run in 3.3. After all, Unholy’s getting a few buffs and ret isn’t being nerfed for once, and I casually mentioned that poor retribution had been nerfed every single patch since LK shipped.

And you know what my friend said? He said “yeah, and you guys are STILL overpowered!” I mean it was meant as a joke, his main is a death knight after all, but ARGH ret pallies aren’t OP anymore!

So a long discussion was launched, in which I enumerated the many areas with which ret paladins are seriously lacking, about the lack of control, snares, gap closers, interrupts, and so forth, all the while kicking ass in AV.

At the end of my lengthy tirade, the same friend spoke up and said “That’s great and all, but I just watched you kill fifteen people in under three minutes, by yourself, without using major cooldowns, and you were fighting no less than three of them at a time.”

Which was, of course, completely true. My defense?

“Well… yeah… but… they… uhh…”

I mean how do you say “I was better than they were in nearly every way” without sounding like a complete tool? I had better gear than them, I made few mistakes, they made many, I knew how to play defensively to win and how to use CC properly, they didn’t.

Which brings me to a completely different point.

The vast majority of people in battlegrounds have no idea how to PvP, in the broadest sense.

I’m not talking about how to PvP with their class. I’m not talking about, say, a hunter having no idea how to use traps/deflection/disengage properly or a mage not knowing when to use counterspell.

I’m talking about PvP in general. As in, PvP skills that you use no matter what class you play, no matter what game you play.

Defensive play, for one thing.

The number of people I meet who can play defensive is surprisingly low.

To use the broadest possible sense, there are two modes to PvP: offense and defense. At all times, you are trying to defeat your opponent (not necessarily killing them).

When you are in offense mode, you are actively trying to kill. A frost mage using Deep Freeze and unloading a hasted frostbolt and two ice lances into a target is offensive play.

When you are in defense mode, you are actively trying to survive. A frost mage ducking out of LOS for a split second to dodge Unstable Affliction is defensive play.

Proper defensive play can’t really be taught, you have to go out and consciously learn it. You can’t tunnel vision, you need to be aware of LOS, know how to use it properly, know how to prevent your opponent from using it, you need to be aware of what cooldowns you have and what cooldowns your opponent has.

I’ll give you a few examples to try and describe what I mean. Hopefully you learn something.

The scene: My ret paladin, wintergrasp, a southern workshop. 4 horde, including me, versus 9 alliance.

Largeish battle going on. A hunter disengages from a warrior, landing directly in front of me at half health. A quick crusader/judge later, the hunter bites the dust. I get hit with curse of agony and corruption, which means there’s an afflock out there. Destruction warlocks don’t use CoA and rarely use corruption, they use curse of elements, then immolate to fuel massive chaos bolt/conflagrate crits.

UA and haunt are coming right up, even though I don’t see the warlock yet.

I’m near a drop off, so I take a quick couple steps and drop out of LOS. Cleanse corruption… oh hey look, the warlock followed me! Standing right above me on the edge. Felhunter just dispelled Sacred Shield, which means the warlock can’t dispel anything from himself for 8 seconds. He’s too far away for me to melee, which means I can’t autoattack or get in any crusader strikes. But he’s in range of everything else. Hammer -> judge -> DS -> exorcism -> hammer of wrath -> dead warlock.

The scene: My ret paladin, warsong gulch, alliance tunnel. Myself versus a hunter and two ret paladins.

I’m currently exposed in the tunnel, a survival hunter at the top of the tunnel ramp and two ret paladins bearing down on me. Impossible odds. I duck right, out of LOS with the hunter, popping a quick FoL off before the rets are on me. I retreat, the hunter doesn’t follow, so I go out into the open to fight the two rets.

The draenei paladin is in deadly glad gear with the 219 axe from the Black Knight. The human paladin is in significantly better gear, 1800 rating relentless sword better gear.

Quick question. How do you beat someone in melee if their melee is way better than yours? Simple. Don’t.

The plan: if at all possible, avoid being in melee range of either ret paladin at all times. Fight using judgement, most likely every Art of War proc will be needed for healing. Use DS only when both paladins are close enough together for me to hit both of them. Judicious use of freedom (it counters JoJ), hammer, and repentance. Hit the draenei first, it’s a lot easier to fight a good player one on one if it actually is a one on one fight.

Both paladins seem extremely confused by my strategy, constantly running into melee range, then stopping for a few seconds before chasing me again. Almost as if they expect me to stay in melee range, you know… being a melee class and all.

Draenei paladin is dropping like nothing. So far, I’ve landed every DS on both of them every time, they’ve missed every single one of theirs. Learn to circle strafe guys!

Draenei pops Lay on Hands. I laugh. Goddamn OP ret paladins! I bubble at 4% HP (autoattack for 5k whut), but only heal myself back to 60%. That draenei needs to die. CC chain on the good paladin (repentance, HoJ, belf silence) while I click off divine shield and go full out melee. Draenei dies, but it cost me. Human pally trinketed out of repentance and nearly killed me.

Low health, low mana, ret paladin mirror match, except he’s got better gear and weaponry than I do. The plan? Just stay out of melee range, attacking via judgement only. Using Art of War procs, get myself back up to full, then simply delay long enough for hammer to come back up.

Wings + AP trinket + Hammer = dead ret paladin.

I win, and I’m left wondering why a paladin with an 1800 weapon didn’t freedom HoJ. Maybe I’m blind and it was actually a blue polearm or something.

The scene: Euripedes, arcane shatter spec alone at Lumber Mill, owned by alliance, having just defeated the moonkin/horribly undergeared resto shaman (17k hp) guarding the place.

Half a second away from capping the stupid flag, a warrior charges me out of nowhere. Damn it, I hate it when they do that. Night elf warriors… I swear those dudes just stealth and watch you, waiting for the best worst possible moment to enter the fray.

Whatever, sheep the warrior, it lasts 10 seconds, capping the flag takes 8. I got this. Aaaand there’s a trinket, and ow, that was 70% of my hitpoints just now. Friggin PvE geared raiders.

Root the warrior, keep slow up at all times, bounce ice lance off spell reflect, throw in the odd arcane barrage so maybe he thinks I’m actually trying to beat him. Just stay the hell away from him, that’s the plan.

Poly DR wears off, I throw a full duration poly on him, and evocate. Pop AP; a couple 11k frostbolt crits later and it’s all over.

The scene: My warrior, 30-39 bracket, versus another warrior of equal level.

The opposing warrior is at full health, I’m at 40%, having fought fierce fights. No horde anywhere to be seen, but there’s a few rezzing soon, including my healbot druid.

The plan: sword and board, kite the opposing warrior back to the graveyard. When my healer’s back, bust out the arcanite reaper and put this warrior down.

Hamstring the warrior, thunder clap for the melee attack speed reduction (I probably don’t need it, but why take the risk?), waltz away from him while he follows me like he’s trying to fight a frost mage. No juggernaut yet, can’t charge in combat. Combat drops, I charge him first, refresh hamstring and thunder clap, again running away. I see him swap to Fury stance, which means an intercept is coming right up. I pop shield wall.

He intercepts, and the followup heroic strike/overpower combo hits me hard enough to have killed me had I not used shield wall. Hamstring, run away, intercept him myself for the stun and keep running. Druid’s respawned and is on his way, but I still need to buy some time. I pop Intimidating Shout.

PHOOM oh I have never been so glad to see a Healing Touch. 16% health, jeez. Disarm the warrior, bust out the 2H, he goes down like a sack of potatoes.

The one part of this silly Pilgrim holiday I am participating in is the whole cooking thing. It was easy as pumpkin pie to level my paladin’s cooking skill from 1-350 or so with nearly no effort. I say “nearly” because damn it, travelling is difficult when you can’t port wherever the crap you want.

I’ll probably end up grabbing the ranks on several other characters, too, but maybe not. Euripedes can already make basically any buff food he or any other alt would need at end game, so I really don’t need another cook.

But still… easy as pie leveling for a profession that otherwise is just a stupid ass grind.

There are multiple kinds of grinds, but they can be generalized into “bad grinds” and “good grinds”. What category any specific grind falls into depends on your personal opinion.

Grinding dailies is dull, grinding the AH even worse, but grinding honour isn’t a grind at all for me. Rather, continuously running BGs is a hobby of mine that I dearly love.

Then we have what I call a stupid ass grind. Most professions are stupid ass grinds in the 1-300 area, featuring difficult to get mats, difficult to get recipes, and requiring you to spend literally hours running your pretty ass all over the expired old world.

Jewelcrafting, for instance, requires all sorts of gems that are rare drops on mining nodes, or require you to prospect massive quantities of raw (and very expensive) ore, in order to have a slim chance at the same gems. It’s a long, hard grind that is nearly impossible if you aren’t leveling a miner at the same time.

Then, there’s engineering, and… well, let’s talk about cooking, as that’s the current fulcrum of discussion.

Cooking is tedious to level. In order to get from1-300, you have to run all over both continents, collecting recipes from vendors located as far away from capital cities as possible, then you have to collect meat from mobs that, somehow, are located as far away from flight paths as physically possible.

Some day you’ll get to a higher skill level, where you can level your profession in the BC and LK eras, where it’s far less stupid to do so.

There’s nothing wrong with leveling professions requiring a bunch of mats. That’s fine. What, to me, isn’t fine is forcing someone to go all the way to Silithus to pick up a recipe so they can kill a bunch of worms for a ton of meat with a low drop rate so they can get 10 skill ups.

The 1-300 area for every profession is in desperate need of an overhaul. The current design is horrendously outdated, just ask anyone who’s tried to power level a profession recently.

Consider the difference between, say, the draenei and blood elf starting quests and the starter quests of any other race. Consider the difference between the horde totem quests (especially water) and the draenei totem quests. Consider the difference between questing in your mid-40s to questing in your mid-70s.

It is painfully obvious what content is designed better.

Switching gears, attunements and their relevant quest chains are being dragged out again.

Things like the Karazhan quest chain were removed because they were pointlessly tedious.

Sure, it was fun and felt all sorts of good when you first got the key. I’m right there with you, it wasn’t the hardest thing in the world, but it wasn’t a complete walk in the park either.

But what about the second time you did it? What about the twenty-third time you were running Durnholde Keep to get someone into Dark Portal so they could get their Kara key?

Some of you have fond memories of that quest chain. Me? I’ve done Steamvaults so many times I can tell you exactly how many trash mobs there are between the entrance and the kara key fragment, where they’re positioned, and what their abilities and patrol routes are.

I, for one, am glad guilds don’t have to run SSC/TK from start to finish every time they pick up a new recruit or an officer rerolls a healer or tank to keep the raids going.

I would prefer if attunements were still around, I just don’t want to have to do them over and over again. The Kara key chain, for instance, would have been fantastic if it attuned your entire account and all characters past, present and future instead of just one character.

Pilgrim Euripedes?

No thanks. I did every world event loyally, got the titles, the pets, went hunting for specific class/race combos, and then not one goddamn bag of candies dropped in February. Then I realized I just didn’t really care at all. Bah, whatever, and so forth.

Get the midsummer’s title, Flamekeeper, on the very off-chance I spec fire again, but other than that I don’t really bother with world events anymore.

What kind of title is reasonable for an arcane mage anyways? I switch between “of the Nightfall” and “the Undying” these days (by the way, the Black Drake is an amazingly handsome mount, highly recommended, you kinda feel like a Nazgul on that thing), but those are kinda “durr hurr look at me I raid and stuff”.

Buckle down, spam BGs until I get “of the Horde”? Grab Loremaster? Go titleless because it’s just a dorky vanity thing? Whip out “the Explorer” to make people underestimate me in battlegrounds?

Speaking of that, where are all the good male draenei mages? I can’t recall having seen even one since the launch of TBC. Literally every single male draenei mage I have come across has varied somewhere between “awful” and “not quite as awful”.

You’d think by now some sort of elite super mage would have made a male draenei just to get people to think he’s bad, then he kicks their ass all kinds of sideways.

“Oh look a male draenei, man, this mage is going to wait what he doesn’t suck what is this I don’t even-”

~=~

I keep getting the “hard to get” battleground achievements on alts. Without a Scratch? Paladin got it. Ironman? Got it on the warrior. GAH.

Ironman is hard for a clothie that can’t heal. My two hugest defensive cooldowns, Invis and Ice Block, are wholly unusable. I can’t even use rocket boots anymore!  Some day I’ll have to just suck it up, spec frost and force a couple discipline priests from the guild to help me get it.

~=~

I think arms warriors are overpowered at every single bracket except 80. Maybe not though! I’m still leveling the guy up, maybe I’ll suck in the 69 bracket somehow.

Yeah, no, probably not. LOLBLAEDSTIRMSOISOISOISOI. But seriously though, a level 41 warrior going toe to toe with 48s and 49s (of any class) and that’s an even fight? There is absolutely no way I’m any good at warriorizing, thus the only conclusion is that I’m being carried by my spec and gear.

Heh. Account bound gear for the win. It is mind-blowing how well that stuff can carry your sorry behind.

~=~

What I love as a warrior, more than anything else, is killing warlocks. Warlocks are nothing to a warrior. Nothing. A clothie that can’t run, can’t snare, can’t root, can’t fear me… my eyes light up with the rage of a thousand suns and I cackle every single time.

“FEAR ME! I DARE YOU TO FEAR ME! FEAR ME YOU PANSY ASS MOTHERFU-” and then they fear me, I slam Berserker Rage, and give them a one way ticket to the graveyard. At which point, spittle splattering on the monitor, I scream “THAT WAS FOR THE BURNING CRUSADE!”

I have issues.

~=~

DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT PuG any raid after Friday. Without exception, any raid after Friday is full of fail. There’s a damn good reason I quit raiding 25-man content back in BC, and that’s because I hate people.

Not people people, mind you, but people people.

The kind of people who complains, completely seriously, that giving the Onyxia whelpling pet to everyone is total bullshit because you used to have to work so hard for it.

The kind of people who, after wiping to 25-man Ony, whips out a healing meter and calls out the discipline priest at the bottom with 750k healing done* for causing the wipe, completely ignoring the three resto shamans who died immediately on entering phase 3 and the 10 (seriously, TEN) people who got cleaved to death.

* Top heals was a druid with 2 million (Nourish and Wild Growth spam for the win, apparently), everyone else was 1 million to 850k, the disc priest in question was 100k healing behind the second last healer.

The kind of people who forms a raid for 25-man ony, walks into 10-man, which he has already done for the week, and then freaks out that some asshat got him saved to 25-man and wasted that week’s lockout…

The kind of people who, after seeing people say “no, that’s 10-man, walk out, set it to 25-man”, walk into the 10-man version, see the popup on their screen that says “HOLY CRAP YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE SAVED TO 10MAN ONYXIA, AND BY ABOUT, WE MEAN IN 60 SECONDS, ARE YOU SURE?” and they say “yep I’m sure!” and then bitch at the raid leader when they get saved to 10-man Onyxia.

None of that happened to me, thank god, it happened to my guild leader as he was pugging on his priest (the disc priest mentioned before).

Sadly he told me about it, I hurled myself off the ninth floor, but sadly survived and lived to tell you. Gravity isn’t enough to kill you these days, it’s been nerfed to the ground.

~=~

Mage T10. You must wear four pieces of this set. You absolutely must. The 2-piece haste bonus is decent, yes, but it’s the 4-piece that makes it. For those who missed the memo:

2-piece – Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze grant you 12% haste for 5 seconds when the effect is consumed.

4-piece – Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 18% more damage for 30 seconds.

Read that 4-piece bonus again. Read it again. Now, print it out on a piece of paper, then rub your face all over it.

It’s… I mean… that bonus is so good there are simply no words to describe it. 18% more damage for 30 seconds. Hot damn.

~=~

Apparently I’ve been blogging for over two years now. Go me, I guess. One of these days I’ll write a post that doesn’t suck.

~=~

This the best thread ever.

Why, exactly, is castration illegal again?

Gated unlocking of bosses once again. Yeah, they’re treating the gamers like children, only handling out a few of the candies at one time so the chocolate box will last longer. It’s a bit patronizing[...]

A bit? A bit?! Here I must take the vehement route. Being treated like children is absolutely right, and it isn’t a bit patronizing, it’s patronizing to the point where I expect activating hard mode will generate a warning box that says:

Are you sure? It’s weeally hawd! You might die, and then cwy and be sad!

And then when you wipe the cast of Sesame Street appears and sings a dumb “believe in yourself” song to cheer you up. Maybe Big Bird gives you an ice cream cone that has the flavor text “don’t be sad” or something.

Try to understand something here. Most of us are raiders. You know, people who get together, bring our game faces, our top of the line, researched, gemmed and enchanted gear, and throw ourselves at the hardest content the game has to offer us.

We do not expect to be coddled. We do not want to be coddled. We want to fight a boss that kills all of us twenty seconds into the fight. We want to fight a boss where we go “Woah, ok, what… alright, alright, we got this, just… wow, nine people just died.”

Whatever happened to

It should be the skill of our raiding group that stops you from progressing

~ Cassandri

Everyone still remembers Ulduar, right? ToC hasn’t rendered you catatonic yet? Everyone remembers how every single boss, every single hardmode was available from day one?

How many guilds burned through everything the first day? The first week? The first month?

Oh, that’s right. None of them did, because it was too bloody hard to do.

If your guild was made up of only ten people who lounge around and have a hell of a good time doing naked runs of Stratholme, you could still do Ulduar. Deconstructor hard was beyond your ability, let alone Vezax or Mimiron hard modes. You could waltz in, dork around in vehicles and maybe take Flame Leviathan down. Maybe you even got together a time or two and faced Razorscale.

Or maybe your guild was capable of taking the “easier” hard modes, like Deconstructor, but Firefighter was way beyond you.

Or maybe your guild attempted and beat Deconstructor hard almost right off the bat, and gave Firefighter some serious shots before the first month was even over.

Point is, you and your guild could progress through Ulduar at whatever pace you chose, at whatever difficulty you chose, and the raiding scene was able to fully accommodate whatever difficulty you chose to raid at.

Why was that system scrapped? Why are we going to be forced to play at Blizzard’s pace?

Going back to the Crusaders’ Coliseum, part of the challenge we made for ourselves was to create an instance that didn’t require as much time or resources as Ulduar

Oh yeah.

~=~

On a totally unrelated note, I proved my theory that any traditional role can carry any other role provided the third one didn’t suck.

Heh, I kid. This is about overgearing the crap out of content. I don’t think it’s possible to actually prove my little theory as long as people are wearing gear over thirty levels too high for the content.

(By the way, you sell me way too short, Balthazar. An arcane mage pulling threat? Yeah, that’s definitely possible. If you want to talk that specific case further, the death knight tank is an extremely good friend of mine, we were on voice together, and he outright told me to burn everything I had. FYI, never moved past 60% of his threat, and that was without blowing aggro dumps/wipes. And no, he wasn’t brutally overgeared either. Neither of us had the epic achievement yet, not even close.)

Every now and then I drag out my paladin’s healy set and go smack around a heroic or two. Or more accurately, stand there and watch other people smack around heroics whilst I throw a Flash of Light at the tank every couple of minutes.

Prot paladins have it the worst when outgearing content.

The most egregious example I can think of is a Gun’Drak run. The paladin tank was sporting 37k hitpoints, all three DPS were pushing 5k, and then there was me, with a single 213 epic, everything else being 200 epics or blues. The tank didn’t take any damage until we engaged Sladran. A single FoL healed it all.

And so it continued. The poor tank had to drink every other pull, as he was getting nothing from Spiritual Attunement and Divine Plea wasn’t returning nearly enough.

I wouldn’t have even blinked twice if the dude had whipped off his pants and started tanking with a two-hander. My Holy Light button has dust on it. Pretty sure you can afford to be  a little more daring, mr. tank.

Speaking of which, me death knight best buddy pal (who tanked the VH run mentioned in the last post) knows exactly how to combat healer boredom. He just grabs multiple groups. I think his biggest was the first boss of HoL (with overcharge up) and three trash pulls at once*. Yes, we made it, nobody died, etc.

Major props to Laelaps for continuing to bother with heroics considering the daring risks (read: pulls every trash group in sight just because he can) Decessus takes.

Relax, guildies. All of you have been thoroughly armory stalked by now anyway. Half my readers probably know your birthdays by now.

* Before you jump down his throat for being a bad tank, please reconsider your comment, because you are wrong and we will laugh at you.

Quite the bombshell.

ICC is going to be gated, and gated very heavily. As in, on release, we only have access to the first four bosses. This is all we get for weeks. “Several weeks”, to use the exact quote. Then we get to fight the next three, and after several more weeks, the next two, then after several more weeks, the final three.

And then, and only then, does heroic mode unlock. And did I mention that you get limited tries on the final boss of each wing?

This is… interesting.

On the one hand, this is perfect for casual aligned raider guilds. No pressure to continue past a certain point, because there isn’t anything beyond that point. On the other hand, this is a huge cockblock for the high end guilds, and possibly immensely frustrating for mid-level raiders.

Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

I shake my head in sadness at (some of) this, personally. Daelo (the blue poster) says that this will allow “players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace”, but all I see is our guild killing everything our first week in there, maybe first night, and then having nothing new to do for a couple weeks before we get the chance to kill the next few bosses in a raid night or two. Repeat.

But maybe not! Who knows? We didn’t kill Faction Champs until the second week they were out, though we killed everything else first night in ToC.

As it is now, without ICC, it’s getting difficult to find things to actually raid. Our first raiding night of the week (tuesday), we clear regular ToC, Onyxia, vault, and sarth 3D, and then call the night an hour early so we can get a full night in for heroic ToC tonight.

That’s two hours of raiding there folks, most of it spent on traveling from one instance to the other.

Then we hit HToC with everything we’ve got. Beasts is like clockwork now (usually!), Jaraxxus is solid if scary hard (such a ludicrously hard and awesome fight as a mage), Faction Champs is laughable, and I expect we’ll be killing Twins soon too. Fingers crossed! NO DON’T CROSS THE STREA-

Anyway.

There’s a perceived reluctance on our guild to do content that doesn’t reward tangible things, i.e. loot. We do Sarth 3D for the mounts (the mount is awesome, by the way), but other than that, we really only do stuff that would award, y’know, loot. EPIX.

I say perceived because I don’t really know if anyone actually thinks that way, or if a bunch of people just think that the others think that way.

I don’t raid for loot, never have. I raid for the challenge, as I’ve so eloquently stated in the past. Loot is, obviously, a factor, but only to a point. Loot is an enabler, to allow for the challenge to be defeatable. Doing something that is hard, that’s cool. Impossible? Not so much.

If there was a really hard fight that only awarded iLevel 187 blues, I’d do it, loot be damned.

I don’t really care of Yogg drops useful things, I just wanna kill the dude. Same goes for Algalon and all the other hard modes in Ulduar.

Me death knight buddy feels slightly different. He likes a challenge just as much as I do (wiping to heroic faction champs for three hours solid before our hack strat remains the highlight of raiding for both of us), he just wants to be able to actually use the stuff that drops.

To be rewarded for his sweat and blood, so to say, whereas I sweat and bleed because I like it.

…

That, uh… that sounded better in my head.

In a roundabout way, this is what concerns me about ICC. Some boss fights remain interesting long after we have them on farm (Hodir, Heroic Jaraxxus), but most of them are kinda… well, boring after the first couple of kills (Sarth 3D, everything in normal ToC).

I’m not really sure I want to be bored by week 2 in ICC. Maybe I won’t be, I dunno. The Gunship battle is fantastic, but then again I used to think Mimiron was fantastic.

Personally, I want things I haven’t defeated before (heroic modes of the same boss count if they are different), I want them to be hard, and I want to defeat them on my mage. (Raiding as a ret paladin is kinda meh. Mage is much more fun.)

I’m going to start pushing the guild to go back to Ulduar and finish the damn place. Kill yogg. Try firefighter. Try Vezax hard mode (sorry healers!). Do Freya with all three trees up. Maybe finally kill Flame Leviathan with 4 towers up.

Actually scratch that last one. All I do is fetch barrels for my driver and kill turrets. Dull dull dull.

I want to raid more than two nights a week damnit! And doing the 25-man and 10-man versions of a raid in the same week doesn’t count. Not even close.

Leafshine hit the nail on the head. (Two different links, people!)

WoW is a game that, in the Wrath age, rewards a broad-brush approach to play. And which can be very unforgiving if you only have one or two aspects of the game that really appeal to you.

If all I wanted to do was raid, I’d be in quite the bind.

Fortunately, I have alts, I have boatloads of PvP to do, and that right there is enough to blow hours of time. If that fails, I still haven’t “beaten” Age of Empires III, and I can always play Left4Dead or something.

More than likely, I’ll just end up throwing my time at PvP. I PvP a lot, and I should probably do more. Still less than 50k lifetime kills on my main?! Pffff. Pathetic.

I PvP a ton on alts. I PvP on my warrior. I PvP on a rogue. A priest. I used to have a 19 shaman twink with slightly over 5k lifetime kills. Even my hunter, who did PvP for all of 2 weeks way, way back at level 29, has 2k lifetime kills, and that was back when Aimed Shot had a cast time.

I mean, I didn’t PvP on my paladin until january, got my 10k lifetime kills achievement in May, and now it’s November and I’m on the cusp of 25k lifetime kills. That’s over two thousand kills a month people!

Damn it, I’m bragging again.

LOOK AT MY EPEEN. IT IS VERY MUCH BIG. ITS GIRTH BLOTS OUT THE VERY SUN.

All pointless bragging aside, the point is that I actually have a bunch of stuff I do outside of raids, mostly PvP. Having limited raid content bothers me, for sure. Is it really so hard to just design content that we can progress through at our own pace? The casual raider guilds aren’t going to clear out the instance any faster just because it isn’t gated. The hardcore guilds will, but that’s what hardcore guilds do.

“But if they don’t stretch the hard content out, people will complain they have nothing to do!”

So what? Screw ‘em. It was their choice to burn through that content.

Locking hard mode behind a Lich King kill, and thus literally at least a month down the line from the release of 3.3, just seems cheesy to me. How, exactly, is sitting around twiddling our thumbs for weeks enabling us to enjoy ICC in all it’s splendor?

If we’re restricted this way to force us to gear up because the top end bosses are just that hard, then just say so, get rid of this dumb gate thing, and let us at some bloody hard content. I want more Jaraxxus style fights where sneezing causes a wipe plox. If that means we try heroic saurfang and he kills the tank in two seconds, so be it. Bring it on!

To be more specific to ICC, I don’t mind having to wait until a Lich King kill to have access to heroic mode. That’s fine, it makes sense. But forcing us to arbitrarily wait to even attempt that fightl, that I have a problem with. What the hell is that about?

The limited tries available for the final boss of each wing is also extremely bothersome.

I’ve heard the argument before that it forces people to actually be on top of their game and react swiftly to mechanics, rather than just trying over and over again until you finally get it on the 276th try.

First off, only the hardest of the hardcore is even going to bother wiping to the same fight that many times. Nobody else has that level of patience. Besides, giving hardcore guilds limited tries does not actually limit their tries at all. All that does is force them to be creative.

Hardcore guilds are not going to say “k, we got 5 tries to get this”. No, they are going to practice on the PTR, they are going to try it first on alts to learn the mechanics, they are going to try it in 10-man, they are going to server transfer en masse to get a fresh raid ID to try even more, they are going to have an army of warlocks outside with soulstones to prevent wipes.

For the rest of us, this just means the poor guy who’s internet crapped out for a second or the gal who’s computer just crashed costs the entire raid an attempt and makes them feel like toe lint.

Forcing people to be on top of their game, forcing people to respond and recover from things to try and get it right the first time is great and all, but if a single error or issue kills 4 people immediately… you can’t recover from that.

That’s not “react and get it right the first time”, that’s “you won’t get it right the first time, and you have limited tries because fuck you.”

Say the tank takes a bunch more damage all of a sudden. Great, healers have to be alert and be able to react to that. That’s a good mechanic. But if said damage spike kills the tank in a second without warning? That is not something that can be reacted to, besides “wtf just happened.” And then the paladin healer just spams Holy Light from then on out, because of she doesn’t, the tank dies, and sometimes will die anyway.

I’m all for raid fights that require a great amount of flexibility, call it “skill” at your class to react to unexpected things. But there are few raid fights like that. Hodir is one. Mimiron’s hard mode is another.

Things like Faction Champs should have been a fight like that, but that just turned into “you have to cheat or the rogue mob is going to go kill a healer in under a second.”

The very first video game I ever owned was NHL ‘96 for the Super Nintendo.

The goalies, being controlled by the AI, auto-tracked the puck, and would do their damndest to stop goals. Problem is, by creating a custom character, you can create a character that can move faster than the goalies. Thus, you could simply grab the puck, skate straight at the goalie, then curve a little to the left or right, and shoot. Because your character moves faster than the goalie, it is literally impossible for that goalie to move fast enough to stop the shot.

This resulted in hilarious games where I could score once every ten seconds, if not more.

Point is, I wasn’t playing the game within the rules laid out by the game. I was, in fact, playing against the game itself, abusing and exploiting the rules to crush the crap out of it.

Hands up, who’s played D&D? Alright, hands up, who’s intentionally exploited the rules, or even the GM, for personal gain?

The difference between playing a game, and playing against a game is a distinction that is nearly completely lost on long-time gamers. Beating the game on its own terms, and beating it by bending or outright breaking its rules are really the same thing, aren’t they? Either jump through the hoops the developer made for you, or make your own hoops and jump through those instead.

How many examples of this in WoW can you think of off the top of your head? I can think of a few.

How about that change where, in order for a warlock’s soulstone to be active, the warlock has to be present for said boss fight? This was done precisely in reaction to Ensidia filling a raid with warlocks to gain extra spellstones to resurrect fallen DPS.

To say nothing of the fact that Blizzard had to restrict active soulstones to warlocks in the same raid for the same reason.

Or how about when Blizzard had to introduce cooldowns on vehicle construction in Wintergrasp to stop a single person from grabbing rank 3 then spamming siege engines?

Or how about the death of wall climbing?

Or, or or…

I could go on but this is really about one shotting heroic faction champions.

Yeah, I said one shot. By far the easiest fight in there on heroic. Well, 10 man at least. God, I hate 25 man so much.

Anyway.

Here’s the thread outlining the ultimate strategy of face rolling awesome. Basically, the thread is this:

The cause of the misunderstanding that Faction Champions have no threat is the fact that their threat is not the result of damage taken or healing sensed. It is calculated by different rules than any other encounter in the game.

These are those rules.

To summarize:

Melee DPS Faction Champions calculate their threat based on an additive combination of 3 factors. Each of the three appear to share equal priority for determining target, and the threat list constantly updates.
These factors are ARMOR, PROXIMITY, and HEALTH DEFICIT.

Ranged DPS Faction Champions function on very similar lines to melee DPS Faction Champions, with one difference. Instead of Armor Value being part of their threat calculation, they instead compare Resistance to their school of magic.

RESISTANCE + PROXIMITY + HEALTH DEFICIT = THREAT

Healers heal based on a very easily recognizable principle. They place priority on their healing targets based on the lowest absolute hp among friendly targets.

And boy oh boy, when you know the rules, there is no end to how hard you can twist those to your will.

The fight went from the “complete and utter clusterfuck” we had last week where sometimes if we were really really lucky we’d score one kill before we all died, to something that amounted to little more than a tank and spank.

It was seriously that easy.

We had two tanks. A prot warrior with 0 spell resistance in every school, and a prot paladin who started the fight at 50% health, with the healers expressly forbidden to heal him above that percentage. As low health as possible, just not dead. Everyone else gets their spell resistance and armor as high as they can get it. Cloth wearers had to use armor pots and everything.

(I personally had 215 universal spell resistance and slightly over 6k armor. That’s the closest I get to being a tank.)

Naturally, everyone stays as far away from everything as possible, but especially the melee. The holy paladin healed the prot paladin, of course, due to the higher armor value.

Result being that the caster generally attacked the prot warrior, and the melee generally sat on the invincible prot paladin, while we burned down targets one by one, and largely ignored CC because we didn’t need any.

That’s right.

Didn’t need CC on bloody FACTION CHAMPIONS.

Ugh. Midterms.

I missed a bunch of school thanks to swine flu, and am still trying to play catch up. Caught up in 3/5 courses at the moment, though I still have a massive essay due this friday, and frankly it needs work. Lots of it.

Life is hard doodz!

This was brought to my attention today, and while an interesting read in and of itself, something I ended up thinking a lot about was the following sentence:

all the characters did exactly what I had hoped they would do

Writing fiction is a strange experience. Characters, stories, are invented and thought up, and then writing begins. Maybe the author had an idea for this, had the plot envisioned, knew where s/he wanted the story to go…

And then halfway through, the actual story doesn’t look anything like the little fiction embryo the author thought up in the first place. Sometimes, the characters do what you hope they would, and sometimes, they don’t.

Ultimately, writing fiction is an organic experience, largely because you, the author, are giving this little world, these characters, life. And they take that life and run with it, and eventually, you stop, breathless, wondering how the hell that just happened.

None of it is real, in the way this chair I’m sitting on is real or this delicious turkey sandwich I’m eating is real. And yet they are alive, full of surprises, hopes, wants, dreams…

There’s a question I see thrown around a lot on (useless) “how to write fiction” style websites: what happens next? My elementary school teachers used this, too, as a way of getting the young budding authors to build a story line.

Well, what happens next?

The proper answer is, of course, you have no idea until you write it.

This is why I like fully fleshed out characters. I like characters that are multi-dimensional beings rather than just props. I like faults in characters almost to a fetishized state. With a well-written, well-fleshed out character, you never have to ask “what happens next?” You never have to stop and think “what would my character do in this situation?”

You have no idea what comes next, but your character knows what comes next. Your character knows itself better than you do, and it deals with situations in ways you could never even comprehend.

Ultimately, you aren’t in control of what your characters do. You may hope they act a certain way, respond to this situation just so to make it something worthy of being called art. But you don’t get the final say in the matter, your characters do.

My little paladin, Arkenheart, started off as a young, nubile, innocent little paladin that had no idea about the corruption inherent in the Blood Knight organization. Then… then I started writing. Just little stories here and there, and Arkenheart swiftly evolved into a brutally scarred woman who has watched her entire world burn over and over again, and all she could do was watch.

Girl got issues!

And so it goes. Euripedes started off as an extension of myself, but now, as a character, he has changed into a hyperviolent psychopath aware of the fourth wall with a burning desire to gain immortality.

Euripedes is by far the weirdest character I have ever worked with. That troll mage is aware of me (the real me) and is actively seeking ways to exploit his position “in the matrix”.

It’s… disturbing, to say the least. Imagine Deadpool, but where Deadpool is not only aware of his creator, but is actively seeking ways to kill him. And perhaps most terrifying of all, the jerk actually seems to have figured out how to do it.

But who knows? I didn’t even think this way no less than six months ago. But I’m young, things change, the way I think evolves, I become more cynical, and now I’ve discovered that, in regards of fiction, I am little more than a conduit for forces beyond my control.

This is all probably old hat to you more experienced writers, but for me, this is NEW and EXCITING. Or something.

25-man VoA forming up. I was on my paladin at the time, so I figure what the hey. Ret DPS isn’t exactly difficult (read: easy as crap) and I could use the Relentless gear, it would save me some honor farming. So I join in, do literally all of the summons myself (thanks guys), though thankfully I did at least have a dedicated clicker.

Gah, big advantage to 10 man raiding right there. Summoning is so easy when you have to deal with 8 people at absolute maximum.

Anyway, so in we go. Trash drops like nothing. We get to Koralon.

Our two tanks are Rhyokin (a well geared orc warrior with the title Gladiator) and Iliad (tauren DK, also well geared and also a Gladiator). Now, I respected both of these guys a great deal. They raid hard, they PvP hard, they seemed like pretty cool guys, overall. It’s also worth taking note of Nhiosis, a fantastic warlock with 85k lifetime kills.

If you bothered to armory them, you’ll notice they are all from the same guild.

First red flag goes up when the healers ask for healing assignments.

Rhyokin says: Iliad is MT, I’m OT

No, no, like who are we healers healing?

Rhyokin says: Iliad is MT, I’m OT

No… like, ok, I’m a disc priest, this guy’s a paladin, this other dude’s a resto shaman, and

Rhyokin says: Iliad is MT, I’m OT

No, ok, like who’s on the

Rhyokin says: Ok pulling!

And then he pulled.

And then he died during the very first Molten Fists.

And then he was all “WTF our healers suck.”

And behold, for the healers said “lol”.

Anyway, he demanded (and got) a battle rez.

But honestly, I have never seen such inept tanking of Koralon before.

Fire = bad. You can’t stand in fire. Alright, so, now the tank isn’t standing in fire. What about the melee DPS? Nope, they’re fine. Hey wait a minute, why aren’t any melee DPS hurting the boss?

I exaggerate a little. It was possible to DPS Koralon, it was just really, really hard, and there were lots of “attack from the side and pray it doesn’t count as the front” moments.

Relentless gear was handed out, and off we go to Emalon.

Rhyokin pulled.

Rhyokin died.

Iliad picked up everything.

Then the healers got there, and behold, for the healers said “wait what?”

First overcharge comes along. The add dies, but just barely in time.

Second overcharge. There isn’t nearly enough DPS on the add (only one death to nova of didn’t-you-guys-run-HoL-already) and it blows up, killing everyone.

Hamkins says: sry, i g2g, gl!

Nhiosis says: G2G!

Rhyokin says: G2g!

Iliad says: LATER SCRUBS! G2G!

Then they all left the raid.

Huh.

Ok, so. Yeah. There was a wipe on Emalon. More on that later.

But really, abandoning the raid right then and there? You drag a bunch of people together (Rhyokin was the raid leader) and effectively use them to give you the possibility of twinking you out with relentless gear?

I used to respect these people for being top-of-the-line PvPers.

What does it say about the old days when I just assume top PvPers aren’t complete cockmonkeys?

Anyway I put them all on ignore because really… I don’t have time to spend on cockmonkeys.

But god damn.

HOW do you wipe on Emalon?

Iliad says: That’s what happens when you don’t swap targets!

Words of wisdom, dearest cockmonkey.

So? You know what those incompetent farts that called themselves DPS says?

“Maybe we can tank the adds apart from the boss?”

“Yeah, it would make it easier to switch.”

Ok. Maybe I’m just an old fogey here, but I seem to remember there once was a time where, in order to call yourself DPS, you had to… I dunno, be vaguely competent at the job. Yeah, rose-tinted sunglasses.

But come ON. There are only five fucking targets in the room! You only need to attack one of them at a time! When you need to switch DPS, the add in question triples in size! There’s a huge fuckoff raid warning that says OVERCHARGE! IT EVEN HAS A SKULL OVER IT!

How… how do you even screw that up?!

“But I’m melee and my camera-”

Yeah bullshit. Bull shit. I’m calling you out here and now, you are an embarrassment to the label “DPS”. There is literally two mechanics on lengthy cooldowns you need to worry about. TWO. How the hell did you even get to 80 without being able to keep track of two things?

But I didn’t leave the raid. I typed off a snippy, sarcastic remark, ran back in, buffed up, and got ready for the next pull.

Cause I’m not a cockmonkey.

A douche, yeah, I’m a pompous douche. I admit that.

But…

God damn. IT HAS A SKULL OVER IT PEOPLE. DO NOT MAKE ME AGREE WITH THE COCKMONKEYS.

Then a ret paladin pulled the boss and bubble-hearthed, killing a bunch of people.

It wasn’t me, you goofs.

…

Stop looking at me like that.

IT WASN’T ME!

It had better be important.

I don’t think I’ve ever been flat out booted from the game and forced to download an emergency patch before. Seems like this must be something hugely important, what with booting me in the middle of a hard-fought WG, costing me the honor and tokens for winning. 20 minutes of hard fighting, wasted. Thank god I have time to do three WGs a night. I don’t know how I’d deal with this if I actually had something like a social life.

The forums say this is just a tools update, for the launcher (which I don’t use, and haven’t for years) or downloader or something.

Why this couldn’t wait literally ten hours for patch night boggles my mind.

Oh well. At least by punting me in the middle of the evening, this gives me time to deal with all the real life stuff like going to the bathroom or making dinner that I already did so I could play WoW all evening. So instead I’m just reading about Bat Boy and how Mel Gibson is to become the next pope. There is literally nothing else constructive left to do except sit here and watch the patch fail to update correctly over and over again.

Or, more accurately,try to start wow.exe, watch it do absolutely nothing whilst it demands access to fully control explorer.exe, and when given permission, instantly crashed explorer.exe.

Whelp, I’ma restart this here computer, and hopefully I don’t have to wait through that 50 minute download again.

See you on the flipside with an exciting story about how I put some guys I used to respect and revere on ignore.