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?

Cross Realm Boosts

So uhm there is a perfectly good reason why my last post was almost two months ago and that reason is uhm...well.. ya see...HEY LOOK OVER THERE! /Cast Invisibility /Run Away

The real reason is that life in Zurich has kept me rather busy and sometimes I just don't have the time to blog about things and stuff in the World of Warcraft! I am still playing and still raiding in the SoO raid instance(at a really late local time) and over all I've been having a good time. Lot of stuff has happened since the last time I blogged and I figured I might as well make with the yakkity yak blog stuff.

Bad World PVP

Let me start this story by stating that the server that I play on is a pvp server. I’ve played on this server since it opened up in 2005 and as a result I’ve seen my fair share of world pvp. When I was a young mage questing in Redridge, it was a common occurrence to have high level horde raid the town and gank every poor lowbie alliance person they saw. On a pvp server you often get used to such douche baggery happening and when you are higher level and able to do something about it, most people often do. I can remember several pvp battles in Lakeshire, Menethil Harbor, and the ever famous Southshore. Sometimes the pvp fights were a nice distraction and sometimes they were a rather large annoyance but being on a pvp server, you knew what you could expect at any time. To me this made the game a little more deadly and exciting. Not everyone’s cup of tea I suppose.

Sadly as the years have gone by, my server population went from medium in vanilla to low in BC and has stayed there since. Every now and then it’ll pop up briefly to medium before sinking back into its usual low pop status. What does this mean? Well it means that while leveling a lowbie alt you’re more likely to see a group of mobs having a naked dance party than seeing a horde. In fact that’s one of the biggest selling points I tell people on twitter when I tell them to roll on my server to play with me! This is mostly true except for poor Megs who kept running into horde who managed to kill her often.  Anyway, because our population is so low, world pvp doesn’t happen that often. This is great for leveling alts but bad for people who want to pvp.

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.

Legendary Encounters

6 months of spending Saturday nights raiding, about 20 actual raids, countless wipes. In the end what did I get out of it? Well that’s easy to answer. I got to spend 20 nights have a great time with some really fun and awesome people. Oh and I also got a legendary staff that is full of awesomeness and win.

Why did it take 6 months to get a legendary for my mage? Well I went through the Twitterland Raiding community which is composed of people from twitter. We didn’t always have the same raid roster every night so we had to spend a lot of time explaining fights and figuring out why people were dying. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough people signed up so we had to spend time trying to pull people into the raid from twitter/real id friends lists and that ate into the raid time. Both of these reasons caused us to not always down every boss each raid night which led to not getting the maximum number of eternal embers/seething cinders/smouldering essences.

I decided to go through Twitter because one night in February(the 18th to be precise) someone else was running a Firelands run and I wanted to join it. Sadly I did not but while I was waiting to hear back I was in the Twitter Mumble server talking to Oestrus who decided that we should just organize our own group. This led to a lot of tweeting and real id friending and before I knew it, we had a Firelands raid. We had a great time and I met a lot of new and fun people who wanted to run Firelands with me whenever I ran it.

I wrote a post about running Firelands with Twitter people back in February and how much fun I had. Looking back at it now, I have had even more fun since then. Not long into the Firelands runs I decided to take a page from my vanilla playbook and spend the night drinking and killing fire bosses. Back in vanilla, I ran Molten Core with the guild on Saturday nights and several guildees and I would drink together and have a great time killing stuff. With Firelands feeling like Molten Core 2.0 I clearly needed to drink! This quickly spread amongst some of the raid members and became our Saturday night tradition. I would drink and some people would join me and we’d have a good time. If we didn’t down everything, well at least we had a damn good time.

I definitely could not have done this alone and so I get to the most important part of this post. This is the part where I thank everyone who showed up to the raid whether it was just once or whether they were there every single night. A big thank you to the following: Rowann, Oestrus, Poneria, Hestiah, Asherrylie, Hempia, Velidra, Rooster, Dee, Lemon, Sidecar, Rofer, Rilandune, Exlucis, Ekinara, Aero, Pix, Kia, Saz, Munificence, Thyro, Penguin, Stellery, Megs, Haitia, Askevi, Lurien, Matticus, Macaroni, Kitsuno, Sikaros, Finalflame, and everyone in my guild who tried to down rag for me. If I missed your name please let me know and I will gladly add you to the list!  

If anyone would like to watch the Livestream I did of the turning in ceremony you can click here.

Continuing Story Adventures

Jumping out the window was the winning choice last week. So here is the fun story you've been waiting for! As always please leave a comment with your choice for next week's adventure and thanks for reading!

The stranger gathered the few things he has brought in with him and walked to the door. He heard noises outside in the hallway which made him pause. “That doesn’t sound like people leaving the inn because of the fire,” he thought to himself. He heard footsteps coming down the hallway to his door and he took a step back and prepared himself. “Whoever it is, they aren’t getting me without a fight.”

Jedem: Through the years

The very nice and friendly Vidyala over at Manalicious wrote about a cool meme that involved posting a screenshot of your main from many levels ago along with a screenshot of it now to show how far you've come along. I meant to do this post the other day when Vid actually posted about it but of course doing things when they are relevant just isn't my style. So I dug through seven years worth of screenshots and eventually I found screenshots that made me both laugh and cry. Seven years of visual reminders of things that you've gone through tend to do that.

Anyway on with the show! I decided that I would tweak the premise of the meme and instead of posting a comparison of a character then and now, I am posting a visual timeline for my mage. Step back into the way back machine with me as we travel back to the year 2005. It was a good year: Facebook was still only for the cool kids in college, the White Sox won the World Series, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released, and a young man who would go on to be known world wide as Jed, began to play the World of Warcraft.

More class previews

So...how bout those class previews...that I didn't get around to reviewing...at least I have a good excuse! I was busy dinging 53 on my shaman Rhommel! Clearly that should buy me a little slack! Anyway back to the previews:

Warriors:
Heroic Leap = jumping charge + thunderclap + warstomp = content Jed on his warrior!! MOAR PLXX!
Heroic Strike no longer on next swing = yays! Heroic strike doing more damage the more rage you have is even better.
Dual wielding one handers as fury = interesting, its a nice throwback to burning crusade days and it will help arms warriors actually get a 2h over a fury warrior.

Rogues:
Redirect = Woots for not losing combo points on a mob about to die! Nothing worse then losing a 4 or 5 combo stack because a mob dies before you can do something with those points.
Smoke bomb = Nice and sexy new tool to help tanks pull casters without having to run up to them and manually interrupt them. Should be interesting to see how this is balanced in arenas too.
No more weapon specialization talents = bold move by blizzard.

Death Knights:
Outbreak = Awesome for getting agro on a mob that is beating on a healer or dps who are too quick to generate threat/dps, especially when your taunts are on CD.
Dark Simulacrum = DK's are now blue mages? Being able to copy and steal a casters next spell sounds pretty cool but it'll be interesting to see it actually work.
Only having blood tanks = sad Jed. I love my frost DK and wouldn't trade him for anything and this move seriously makes me sad. Guess blizzard is tired of trying to make all three trees tank viable.

Hunters:
Cobra shot = yays for BM getting a new ability to spam instead of steady shot!
Trap launcher = kind of lazy there blizzard, taking an ability hunters already have(freezing arrow) and making it usable with all traps.
Camouflage = A new FD/shadowmeld type of ability. Could be cool or could only be useful for pvp, gonna have to wait and see on this one.
Pet management changes = WOOTS for not having to go back to town to change out a pet if your Call Stabled Pet ability is on cd. Even better because now my hunter can actually get some more spirit beasts to show off in dal!

Druids:
New abilities are kind of blah so far but at least they aren't as bad as the new lock abilities. The change to Tree of Life make me sad face. I LOVE my tree form in raids and only being able to use it when I pop a cd doesn't make me happy.

Mages:
Flame Orbs = Can't wait to see this move in use! It sounds pretty cool.
Time Warp = HEROISM or BLOODLUST if you're horde. WOOTS! Not every raid has a shaman but most will have one or more mages so giving them a heroism type ability is awesome! I plan to make a Rocky Horror Picture Show macro for when I use my Heroism!
Wall of Fog = Who needs a knockback when you can slow down anything agroing onto you so the tank can get it back before it kills anyone. This will seriously piss off people in BG's.
The changes to food at lower levels is kind of dumb to me but at least mages will be able to make an all in one food/drink to save on bag space.


Well that's about it for the class previews until tomorrow when Paladins get their review. So far I am looking forward to my shaman and mage the most with my warrior and rogue coming up after them. I really hope they don't screw up my paladin or I'll be a sad panda.

Oh and after the paladin preview I'll probably have another lowbie instance rant to post so all my blog readers(all 3 of you) can have something to look forward to!

- Jed