Classical beauty

*Opens rusted shut door with difficulty*

Hello folks, its me, your favorite mage Jed! Now I know that it's been a minute or two since I wrote a blog post but lately I've had that itch that only blogging can scratch. First off let me apologize for not having written anything since...2015?! Well crap that is a lifetime ago. Since then my adorable baby girl has grown into an adorable four year old who still demands a TON of my time. I've also been streaming a crap load more and have made it to twitch affiliate. I know that y'all are super impressed by the streamer part more than the baby part. Well anyway that's enough of me and my story, lets go on with the whole blogging thingy!

*Replaces burned out light bulbs and clears off cobwebs*

There's an old saying "everything old is new again" and as I get older, it does seem to be proving itself truer and truer every year. Blizzard announced at Blizzcon 2017 that they were going to be bringing us World of Warcraft Vanilla in the near future and I got to tell you that there was not a single person in that hall that wasn't cheering their mind out. Fast forward to today and we are counting down the global launch of Classic Warcraft. What is Classic Warcraft?

A decade of shenanigans

*taps mic*

Hello...is this thing still on? Crap it is! Uhmm...hi everyone. I bet you're all wondering where in the hell I have been this whole time! I mean my last post was back in January and since then this place has been deader than a bbq at the Firelands. Well I HAD planned to blog about stuff since than and honestly I did have things I wanted to write about but I didn't because something came up. What came up that could have kept me away from my loving and adoring audience? Well if you've been following me on Twitter, and let's face it most of you have not, you know that in February my wife and I adopted a beautiful baby girl. If you aren't on Twitter and didn't know what was going on, well now you do! I'm not gonna post pictures here because they are all over twitter and you can go there and look at them if you so desire.

From the Mage's mouth

Hello adoring audience, your normal writer Jed has been sidelined for numerous reasons that he has assured me are not made up or pathetic. He asked me to cover for him I've chosen to pretend that he isn't a complete slacker and have taken pity on him. So you get to enjoy my amazing writing. Who am I? Why I'm the amazing, outstanding, and oh so awesome Archmage Jedem!

You may recognize me from the image in the banner of this blog. Sadly that photo is from years ago when I was younger and slightly less experienced but as often happens to people, I've come a long way since then. Why these days at my disposal I have several weapons of mass destruc.... uhm pretend you didn't hear that and if the mages guild asks you, you have never heard that term before. Let's just say that I am even more awesome than I used to be. Why am I here writing this blog post instead of off adventuring in the past Draenor or saving some damsels from distress or drinking many wonderous alcoholic beverages? Well like I said, Jed is a slacker. He asked me to regale you folks with stories of my amazing adventures. That bum knows how to appeal to my one weakness, talking about my awesomeness.

Gotta heirloom'em all

They should have renamed the 6.0 patch to the Heirloom Patch. I say this because since the patch went live I've done nothing but try and get heirlooms from Garrosh Kills on all my characters. Some I've gotten through groups I've put together and some through awesome people on twitter organizing groups. I've yet to get one through the new group finder because sadly most of my groups fall apart after one wipe or because people think they can overpower mechanics and as we all know...that rarely works. At least I can cry myself to sleep holding the heirlooms I have.

So a lot of heirlooms, a lot of changes to classes, and a Halloween holiday event. Blizzard has definitely provided us with a lot of content in game to keep us busy until the expansion release date which is almost upon us. Throw Blizzcon into the mix and suddenly October has been a very busy month for most of us! With all this activity it's been fun to see people who stopped playing WoW, finally log back on after a long time. They are usually confused at all the changes and are often asking questions in guild as to how to do stuff or what things are.

Random Musings

Sometimes I think I should post more but I can't figure out what I want to write about and then when I think about a topic I can't find the words to convey what I want to say. This is why my blog posts have been...lets just say few and far between. It sounds nicer than non existent. I am sadly having this problem with a lot of projects I have going on. I just can't find the words I want to use. It makes me the sads.

In an effort to force myself to write something I have decided to just post whatever random thoughts I have floating around in my head and see if I can make a blog post out of them. Bear with me, it may not be the most cohesive blog post I've ever written but hey no one reads my blog for a well written post anyway. So...uhm buyer beware or something.

The Blizzcon Experience

Blizzcon. A place for the WoW players to mingle and share their love of all things Blizzard. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to get tickets to the convention. I think that the only appropriate word that I can think of to describe it was: AWESOME! I had written a blog post about how I was worried that my introvertedness would make an appearance and punch me in the face. Thankfully that was not the case! So buckle up my faithful readers for beyond this point lies Blizzcon! (Also expect a lot of name dropping)

Days of Future Past

Today I am going to talk about several different things and hopefully it’ll seem like I have coherent thoughts when I write (I don’t) and it will all blend together to make a good post. (it won’t) So buckle your seat belts boys and girls and prepare for the trip of your life!*

*Trip of your life may not actually be the trip of your life. Mileage may vary. If this is the trip of your life…you may need to have more fun in your life!*

To celebrate WoW’s 8^th anniversary Blizzard released this video that mashed up a lot of the previous game cinematics and to me it is awesome! If you haven’t seen it yet you should open up another tab/window and watch it right now. Go ahead I’ll wait.

Pandarian Things

It’s been a month and a half since the Mists of Pandaria launched and things have been a bit busy in my little corner of the internets. I’ve leveled 2 characters to 90, gotten another to 89, gotten a monk to 86, farmed a lot, and gotten my pally ready for raiding with the guild. Very busy 6 weeks. So what do I think about this expansion now that I’ve had time to spend a good amount of time playing it? I think that Blizzard has done a good job so far with most of the new stuff in Pandaria. I am having a good time playing and as usual I don’t see myself quitting any time soon. Lot of real life stuff going on so I haven’t been able to blog about what I’ve been up to in WoW.

The Good

I LOVE lamp pandas. They are seriously fun to play and just watching them run around is hilarious. Pandaria is a very beautiful place and flying around it and just watching the scenery is a fun time. The storylines in each zone are also pretty awesome and at times you can easily find yourself pulled into the storyline, cheering on the NPC’s or feeling sad when someone dies/succumbs to emotions.

I can’t forget to mention pet battles. Oh man pet battles are so much fun. Stupid awesome pets requiring you to battle to make them even more awesome. DAMN YOU PET BATTLES! DAMN YOU AND YOUR FUN! Must battle one more pet, just one more pet. One more…just one…must be the best, like no one ever was…

The Bad

SO MANY DAILIES! Once you hit 90 there are so many things that you can do that it can be slightly overwhelming. There are Tiller dailies, Anglers dailies, Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, cooking dailies, archeology dailies, Cloud Serpent dailies, AND you have dailies to get rep with individual people like Nat Pagle and the Black Prince. If you want to get VP you do dailies. If you want to get gear because the LFR/raid won’t drop pieces for you, you do dailies because you need to get revered with factions to buy VP gear. It’s a little weak but honestly you don’t NEED to be fully geared out in VP gear to do well in raids.

Pandas are awesome BUT since both factions can have them, you are technically neutral until you pick a faction around level 12 or so. This means that you have to go through the Panda starter zone with no guild chat, no direct whispers, and no mailbox. Kind of a pain but thankfully once you pick a faction and get out into the world you realize that you are a Panda and that you rock. Until that point though, you are isolated and worst of all…you have no bags except for the ones that you can get to drop! The horror of running around with 6 slot bags!!!

The Guild

My guild was able to work hard and pull together and snag the Realm First Working as a Better Team achievement which was really cool. I know that several of my guildees got a few realm first profession achievements which is great for them. We also started raiding and downed the first boss in the Mogushan Vaults, the Stone Guard, and we are making good progress with the second boss, Feng the something or other. Seriously that guy made me want to punch the computer when we wiped at 8%! So close!!!! But I know that we are awesome and we’ll down it the next time we raid. 

Speaking of which, we are looking for more people to start a second raid group on Sundays! Tanks, heals, and dps are needed! It’d be Sundays 5-8 PST on Ursin-US-PVP. Oh and it’s for alliance only in case anyone was wondering. We’re a casual group that happens to raid and our raids are usually full of fun times so if you’re looking for a home check us out! Also if you're just looking for a guild where you can be social and not raid, we would totes love to have ya! =D

Overall I am having a good time. I love my little farm where I can grow veggies or motes of harmony and since I hit exalted with the tillers I finally got the 60 exalted factions achievement. I’ll probably slowly work on getting my mage exalted with the remaining factions that I need and see how far I am from 70 exalted factions and the Beloved title. I might have issues.

To all the lowbie groups

I am going to start this post by announcing that this is a rant. If you have no desire to read my angry rant, please feel free to browse through my other posts until you find something more to your liking. If you’re still with me, hold on to something because this is going to get angry and possibly violent. I’ve been leveling my panda and I LOVE it! They are a fun class to play regardless of spec and I highly recommend leveling one. Now because I am one of those weird people who like to play a class to level cap as the same spec that they are going to be at said level cap, I tend to level some characters as healers or tanks. For my panda I decided to level as a Brewmaster, which is the tank spec. 

This means that I’ve run a lot of dungeons so far. I usually quest for a bit and then queue for a bit so that I don’t end up running the same dungeon a million times in a row. Nothing like running RFD 5 times in a row to make you want to stop playing for the night. Anyway, since I’ve been leveling I end up in a lot of groups with everyone but me wearing all heirlooms. Why don’t I have heirlooms you ask? Well because until this expansion each account could only have 10 character slots per server. I had one of each class at level cap. I had no need to buy heirlooms because I didn’t have a character that could benefit from them and I would rather spend the JP on other stuff like mounts or crafting mats or gnomish hookers. Had I been smart, I would have bought them with the extra JP I had before it got turned into gold in 5.0.4 or whatever patch it was. But since I’m dumb and didn’t remember to do that, I have no heirlooms.

Pandarian Shenanigans

The Mists of Pandaria expansion has been out about a week now and I’ve been very busy in game seeing what it has to offer. I think that after all I’ve seen so, I am loving this expansion. The first day I might have caught a 24 hour type of bug that forced me to stay home…and play a lot of WoW. Damn those strange and random illnesses! (/shifty eyes)The first day I said forget leveling I’m battling my pets and so I ran around leveling up a battle team. I have yet to name my battle team or even the pets in said team but they are around level 10/11. I have collected a lot of new pets and currently I am under 50 pets to the 250 unique pets achievement. Woots.  

After a while I decided to go quest for a bit in Pandaria and see what else the expansion included. I had quested in the Jade forest on the Beta back before they changed the whole zone. Because of this I had seen what the starter quest lines were like and I think that the new starter area is a ton better than the old area. In the old starter area you would find yourself in the Jade Forest under attack from Hozen and you would have to defend yourself. The new zone has you take the fight to the Horde and their base on the island. I much prefer the new quests as they definitely convey the “we are at war” concept that blizzard has been pushing on us for this expansion.

Coolest Mage Spec: A guide to 5.0.4 Frost Mages

Oh Frost spec. You and I have done our dance for a long time now and we’ve seen many highs and many more lows throughout our WoW love affair. We have been mocked for choosing each other but those people never understood the power of Frost. They didn’t let us raid with them and it was ok, because you and I were better than them and we knew it. We were once the top dog in Vanilla but when BC came out, we were left behind by the other two specs. It was ok because we had our water elemental (Aquamus Prime)and we were still feared in pvp. In Wrath we were given more fight control talents but our dps was miles behind most other classes. Our new ability, deep freeze, only froze things in place for a few seconds and on mobs that were immune to it, it was wasted. Eventually it was made to do damage on immune mobs and seeing high crits on bosses was nice but we were still a rare sight in raids.

When leveling, many mages went frost because it made leveling a lot easier to have a damage shield and plenty of crowd controllability. As soon as most frost mages hit level cap, they’d usually pick a different spec. Why bother playing a class that you enjoy if it can’t bring the dps you need in raids? Because of the high number of leveling frost mages who didn’t understand the class or how to play it right, most people assumed that frost was a lost cause and that only baddies played frost at level cap.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

We have a week to go before the 5.0.4 patch drops and about a month before Mists of Pandaria is finally released. Between then and now we have to do two things: relearn how to play our characters with the new MoP talents and secondly, decide if the new game changes have made the game more or less fun. Hopefully most of you are in the more fun category but I know that for a few of you, the game has lost its grasp on your interest. Don't worry my dear readers, I have played the beta and am firmly in the still fun category. I look forward to seeing everything Pandaria has to offer and having a great time with my guild running new dungeons, raids, and scenarios.

With so many new and exciting features like pet battles and scenarios, I believe that there is enough to keep me interested and playing WoW until the next expansion. I know some people are looking forward to one feature above all others, the pet battles! For others they are looking forward to Pandas and monks. 


But as I said, for some the game has taken a turn that they don't like. For some of these people the game is not the same game they fell in love with. For some real life has intruded (as it does) and while they sadly would love to play the game, they are unable to do so because of real life. Perhaps some have found a different game that now holds the place in their heart that WoW once used to occupy. They have decided to jump ship and are not looking back.

Pandas and you

So with Mists of Pandaria having a release date of 9/25/12 we are now faced with the fun task of preparing for the expansion that will be here before we know it. What does this mean for you? Well now is a great time for someone to decide to switch who their main raiding character is going to be. This character wont be the character you'll be forced to play for the rest of the expansion, it'll just be the character that you are focused on leveling to 90 first. If you mainly played a healer this expansion and want to raid tank or just focus on dps, this expansion is the perfect excuse to make that switch.

For me I know that I'll be leveling my mage AND my pally at the same time but focusing on the mage since he is always my first max level capped alt. The pally will be my raid main so he will be who I raid progression stuff with, as usual. I know that I'll be make a panda monk on my main account and that I'll be race changing my mini-mage to a panda because panda mages, like fezzes and bow ties, are cool.

I also plan on running around pet battling the hell out of everyone on my main mage because he is my pet/mount collector and I wants me some more achievement points! I suppose I should make a bucket list now that I know I have a deadline for it so expect to see that post somewhere down the line.

What about the rest of you? Who will you all be leveling to 90 first? Is anyone going to be rolling a panda monk and power leveling that to 90?