I Sheep Things…

This was originally a comment for Elleiras’s post on PvE to PvP transfers, but it got to be pretty long and crazy, so I decided to repost it here as its own topic.

While I’m taking my short vacation with Rhii, I somehow didn’t feel like leveling a lowbie. So I decided to play around a bit more with my DK, Avaani, that I rolled on Aurdon and Adreanna’s server a while back. They play on a PvP server, and (as has come up in the recent past) I’ve only just begun to see the appeal of world PvP at all. They’ve told me repeatedly that the random killings and slayings on their server aren’t too bad.

I beg to differ.

From about the instant I logged on, I was being killed everywhere I went. Now maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that I’m horrid at PvP to begin with, maybe it’s because I’m very unfamiliar with how to play a DK at all. But I couldn’t kill ANYONE.

I don’t think there’s a class in the game that didn’t get at least one killing blow on me. Oh yes, Holy Priests were represented too. I would go to an area, kill a mob or two for whatever quest I was (vainly) trying to complete, and then I would get killed and camped for 20 minutes. Frustrated, I would res at the spirit healer and go farm ore in Tirisfal for a while until my res sickness wore off. Then I’d go to a different area, kill a mob or two for a different quest and the whole thing would begin all over again.

I must have gotten a reputation for being an easy kill, too, because I was literally followed all over Hellfire by a stealth-kitty druid and his roguely companion. No matter where I went, those two popped up from literally nowhere and knifed me in the back. It got so when I saw them materialize (or rather, found myself stunned for no good reason), I’d just stand there and let them get it over with quickly. At least it took up less of my time that way.

On at least two occasions I logged off and didn’t come back for 40 minutes to an hour. When I logged back on my friends were right there, waiting to spring out of the shadows somewhere and make me dead all over again.

It was horrible. Awful. Intolerable.

If it happens the next time I log in with her, it will be the last time I log in on Kel’Thuzad. That is not fun, and I can’t and won’t deal with it.

Popularity: 1% [?]

With Rhii sitting at 78, so close to 80 I can taste it, I’m on the verge of deciding to hold back. To cool off. To take a break. To give her a rest. To drag my feet.

I’m extremely torn about it.

Here’s what happened. I started dating a WoW-player. Now Elleiras met her boyfriend in Underbog. They raid together, I believe. But not all WoW couples have to do things the same in game to get along okay outside it. Sideshow and Syrana seem to do well enough. Aurdon and Adreanna too. And Gevlon and his gf both play the game, though she quit raiding and he keeps it up.

My significant other rerolled to play on my server. His old server was where he’d played with his ex, and I can’t say I blame him for wanting to leave it. I like that we are into the same games. I like being able to link items to him in chat and talk over skype while we’re both questing. I like that aspect of it a lot. When he did it, I was having kind of a burn out phase with Rhii, she was stuck at about level 67 and had been for a month or so. I told him when he did it, that I didn’t know when I’d feel like playing Rhii again, but that she was always going to be my main and that I wouldn’t hold her back for him (or any other reason).

He rolled his little druid and I rolled a pally and we leveled them together to about level 25 or so. Which is when he took off like a rocketship and streaked through the levels fater than I thought humanly possible. My paladin struggled up to 30, then I caught a second wind with Rhii and off I went questing toward 80.

Skip forward about two months from the day we rolled those level 1s. Rhii is sitting at 78, Naelian’s at 72. He’s done in two months what it took me a year to manage. And I’m FINALLY doing what I want to in game. I get group invites, I’m making friends with other players I’ve PUGged with, so I don’t get so many “deathtard” tanks anymore. I’m addicted to the argent tournament. I’ve got my very first purple (granted, it’s crafted and I made it myself, but it is PURPLE!). I’m feeling powerful and successful and my adrenaline is at an all time high when I step through an instance portal.

And he’s upset.

He doesn’t want me to get so far ahead of him, he feels like I’m intentionally leaving him behind. That I’m determined to do as much content as possible before he has an opportunity to do it with me. That I’m being competitive. But I’m not intentionally trying to stay ahead of him. I am just on a roll. I just love instances. I just want to do my quests before they turn green. After all, he’s HAD an 80 before.

But what really concerns me is that I don’t think we’re going to want to do the same things at end game. His last 80 definitely didn’t do the things I was interested in. He loves Wintergrasp. I’ve never been in a bg in my life and I’m scared to death to try. He hates dying more than I do, I don’t mind wiping in dungeons if it’s because something’s a challenge (although I hate stupid unnecessary deaths as much as the next person).  I want to get into heroics as soon as is humanly possible, and when he had his last 80 I don’t think he had never completed one. I don’t mind PUGging if it gets me where I want to go, he doesn’t particularly like playing with strangers and he hates talking in public channels like Trade or LFG. I hoard up money for things I consider really important (I still had money in the bank after buying cold weather flying and dual spec in one week) he is constantly buying armor upgrades in the AH. I want to read and learn and do things the most efficient way possible even if it’s already been done before. He likes to figure things out for himself and to do things his own way. I want to RAID….

Here’s an example of our differing attitudes to the game. We both went off to steal the Horde flames for the Midsummer achievement. We had some hilarious deaths, we had some frustrating deaths — especially in Orgrimmar and Silvermoon. I was loving it. I laughed, I made rude gestures at the Silvermoon guards from a hidden spot in the fountain, I took screenshots. Eventually I got all the flames. He was stressed, frustrated, angry, and convinced that he wouldn’t be able to succeed. He eventually got all the flames too. But even with the two hardest achievements under his belt (stealing the flames and Ahune) he doesn’t seem inclined to try for the Flame Warden title. But he doesn’t mind dying over and over in world PvP, whereas I feel humiliated and ashamed by that. There’s nothing wrong with the way he plays. We just like different experiences.

I don’t want to feel guilty for enjoying the game the way I want to play it. And I am frustrated to be asked to wait, when I don’t really think we’ll be playing together directly all that much even when we are the same level. Is he going to limit my guild choices to where he can go too?

But for now, I’m going to shelve this concern and I am going to shelve Rhii while I wait for him to catch up. The implications on the RL relationship are so much more important just now than what my hoofed-other-self wants. But I can’t help but be just a little bit worried.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Some of Blizzard’s ideas in past have been pretty retarded like the removal of ghost wolf taming.  Other things were great ideas, like Guild Banks.  The rest of Blizzard’s ideas fall somewhere in between.  One of those in between ideas was to allow us reputation gains for turning in lower level cloth.  Each capitol city has a cloth NPC that will accpet donations.  Usually you’ll find these guys by the tailoring trainers.  They offer quests to turn in Wool, Silk, Mageweave, and Runecloth and finally repeated Runecloth donations for that cities reputation.  Blizzard, let us turn in Netherweave for Reputation.

A Donation of Netherweave seems to be the logical progression of this idea…but it just kinda stopped off at Runecloth.  Why?  Why not continue?  I know the Argent Tournament offers a fast track to reputation gains with factions now but still…is it all that much harder to add in a quest for this?  I’ve got tons of Netherweave stocked up (See photo) from running alts through Outland but no way to offload it other then the AH.  Sure it’ll sell…sure I could craft bags with it.  But I would rather just dump it on a guy for tons of useless rep and be done with it.  Maybe it’s not the greatest idea in the world but I think it just bugs me Blizzard just left things off at Runecloth.  Every “What Blizzard Should Do” can’t be a brilliant idea

I’d like to see something like this put in place but sadly I’m sure Blizzard has already done the calculations on it.  Player complaint’s equal X.  Level of programming effort equals Y.  If X<Y then do nothing and mention “it is being considered but no news yet on when it might find its way into a patch”.  Anyways…its What Blizzard Should Do.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Can’t even begin to describe how good it feels to be in Northrend and finally doing instances again. They are FAR and AWAY my favorite thing about WoW, and I have really been missing them for the last, oh, sixty some-odd levels.

So this week, I finally got into LFG and did some PUGs, some good, some bad. I ran Nexus, uneventfully. Honestly can’t remember the names of any of the ppl in that group… nobody sucked, nobody was mind blowingly awesome either. I am trying to gauge my progress in DPS, so I was relieved to see I was a close second to our dps shammy. Not bad for a nooblet, hmm?

Then the next thing I tried was Azjol-Nerub… ummm yeah. Still don’t have that achievement. First group to inv me was four DPS… no tank… no heals. >_> I said, I’ll pass this time, guys, don’t worry about me… and slipped away quietly. Good on me. The second inv I got was an interesting group too… there was a DK tank, a resto shammy healer, and for DPS there was a lock, a feral druid, and me. The tank couldn’t hold ANY aggro… I went oom and was wanding something (*embarrassed*) and the tank lost threat and I took damage. It was bad stuff. Anyway, long story short, healer got creamed, wouldn’t come back (who could blame him?) and group fell apart. Mooooving on.

Next inv was for Gundrak. I didn’t even want to GO to Gundrak. But they promised me good gear, so I tagged along. Figured it couldn’t be too bad, or if it could, it couldn’t be worse than the last one. We had an interesting group: a hunter whose name was made of jumbled characters… diwfleriuflwe or something… and who flatly refused to talk, couldn’t control her pet, mostly used autoshot and… on the whole, might have been a bot??? Very weird to say the least.  Then there was a lock who kept getting disconnected. Then there was a stellar priest healer and an equally stellar pally tank. And me. The fifty nine millionth time the hunter’s pet pulled aggro that resulted in deaths we booted her. Bye dwoifwlekfewois. The lock died in one of the inconvenient pulls and then couldn’t get back to the instance because of connection issues. So the amazing and lovely priest, the durable and magnificent pally and I finished the instance alone. Last three bosses went down without a hitch. Beautiful, smooth, easy. Got some loot, which was nice. What was nicer was knowing that I don’t suck. At least I’m pretty sure, since I three manned Gundrak at 76.

So, after Gundrak I got to comparing gear. I was sporting Turtle Minder’s Robe from the Kal’uak Quartermaster before the run (<3 red robes!), but in Gundrak Embroidered Gown of Zul’Drak dropped. I was the only one who wanted it, so I got it. And I sat around comparing the two trying to figure out which I should wear. Finally I got frustrated, being a noob at gear comparisons and all that, and asked an 80 mage in my guild what he though. He gave me a big grin as though he was happy to help a young’un learn the ways of the endgame and told me wear the Embroidered Gown while questing and the Turtle Robe when fighting bosses. Puzzled, I asked for an explanation. I can take an answer as read, I swear I can, but unless he wants me to come to him next time I’m not sure, I need to know the rules for figuring these things out on my own. Anyway, he got all annoyed with me and ranted a bit about how he just woke up and was late for a raid and how I should just look on wow-wiki if I wanted an answer in detail.

Maybe my feelings are too easily hurt. I kind of cried. I know I’m noobly… I know that was a dumb question. But honestly, how am I supposed to learn if people won’t help me? And why are you an 80 in a casual leveling guild if you’re going to be all snotty about the raid you’re going off to? I just want to learn so I won’t be a noob in the future. That’s all…

Anyway, I recovered from my fit of hurt feelings (well maybe not entirely, I’m not sure my relationship with that guildie will remain altogether cordial *sniff*), and I jumped back in LFG… mostly because I LOVE instances…

And so I went to Old Kingdom (yay!) with the lock who had previously had connection problems. He was kind enough to vouch for my dps-ability even after I went on to finish Gundrak without him. Fortunately his connection had cleared up. We also had a live hunter who actually talked, a talented resto druid and a warrior tank. Old Kingdom went smoothly until the end when Herald Volazj casts insanity.

Oops! It’s time for today’s Mega-Noob-Moment!!

Nobody had warned me about that, and of course, I had no idea what was going on when my groupmates turned on me so suddenly. I turned tail and ran like a scared little draenei girl who sees orcs in her closet at night. I thought, oh, it’s temporary insanity, they’ll stop trying to kill me in a minute… so I ran, and I ice blocked, and I blinked, and I used all my little defensive tricks to get away, and eventually they did stop attacking me… I WTF-ed as hard as I could in /party, and lo and behold… they stopped attacking me because they were CLONES and my REAL groupmates killed them for me. /facepalm. But even with that (hideously embarrassing) faux-pas, I still managed to top the DPS meter by almost 300. Which doesn’t seem like much in the land of 3k and 4k (*glares at raid-geared 80s everywhere*), but in the land of 1200 vs 900 it’s kind of a distinction. And my groupmates understood that I was new at this whole crazy-freakish clones business, and they were nice to me about it. We had a laugh. And now I know. Which is a lesson a few other people around here could learn. *clears throat accusingly*

All in all, the ups outweigh the downs. I’m feeling pretty good about, well, Life the Universe and Everything… at least in WoW, anyway. But nobody’s on top of everything in the real world anyway.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Better than I expected of me, honestly. But then again, I didn’t expect to be able to be “Flame Warden Rhii” either, and I pulled that off too!

Popularity: 1% [?]

World of Warcraft is an MMO.  To date, probably the greatest MMO.  But sometimes I really don’t feel like playing in the Massive Multi-player aspect of the game.  Sometimes I want to simply log in, do a project or two and then log out.  I don’t want to see guild chat, I don’t want my friend to ask me what I did last night (raided….duh), and I don’t want some random guy I might have run a horrible heroic instance with months ago to ask if I want to go do it again (you sucked dude…my boot costs more to repair then your entire set).  Blizzard, give us a REAL DND mode.

There is currently a Do not Disturb mode (DND) but all it is is simply another status move like /AFK.  It might reply back to a /whisper with some /DND message but I’m pretty sure it simply just tacks on the <DND> status to your name.  I want not to be disturbed…I want no whispers…I want no chat.  DON’T BOTHER ME.  I don’t want to be even SEEN.    Don’t even let people know I’m on.  If I want to log in and check my mail or browse the Auction House…I should be able to do that under the radar.  Seriously…why don’t we have a DND check box on the character selection screen which logs us into the game in some sort of “ghost mode”.

This mode should obviously have its limits.

• No chat. This is a true DND mode.  Both ways, You can’t chat with me and I can’t chat with you.  NPC interaction only.
• No travel outside of cities. I don’t want to complicate things by allowing questing.  People would think its weird seeing a mob keel over dead because a DND ghost killed it.
  • I suppose its possible to make this happen but I doubt Blizzard wants to create a “personal instanced zone” for every player in the game.  That’s too much against the MMO aspect
• No avatar. I want to be invisible.  If I’m skipping out on a raid and I’m caught hanging around the mailbox….fail.  Simply create a instance for every major city and make every player invisible to each other in that instance.

On the flip side…this will empty out alot of the cities…much like when you walked through the Org ghost town the first couple days after TBC or WotLK released.  There is a lot of loitering around and they do add a bit of ambiance to the cities much like NPCs that do nothing but walk around and spout out canned messages.  That’s not to say you can’t still go there in the live mode and stand around…but I would suspect that if you added a DND mode….probably 30% of those people would use it all the time.  Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing…I’m not sure.  Other then that…I don’t really see a down side.

I’d like to see something like this put in place but sadly I’m sure Blizzard has already done the calculations on it.  Player complaint’s equal X.  Level of programming effort equals Y.  If X<Y then do nothing and mention “it is being considered but no news yet on when it might find its way into a patch”.  Anyways…its What Blizzard Should Do.

Popularity: 1% [?]

It’s that time again boys and girls.  Azerothian Warming has hit his peek and The Ice Stone has Melted.  This had almost become a meme back in Feb 09 when a bug in a patch caused this phrase to be emoted out in world chat every 30 seconds or so.  It later became hot (get it?) fixed and all was forgotten.  The phrase is tied to the midsummer fire festival which started today.  This will be going on till July 4th.  Ultimately you’ll get the title of Flame Warden or Flame Keeper for finishing all of the achievements related to this quest line. The most difficult achievement will be the Burning Hot Pole Dance which is completed by wearing an entire Midsummer outfit.  This will cost you 400 tokens.  I would have had plenty left over but they started adding a timer to these tokens last year.  I had about 150 left over from 2007.  I didn’t have quite enough for my set so I thought I’d bank them again in 2008..then poof…they were gone…grrrrr.

The part that I’m not looking forward to is to travel all over the world to click on these fires.  There is good reason why I don’t like to go back to these zones.  I leveled several characters through them…I can’t simply fly over and zip around at 280% speed to get this task done.  You have to jump rivers, go around hills and weave along roads and paths to get to where you are going.  Blah!  I would much rather do something more engaging then ride around.  I love the torch tossing.  Having a single quest line to kill a guy?  That’s fine.  Farm a easy boss to grab a pet?  Sure….but running around on a mount to click on a fire…bah.  I felt the same way about the lunar festival.  At least you get to keep the  Coin of Ancestry for the next year.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Mage class Q&A is now live with all the answers to those burning questions about the Mage class.  The “send us your questions” thread started up back around 5/20 and about a month later…we have our answers.  Here is a copy of the transcript.

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

Community Team: Joining us today to shed some light on the many questions we’ve fielded from players within the mage community is the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft, Ghostcrawler, who has enlisted the assistance of several members of our class design team to provide the most thorough answers possible. We’d like to begin by exploring the perceived role of the mage class. A lot has changed since the days when the “glass cannon” description was applied.

Question: Where do mages fit in the current scope of things, and where do you see them from this point going forward?

Ghostcrawler: The mage is the iconic caster — a ranged class that wants to stay at range in order to focus on dealing damage. They can do single-target damage, area of effect damage (AoE), or crowd control. Every group should want a mage because they are reliable, powerful and flexible. Most of the mage’s spells have a cast time and a lot of the gameplay involved in improving your mage revolves around minimizing the limitations of the cast time, whether it’s lowering cast time through talents and gear, getting away from enemies so you have an opportunity to cast, or using the occasional ability to make a spell instant. While all three of the mage talent trees focus on dealing damage, we are pleased with the different feel between Fire, Frost, and Arcane. Arguably mages even have a fourth potential style now that focuses around Frostfire Bolt. We know the stylistic differences work because there are Frost mages who just love Frost and want to see it work in Player vs. Environment (PvE) and Fire mages who want to play Fire in Player vs. Player (PvP). They prefer a play style within the same class over a different play style that would be arguably more effective within a particular aspect of the game. While understandably frustrating for those players, it also points out a success in the class design. We used to call the mage the master of AoE damage, but we’ve since decided that’s not a great niche for anyone. The “AoE class” feels mandatory in situations where you do have large crowds of enemies to contend with, but then the AoE class gets bored when everyone else is maximizing their single-target damage on a boss. Now we try and give AoE tools to all damage-dealing specializations (specs), though we will always make extra effort to make sure mages stay good in that department. Players sometimes wonder why the mage class has seen fewer changes than some of the other classes during Lich King. We think that’s because by and large, the class works. That’s not to say there aren’t areas we can improve, but we think the mage has all the right tools to live up to its reputation.

Question: What is it that makes them unique when compared to other classes?

Ghostcrawler: All of the mage specs, though less-so Arcane, focus on a single spell such as Fireball. At first glance, and especially to non-mages, this might make the class appear overly simple to play, but really you can have a lot going on. There are chance-on-hit abilities (procs) such as Hot Streak and Firestarter to contend with. Mages have some great tools, like Presence of Mind and Arcane Power, to really kick up their damage on demand. Frost PvP in particular requires a lot of finesse to get the Water Elemental’s Frost Nova at the right time for a Shatter combo. Mages are fragile though (just ask a healer), so they have to make sure they’re staying alive as well and using the tools they have to do so. Even though most of their damage comes from one spell, mages have a lot going on. The damage per second (DPS) difference between a skilled and less-skilled mage with the same gear can be pronounced. Mages still are a glass cannon when compared to priests and warlocks. While all have their armor spells, the mages also have escape mechanisms from Polymorph to Frost Nova to Iceblock to Blink. Mages should never feel “tanky” in a PvP environment. The biggest risk for homogenization occurs with the mage and the warlock, but in this case we think the mage is in a good place and it’s the warlock that we want to move slightly farther away. We’ll talk more about the locks soon, but we need to focus them even more on mechanics like shards and demons. Mages also retain some unique tools, such as the town portals and the (ahem) food and beverage service. Their crowd control is still among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, in the game.

Community Team: A lot of initial questions and concerns we received from mages around the world were concerning itemization. In particular, a lot of the newer PvE and PvP mage or caster items seem to favor Fire spec and, to a lesser extent, Arcane. Do you feel as though mages are being forced to focus too much on critical strike rating (crit) over stacking more haste, spell power, and intellect, stats that are much more beneficial to the Frost mage?

Ghostcrawler: It isn’t in our best interest as designers to have Frost want very different stats than Fire. In a world where we already must add so many new items to the game with every new raid tier / Arena season, we just don’t want to dabble too much with “this piece is attractive to the Fire mage, but not the Frost mage.” We think the value of different stats has just crept too far apart for different specs of the same class. It’s just never going to feel right when one stat is worth double or more of the value of another stat. We’re making a big pass at all of the talent trees and item stats to try and get this a little closer for everyone. Ideally you might be comparing two pieces of cloth and have to decide whether the haste or crit is more valuable to you, and not just write off everything without crit as junk. So to answer the question succinctly, yes mages are being asked to focus too much on some stats. We also understand there are some items in Naxxramas that are superior to items in Ulduar. This isn’t ideal, but is partially fallout from our decision to not have the final boss of Ulduar drop better loot than the rest of the instance, which is a design change from the previous tier. We are looking at the items on a case by case basis as the feedback comes up. While it isn’t our goal to ensure that every drop is automatically an upgrade, it also isn’t our goal that you try and get your group to keep going back to the old content because it provides more upgrades for you.

Community Team: There are some funky cloth legging designs out there that are difficult to truly appreciate unless one wears a tunic.

Question: Even so, will mages get robes, or at least the option of choosing robes, over tunics going forward?

Ghostcrawler: To be totally honest, this is not a huge priority for us at this time. We embrace some level of player visual customization in World of Warcraft, but it’s just not in the design vision to give players as many controls over how their character looks as some players would probably desire. One of the distinctive visual qualities of cloth is that it often looks like long, flowing robes, which is pretty consistent with the iconic fantasy wizard. No doubt some players would prefer to change the look of their weapon or weapon enchant if they could without having a game play effect, so this is just a slippery slope for us. We will keep the feedback in mind though.

Community Team: The next few questions concern the number-one issue raised by mages on the forums as of late: mana efficiency. Mana Gem and Evocation are commonly referred to as outdated mechanics. Many players feel the Mana Gem does not restore enough mana and should not be placed on the same cooldown with a warlock’s Healthstone, while Evocation has too lengthy a cooldown and is typically not a reliable means of acquiring mana during boss fights.

Question:How do you view these mechanics, and are there any intentions of updating mana recovery capabilities for mages in the future?

Ghostcrawler: Our general philosophy, in a very broad sense, is that healers risk running out of mana if they aren’t careful or are in over their heads, but that damage-dealing specs generally have enough mana to do their jobs. That doesn’t mean that you never need to burn a gem or use Evocation, but it does mean that if you are being reasonable about what you’re doing that you should have enough mana except perhaps on very long or unusual fights. What we are more likely to do is just lower the mana costs of the main nukes: Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt, and Frostfire Bolt.

Community Team: Compared to many other damage-dealing counterparts, mages feel their AoE damage is less reliable and way too costly.

Question: Do the developers feel that the cost to mages of doing AoE damage is appropriate?

Ghostcrawler: It’s close. We don’t want say the Blizzard spell to ever look really attractive to use against a pair of creatures or a single target. It’s taxing on your mana bar to do many Blizzards, but it doesn’t feel inappropriate for the amount of damage you’re doing during that time. The efficiency is still good in cases with a large number of targets, which is the whole point. Now some of the other mage spells could definitely use some improvements to make them as competitive as Blizzard (the spell) in terms of usability, damage or efficiency. Clearly it’s in our best interest to make sure a spell with the name “Blizzard” kicks some major posterior.

Community Team: Spell Steal is a very costly spell, especially considering it can be resisted, an unnecessary buff can be stolen unintentionally or the stolen buff can be dispelled.

Question: Are there any plans to reevaluate the mana cost and functionality of this spell?

Ghostcrawler: We think the core of the problem is that a spell that was designed to let you steal cool buffs from an enemy has sort of fallen into the niche of a general dispel. Rather than make it cheaper, we’d be more likely to let it actually only steal spells that would benefit the mage. This would be a buff in some cases and a nerf in others though, so it’s not a quick and dirty change. We have considered a glyph to let Spell Steal take two buffs at a time. Community Team: Now let’s jump to some questions about specific talent specs. Firstly, the Arcane tree is widely considered too bloated. It seems that, over time, the talent trees of all classes have really evolved to provide plenty of different options with fewer five-point talents to allow for greater customization. There are several flavorful talents in the Arcane tree (i.e. Student of the Mind, Magic Absorption, Magic Attunement, Incanter’s Absorption, etc.), but many players feel that they cannot afford to spend points in such places since many of the most necessary damage-dealing talents require five points.

Question: How do you feel about revitalizing the Arcane tree to thin out some of these five-point talents?

Ghostcrawler: Arcane is a little bloated. If you take all of the damage and mana talents there aren’t many left to spend on the more fun or cool talents. We recognize that it’s hard, for instance, to have a single Arcane build that can work in both PvE and PvP. To be clear though this is a problem with several of the talent trees and not a problem with Arcane alone. If you look at say the warrior Protection tree or the paladin Retribution tree, those provide a model for where we’d like to take talent trees in the future – fewer talents overall and plenty of points to spend on fun play-style choices that really do feel optional rather than talents you need to make your spec function. Also note that fixing some mage mana issues might make some of the mana talents feel less mandatory.

Community Team: To expand upon the last question, Torment of the Weak is used in several of the most popular mage talent specs for both PvE and PvP, however, the Arcane talents prior to this one are of very little use to Frost mages – and Fire mages to a lesser degree — in PvE.

Question: Are you concerned at all that Torment of the Weak is considered to be so important to mages, regardless of specialization, that a minimum of eighteen talent points must be spent in the Arcane tree to reap its full benefit?

Ghostcrawler: We don’t think it’s must-have for Frostfire builds and it doesn’t strike us as weird that Frost or Fire would subspec into Arcane, since that is generally going to offer them more than say a Frost mage who subspecs into Fire.

Question: Are there plans on the horizon to improve Fire mage representation in PvP?

Ghostcrawler: Yes. It is more important to us though to fix classes that have no viable specs than it is to bring options to classes that already have a reasonable Arena presence. We are more focused on improving hunter and warlock representation than making sure Fire has a PvP role. It’s still something we would like to do, but in a game of this size there are a lot of things we’d like to do. Dragon’s Breath is one spell we think we can improve for PvP. With a lower cool down it could be more like Scatter Shot. It’s not necessarily that Fire is terrible at PvP, just that Frost has a lot more tools.

Question: Is threat generation from Fire mages a concern at all given their burst damage is controlled mostly by proc talents and critical chance?

Ghostcrawler: Threat-generation is a concern. One way we’d like to fix this is through Invisibility. We’ve always been a little cautious with making sure the spell wasn’t too powerful, but we think we have plenty of room to improve it. In PvE for example, it’s really hit and miss whether you’ll take damage that will prevent the threat wipe. Do remember that Mirror Image is quite useful as a threat-reduction spell. Your threat is divided among the images while it’s active. Sometimes it makes sense to blow the spell right at the start of a fight, and other times when you get a spell buff or are otherwise able to go into really high damage mode for a few seconds.

Question: Do the developers still consider it an objective to improve Frost damage for PvE?

Ghostcrawler: Yes. The challenge as always is to make sure we don’t over buff Frost in PvP just to make it viable in PvE. While it would be ideal for all specs to be viable in PvP and PvE, having different PvP and PvE specs at least keeps those specs alive rather than having one tree which is good at everything. We’d like to buff Frost through Ice Lance. Currently another Frostbolt is always better than an Ice Lance in PvE. We experimented with improving this through the glyph of Ice Lance, but it turns out the glyph would have to improve Ice Lance’s damage by x6 or something ridiculous like that.

Community Team: Finally, this wouldn’t be a mage Q&A without a question about Blink. It has been discussed in the past that it’s the terrain that can cause the spell to fail and not necessarily an issue with the spell itself.

Question: While mages do recognize this issue, has there been any discussion about reworking Blink so it’s more intuitive and could recognize a mage failing to teleport any distance forward, wasting only a global cooldown rather than the mana and spell cooldown?

Ghostcrawler: Blink is a movement spell, and anything related to movement can be a little dicey on a client-server game like World of Warcraft. That’s not an excuse for it bugging out, but an explanation for why you can get into situations where it doesn’t seem to work. In the 3.1 patch we made some technical improvements to the spell working on slopes. It used to fail a lot in the portal area of Dalaran for example, but that has been much improved. One of the places where it still seems to struggle the most is entering or exiting the tunnels in Warsong Gulch, which ironically is one of the places where it’s also the most useful. Anywhere there is a change in terrain, such as entering a building, could be problematic. We are working on this issue. If you run into a problem with Blink, the most helpful thing you can do in the Bug Report forum is specify where exactly you had the spell fail. That will let our engineers zero in on solutions

Question: How awesome is Aurdon and don’t you just love his blog?  He should really start posting more often.

Ghostcrawler: By far he’s got to be one of my greatest heroes.  I really wish I could hang out with that guy.  He adds so much to the community.  We need him. Hell, I need him. I’m a mess without him. I miss him so damn much. I miss being with him, I miss being near him. I miss his laugh. I miss his scent; I miss his musk. When this all gets sorted out, I think he and I should get an apartment together…..whammy.

Ok so there you have it.  Ghostcrawler bares all and answers some of the top Mage Q&A questions.  So please don’t ask these questions at Blizzcon Q&A folks…its already been covered.  Special thanks to Teza and Wowraid.com for the coverage of this topic.

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So you’ll have to wait a bit longer for my promised update on Rhii’s downtime. My partner in crime has been a little hard to nail down for the screenshot extravaganza I’ve been planning. But instead, let me show you my newest achievements!

Yep, it’s true. My PvP-phobic little Rhii took down a level 80 DK this weekend. With the help of some Goldshire guards… but they just softened him up, she did most of the work herself. I think he must have been on his way to the Darkmoon Faire, actually, and I feel a little bad about slaying him mercilessly in the road.

Wait, no I don’t. I was so excited about it I started yelping in /g like … well like a girl.

What I didn’t realize (even though Adreanna tried to tell me) is that PvP is a rush. I swear, I had tingles all over when I saw that DK go down. I wonder what he thought? I bet he was embarrassed. A level 72 mage and some NPC guards should not have wiped him out like that. In my excitement I forgot to screenshot his corpse… I forgot to /hug him… I forgot everything except looking at my new 5 honor I can probably never do anything with…

Unless I start learning to PvP more. Why am I suddenly tempted? This was almost certainly a fluke. I am bad at PvP. The last time I accepted a duel invite I was killed by a Shammy’s totem, for crying out loud. The shammy was gracious and healed me up afterwards, so I have no hard feelings, but there’s the proof, I’m BAD. I have never won a duel, in fact. Despite having featured in several of them. You can see that achievement all greyed out in my screenshot.

But I like winning, and that excitement was real. Hm. Something to think about.

I’ve also been working on my cooking again, and managed to get these beauties as well:

We do love Northrend. We do.

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Well time to dust off the old blog and post some exciting news…the patch notes for upcomming patch 3.2

Mages

• Arcane Blast: Mana cost reduced by 12%. (woot!)
• Invisibility: Can no longer be interrupted by a hostile action or damage done during the 3 second fade time, however an invisible mage can still be stunned or silenced. (a positive)
• Talents
  • Fire
    • Empowered Fire: In addition to its existing effects, this talent now also grants a 33/67/100% chance to regain 1% of base mana each time the Ignite talent deals damage. (another plus)

Wow…every change to the mage class (a short list perhaps) was a postive change…no nerfs?  <3 Blizzard.  Also there are changes to classes in general that apply to Mages:

Classes: General

• All pets now receive 40% of their master’s resilience and 100% of their master’s spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
• Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).
• Silence, Strangulate, Silencing Shot, and Arcane Torrent: These abilities will also apply a 3 second interrupt effect against non-player controlled targets, making them more versatile against creatures immune to silencing effects.

Make sure you also check out the changes to Mounts and Battlegrounds.  Lets hope it hits soon!

Source: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

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