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.

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.

Ursin Adventures

I had asked Exlucis to write a guest post for me and he did an awesome job at it. I meant to post this over the weekend when I originally got it but since I was at a Comic Convention, I didn't get the chance. So you get it today! I'll try to get out the next part of the story later this week.

When Jed asked me to do a guest post on his blog, I was honored.  Then I was hungry, so I made a sandwich.  After the sandwich I felt nervous; not because of the mayo or anything like that.  I wasn’t sure what I would write about.

It’s easy to write about myself and stuff about me, because I am familiar with myself and what I’m dealing with, and how all of that coincides with gaming.  What could I use from my knowledge that I could apply to Jed’s blog?  I considered spinning a yarn of my own, about Jedem and Oslis, adding to the tale.  I considered writing about the effect an enthralling story has in our interactions in Azeroth, both with the game and each other.  I considered writing a biopic about Jed himself.  I decided to write about the gnomish death race instead.  Or rather, where the race itself took place.

Adventure Times

I know this is late and I have no excuse other than the fact that I was suffering from a case of serious writers block. Thankfully I was able to overcome it and I figured out what I wanted to say for this part AND the next part! For now, enjoy! =D

“Fine! I suppose we can wait for you to get us in but you better make sure we don’t wait all day Elling,” Jedem said. “We’ll be at the Pig and Whistle Tavern. Come along Oslis; let’s give Elling some time to work his magic.”

“Ye had mae at tavern,” Oslis responded.

“Watch yourself in Old Town Jedem,” Elling warned. “By now word of your arrival in town has probably spread across Stormwind and you-know-who will want to have a word with you.”

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?

The Seven Year Itch

Once upon a time in WoW, there was a stubborn guy who was abandoned by all his friends on a brand new server. Instead of despairing and following them, this super stubborn fella decided to create a guild and show all his supposed friends that they were wrong for leaving him behind. From this stubbornness something was created that has continued to thrive to this day: the Avengers of Azeroth guild. I’m sure that some of you read that last sentence and probably thought to yourselves “wait all this over some dumb video game guild?” To those people I respond with: YES NOW SHUT UP AND LET ME CONTINUE!

Why am I rambling about my guild yet again? Well because it's the bee's knees duh! Also because we have officially turned 7 years old today July 24th. Our server was opened on July 23, 2005 and my guild came into existence the next day. We would have started that first day but I wasn't able to get enough people to sign my charter until the next day. As it stands now, my guild is the oldest active guild on the server. There is only one older guild on the server but they are not really active and so my guild > theirs.

To celebrate we are going to be holding one of our super awesome traditional events: a Gnomish Death Race! This year its going to be an Outland style race, from Shattrath to Honor Hold. The race will start at 5pm Central Standard Time and will probably go for about an hour or so. We will provide a Ventrilo server for all the racers to join us before the race to facilitate invites and such.

Sounds amazingly awesome right? Want to attend the race? Well all you have to do is roll a level 1 gnome on the Ursin-PvP server and send a whisper to Jedem or anyone online in Avengers of Azeroth. The race is always a fun time and some people go all out with their racers by sending themselves vanity pets and fashionable white gear. No heirlooms are allowed in the race as they provide an unfair advantage since not everyone has easy access to them.

For anyone who can't make the race but would like to watch it, I will be streaming it live: http://www.livestream.com/jedsstream

Its a race...of DEATH! I hope to see you all at the race!