Category: Warcraft

Casual Is Not A Dirty Word

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, being called a geek was a crude insult thrown around by those unwilling to accept that people didn’t share their interests and hobbies. Nowadays it’s worn as a badge of honour. I’m not saying that you’ll see me standing on the top of a mountain with my shirt torn off, shouting “I AM GEEK” into the wind, but you get the idea.

I can see the same thing happening within gaming culture. The terms “casual” and “social” are thrown around with a sneer in the voice. After all, social gamers aren’t real gamers, are they? Casual gamers just don’t play games properly? Unless you’re playing the game in the style of a seasoned professional, you must be doing it wrong, right?

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Blog Azeroth Secret Santa

Posted on by Gazimoff

Every year Blog Azeroth organises a Secret Santa event where bloggers from across the community write guest posts for each other. This year was the first time I entered, with Arphalas from The Dark Order pulling my blog in the draw. I’d like to thank him for putting together such a great post and I’ll be sharing my own Secret Santa soon. Enjoy!

Greetings everyone!

secret santa bannerThis is a bit different than your normal blog post, but instead of Gazimoff I will call the shots tonight! My name is Arphalas and I am a Death Knight Blogger from The Dark Order on a mission called ‘Blog Azeroth’s Secret Santa’.

With that out of the way shall we begin?

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My 3 Warcraft Christmas Wishes

Posted on by Gazimoff

Curio standing in front of a large portal, surrounded by Christmas decorations

Every year we ask each other what we would wish for Christmas. For some of us it’s something sensible like a new computer chair, while for others it’s something crazy like a Nerf Havok. Either way, we all have something we’d love to get our hands on.

But what would you do if Blizzard asked you for your Christmas wishes? What would you say to Greg Street, Chris Metzen and Tom Chilton if they showed up at your door asking what you wanted for Winter Veil? That’s the idea behind this post: my top three things I’d ask Blizzard to give me for Christmas.

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Coping with Cataclysm Heroics

Posted on by Gazimoff

LFG screnshot header

Let me say one thing up-front: the experience of running heroics in Beta is both different and identical to that in live. It’s different because healing was less of an issue – premade level 85 healer classes were given gear that’s suitable for their role, including Spirit on almost everything. It’s the same because even when the Tier 11-clad epic premades became available, people were still wiping on bosses because they were unable to adapt.

What does adapting mean though, exactly? There’s a term that my wife affectionately calls “management bollocks”, but it’s basically making sure that you set your expectations reasonably.  We’ve had our perceptions shaped by the state of the game over the past year or so. The changes the expansion has brought have been a shock to a great many people.

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The Veteran Mage Toolbox

Posted on by Gazimoff

Cataclysm has been a wake up call for many of us. After enjoying the new quests and zones and chomping through five more levels, several of us have thrown ourselves into the new dungeons. While completing these new instances on normal mode is straightforward, heroics can be a brick wall.

The trouble is that Wrath has made us lazy. The tricks and techniques we kept up our sleeves were crucial back in the days of Vanilla, and remained so for the early days of Burning Crusade. Unfortunately that all went out of the window with instances that could be zerged and almost limitless healing available. With the arrival of the new expansion, those days are gone.

The biggest obstacle to completing heroics is survivability. This means either avoiding or preventing the causes of damage, or being able to withstand damage when it occurs. Crowd Control is a large chunk of this – being able to polymorph a mob so that it doesn’t engage in combat. That’s only part of the picture though – Mages have a ton of other tricks and abilities that can help to keep a mob busy or help you take less damage.

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Mage Resources Need You!

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s incredible to think that we’re days away from the next expansion. In less than a week, we’ll be doing the new quests, entering the new dungeons and collecting the new gear. Expansions are the great equaliser – everyone starts at the same position again. Newer mages get a fresh chance to join raidgroups at the start of an expansion, as almost all are recruiting to replace tired veterans or character changes.

It also means that it’s time to sweep away the older guides that no longer apply to a sundered world. A lot of the core mechanics have changed, while guides to the new dungeons, heroics and raids are sorely needed. There’s also a need for gear information, upgrade paths and so on. Think of all the questions you’re likely to ask as you level through the new content, and these are the ones that are likely to be asked.

Over the next few days I’ll be refreshing the content in the Mage Resources page to ensure all the links are relevant for 4.0 and Cataclysm. But this also means that I need your help to update it and ensure all the great guides and articles that everyone has written get included.

If you’ve written a guide or article on anything mage related for 4.0/Cataclysm – or know of one that someone else has written – please leave a link in the comments.

If you’re thinking about writing something  but don’t yet have a blog, feel free to post it in the relevant part of the Mage Forums. I’ll be sure to include a link to it from the Mage Resources page, plus other forumites can provide their own thoughts and feedback on it!

Thanks for all your help!

Choose Your Mage: Alliance

Posted on by Gazimoff

With the release of Patch 4.0.3a, new race and class combinations became available for players to try out. Mages have become one of the most accessible classes, with all classes except Tauren having them available as an option. With all new quest content, revamped zones and streamlined zones, it’s never been a better time to choose a new mage.

Unfortunately having so much choice can be bewildering. Choosing which race to play is as much about how they feel as what bonuses they give. You might want to play an explosive Gnome instead of an aristocratic Blood Elf. Whatever your drives or desires, this two-part guide should give you everything you need about choosing your ideal character. This week I’ll be covering the Alliance races, while next week will be the turn of the Horde.

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Taking Better Screenshots

Posted on by Gazimoff

This is a bit of a follow-on from my old-world screenshot post a few days ago. I was unhappy with the quality of many of the images I’d taken – I was getting horrible JPEG artefacts, especially in images with subtle shading such as sky, water and so on.

Back in the early days of Vanilla, Warcraft used to capture and store screenshots in the lossless TARGA (or TGA) format. Nowadays they’re stored using JPEG encoding – a lossy compression algorithm that can have a huge impact on your screenshots. I’d been wondering if there was a way of improving the quality of JPEG quality screenshots, or even getting back to the TGA format previously used.

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Last Chance To See

Posted on by Gazimoff

As is tradition, the US servers are patched a day before those in the EU. This week was no exception, as we saw our cousins across the pond upgraded to 4.0.3a before us. This patch brings with it the changes to the old world as the surface of Azeroth is remade. Many old areas that we’d grown used to over the years will be lost forever.

I often watch Twitter on patch days – it gives me an idea what to expect. Will European Wednesday be smooth and trouble free, or do problems in America tell me that we’ll have extended maintenance late into the night?

But along with the waiting and the gnashing of teeth, I also saw a lot of mourning and regret. A lot of people said they’d miss aspects of the old ‘pre-Shattering’ world and regretted not taking screenshots of particular locations.

Since we were still in the unchanged world in Europe, I thought I’d give people a second chance. I offered to go around and capture images on demand. These were the requests that came back over Twitter.

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The Machine Behind The Curtain

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m going to start this off with a question.

Does the amount of fun you have with Warcraft decrease as the amount you know about the game increases?

I’ve been thinking about this question ever since I read an article by Larísa of Pink Pigtail Inn about someone who’d burned out on Warcraft, developing the belief that ultimately the game boils down to pressing a button on a random number generator and getting rewarded no matter the result.

This makes me nervous because of my own quest to improve my knowledge of the game. I want to improve my own ability and I like being able to share what I find with others. But should I be fearful of poisoning my enjoyment of it by finding out too much? Am I destined to become a bitter, grumpy old mage who snaps his staff in disgust?

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