The beauty of a spell

Does it really matter how a spell looks when you cast it? As long as it hurts a lot, couldn’t it have any kind of colour and shape? That would make sense. But I’ve got a confession to make: sometimes I’m not sensible at all. Sometimes I want to look cool and feel like the über-powered super mage I was meant to be, even if it’s just an illusion.

Learning frostfire
As a mage you have a few spells to choose between, but until now neither of them has met my expectations when it comes to looks. I guess I’ve seen too many fireballs and arcane blasts take off in my days to really notice them anymore.

I haven’t thrown quite that many frostbolts, but they seem a bit… plain. Arcane missiles are more spectacular, but a little too tiny, reminding of harmless fireworks handled by children.

But now my prayers have been heard! Dinging 75 last week I trained the new glorious frostfirebolt spell that the whole mage community has been talking about lately.

There was no doubt about the fact that this was an interesting spell damagewise. I won’t go on about that, it’s been covered in other blogs – check out Frost is the new black, Critical QQ and Player versus developer for some further theorycrafting and inspiration. What I appreciated most though was the graphics. Finally we’ve been given a spell that won’t pass unnoticed!

From slush to comet
To be honest I had been a bit sceptic towards the whole concept of frostfire. If you think about it, fire+ice should end up as some sort of harmless, melting, soft slush. Cold, wet and annoying, but not very hard hitting. But I was dead wrong. I had forgotten about the comets travelling all across the universe, cold ice blocks which turns into burning deadly projectiles when they hit the atmosphere. That’s where Blizzard has got their inspiration. Fire and ice – yes it makes sense in this version. They’ve also given it a sort of glimmering, metallic finish, which makes it look even better.

What does frustrate me a bit is the speed of it – the waiting time for it to go off makes me feel as if I had been hit by some slowing frost spell. On the other hand I’ve got hot streak and frostbite nowadays, giving me instant pyros and freezing the mobs to ice every now and than. That makes up for it. No more boring fireball spamming!

Time for a change
How many fireballs have left the little paws of Larísa during the years? I have no idea. Thousands? Millions? It was definitely about time she had a change. Even though it’s just the colour of the ball hurling through the air, the feeling of it is totally different.

Where will I stand in six months from now? Will I still be enthusiastic or will the sensation of a novelty have wear off by then? It remains to see. But for now I’m all in for it!

It remains to see where I’ll stand in six months from now. Will I still be enthusiastic or have I seen it too many times by then to notice anymore? It remains to see. But currently I enjoy every single beautiful comet spell that takes off.

Node stealing, inner moral compasses and a true story

Recently there has been a lot of talk on the blogs about player behaviour. Some players have complained about supposed “ninja actions”, when players “steal nodes” from other players, who have cleared the way to the node, killing the mobs around it.

Others have witnessed about the opposite – how easy it is nowadays to group in player heavy areas instead of fighting over a certain named, slow spawning mob, needed for a quest. People help each other because it benefits everyone in the long run.

Goblin philosophy
Gevlon at the Greedy Goblin took another approach to it the other day, pointing out that there is no such a thing as a rule that you “earn” nodes or certain mobs. With his usual goblin logic he showed the futility in doing such claims. Not surprising he got quite a few comments on this post, including one from myself.

Something in me revolted against the idea that only rules that are written down and decided from an authority should be respected. Life – in Azeroth as well as outside of it – is full of unwritten rules, conventions and agreements people have made since hundreds and thousands of years. Of course some people don’t care about them, but most do, and that makes life a lot easier and more pleasant than it would have been if they hadn’t existed.

The idea that you “earn” a node by killing the mobs around you comes out of a feeling of justice, no different from real life. If you work you expect to get the fruit of it (with the exception of taxes of course.)

Differently tuned
Now comes the inevitable question: how do I know what is fair? Well, I think I have a sort of inner moral compass. A feeling of what’s right and wrong, coming out of some kind of humanity dwelling inside of me in my brain, my heart or perhaps an organ yet to be discovered by scientists. And I think I share this feeling with many people, no matter of what beliefs they may have and not have. It’s not about religion. It’s about being human.

What I think causes some problems in the game is that for some reason the inner compasses of some players are differently tuned in the game than in real life. I doubt that the guys who grab the opportunity to snatch nodes from others would do the same thing if they were out in a forest picking mushrooms. “Hey, someone else found a spot of mushrooms over there, I’d better rush and pick as many as I can in front of their eyes. After all there’s no law against it”. You don’t see that often, if ever. But in the game you do.

Where does this difference come from? Well, maybe our inner compasses aren’t telling the whole story after all. Maybe we all carry more features of selfishness or even evilness than we want to admit, even to ourselves. There’s an additional arrow in our compass, pointing in another direction. And the game provides an anonymous arena where we can try it out, obeying those less flattering sides of ourselves. Maybe we need it, as an outlet.

This is an attempt to explain it – but still I still don’t think it’s a valid excuse for behaving like a moron. If you want to explore your aggressive and mean sides, you can do that in PvP and no one will whine about it the slightest.

How to handle it
However, even if I do disagree with Gevlon – in the aspect I think that we as civilized citizens have moral contracts apart from the written laws – I do agree with his conclusion:

Of course you can call the people, who don't follow your non-existing rule "asshats" or "jerks", but it does not change anything. They most probably don't even know what you think, and if you /w it to them, remember, you are just an /ignore away. Calling them anything won't stop them taking "your" node. It increases your blood pressure though.

How true isn’t this! Getting angry won’t change anything, it will only make you more miserable – and what’s the point about that? Stay calm. Turn your back to hate and blaming and keep your eyes open. When you least expect it you’ll find someone with an inner compass pointing in the same direction as you and it will make your day.

A true story
I’ll end this quite messy, ranting post (which I apologize for, for some reason my mind seems to wander more than usual today) with a sweet – and true – little story. It all took place in Sholazar Basin, where I was questing the other day. I was on a mission to make a quest where you’re supposed to kill an elite by using a ward, reflecting his nasty deathbolts. When I arrived at the spot the mob was dead and I saw another guy waiting there. Now this was a hordie, so we couldn’t group. Since he was first on spot I waited to see him take down the guy first. He didn’t. He died, even though I tried to help him. When he had died, the tag went over to me, but of course I died too. (This quest was a bit tricky until you understood the drill). Corpse run back, followed by a new try, which also ended up in both dying. The third time however I managed to help him take down the mob. Conversation was impossible, for known reasons but he thanked me in gestures and I happily hugged him back. Then this hordie stayed around and waited for the mob to respawn and returned the service, helping me out.

There was no written rule that forced me to help him in the first place. And certainly no law told him to return the service. Still we partied in the way we could, since our inner moral compasses were synchronized. And you bet the warm and cosy feeling I felt in my stomach after this short encounter was a much bigger reward to me than the xp, gold and gear that the questgiver gave me.

So my final words are: keep listening to your own inner moral compass – no matter what the formal rules of Blizzard say. Do what’s right and don’t feel as a looser if other players take advantage of you because you’re “soft hearted”. Sooner or later you’ll run into likeminded players and in the long run I think you’ll end up as a winner, one way or the other.

If nothing else you’ll have a warm tummy.

Unprepared and utterly happy

The other day I experienced one of the most enjoyable instance runs I’ve had for a very long time. What made me so happy wasn’t only the fact that I was in a nice and competent group of guildies. What made this run special was that I broke one of the basic rules, known and accepted by all players. I was NOT prepared. And even more: no one else was.

We entered Halls of Stone without having the slightest idea about where to go and what to do. We barely knew where to find the entrance in the first place. And the rest was an unknown territory. No one had ever been there; no one had read a single strategy. How many bosses were there? We didn’t know. What abilities would they present? We didn’t have a clue.

For once I really felt like an explorer in the game, a feeling I can’t remember when I last had. For all of those titles and achievements about exploration – who can honestly call himself an explorer in its real sense these days, when many players will consider you noobish or plain stupid if you don’t read strats, follow guides or at least have the proper addons to help you?

Improvising
So we did what a true adventurer does – we looked for mobs, grabbed them and nuked them. And every now and then we stumbled upon a mob which seemed harder and evidently was a boss. When we saw what they did, we improvised, which honestly wasn’t that hard. “Oh, this one makes black holes. Better stay out of the black then”. “This seems like a sort of miniature Gruul, remember what to do?”

Suddenly we met an npc which obviously had a quest to offer us. We thought it over a bit suspiciously. Quests you find in instances normally are about some kind of escorting. And the experiences from TBC have been that you should save those escorts to the end, when everything else is done. Had we done everything else yet? We didn’t know; we had wandered around and cleared whatever we had found pretty randomly. But having those adventurous minds we thought: “What the heck” and picked up the quest.

A couple of events followed. It started as a normal escort quest, killing some mobs popping up, and I thought: “won’t there be anything cooler than this?” The most dramatic thing that happened was that the questgiver suddenly disappeared, running off like a speeded nightelf. “Where did that bugger go?” we asked ourselves, worried to fail the quest. But finally we found him and could enter the final stage.

I won’t tell you what it was like, but the setting surely made us go “ooohhh”. It was cool and beautiful and entertaining. And it was a once-in-a-lifetime-event. Next time I’ll do this instance it won’t be half as fun, because what made it so enjoyable was the surprise factor. We never knew what would happen next and when or where it would end.

Breaking the rule
I’ve still got four instances undone in WotLK. It remains to see if I’ll be lucky enough to end up doing one or more of them in an unprepared group, doing its virgin run. I’m afraid it isn’t likely since people have done most of the instances by now, and for every day that passes, the chances will decrease.

So is being prepared a bad thumb rule? Of course not, not generally and definitely not if you’re into raiding. But I can’t see the bad in it when you’re levelling and running instances on normal mode.

By breaking the rule I had a far more fun experience than I would have had if I had read wowwiki or other guides on beforehand. And since every boss was oneshotted our ignorance didn’t cost us any gold or time.

It doesn’t hurt to be unprepared from time to time.

Guild applications – secret or public?

When you apply for a job you don’t expect your possible future employer to make your application public, available for anyone to read at a website. But in WoW, for some reason, it’s more or less standard procedure when you’re applying to a guild. I would say that a majority of the guilds which are serious enough to require applicants to answer a bunch of standardized questions choose to handle it in the open.

If you consider applying you have to count on that anyone on your server, former guildies and friends as well as possible enemies you’ve made on your way, will be able to read it and react on it.

Advantages of openness
So, how should you regard this habit of open applications? What are the reasons for it?

If you see it from the guild side, the future employer, it’s quite handy to keep track of your appliances. You get a good overview and can easily see which ones have been handles and which are in pipeline. The whole guild can take part in the process and add comments if they know the wanna-be-guildie. Everything is transparent, which shouldn’t hurt as long as the applicant is honest about himself. If the person is lying on some point it’s less likely that he’ll get away with it.

From the applicants point of view, reading what other have written and seeing how they were received by the guild, will give you a lot of information. Judging from who was accepted and who wasn’t, you can get a good picture about your own chances to pass and make an informed decision if you meet the requirements or if you’re just wasting your time applying.

Advantages of secrecy
What about the other way round? Are there advantages in offering people the possibility to apply to a guild away from the public eye, by sending an e-mail? I think there are.

From the guilds perspective you don’t risk that candidates will be inspired and more or less copy previous successful applications. People will be forced to think for themselves and make an effort of their own applying, especially if you have some questions which are open in their character, not only the yes/no-sort of questions.

Another point is that you won’t miss applications from players who for some reason wish to be discrete about their plans to switch guilds. You don’t add the unnecessary obstacle of publicity.

For those applying I think most will appreciate not having to expose themselves to the public. It can feel pretty awkward “selling” yourself with other readers; it can easily be regarded as gloating. Maybe you’re not quite finished yet with your old guild and feel guilty showing the world you’re applying for something else. (That said I DO think that it’s best for everyone if you can leave your current guild before you’re applying to a new one.) And what if your application is denied? It’s a lot easier to cope with if you don’t have to inform the world about your failure.

A solution
If you sum it up I’d personally vote for the second, discrete strategy for guild recruitment.

But you can ad a twist to it to make it work a little better and involve the guild, without exposing the applicants to anyone on the server. This is what we’ve done recently in my guild. From now on the applications will be published on guild forum, which only is available to guild members. In this way guild members who have valid information will be able to comment and thus help the officers to take a wise decision.

Another advantage about this is that not only the officers, but the whole guild, will know a little bit more about the newly arrived team members. It will make the process of getting to know them smoother.

The only thing to remember is to take away the thread of evaluation once the applicant is let into the guild. If there have been discussions for and against the candidate, there’s no reason to let him or her read about it, once the decision has been made.

Proud BC Baby greeting the Children of Wrath

I’m a proud BC Baby! I didn’t know I was until recently, when Starman of Casual Raid Leader wrote a post about the next generation to enter the game for the first time: Children of Wrath.

In his post Starman asks us: What things will the Children of Wrath never see? What aspects of the world will they miss? What aspects will have changed so dramatically that they have no concept of things we speak of? He gives us a few good examples and wants us to write posts and add some more.

Here are a few that came into my mind.

The Children of Wrath will…

• never experience the frustration of clams from nagas invading all of your bag space unless you stick to a strict open-them-at-once-routine.
• get all their achievements recorded from the beginning. They won’t have to do Dead Mines over again just to proof they were there.
• probably never do the TBC instances in heroic mode unless they’re very addicted to achievements.
• unlikely set their foot into Shattered Halls, Shadow Labs or the Tempest Keep ones, for the same reason as I never cared about doing Dire Maul. Northrend is waiting for them at 68.
• be utterly spoiled when it comes to bagspace, considering that BG tokens, mounts and pets have been removed from it.
• be more likely to collect pets and mounts since there’s no problem to host them.
• have other expectations on how quick and easy levelling should be, considering how spoiled they get on their way to 70.
• not suffer from the monotony of doing the same instance over and over again for reputation. They’ll just wear the right tabard and pick any instance they like.
• become used to carry smaller stacks of arcane powder, if they’re mages, and not know what it’s like to empty your mana pool right before a pull just because you need to buff five raid groups.

Yes, they’ll become spoiled little kids, those newbies, won’t they? But I’m so happy they’re joining our ranks. I haven’t met them yet. I think, they’re probably still levelling, and since I, like many others, am more or less permanently stationed in Northrend these days, it’s unlikely that our paths will cross.

However, the very knowledge about their existence made me smile. Their arrival means that I’ve moved up a step, gaining a veteran rank! It’s the same thing as in school when you moved from 1st to 2nd grade. Suddenly there was someone else who knew even less than I did, who couldn’t find their way to nurse, cafeteria or school library, someone who sneaked along the walls, watching all the Big Kids in awe and fear.

Time has come when I’ve been around long enough to understand most of the code words thrown around by the other veteran players. When someone described one of the bosses in a Northrend instance I did like “a little bit like Leotheras”, I knew exactly what he meant. If I had been a Child of Wrath I wouldn’t have had a clue. It’s like I’m part of a secret society.

Of course there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve missed being a BC Baby. I’ve only seen the old raid instances in an overpowered rush-through-them-at-level-70-for-nostalgic-reasons-mode, not as the huge challenges they once were. I’ve never stepped into Molten Core. And there’s really no way to make up for it now. I’m still locked out from the Inner Circle.

But now at least there are some fresh newbies around who knows even less than I do.

Sweet little Children of Wrath – welcome to our world. And who knows, in a year or two it may be your turn to climb up one level on the ranking.

Dealing with the fear of falling behind

Levelling in Northrend reminds me of participating in on of those huge sporting events for joggers. They always have a common start, but soon enough the crowd will split up and the best and most competitive runners will disappear in the far horizon. At the point when they’ve reached the end of the run, I’ll find myself with at least 2/3 of the distance left. It has become painfully clear that I’m stuck in the “fun run class” where no one will clock you unless you do it yourself.

If this really WAS a jogging run, I wouldn’t have any problems ending up in the tail. I know my strengths and limits too well to measure myself against younger, better trained runners. Their success won’t diminish the value of my own achievements. I would focus on reaching my personal goals and be very happy about it. But for some reason I find it harder to cope with the same situation in WoW.

Left behind
As long as I don’t know the player, I’m perfectly fine with others levelling much quicker. The frequent messages the first few days about the first priest or shaman or gnome to reach 80 didn’t affect me. They play their game and I play mine.

But seeing friends in the guild dinging 80, while I’m still doing the first few levels in Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, is different. They will no doubt be ready to start raiding and gearing up in Naxx, while I’m still stuck at killing mammoths. I already see them entering instances where I don’t have access, at the same time as they have no reason whatsoever to run the ones I need to do.

I can’t free myself from the feeling of being left behind, which is extremely childish, and of course I feel ashamed about even having those feelings. It’s way below my dignity.

No hurry
There’s no reason for me to panic when I think about it. The first official raid of the guild isn’t scheduled until the beginning of January. Even though I have a lot of real life obligations this time of year, limiting my gaming time, I should be able to ding 80 in due time for the raid if nothing unexpected happens. Maybe I haven’t yet capped my professions and maybe I haven’t geared up in heroics properly, but I should be OK since the first raid instance is supposed to be pretty easy.

The early runners probably will be better geared than me at the raid premier night, but so what? I’m in the raiding team and I guess I have the same chances to get a raid spot as anyone else.

But try to explain this to my inner child, who keeps whining no matter what I tell her. I think she somehow recalls times of loneliness in the school yard, watching other kids playing a game where she wasn’t qualified to participate. What I THINK about being left behind is one thing, what I FEEL about it is something different.

Behave like an adult
So what do I do? I try to see the next fem months as a trial of the level of my maturity and independence. I don’t want to get my levelling process spoiled by the constant stress and feeling that I need to speed up to catch up as soon as possible. It’s about time I start behaving as the adult I am.

Stay calm.
Stay confident.
Relax.

People ended up raiding for two years in TBC and I can hardly believe that the speed that people levelled up to 70 affected their possibilities to raid at any greater extent. When April comes, who will care or remember if I dinged 80 in the middle of November or two months later? Nobody. And levelling won’t be any lonelier than I make it. Northrend is crowded with people to group with for quests and pugging isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

As you can see I keep fighting my inner demons and I’m afraid it’s just as in the Leotheras fight: there’s no one around who can beat them but myself. Wish me good luck.

Buying food is humiliating

My era of self sufficiency is officially over.

It was humiliating and I hesitated for a long time but finally Larísa took the step. At level 73 she bought her first stack of food from a vendor. Ever.

Blizzard is playing a joke at the mage class in the expansion. While they did add new food to the vendors, they didn’t give mages any new rank for conjuring it. Our food is now only half as good as the sold one and won’t become any better until level 75, when we learn to conjure mana pies.

At first I didn’t believe my eyes when I happily went to the mage trainer at level 70 to train the new food spell. I took it for granted that they would give us one. But the trainer just stared at me with a blank expression in his face, offering me nothing at the moment.

Trying on my own

Until now I’ve tried to manage on my own, changing my habits slightly. There’s no point starting every gaming session conjuring food since it’s useless and I won’t eat it anyway.

In order not to leave Larísa starving, I’ve stopped throwing away or vendoring food dropping from mobs. Instead I’ve stored it carefully in my bags, swearing a bit over the fact that the diet is so varied; it takes up quite a few slots. I’ve also come into the habit of using evocation as often as possible – I gave it an inscription so it returns heath as well as mana.

But finally I realised that my efforts wasn’t enough. In my long journeys, following questlines all over the place and rarely getting to an inn, I saw there was a potential risk that I’d end up with nothing but the Mage Emergency Food. So for a few silver, but at the cost of my self respect, I gave in and bought my first stack of vendored food. It was a Salted Yeti Cheese and I hope Larísa enjoyed it. After all she’s had quite a few croissants in her days, perhaps it was time for a change, even though salt cheese doesn’t sound too tasty.

Still, on behalf of the mages, I’d like to grumble a bit about it. All classes have some benefits. Shamans can walk on water, druids can swim, warlocks can make health stones. Mages can make food, that’s one of the things that characterizes us. And why not let us make decent food then?

Vacation
However, I wouldn’t be Larísa if I didn’t try to look at it from the bright side. Because in my misery, I’ve also noticed that the devaluation of the mage food has an instant effect on the demand of it. I don’t want my own food anymore, and of course no one else wants it either. In every instance I’ve run so far, I’ve offered the group a table, as any decent mage would do. But it’s always turned down.

Maybe we should view this period as a short vacation, when mages are free from their duties to cook? Soon enough we’ll be back to baking pies, not only for ourselves, but for everyone else too. Proud and independent of vendor food.