I Sheep Things…

Hey guys.  I’m sure you’ve always been there.  You always remember something else you should have said or don’t feel you explained yourself well enough so here is a lengthy transcription of the show.  I paraphrased each question below along with a short version of what I said or an extended version explaining myself a little better.  Also there are links to everything I talked about trying to give some credit for anything that spewed from my mouth.  This post will probably work best by having it open when you are listening to the podcast and following along whenever I’m asked a question.

 

Mike: When did you start Isheepthings.com
A: First blog post was Hello World!…of Warcraft

Mike: For someone who just discovered your site, what post would you point them to first?
A: Post’s I’d recommended: Play to Enjoy.  Also check out any of the “Popular posts” I have in my sidebar.

Mike:What do you do with your mage while in game?
A: Raid with my guild Mimnoks Shadow, and we’re #17 for Kel’thuzad raiding atm.

BBB: You’re on Alltop are you not?
A: Yep. Here is the WoW Alltop crew….and they changed the address I quoted and it no longer works.

BBB: Do you feel you compete with other mage bloggers?
A: Oh boy, here is where BBB tried to get me in trouble.  I hope I didn’t offend anyone here with my takes on your blogs guys .  I really enjoy reading everyone’s blog and being asked to classify my blog in contrast to every one else who blogs on mages kind of put me in a awkward position.  Short of it is, I consider my blog more or less random mage commentary of someone who plays a mage but isn’t really the best at it.  You guys are awesome and I really love reading everyone in my Magetastic Blogroll.

Mike: You in Beta?
A: Yep

Mike: What have you been up to in Beta?
A: Crashing in Northrend on my Mage and playing a DK.

Mike: What do you think of the swapping spec posibility?
A: Ramble mumble mumble….Spec template mod.

Mike: Do mages swap specs?
A: Sometimes….don’t have to.  I generalize some of the builds and point out that Arcane is trying to be built into a viable DPS tree by speccing deep into Arcane.  And I’ve had lots of posts on this recently.  Still not sure what the future holds for Arcane.

Mike: What do you think of Mirror Image
A: Haven’t played tons with it but I think its going to stay a powerful spell in the Mage arsenal.  They seem to be making very subtle changes to it but I think the damage from it will stay impressive while they may still tweak the “phasing” annoyance where it resets your cast bar.

Mike: Blizzard has dropped the “First to” titles.  Thoughts?
A: Happy.  This was a bad idea and I’ve voiced my opinions here the moment I found out about it.

 

**CUE THE MUSIC BREAK**

 

Mike: Tell us about your Grant a wish: Mage Edition was about.
A: Read it (and the comments) first.  But then I tried to pull it all together and failed. Mike felt Polymorph and Mage tables are enough to make mages happy with the end game.  Damage sucks atm.  WoW Web Stats Parse’s show that the Mages aren’t even invited to the fastest DPS records (thanks to My Mage sucks for clueing me into this).  Locks are getting a form of Blink.  Yes yes I know its different but maybe I don’t understand the Lock PvP enough (must be because they drop me in < 3 seconds).  This spell was put in to give them a way to get away from melee but come on.  You get a 40 yard teleport/blink and we trip on a pebble and blink 2 ft away from where we started.  Yes DK were actually being called a Pet class because currently they can keep their ghoul out 24/7.  We’ve had water elemental since patch 2.0 and at best in patch 3.0 with specs you can minimize the downtime of that elemental to 1:24 seconds by my calc. 

Mike: Do you think the Developers aren’t really hearing the mage requests?
A: No. They hear us but you can’t grant every classes wishes.  And I really do stand by what I said about Damage.  I feel that instead of worrying about trying to beat out classes a the DPS meter, we should be more worried that we do way to much and we need to pull our punches so we don’t pull agro.  On the flip side of that, if we do pull agro we should be one shotted.  Mages shouldn’t be able to take damage but we sure as heck should be able to dish it out better then any other class. And BBB pointed out Krizzly’s comment and James’ Comment about non-DPS posiblities to the class.  And yes those are good suggestions but I couldn’t see how those additions to the game would calm down the mage community about our shortcomings in the game at the moment which Mike agreed.

Mike: How would blizzard make your class unique?
Here I  might have gotten off track a bit and instead of answering how we could be unique I went back to “cool mage spells that shouldn’t be too hard to add” in which I cite warlocks and QQ about not being able to enslave….real unique answer there Aurdon

BBB: Mages do have unique places in some raids.  Is that not unique enough? 

A: No.  Blizzard has already kind of said that’s not something they want to encourage in WotLK.  “You no longer need to rigidly control the melee/spellcaster balance of your raid, or make sure every group has all the critical buffing classes, etc. This change has many class balance implications. ”  They don’t want you to be relying on a certain class and Mike agreed. 

Mike: Do you think you continue playing a Mage?
A: Always…I may park him now and then but I’ll always follow the Mage class and I enjoy playing a mage.  Voodooventures was who I was talking about on twitter and said “Priest seems to be the class etched into my heart, though I no longer play one. Why else would I follow the Priest blogs so intensively?”

Mike: What do mages like best about their class?
A: You can read everyone’s comments here. Portals, Conjuring, Crits, AoE (Spicytuna’s Beta Blizzard Post).

Mike: You buying CE of Wrath?
A: Nope.

Mike: Wrath is out 11/13. You taking off work?
A: Haven’t yet decided.  I did create the WotLK Release Date timer btw. Feel free to use it and join in the Wrath Countdown party.

Aurdon: Mike you think dance studio will be ready?
A: No.

Mike: What do you think about the Bikes? You think this is non-warcrafty? Is this an engineering thing?
A: Bikes are cool, yes engineering, BBB is insane for lvling 2 engineers.  I think they fit within the WoW universe just fine.  I do Tailoring/Enchanting on Aurdon.

Mike: You like achievements?
A: Yeah they sound alright but I’m going to be casual about them.  I’ve seen a lot about achievements in steam games.  I didn’t say this on the show but I do have issue with rewards from achievements that change the game.  Such as unlocking Team Fortress 2 class weapons.  That just encourages people to cheat at the achievement system to gain those items.  If all you get is a special tabard or special mount..meh. When BBB was talking about how the final count number was slightly off, I was trying to find a place to jump in and mention Wrath mounts will help achieve this goal but didn’t get a word in edgewise .  Warcraftpets.com shows 98 vanity pets.   Can’t find the post about the pet collector achievement…pretty sure it was a blue forum post that hinted it as a possibility.  Pet collecting isn’t very easy.  Currently my friend who has 73 of them has given up that many bagslots (glad that’s changing) and a lot of work can go into getting these pets.

Mike: Thanks for coming on Aurdon
A: Glad to be part of the podcast.  I hope I represented the majority of the Mages on this podcast.  This is indeed where you can go “Tet-a-tet” with me (and my readers’s)  and discuss if you believe the mages are gimps or wimps.  Then I shouted out for ppl to comment on iTunes because Mike forgot to harp on that this week.

***FIN***

 

So there you have it.  I hope you enjoyed everything.  I really had a blast.  Just as Mike always asks for feed back on the show, please let me know here as well if you thought it went well.  Be sure to send him an email at theshow@wowinsider.com and comment at wowinsider to tell him what you think (good or bad) and as for me you can simply comment here.  Maybe if enough people liked me they’ll have me back sometime.  Maybe if everyone hated me, they’ll have me back some time. =)  

Thank you Mike, Duncor, BBB, all the folks in IRC and those listening later for tuning in.

 

Andy "Aurdon" Scott

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 1:34 am and is filed under Aurdon, Beta, Blogging, Mage, Podcast, Wrath of the Lich King. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.