So BRK is underwhelmed by the mage blogging community. That’s for sure. According to the show I just listened to, he and his fellow hunters think there are only two mage blogs out there. And of those two, one has the bad habit of publishing misleading information.
Don’t you believe me? Well, download episode 34 of Hunting Party, where BRK appeared as a special guest, and hear for yourself.
It was a bit of a shocker, I tell you! My hero is rejecting me and all of my fellow mage bloggers. Just like that!
I probably would do wise to remain silent about it. You don’t challenge the most outstanding icon of the blogging community (an icon I happen to like a lot myself). Especially not considering he’s wearing a gun.
But right should be right, so I’ll speak up, regardless of the consequences.
Admittedly BRK wasn’t the one who said that one of the two existing mage blogs is misleading. The host did. But BRK didn’t object at all – on the contrary, he seemed to agree and added that mage blogs didn’t hold much content except for “Hi, I play frost, it’s cold” or “I’m short and wear a dress”.
Of course this woke my curiosity. Ever since I heard it, I’ve been trying to figure out which blogs they had in mind in this conversation. The frost blog should be fairly easy to identify, since Euripedes sadly closed his door and Spicytuna hasn’t updated for very long. It leaves us with Frost is the New Black as the most profiled candidate.
But which mage blog contains the misinformation? Hm. That’s a bit tricky. It could be Krizzlybear of course, but he has backed up his weird love for the frost spec with some solid damage charts to prove his points. It’s probably more likely that they’re talking about Gnomeaggedon, known from the past to spread delusional ideas, such as fire being a better spec than arcane and BG:s being a fun way to spend your time online.
But on the other hand, who’s the short one in a dress? Could that be me? Or is it someone else of the approximately 70 mage blogs there are out there?
Yes, we’re actually that many according to the blog list kept by Gnome. A few of the blogs on the list have closed down, but even if only half of them are still around, it’s yet a big collective we’re talking about. More than two at least.
I admit that I don't know of any podcast entirely dedicated to the mage class, unless you count TotalBiscuit who never has played anything but mage, but makes a point out of not letting class specific information taking over the show.
And I too can get a little bit impressed as I look at the abundance of hunter blogs and druid blogs. For some reason those classes seem to slightly more chatty then others.
Nevertheless – don’t you agree that it’s to pull it slightly too far to claim that there aren’t any mage blogs at all around, and that one of the two there are contains misleading information?
Brothers and sisters in the mage blogging community! We’ve had our controversies over the year regarding what spec is the best to play. Now it’s time to unite our voices and speak up, so loud that even those hunters will hear us through the noise of their blasters.
Mage blogs exist! And we don’t mislead you any more than necessary to keep some of our secrets to ourselves. Just to maintain the class balance, you know.
Don’t you believe me? Well, download episode 34 of Hunting Party, where BRK appeared as a special guest, and hear for yourself.
It was a bit of a shocker, I tell you! My hero is rejecting me and all of my fellow mage bloggers. Just like that!
I probably would do wise to remain silent about it. You don’t challenge the most outstanding icon of the blogging community (an icon I happen to like a lot myself). Especially not considering he’s wearing a gun.
But right should be right, so I’ll speak up, regardless of the consequences.
Admittedly BRK wasn’t the one who said that one of the two existing mage blogs is misleading. The host did. But BRK didn’t object at all – on the contrary, he seemed to agree and added that mage blogs didn’t hold much content except for “Hi, I play frost, it’s cold” or “I’m short and wear a dress”.
Of course this woke my curiosity. Ever since I heard it, I’ve been trying to figure out which blogs they had in mind in this conversation. The frost blog should be fairly easy to identify, since Euripedes sadly closed his door and Spicytuna hasn’t updated for very long. It leaves us with Frost is the New Black as the most profiled candidate.
But which mage blog contains the misinformation? Hm. That’s a bit tricky. It could be Krizzlybear of course, but he has backed up his weird love for the frost spec with some solid damage charts to prove his points. It’s probably more likely that they’re talking about Gnomeaggedon, known from the past to spread delusional ideas, such as fire being a better spec than arcane and BG:s being a fun way to spend your time online.
But on the other hand, who’s the short one in a dress? Could that be me? Or is it someone else of the approximately 70 mage blogs there are out there?
Yes, we’re actually that many according to the blog list kept by Gnome. A few of the blogs on the list have closed down, but even if only half of them are still around, it’s yet a big collective we’re talking about. More than two at least.
I admit that I don't know of any podcast entirely dedicated to the mage class, unless you count TotalBiscuit who never has played anything but mage, but makes a point out of not letting class specific information taking over the show.
And I too can get a little bit impressed as I look at the abundance of hunter blogs and druid blogs. For some reason those classes seem to slightly more chatty then others.
Nevertheless – don’t you agree that it’s to pull it slightly too far to claim that there aren’t any mage blogs at all around, and that one of the two there are contains misleading information?
Brothers and sisters in the mage blogging community! We’ve had our controversies over the year regarding what spec is the best to play. Now it’s time to unite our voices and speak up, so loud that even those hunters will hear us through the noise of their blasters.
Mage blogs exist! And we don’t mislead you any more than necessary to keep some of our secrets to ourselves. Just to maintain the class balance, you know.
51 comments:
Yeah, that BRK. He do say the darndest things on podcasts once his mouth gets a-rolling. Could be worse, though. Poor Kinnavieve's still upset from the time he called her the "ugliest paladin in Azeroth" over on Twisty Nethers.
Curious, isn't it, that on our 10/12 heroic icc 25 guild, our top mage went Fire and is pumping out an extra 1-2k dps per fight than in his arcane spec!
WARLOCKS FOREVER! DOWN WITH MAGES!
To be honest, I don't know about half the blogs that exist out there. So much of it is not useful, and in fact, even YOUR blog is pretty useless for a mage.
No, you may be a mage, but yours is not a mage blog.
Much love for you Larisa, your blog is important to me, for helping see the game as the sandcastle at the beach as it is. I may have left for the day, and my sandcastle may have washed away, but.... I just might be back someday, and I'll make another sandcastle with some friends. THAT is the importance of you blog. The mage part doesn't have much at all to do with your blog.
I really don't look at you as a Mage blogger - You cover a much broader set of topics than just magery.
I look at you not as a mage blogger, but as a blogger who happens to play a mage!
Scotch
This is a mage blog? I thought it was a blog about RP with a few other tidbits thrown in...
Don't get me wrong, but I don't think a full on "all about mages" blog would be all that interesting...
Rotations are all fairly easy, gems glyphs builds etc have all been covered... its not like tanking where you need to know where every pixel is going to be in a fight... as a pure dps class, you cant heal or tank, you can only dps... dont stand in the fire and kill the adds... there is the boss explaination for 75% of WotLK
That was one h3ll of a grotesque paladin, and we've yet heard a single word of denial.
FYI, we love the PPI!
(Holy wow that rhymes. Where's fitty cent when we need him?)
/wave!
BRK
I respect BRK as a "big name" in blogging, but his new efforts are pushing me to the brink of removing him from my reader.
I don't really understand why people keep fawning over these posts that are just lines of non-information. We're up to nine (and counting, I can only assume). It was funny the first post or two, to read blanked-out spoilers and things like "HAHAH I can't believe they did that!" .. but now the comedic potential has been stretched thin and it's just boring and dumb. I thought it was just for comedy value once or twice - but it seems like he's going to go on like this for the entire duration of the Alpha? If that's the case, bring on the Beta, for the love of god, so we can put these posts out of their misery.
I understand he is under an NDA so he can't post specifics - but he could still write something more than un-notes. Retrospectives, speculation about the future of the class.. anything. But no, it's almost exclusively posts about _______ being hilarious and ________ being horribly broken. It's dull, repetitive, and pointless. And the more it continues, the more I wonder whether it's worth continuing to subscribe - is it going to get any better? I want to read his actual posts, not a list of blanked-out inside jokes. So I stay subscribed, hoping that it will actually be worth reading.. sometime.
Sorry to bitch, I know your post was not specifically to bag him. And I know nobody is the perfect blogger (I'm certainly not), but I guess I expected.. more? More from BRK because he is such a big name. More than just the same thing barfed up each day, with different blankety blanks, and perhaps prefaced with "I'm trying goblin today" or "Human testing today" to make people guess what he might be referring to. ZZZ.
Not exactly the triumphant return that I had anticipated.
/snarkymode off!
..I realise that was only very vaguely on-topic, sorry to clog your mage post up with my personal frustrations!
I blame the mirror image + invisibility combo. We constantly pop those spells to drop aggro but they probably make us hard to follow. :)
Ironically, I think it's also a generally good time to be a mage. We've currently got four plausible PVE specs (well, Frostfire seems to be down for the moment, but it'll make a comeback with five more points in Cataclysm) and at least two PVP specs. I've been amusing myself by farming Heroic Magister's Terrace solo in the hopes of getting a non-robo chicken.
Maybe mages are less visible because we've got less to complain about than usual?
Wait, what? This is a mage blog? I thought it was a WOW blog incidentally run by a gnome, who happens to be a mage?
I'm sorry if we offended, but to be honest, I just don't know that much about mages. I assume that there's only so much you can write about summoning food, porting people home after the raid, and blinking, though.
<3
"I assume that there's only so much you can write about summoning food, porting people home after the raid, and blinking, though."
ouch.. :P
BRK retired last year. Now it seems that while he is away, somebody else has hacked his account and is impersonating him, trying to make him look stupid. It won't work, though. The Big Red Kitty was never that stupid.
I haven't listened to the podcast yet, so this is not directly to that. But, my alt mage just got to lvl 80, and I was curious about some "how to"-things (mainly if fire would perform better in heroics than arcane, if we presume that the challenge is speeding up the overall run, not if bosses go down or not). The way I remember BRK's blog before, I could have asked a hunter question like that there and gotten a lively discussion in response. I considered if there were a place to ask it, and I actually thought of the Inn since I love the blog and know that Larissa is a mage - but it didn't seem like an obvious question to ask to me. (If it had been a question to something close to what Larissa was currently doing of content and same gear lvl it might have been different).
So, since it's already come up, where is a good place to ask that kind of mage questions in the blogosphere?
(Of course, noone has had to go out on an epic quest to teach mages to be mages and not magetards, since the mage community has never had that kind of prejudice directed against it. Maybe that's part of the difference? Hunters seemed to have a very strong solidarity, let's help all hunters be great kinda thing going back then).
I'm going to blogger hell for this, but I thought you were a paladin. I checked back over the last month and you've hinted at being a mage three times and only came right out with it once (when you got your kingslayer). I remember realizing I was wrong about the pally thing at the time, but then I forgot.
I'm not quite sure how I came to that conclusion, but I think it went something like this:
1) everyone who's anyone plays horde
2) the only horde with pink hair would be belfs
3) all belfs are pally's
Perfectly understandable right?
(OK, the real reason is probably that I added you back when I was collecting healing blogs and you probably had a post about pally's)
Needless to say, you should write more about your baking exploits so no one gets confused. :)
I think the solution to this problem is fairly obvious. The blogging community is rather large. Let's find some new mage bloggers that have labored in obscurity and spread the word. I for sure would read them, link them, and love them. I refuse to believe that there is a scarcity of information on ANY topic or any class - we just have to get better at finding it.
I really hope you were joking when you were saying that fire being better then arcane isn't true. Once you start geting into a bit of hardmode hear and a proper raid setup fire doesn't just do more damage because it's more movement friendly, it also will pump out more damage. The only fight I still use arcane on is lootship because you can burst the Mage faster.
I'd be more curious to know why there are so many hunter blogs!
and yes, I'm probally being paranoid about you commenting on firemages, but after seeing some of the horrors in pugs you can never be to sure.
And even worse, someone using the BRK name (even worse if it's actually him), logs in here and ignores the whole point of the PPI post, only obliquely referencing one obscure side point from one of the replies.
This kind of reminds me of an incident a few months back where a rather popular blogger, and her cadre, attacked another smaller blogger.
Arrogance and/or indifference (especially to smaller, newer folks) bother me.
Then again, we don't all get a gun named after us.
CriticalQQ has always been my mage blog of choice, and I just went there to check him and found out he's retiring. Dammit.
Wolflore said...
I agree with those that don't see the PPI as a mage blog. You rarely discuss mage specific issues and that is why you have a much broader audience.
So don't feel concerned about what BRK said.
@All: just as a clarification in case someone missed it: Larísa <3 BRK and I’m not at all upset for real. This post was supposed to be a good humoured response to some silly words I heard on the podcast. I’m not offended and don’t want to offense. OK? In case someone missed that I’m truly sorry. I suppose humor is kind of hard and I’m not known for being particularly funny either so… oh well.
@Ratshag: He’s a dwarf. Explains it all.
: I’m not surprised at all. As said: this post is written from the funny side. I’m well aware of that fire indeed is competitive enough and probably better. I clinge to the arcane spec since I enjoy it as long as I can though since I’m doing pretty crap whenever I try fire. My teasing of Gnome goes back to a little battle we had about our specs two years ago, at a time when hardly anyone but ourselves read our blogs.
@Magma: you say you’re joining the hunters? Hm… We’ve got to look for some new allies in this then.
Fallstar & Stoctch: Hehe, I’m fully aware of this. If you look at the tags, there are only some 35 posts of 500+ that are tagged as “magestuff”. Nevertheless I think it sometimes shines through that I see Azeroth from a mage perspective. It’s true though that I’ve never written a single useful post about how-to-play-a-mage. But somehow my heart remains with the mage community and I speak on behalf of them.
@Red: A blog about RP? Hm… Now I’m kind of clueless. Of all the posts I’ve written, only 9 are tagged with RP. Unless you count the entire setting, using the metaphore of a pub, as role-playing. In that case I suppose you’re right… hm…
Is it easy or hard to play a mage? To be honest I think it’s fairly easy to do it on a basic level, where I am. But if you’re going to be really really good and top the charts you have to know your stuff and it’s more than just not standing in fire. I’m definitely not in that class myself though and there’s no way I could write about how to become that kind of super-mage.
@BRK: <3! But you knew that already.
/wave
@Keeva: I can’t say that the alpha-posts tell me that much either, but I’m patiently waiting for the NDA to be lifted. I also recommend you to listen to that interview. My expectations were pretty low since the NDA is there but it turned out to be very enjoyable. It gave me a new perspective for instance on what being in the alpha is about. It’s software-testing as opposed to playing. Food for thought.
@Green Armadillo: Haha, yeah, maye we got clueless when we couldn’t QQ anymore. Critical QQ shutting down says everything, doesn’t it?
Good idea about MgT. I haven’t tried to solo it at all, actually I never thought I could. But maybe I should give it a try…. It sounds as a good summer project when everything is slowing down. You’re frost specced?
: Yeppish. I admit it actually on the front page under “About me”, but noone seems to have noticed.
: Even the vendor machines and taxi drivers need to rant a bit once in a while. And as I said: no offense taken.
<3
@Dàchéng: Nawwww… Again: Larísa <3 BRK. But if you’re friends you can mock each other a little from time to time, can’t you?
@Syrien: Well, I can’t claim that I’ve got the full picture of every mage blog there is out there, so I’ll probably be very unfair and oblivios, whichever mage blog I’ll mention. I linked the list at Gnomeaggedon, which holds a lot. The Twisted Nether wiki is another place to check. But OK, let’s check a little in my own blogroll… hm… Critical QQ was THE best mage to ask about specs and stats and stuff, but he’s closing now. There are still a lot of post on his blog that will be relevant for a while more. Spicytuna hasn’t been terribly active for a while, but he’s a good theorycrafter as well. PewPewLasers knows a great deal more about magery than I do. Gnomeaggedon has been messing around with his shammy a while, but he’s still a mage at heart and knows some stuff, more than he pretends. Frost is the New Black for frost goodness. Mana Obscura – I’m sure he’ll be happy to answer questions about how-to-play-a-mage. Cleardasting used to be pretty mage-centric, it isn’t anymore but I bet she can write mage-stuff if you ask her nicely. Hm… Tachyon at http://www.frostnova.ch/tachyon/blog.do doesn’t post that often but is a mage-blogger on the useful side. Empowered fire has some guides that I think you might find handy. http://www.empoweredfire.com/ This is not a complete list. Just a few examples. Sorry for everyone I forgot to mention!
@Arcsin: A pink pigtailed belf paladin??? Rofl.
My very first character WAS a pala. A human one. I tried to make her look like me and she looks just stupid. I never got the hang of how to play her and deserted her when her armor turned red and I didn’t understand why she kept dying so easily. I thought she had a disease. She’s still a teenager back at the Kul Tiras server.
It is quite amusing that you saw me as a pala all this time. I thought it was clear that I was a gnome at least???
@Zelmaru: Gnomeaggedon has really tried to spread the word about the mage blogs and promote the mage blogging community more than anyone else. Nevertheless – whenever a new mage blog pops up, the first post they write is “I looked around to find a mage block, but I couldn’t find any, so now I’m starting one”. It makes me giggle every time I see it. For some reason mage bloggers seem to be less visible than others.
: as I said above, the teasing between me and Gnomeaggedon about which spec is the best one has a long history. I was a fire mage back in time too. I enjoy playing arcane more, but when I have to I go back fire. Currently I’m way too low on hit on my gear to respect fire, but yeah… if it turns out really necessary I will. But for some reason we’re not in love anymore, that spec and I. I don’t really enjoy tab-targeting, putting LB on multible targets. I kind of hate it. Sadly enough, from what we’ve seen, arcane won’t be viable in Cata and I’ll have to go back to fire if I want to raid. Just reading from what they’ve said so far. But hopefully that will change. If not – well then I’m back to fire. Reluctantly.
@Spinks: hm… they’re basically sort of double already, sort of dual boxing with their pet. So maybe they’ll duplicate the blogs while they’re at it?
@SlikRX: No way… this doesn’t remind of that. The remark in the podcast was a bit on the silly side and I wrote a silly reply post about it. No bad feelings involved from any side! This is just a friendly banter. And I’m grown up enough to take a punch even from BRK!
@The Noisy Rogue: yeah, it sucks. It really does. The blogosphere will be a lot emptier without his voice.
: Yeah, I’m aware of that I’ve probably slided away a bit form the mage blogging community. But sometimes I’m reminded of my roots. Got to help out my friends when they’re under attack!
I like BRK & mage bloggers. Having recently made my mage my main, I think it is fair to day that mage info sites might not be up with some of the other classes:
There are three levels of information density: Mages Writing, Writing about Mages, and Mage resource sites. There are resources like Shadowpanther for rogues and Warlock's Den. It could be my Googlefu was lacking, but when I went to respec to try fire, I ended up using WoW.com and WoW forums. this is not a Good Thing. I don't know if there need to be more/better Mage bloggers, but I think there need to be better Mage indexers, editors and archivists.
No matter how well written the prose, articles on frostfire specs and Nax are not responsive to the questions people have in June.
All the hunter resources,
Meh.. All Hunters are Barst...ools... that's why you can see them here in the Inn ;-)
Believe it or not, Larisa once posted Mage posts, nearly theorycrafting posts and they were about Fire.
You will have to go back to the beginnings.. back when she painstakingly translated all her Swedish posts into English... that is dedication to the Mage cause!
She inspired me to Blog.. not because I liked her style, but someone had to correct her misinformation ;-) and well, there weren't any other Mage blogs about!
I soon discovered that there were a good dozen or two of them about.
Still, if you think it;s hard to find an invisible Mage blog, try to find a stealthed Rogue blog.
As Larisa says, there are 70 entries in my Mage blogroll... there are many more that I haven't had the time to add to the list, that's over the 2 years I've been blogging.
The thing is we Mages have other great theorycrafting sites, EJ is still about.. Magecraft appears to have forgotten to pay the landlord.. but right now, it's not such a problem.
We are in a good place, no matter what spec you prefer. There used to be more need, there may be in the future, but I expect people will return to this when it is needed most.
it goes back in part to Larisa's post of a few weeks back.. about Blizzards lack of support for the winder community.
Many Mage bloggers have given up as there isn't that much to write about if your goal is pure theorycraft. You write a guide and it is static for months, if not years.
Larisa, Krizzly, Euripedes and a few others have survived by NOT being theorycrafting Mage blogs (or not alone). Side stories, love of Magery, these are the things that keep us going.
I feel for yound Mages searching for clues (which is why it would help if Blizzard at least pointed at the Twisted Nether Big List of Blogs), because sometimes we are hard to find, or our guides are hard to find.
I also feel for Mages that would like to blog, but dont have the time.. I intend to do something about this, but don't want to shout from the rafters while Rip is packing his CriticalQQ bags... he deserves his time in the spotlight. As a heads up, if you would like to write something, anything, Mage related, but without the burden of running a blog, let me know.
BRK and the nutters on that podcast were joking, yet their scattered shot wasn't far off target.
The question is... what are you (no not Larisa.. you!) going to do about it?
My SAN alt is a mage, and playing her is a blast - she's fire spec and more often than not I can get them to fall over before they get to me, or not long after.
Pyro forever...
(although a fire mage blog would be handy!!!)
Hey gnomeaggedon- why have hunters stopped giving mages wedgies after t8?
Because you all wear dresses again!
@Daergel: We are around.. Empowered Fire is another good one.
: What is that hand motion used to taunt hunters (archers).
TBH, those pants never fit very well... it takes balls to be a Mage...
(Sorry Larisa.. couldn't resist)
I enjoy your blog, but don't consider it a mage blog. It's more of a meta blog, or at least that's what I get out of it. Before this post, I wouldn't have been able to say what you main was.
Thanks for the tips, Larissa :)
I still stick to the belief that there are more how to hunter-blogs because hunter's are stupid. What, no more ale for me? WHY? *hic*
I play both classes and must admit, while i agree that there are more than a couple mage blogs out there, most of them dont have any real substance and are often outdated. Hunters on the other hand have a ton and i mean a ton of helpful info. Specs for soloing/ extreme soloing/ pvp 3 specs/ raiding 3 specs/ and hunter tanking....and they are all up to date. They even have an online spreadsheet where it grabs your character from the armory. As a mage, you really have to search to just find out the optimal fire raid spec that is current. Love my mage, but on pure research and resources, we are far far behind them :(
: well, it depends a bit on your spec tbh. If you're frost at least there's quite a lot of good information.
@Gnome: wise words from the silly gnome. Yeah, I think the lack of theorycrafting posts is a sign of the season as well. It goes up and down and corrently there isn't that much to say.
@Daergel: check out Gnomes earlier posts. Lot's of fire love there.
@Goeben: Nah, you're probably right. I just feel like a mage blogger, but in fact I'm more in a classless limbo.
@Syrien: np, I hope you can use some of it.
@Mage/hunter player: well, tbh really honest with you theorycrafting isn't for me. It's not just that I think you can find better information in other places from players with more knowledge - I also think it would be boring and unsatisfying to write. No fun. As simple as that. But if you enjoy that kind of posts, why don't you start a blog of your own and share some of your findings with the blogosphere. If it is as bad as you say, you won't lack readers!
@Larisa
I totally agree with what u said. I read your blog not for the theorycrafting, but for the enjoyment i get from your posts. The problem I have is that there really isnt any real number-crunching/ theorycrafting mages that blog. Take WHU,(im sure you know the site), the guy fires 10,000 steady shots into a training dummy and gets the average damage for that shot, and then changes one glyph and repeats the process. Who really has time for that. Not me certainly, but I wish there was at the very least an equvilent to the femaledwarf.com spreadsheet for mages. Then at least we can theorycraft and fine tune our class a bit more. Anyway, none of this is aimed as a shot at your site. You do your thing very well and I hope you continue to entertain :)
@Mage/Hunter (which scares me because I read Mage-Hunter) ;-)
Tachyan does the 10,000 fireball/AM/Frostbolt stuff
various bloggers do the raid/solo/whatever guides
we don't have shadowpather (which I believe is one of the main reasons for a lack of rogue blogs)
but we do have EJ and EJ supported RAWR for the gear/glyph/gem/0.5% more dps discussions.
I know (and suspect many other mages bloggers) started blogging to bridge the gap between official forum drama and EJ gobbledygook.
Many mages don't care about that last few %, most would like to know where to put the talent points, but searching for "Mage talent tree" gives you wowpopular - job done. Sure without the explanation... But Mage bloggers step up when there is a change to the standard and describe why.
The issue I think is two fold. We are in a good place and the tons of Mage blogger have snippets.
It could be that we also don't have passionite theorycrafters with the time to blog enough to make it viable. It's usually 2-3 months before a new blogger gets the attention that makes it (feel) worthwhile to continue. It's those few months that most bloggers (of any persuasion) give up. This is one of the reasons I try to highlight new bloggers, to give them the incentive to keep writing.
But in the whole scheme of things 11.5 million players) who has heard of me in the 1st place?
I normally went to EJ for any mage advice and used Rawr.Mage to test out rotations and gear. I read CriticalQQ for pointers, mostly when I would venture into the darkside of PvPing, but EJ was the only place I would go for theorycrafting.
PPI and CQQ were more about being mages and wove stories about WoW and more, often than not, include a mage or two. Much more enjoyable than constantly reading about maximizing DPS.
Larisa, if theorycrafting isn't for you, why would you take offense at BRK agreeing that the level of mage blog theorycrafting isn't there?
It's not.
I'm first a hunter who loves BRK and WHU and frostheim and femaledwarf and all that they did and do to eek out a few more points of DPS and to really understand where the damage is coming from.
They do spend a lot of time and provide some serious data. But seriously, it's mental masturbation to the vast majority of us.
I also have a little pink-haired mage (just dinged 40!) that I created with you in mind. I think I've only been out DPS'd once in an instance so far (with BoA gear) with no theorycrafting. Honestly, how DO you you get to be level 38 and have a gear score of only 297?
And I CC my butt off. Does hearing an orc warlock go "BAAAA" ever get old?
I get bored of the competitive nature of raid-huntering. It's not always very fun.
Brissah has a cute little voice, waddles like a duck, and can skin a basilisk with her teeth. Now that's fun.
Mages rock. Down with math.
@Spinks "I'd be more curious to know why there are so many hunter blogs!"
because they can write posts while raiding.
BRK's obsession with WoW came with a hefty price to pay at the end.
I do not know, nor I am interested in knowing the circumstances of his return but the fact he he resumed blogging and podcasting as soon as he picked up the game again leaves me a sense of déjà vu.
I wish him the best, and to his son.
i was shocked (and a bit hurt, i admit) by BRK's ribbing, and i told him so on his blog. i've been a BRK booster from early on. anyway, i'm not a blogger, but i port into all the mage blogs i can and comment when i feel i can contribute in my own small way, as a way of showing appreciation to those who DO write the mage blogs (*waves at gnomeageddon*).
i think that mage blogs get overlooked because everyone just assumes that the latest in-fashion spec is the one that everyone's running -- end of story, nothing more to talk about. gnomeageddon's blog rocks because of his passion for the fire spec and for battlegrounds. he has posted many, many great explanations on both, and i have not found them to be misleading in the least. i've learned a lot from him. in fact, i learn a ton from ALL the mage blogs: CQQ, gnomeageddon, empowered fire, FITNB, i sheep things, great balls of fire, on and on and on. /respect to all of you!
anyway, i have longed for a mage podcast in the vein of the old BRK podcasts. i loved his attention to detail, his explanations of different spec trees, etc. etc. -- mages need that sort of thing! i wish the major mage bloggers (that included PPI, too!) could band together to put out a podcast that covers each spec and talks about things from all the different mage perspectives. a dalaran discourse, as it were.
oh, look at me, not a blogger but rambling on like i know what i'm talking about, ahem...
Larisa - I "get" the alpha - I understand it's a software test, not frolicking around before everyone gets a chance.. but that doesn't really change the fact that it's really irritating to read virtually the same post over and over for weeks. Like I said - yeah, he can't say much in terms of specific - but he's flogged the concept of un-comments to death, and I find it dull and not at all entertaining or clever. Even with the NDA in place, he could write more than blanked out bullet points.
Again - not a perfect blogger here, and not my place to order people to blog in a particular way - but I don't think I'm alone in being disappointed in the "content" he is currently "writing", compared to his old blog.
@keeva:
well, i really enjoy BRK's continuing "NDA compliant" posts. i love trying to guess what in the world (of warcraft) he's referring to. but i like his sense of humor... most times. : )
I liked them too, at first. Once or twice - funny. 9 times... getting a little old now.
I know that a bunch of people enjoy it - they've posted to say so. That's cool. And I know I can just not read, if it irritates me. I guess it just irks me that he's posting the same stuff over and over, and I don't understand why people are (still) fawning over it.
A whole alpha of those posts.. ugh. I want to read the real BRK posts, please. No more bullet point posts over and over. It's getting tiresome.
He could write more, still without exposing anything. Perhaps if there were more "real" posts peppered through, it wouldn't be so bad.. but post after post of "hahah this is awesome" or "/report bug" is just.. zzz.
: A sad thing is that the EJ mage forum is in a pretty bad shape atm and has been for a while. It’s really hard to sort out what’s up-to-date and to get any coherent picture of how-to-play-a-mage from that info. They have a nice thread called “simple questions, simple answers”. I like the idea, but how are you supposed to find what’s been asked before? Impossible. Brows through hundreds of pages… good luck on that. Or ask your question and feel stupid because it’s been asked before….
Yeah… While I don’t agree at all on that there only are two mage blogs of which one is misleading, I think there is room for more blogs with a more dedicated how-to-mage-approach than the current ones provide. Especially with bloggers as Critical QQ and Spicytuna not publishing much anymore.
@Markus: yeah, that’s how I do it to. I desperately try to find the cherries in EJ. And I run Rawr from time to time.
@Bristal: as I said I’m not truly offended. This was on the joking side from both parts. But if you take it slightly more seriously: no I don’t agree that the state of the mage blogosphere is quite as crappy as they said. The world isn’t black and white. There could be more theory-oriented mage blogs (although I must admit that I’d read them more out of duty than of pleasure because I find number-masturbation as you call it immensely boring). But this doesn’t mean that there are only two mage blogs of which one is misleading.
@Stabs: hehe… good one!
: He hasn’t picked up the game tbh. He hasn’t even got a subscription. He’s just doing a bit of software testing. He’s got his priorities right in his life from what I’ve heard and he has no plans to go back to doing podcasting, endgame-theorycrafting and all that circus. Those days are over. I wasn’t worried at all as I heard the podcast.
: a mage podcast? I can’t honestly say that I could put in even more time into out-of-game Wow activities. Blogging takes enough of my time as it is. It’s not that I don’t have fun doing it – I have, but the week has only that many hours. But who knows, maybe someone else will jump on that idea. You never know.
@Keeva: well… I’m just patiently waiting… I’m sure something else will come. And I think we can agree on that just a couple of posts aren’t enough to judge an entire authorship. At least I develop a certain relation to a blogger I follow over time and occasional posts that I find less interesting doesn’t matter at all on the whole. I think you'll get some more agreement from Adam at The Noisy Rogue. He wrote something in that way the other day.
@Stabs, that was a good one about the facerolling huntard blogging at the same time they were raiding. Mind telling me how many mages were in the world first kill of Lich King? Just saying.... (and just kidding, of course).
Seriously, though, I think part of the reason there is so many huntering sites out there is due to the changes Blizz keeps making to the class. I mean, on any given patch day, the whole class may change. Three words to back that statement up - BM Hunter Nerf. That patch alone effectively changed the way the class was played.
And, it's now gonna happen again in Cataclysm - hunters will no longer use mana and will instead use focus. Without even going into that and derailing this post even further, I guess what I'm trying to hint at is there the same NEED for a plethora of sites dedicated to same level of theorycrafting for the mage class?
SpiritusRex
I hadn't had a chance to get back here and see you kind response to my comment, Larisa, but I was informed via email about my lack of understanding. Appologies to anyone I may have ruffled in my ignorance.
The good thing about inside jokes is that you can share them with folks you are close to, and get a nice private smile and warm fuzzy feeling. It's private.
The bad news is that nobody outside of a very small number will understand the joke and it can easily get misinterpreted.(*waves*)
I think I've mentioned elsewhere, but I'm going to have a stab at pulling together every single bit of mage info there is out there - every guide, every strategy, the whole shebang. This might take a while...
Also, if EJ isn't your cup of tea, try EpicAdvice. The community atmosphere there is very healthy and self-moderating, so seems to work well.
It would have been obvious that you were a gnome from your header if I visited your home page, but I read my 30 blogs through Google Reader. I'm a little annoyed that this loses so much identity of each blog (clearly) and probably gets them all conflated to boot. I'll have to check my blogroll for a pally blogger that I think is a mage. :)
This is probably why Matticus et al. embed their signature in every post. I thought that was a little quirky for a bit, but I've certainly never been confused about who I was reading with them.
Fire kinda is better than Arcane now, if you have the right gear setup.
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