Doom Lord Kazzak Has Zerglings!

Ok, so Patch 2.4 brings about a bazillion new dailies, a truckload of stuff to do back in Azeroth and all over the place in Outlands. Most places just get a revamp, some, like Doom Lord Kazzak here, have their home turned into a place filled with weak demons and overdosing elves. Oh yeah, and it’s filled with random people doing dailies.

Now, Blizzard, in their eternal wisdom, have vastly increased the respawn times on these mobs. We’re talking twenty seconds. That way everyone has enough mobs to kill.

The horrible downside is that when good ol’ Doom Lord spawns, he’s surrounded by a vast collection of incompetent morons. Both PC’s and NPC’s alike. So needless to say, trying to properly down DLK closely resembles the efforts of five guys with shotguns attempting to prevent Koreans from purchasing Starcraft 2.

Pardon my language, but the word “Cluster[expletive that rhymes with truck]” is rather suitable.

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This Is Not a Copout Post

Every now and then, I like to go take a look at my blog stats, and see what’s up. For example, in February, this little blog had precisely this many hits. Seriously, 9,027 hits. That’s a lot for some random mage who likes to say “BLAH” to his friends.

What the hell is making me so popular? It was around yesterday that I discovered that wordpress automatically saved all the information of how people are getting to my blog. So like any good blogger does when he’s drunk out of his mind and has difficulty remembering his own name, I present… A Not Copout Post!

So how are the masses getting to my humble little site?

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I Have Come to the Conclusion

That the Alliance players on Duskwood are [expletive] assholes, and I hate them with the fury of a thousand Pyroblasts.

Case and point. Ogri’la, I’m almost finished the Aether Ray daily. Got one more left to train up. I spot one, it’s pretty close by. Run up to it, start charging up fireball. Fireball casts, starts moving towards the Ray, and out of nowhere, this druid in kitty form appears out of nowhere and tags the mob. So, natch, the bar appears gray to me, and I now have aggro because the kitty probably just licked the darn thing and I just set it on fire. Well played, little druid, you beat a mage to the punch. But I see you managed to aggro a pair of those Crystalhide Boar thingies as well.

Well, being the general nice guy I am these days, I figure the night elf needs a wee bit of help here, seeing as how she’s undergeared and has a pair of boars kicking her ass. So I jump in, Blastwave to snag aggro, lure them off a bit, root the boars, and toss a fireblast on the Ray so’s the druid can wrangle it quickly and come help out with the boars. So the druid wrangles it, tosses lifebloom on herself, hits Cheetah form and runs for it.

Leaving me in the lurch with a pair of angry pigs who can spell reflect what feels like every mother[expletive] second.

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Euripedes of the Shattered Sun

Does that sound cool to you? ‘Cause it sounds damn awesome to me.

I will most likely be devoting all of my WoW time over the next little while to trying to get this title. I gotta spend 1k in phase 4… can’t miss it. Gotta be Exalted by phase 4, or during. Whichever turns out easiest.

DAMN YOU DUSKWOOD. STOP TURNING IN QUESTS, I NEED MORE REPUTATION.

Ok, ok, ha, I jest. I do believe I will find your IP addresses, hunt you down, then stab your computer.

Oh, yeah, and Patch 2.5 or something hit, there’s some stuff about mages I should really blog about, or raiding… I mean, how cool is that? Euripedes of the Shattered Sun? Feh, I could care less, I just want that magnificent text hovering above my head.

Some day, in the new expansion, I’ll be checking my mail box in my Tier 10 gear, some other people will be standing around, I’ll get a whisper from a level 73 Tuskar Frostknight, “How u get that titel?” and I’ll smile inside. This, my friends, is respect of the highest order. I will have WoW cred. It’ll be like how the titles “Scarab Lord” and “Centurion” are now. Some of us will remember the old times, most will be “Wow! That’s soo coool!”

And we’ll smile.

They weren’t there for the grind, the lag, the server crashes, the nerf bats.

We were.

We… damn! Euripedes of the Shattered Sun!

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The TTR Is A Party Game

Pwiffle… Pwifty… Pwiften… Pwififif… Ppffifty… Poofy over here has some rather interesting thoughts about the TTR, and his (her? Oh Sh!t I don’t know!) utter refusal to transfer over and create a character there.

Essentially, the argument follows thusly:

” This is WoW.

The fact is, an enormous part of WoW is dedicated to the ideology of the MMO. Why? Because it’s a god damned MMO. ”

And as such…

“ If I were to transfer to these Tournament realms, then I have effectively lost what I most love about the MMO. [I] would have transferred to a massive server so that I can experience the thrill of MMO PVP, but without any form of progression”

Think about that. Go read the entire post in it’s original format. Then come back here.

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Premades… I Made One

So. I tried out some other classes on the TTR. I made a hunter. I played around on the hunter. I made a shaman. I played around on the shaman. I made a priest. I played around on the priest.

There are some things I adore about these classes. As a hunter, having the pet really makes me feel like I can be effective in multiple places at once. Sending my pet at the Paladin while turning my guns to some other class just makes me feel so… useful. Like a master strategist at the back of the fight, being all commanderly.

And the sense of power I have from destroying Warlocks… coming from a mage, a class which is practically dominated by warlocks… it feels good. Really good. The amount of satisfaction I get is… unnatural. I think I need therapy.

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5v5: Chaos Theory

So I (was) running steady with a 5v5 arena team on the TTR. I use was, because I logged in today to find it, mysteriously, gone. Team Captain must have disbanded it or something. I dunno, I’ve never “captained” one. Ahh, well. Apparently this type of thing happens all the time on the TTR. Team appear, then disappear, than appear again. Apparently, it’s not uncommon to be a part of five or six arena teams… in one day.

Well, assuming you went in there with no friends. Like me… /sniffle

ANYWAYS.

So, here was the group we went with. It’s referred to as a “4DPS” set up, although for us, it was more of a “3.5DPS” set up. We had:

1. Myself, Frost Mage (0/17/44. Molten Shields is sexy)
2. Profundere, Discipline Priest (43/18/0)
3. Vehemence, Elemental/Resto Hybrid Shaman (40/0/21. Ok, that’s not really hybrid, is it? Meh)
4. Pinchy, Marksman Hunter (11/42/8. He had a Scorpid pet named “Pinchypet”. Figure that one out)
5. Arglblarg, SL/SL Warlock (I believe the exact number was 27/34/0. Something like that)

Discipline Priest on main heals, Shaman jumping in when necessary. Our strategy was fairly simplistic, burn the weak, kite the strong, bitch slap the healers. As a group, we had set up /assist macros to our hunter, and he had a macro that would give us “ASSIST” as a raid warning when burst damage was called for. After a few games, we had it down pretty damn well. We’d get the raid warning, and within the next four seconds, the target in question would eat a Shatter combo (if I could, otherwise a frostbolt/fireblast combo), a Shadowbolt, a Lightning Bolt, and probably an Aimed Shot.

Other than that, the team captain (the discipline priest) pretty much allowed us to do whatever, with a few macro’d prompts, along the lines of “assist Vehemence” or “assist Polymorphine”; stuff like that. He pretty much expected us to simply know how to play, and I guess he was right. Since more often than not we all came to the same conclusions anyways. Warrior rushes us? We largely ignore it, root it, sheep it, and go after something else. Our warlock was very DoT happy; usually, CoA, Corruption, and Siphon Life would be ticking on at least three of their team.

Only real confusion came from when we were fighting rogues. My strategy was to keep the rogue controlled while killing healers. Sheeped, rooted, or otherwise, in at least an effort to try and force the rogue to blow valuable cooldowns early to attempt to save his own healer. The hunter thought the opposite, control the healer, kill the rogue… All fine and dandy until he pops Sprint and Vanish atst, and bum rushes our Priest… BUT I DIGRESS. I swear I had a point here…

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Tournament Test Realm

In case you haven’t heard, Blizzard is introducing a new type of server called a “Tournament Test Realm”. Essentially, it involves people going to a special server, where you can make a level 70 toon, pimp yourself out in Season 2 gear (or T5 stuff, if you want?) and the play arenas. And lots of them. And everyone’s doing it! All the famous folks, even the game developers! Hell, Faxmonkey has even gone toe to toe with Hortus.

So natch, I’m heading straight over there as soon as this darn patch loads up.

And if you do get in there, send me a whisper. I’ll be Polymorphine (I love that name so much), the rather sexy troll mage.

I highly encourage you to pick a race/class combo you’ve never tried before. This is only a Test Realm, who’s going to care if we run a 5v5 made up of nothing but Tauren druids? We’ll call ourselves “Battle of the Bulge”, with witty names like Moscow and Mookov.

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Ogri’la Attunement Achieved

Finally. After all this time, wasting time at level 70 with, like, a daily or two per day, I finally have access to an additional three. Let the gold roll in! (I have 2k now. Epic mount, here I come!)

The attunement process itself was fairly annoying. 5 major arse group quests in a row? Obviously, I tried to solo them. That didn’t work out so well. So I grabbed Ghostkid, my personal hunter chef (no one fries up Basilisk’s quite like this guy) and we took a shot at the guy above Shattrath. It didn’t go over so well, needless to say. It was a chaotic mess of fireballs shooting everywhere, a hunter pet dying, me getting squished, then the evil bastard reset. We got him down to about… 80%? 75%? Somewhere in that area.

So we got a druid buddy (who had just finished AV) to help out. We tried it with him tanking, didn’t work out. HAHA! YES! WE NEED A HEALER! RIGHT! So then we tried it with the hunter’s pet tanking, with the druid healing. Nope, still didn’t work. So we went and grabbed a proper tank, a warrior in T4,5 level gear. Well… proper is relative. Relative to a non Beast Master hunter’s pet, a fury warrior who just happens to carry a shield he found lying in a corner in Karazhan is a proper tank.

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Fundamental Elemental

Today I’m going to be talking about something that is most definitely not the norm.

Y’see, Shamans aren’t the only class in the game that can spec Elemental. We mages can do the same. With strong talents in both the fire tree and the frost tree, a mage can seamlessly mesh flaming death and frozen fury into a deadly tapestry that I like to call “freezer burn”.

Imagine combining Cold Snap, with all it’s frosty goodness, 10% chance for fire to stun, and thanks to Molten Shields (that is what it’s called, right?) next patch, on any and every attack, including ranged attacks and spells, 1 second snare from Frostbolt, very high burst potential from both the frost and fire trees (imagine Fireball/Ice Lance shatter combo), Blazing Speed, Ice Barrier, and Blastwave (undispellable daze ftw) all combined in one insane little bugger of a mage.

Sound fun? Of course it is. You know why it’s fun? Because it is.

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