Plot and Ice Cream

I’ve heard quite a few people express their opinion that Outland, and the entirety of the Burning Crusade, felt detached from the Warcraft story.

I can understand it feeling detached from the player, as the overreaching story involving Illidan seems to go out of it’s way to avoid having anything to do with the player.

But the story itself?

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Ignite: the New Blink!

Ignite shares a very unfortunate property with blink: it doesn’t work properly, and, in fact, never has.

“Whats wrong with Blink?” you ask? I take it, then, you’ve never tried using blink while standing on very odd terrain? Things like doodads, ramps, and slight breezes tend to mess with blink something fierce. It was even the source of a hysterical complaint from a hunter claiming that blink needs to actually move the mage forwards 20 yards, as a mage blinking backwards cost him a duel.

Right.

So ignite then, has also been broken from day 1, and has never been fixed.

ACHTUNG!

Before we go any further, allow me to explain that the issue is not with either of these in themselves, but rather the constraints the game places on them. Blink, as a spell, is fine, but the terrain blink is trying to use is not. Hence, when trying to calculate really complicated pieces of terrain (uh oh, there’s a blade of grass ahead!) it does wonky things, such as nothing.

Ignite? I’ll get to that.

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Things to Make You Feel Old

With LK now (officially!) looming on the horizon, I’d like to take the time and take a look back… before patch 2.0, before Burning Crusade was even heard of…

I’m talking old school WoW. When frost wasn’t for PvP, it was for raiding Molten Core. When Alterac Valleys could last hours… even days. When AV lasting ten hours was par.

Soon, you’ll see people saying things like “man, remember back when Pyroblast had a 6 second cast time?” or “remember when rogues had to be behind a target to use Mutilate?”

And trust me, this will happen. You’ll be flying somewhere, and you’ll see someone in general describing how Totems used to only affect the one party, or mages used to have to spec for Ice Block… and everyone else will be like “Woah!” and “What… you serious? That can’t be right”.

And you’ll be sitting there, shaking your head, if only they knew…

Trolls! Remember when you could only activate Berserking after being critically struck? And how it lasted 30 seconds? Or when it increased damage you took?

Remember when Battlemasters didn’t exist? Or Meeting Stones? Or when there wasn’t a cap on the number of players you could bring into any given Dungeon?

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Input Wanted!

Need some input from my loyal readers.

With Rash of the Itch King looming, the whole purpose to doing posts about current level PvP has largely become moot. Anything I write will become largely invalidated in a few months, thus largely defeating the purpose of writing a guide for it.

And even then, with all the talents and so forth being released early, a hefty chunk of said guides would need to be completely rewritten based on the new talents.

I mean, when I talk about druids, for example, I say that the only viable control you have over them is Counterspell. Any slows or snares (or polymorph) are largely useless.

However, Deep Freeze is perfectly viable against druids, and adds a whole new dimension to fighting that class.

It just seems largely pointless to waste my time, and y’alls time, by writing mass guides and strategies to stuff that will be rendered obsolete in a matter of weeks.

So I pose the question to you.

Is there a point?

Also related to this. A while back there was an idea for “Where the WoW is Euripedes?” involving me dancing on various corpses in various places in the world.

Again related to the release of LK, should I hold off on filming to get in Northrend locations as well, or film the locations that are currently available, and merely add in the Northrend content when it’s there?

It’d be neat if I could just decide these things and that’s that, but this blog is almost as much about you guys as it is about me.

Almost.

I still reserve the right to suddenly start blogging about science fiction movies.

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New Racials?

Some racials being shuffled around in Wrath…

That was a pun, you know. ‘Cause trolls are getting a little something called “The Voodoo Shuffle”, which reduces the duration of all movement impairing effects by 15%.

That’s neat.

But what’s really exciting is this:

Racial “The Fall of Humanity” Feign Death which may trick enemies into not attacking you.

I can’t stop laughing.

No really.

I’m not joking.

I just… this…

I mean…

I’m trying to come up with something to say here…

Nah.

Just laugh.

I’ll be in my corner doing the Voodoo Shuffle.

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And the Race is On!

A standard question many new players ask is “what class should I play?” followed immediately by “what race should I play?”

Hence some people’s utter disappointment they couldn’t play Undead Druids or Draeni Warlocks.

But it got me thinking here… with LK inevitably coming down the pipes, and all the changes it’s bringing, what is going to happen to our beloved mages, stat wise?

TROOLLZ – Nothing noticeable seems to be changing. Regeneration seems to be the only thing that will get touched. With the importance LK is placing on Spirit, this racial stands to get a substantial boost. Maybe even up to something ridiculously high like 50 hp5. WTB Mini Spirit Bond for trolls only.

Undeadth – Again, nothing noticeable. They don’t really have any modifiers or anything. Presumably Will of the F*&%-you will still work just as well.

Belfs! – Yet another horde race which stands to get absolutely nothing? Gee, thanks. I guess I’ll talk about the friggin ALLIANCE then!

PUNY HUMANZ – 10% increased Spirit seems to be heading for a “Holy crap, thats overpowered” scenario, at least for raiding. There’s already a lot of Spirit being tossed around on the beta, having 10% more of it could easily see human arcane mages running around with infinite mana pools.

PUNY GNOMEZ – 5% increased intellect is already tasty, it’s only going to get better the better gear mages get. And, of course, that bonus to engineering will give the little guys early access to motorcycles. The jerks.

PUNY DREANIE… DRANEE… – Recalling that all Draeni provide that +1% hit aura to their party, this is worth some thinking… Blizzard is changing all buffs to go raid wide, and is amalgamating all hit stats into one “Hit”, that effects all abilities regardless of whether your shooting a fireball or stabbing.

Meaning, that a draeni mage would provide a flat boost of 1% chance to hit to EVERYONE IN THE RAID.

… Woah.

*Thinks really hard*

Did the developers feel bad about shafting alliance for so long, or is this all just a mass coinkidink?

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Changing of the Guard

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of the change in LK that will change all the buffs/debuffs so that multiple classes can have them.

Case in point, Fel Intelligence, a buff that increases Intellect and Spirit, just not as much Intellect as AI does, or as much Spirit as DS does. And all these various buffs/debuffs no longer stack. For example, Scorch and Winter’s Chill will no longer stack with each other.

What this change is supposed to do is kill raid stacking, so that people don’t have to go raid with people because of their class/spec, but rather, raid with the people they want to raid with.

In other words, raiding with their friends, without screwing themselves over because nobody rolled a priest.

The good news: casuals rejoice! No more shall you have to scrape to get the right people in order to actually run a successful raid! No more shall you be forced to call a raid because a key person(s) somehow failed to show!

The bad news: say goodbye to class originality and uniqueness! No more will you be able to stack groups favorably, no more will you have to stack groups favorably. Now you won’t need to put in any effort whatsoever to raid successfully!

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The Death of Rank One

Please keep in mind that this post revolves mainly around PvE. This change and its impact on PvE mages is nonexistent.

So the developers over at WoW central have decided that downranking spells is a bad thing, and have amalgamated everything to cost a percent of base mana, rather than having different mana costs per rank.

Obviously there are differing opinions on it, so here’s mine.

Removing the ability to use rank 1 spells at a cheaper cost will destroy a mage’s utility in PvP.

Utterly.

Any arguments to this simply do not understand the way a mage functions in PvP.

It’s certainly possible that PvP will change, rendering my current frame of mind that this is a massive nerf to be irrelevant. It’s quite possible that things like snares, crowd control and dispel protection will no longer matter in level 80 PvP.

Somehow I doubt that.

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Magely Ideas For Achievements

I have yet to see reports of any class specific achievements for Rash of the Itch King, so in the same spirit as the clever Negative Achievements, I present to you my entirely egotistical ideas for mage related achievements.

ORLY? Spellsteal Blessing of Protection from a Paladin while the Paladin is attempting to heal himself.

WTF LAG! Spellsteal Ice Block or Divine Protection from a mage or paladin, respectively.

Sheep Fetish. Polymorph yourself.

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Frostfire, Just This Once

Like every single mage in the world, I initially felt that Blizzard was politely trying to rip off my limbs and sell them to a seedy looking Vietnamese chef with the new expansion.

“Living Bomb” sounded awesome, but turned out be used dishwater, frostfire bolt was kinda cool, but confusing with really no explanation of how it worked, and Deep Freeze was kinda cool.

What? Why don’t you like our cool spells?

No offence, Mr. Blue Text, but Living Bomb is only cool in theory. That spell needs some serious help before I’ll even consider speccing it. And Burnout? What the hell kinda crap is that?

Fine. Be that way. Look, we’ll add a mana burn to Living Bomb, and buff Burnout a bit. How’s that?

Gah, so now Living Bomb and Burnout only mostly suck? Good job guys.

What about Deep Freeze? That’s cool, innit?

Well, maybe, for an instant cast…

OH FINE. FINE. BLAH DE BLAH. Now it deals over a thousand damage too. HAPPY? Them warriors are going to rip your procreative organs off.

That’s fine. They’ve been trying to do that for years. So about them fire talents…? They still suck.

Ok… maybe… we can buff Burnout a bit. How’s this. It effects base mana cost, not your total mana.

NOW you’re speaking sense. That’s awesome. And Living Bomb?

…

LIVING BOMB?!

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