Tag: icecrown citadel

The Back Seat Guild Leader

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ever get the feeling that you’re standing at a crossroads, looking down at the various prongs of a Morton’s Fork? It’s a position that an increasing number of players are finding themselves in during the run up to Cataclysm, and I don’t think I’m an exception to that. And like many people, my thoughts at the moment run to guilds, friends and forward planning.

Like all decisions of this ilk, it’s long and complicated and involved. So rather than doing my usual stint of dispensing advice, I’ve decided to post this to solicit some instead. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this conundrum – maybe you can help me work out how to tackle it or have experiences of your own that can help.

Anyhow, pull up a chair. This may take some time…

Continue reading “The Back Seat Guild Leader”

Clearing My Head

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ugh, things have come to a head lately. I’ve been logging on, doing my thing and generally making my own fun. But for some reason something has been feeling amiss, like I’m dancing round the edge of a crater. I’ve been trying to work out what it is and it’s been driving me bananas.

I think I’ve finally worked out what it is. I think I need to leave my guild.

I think I also need to explain why I’ve got this crazy thought in my head. After all, they’re a great bunch of people and I know some of them in Real Life. They’re funny, entertaining and generally don’t do anything to annoy me. The Asshole Quotient seems to be exceedingly low.

I’ve also got a collection of alts on the same server that look after eachother – a mage, a priest and a warlock. I have a Paladin tank approaching 80 and a Fury warrior and tree languishing in the doldrums of early Outland.

So why would I look such a gift horse in the mouth?

Continue reading “Clearing My Head”

My Diamond Shoes are Too Tight

Posted on by Gazimoff

Yesterday was fantastic. I’d successfully travelled halfway across the country, got home and managed to get settled in front of the computer. For the first time in a few days I was planning on helping myself to a nice portion of Warcraft goodness. I figured that since the raid lockouts had just reset that there’d be a wide variety of choices available, even at the late hour I logged on. As luck would have it, there definitely was.

I managed to get get myself into an ICC25 PuG being organised by a few people from some of the leading guilds on the server. Everything filled up nicely, we marched in and managed to take down the first four bosses as well as the mini random quest encounter. Thirteen badges in the bag, twenty achievement points and a fair chunk of fun for the evening. We’d have progressed further too if it wasn’t for the double-maintenance whammy we’ve had this week.

The awesome thing that came out of the run though was that I picked up Nibelung from Lady Detahwhisper. I’d heard some great things about this staff, particularly how the Val’kyr that it summons can really ramp up your DPS. The trouble with procs like these though is that you never really know if they’ll be worth it until you gem and enchant the thing and give it a go.

I’m also building up an armoury of weapons that I think I should really start cutting down.  But the stats, procs and so on make it very hard to choose which combo is better. I must have spent about three hours at one point trying to work out which was mathematically superior until I realised I was no longer playing World of Warcraft and instead had somehow logged into MetaCraft: Spreadsheet Theory. It was not a fun place.

Currently I have the following taking up room in my bags:

I know it’s a bit like moaning I have too many pairs of shoes, or that the menu at a restaurant I’m visiting has too many tempting options, but it’s a pain nonetheless. And I really don’t want to go back to spreadsheets and searching forums for definitive answers on the best weapon to get. Sometimes I wish itemisation was easy.

So here’s the plan – go to the target dummies and test each weapon in turn to see which gives the biggest answer. Of course, if you reckon you have an answer for me then feel free to pipe up. If we had a unified Mage resource site, I’d post it there, but we currently don’t.

I’m keeping Nibelung though – being able to have Val’kyr proc from by Blizzard AoE (about all I do in heroics these days) should mean I have a harem of these things following me around…

Patch 3.3.3: Twisted Firestarter?

Posted on by Gazimoff

For us over in Europe tomorrow is Patch Day, while those players in the US are already downloading, installing and waiting for servers to come back online. Regardless, the theorycrafters have been out in force, pouring over every talent change and glyph update. But while some classes get some interesting updates, the changes for mages seem bland by comparison.

Before I get into my opinions though, let’s look at what’s been changed in the patch.

Arcane

  • Arcane Empowerment: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc off of critical strikes. The self damage buff remains unchanged.
  • Incanter’s Absorption: This talent now only grants additional spell power when damage is absorbed by Mana Shield, Frost Ward, Fire Ward, or Ice Barrier. The limit of 5% of the mage’s health on the spell power buff has been removed.

Fire

  • Burning Soul: Threat reduction is now 10/20%, up from 5/10%.
  • Combustion: The cooldown on this spell is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
  • Empowered Fire: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.
  • Torment the Weak: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.

Frost

  • Frostbolt: Spell power scaling on this spell has been increased by approximately 5%.
  • Brain Freeze: This talent now allows your next Fireball or Frostfire Bolt to be instant and cost no mana. There is a small internal cooldown to keep the Frostfire Bolt from immediately triggering Brain Freeze again.

Glyphs

  • Glyph of Fireball: No longer increases critical strike chance of Fireball. Instead, it now reduces the cast time of Fireball by 0.15 seconds.

Bug Fixes

  • Arcane Empowerment: Fixed a bug preventing Rank 3 from granting 3% damage.
  • Burning Determination: This talent will no longer sometimes have its effect removed by the same spell that triggered it.
  • Dragon’s Breath: Druids can no longer remove the disorientation effect from this spell by canceling their current shapeshift.
  • Enduring Winter: Tooltip corrected to match actual Replenishment mana regeneration numbers.
  • Fingers of Frost: Mages with Molten Armor active who have the Shatter talent will no longer lose Fingers of Frost charges when Molten Armor causes reactive damage. In addition, the effect from this talent now displays the number of charges on the buff icon.

In a nutshell, Arcane mages get a flat-rate buff instead of one that relied on crits, but lose out on the Incanter’s Absorption trick. Let’s be fair though, only the high-end mages were using this trick – for the average mage it’s no great loss. Fire mages get some interesting changes in the form of threat reduction, more crits and more damage when they crit often. It means that hitting the Hot Streak proc and getting that Instant-cast Pyroblast is becoming even more important. Frost mages get some slight love, mainly from the Fingers of Frost bug fix and the Frostbolt scaling changes.

Will this change anything? I’m seeing a lot of talk from the high-end about Arcane mages going back over to Fire, but the difference I’m seeing is marginal at best. I’m more worried about the practical rather than the theory, and how it’ll translate into bossfight combat.

While theory is great for when you’re standing still and just tapping your hotkeys, most Wrath bossfights involve some kind of movement or rhythm. Looking at the relative casting time of Arcane Blast versus Fireball, I think that Arcane will still win out for most fights where movement is important. It might be that the extra range from Flame Throwing will compensate for some of it, but I’m thinking more about encounters like Blood Princes or Marrowgar.

I also think that a fair chunk of mages just won’t bother. We ditched a ton of hit gear when Arcane became the spec to have and I reckon that there are several who can’t be bothered to collect the additional hit gear again just to go back. This is another one of those reasons why Hit modifiers really need to come out of the talent trees.

Frost will still be the spec for PVP mages, but the buffs still don’t push it up next to Arcane and Fire for raid suitability. It also feels like the tweaks and bugfixes are tinkering around the edges. I don’t think that Frost players will be on a level playing field until much later.

I think the real excitement will hit with 3.9, when the talents get their full revamp along with the Cataclysm stat changes. Until then, it feels like we’re just waiting for people to run the numbers before we go out, change our specs and regem our gear.

The Crutches, They Do Nothing!

Posted on by Gazimoff

Over the last few days I’ve been raiding slightly more than usual. I’ve been back into Icecrown a couple more times, where it feels that we’re around the Festergut-Rotface level of progression. I’ve also been back to ToC10 in order to pick up more badges and test out my new UI. It’s been a pretty interesting experience, as I’ve suddenly realised a couple of things.

The first thing that struck me was how I didn’t miss my boss mods, although it feels a bit weird playing without them. I had it drummed into me after blowing up the raid on Baron Geddon in Molten Core that I needed to download CT RaidAssist and pay attention to the pings. As I progressed through content, I moved to BigWigs then DeadlyBossMods, but I’ve always had something installed. I thought that it was one of those essentials, like raidframes.

Back in the day of Baron Geddon, you needed the boss mods. The debuff was a subtle effect, so unless you were watching out for it the first thing you’d know about it would be when everyone yells at you on Vent. Nowadays it’s like a giant Christmas bauble has landed on your head, making it blatantly obvious that Something is Wrong. Even The Bad is more blatant now – Blizzard famously changed the flooring in the Koralon encounter to make the flames easier to see.

As a mage it’s even easier – you don’t need to watch for when the boss is doing his Super Special Ability as he’ll usually shout it to make it blatantly obvious. The XT-001 fight is a typical example – you have plenty of time to prepare for the heart to drop, pop your trinkets and nuke your face off. The only time I was missing things slightly was during the Lord Jaraxxus Fight, and that’s only because I was missing out on some great spellsteals.

I know it’s different for healers. When I’m on my priest I like to pre-empt the nasty AOE ith a precast AoE heal. I’m not doubting that it’s different for other classes as well, who either struggle to see The Bad from their perspective, or need to track debuff stacks etc. But even though I’ll probably get round to reinstalling DeadlyBossMods, I don’t think I’ll rely on it much unless the fights change drastically later in Icecrown.

The other thing that rebuilding my UI has brought out is this incessant need in me to tessellate everything. The action bars must be square, which must line up with Recount and Omen. Everything must be the same colour, and have the same style, and fit together.

And there must be NO GAPS

Which causes a problem when the minimap is round, but I want it in the bottom corner with my other stuff. I could make it square to fit neatly, but then it doesn’t look all shiny. But with it being round there are gaps, which wastes space, which drives me nuts. Still, I’ll relax. I’ll go and flick through the Warcraft Ikea Catalogue that is Curse Gaming’s addon site, and find something that works and fits.

Finally, I’ve promised that if I ever get the Argent Resolve on my priest, I’ll race-change him to Gnome as soon as Cataclysm launches. People will hate me for it.

Being Late to the Party

Posted on by Gazimoff

I know I’m late to the Icecrown Citadel party, and that a ton of people are already doing it in heroic mode. Today I’m pleased to say that I managed to get in there, get some bosses down and bag some loot. I’ve managed to down everything including Festergut so far. And yes, I got some achievements for my trouble too. All in, the ride was pretty smooth despite some upset during the ship-to-ship combat.

I’m now using Frost Needle in my main hand, coupled with Igniter Rod in the offhand and managing to shed even more hit in the process. I’ve been battling to lose hit ever since I made the switch from Fire to Arcane as my primary spec back in the early days of 3.3, but it feels like I’m finally getting close to having all my statpoints becoming useful again.

One thing that I did get reminded of tonight was the concept of gear mastery coming in with Cataclysm. Basically, if a class has proficiency in a particular armour class (cloth, leather, mail and plate) then they’ll get a boost based off the item’s Mastery value. The idea is that it encourages Paladins, Druids and Shamen to stick to their own armour class rather than grabbing ones from a lower bracket.

I don’t think it’ll work.

The downgrading of armour types has been going on since Molten Core, when we had Paladins running around in cloth so that they could heal effectively. I don’t think that Mastery will help discourage them from rolling on gear outside of their armour proficiency. Instead, I think that the classes that loose out will feel even more bitter about missing out on gear and the additional boost from the Mastery stat.

Why not consider instead a penalty based system? Yes, you can wear armour outside your proficiency, but you face a penalty on your stats if you do. The question then changes from “is this an upgrade to me even without the mastery bonus” to “is this still an upgrade once I take the penalty into account?”.

It’s a difficult balance. On the one hand you want to make sure that players feel that they have fair access to gear, while on the other you want to ensure that gear is useful to as many people as possible before it’s trashed or discarded. It’s why I’m not calling for strict limits to armour proficiency to be built into the game.

At the end of the day, it’s about being selective who you raid with. If you’re with a raiding guild make sure you understand their policies on loot distribution, and if you’re not happy with them it might be that the guild’s not suitable for you. It’s when you’re raiding outside of your network of guildmates (pugs etc) that having game mechanics that nudge players in a particular direction can be a benefit.