Blog Posts from "Totally Overrated"

Three Months of Modern Warfare 2: A Revised Perspective

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:17:06 -0500

Greetings GameRiot,

The few people that read my previous blog, A Month Of MW2, might remember some controversy that surrounded it. It was mainly written from my first impressions from the game & while I might not agree with some points I made anymore, there still are plenty that need to be adressed & remain valid.

I've been a member of the modernwarfare2forum.com for a while now. The boards contain heaps of useful info, for both advanced & new players. Lots of guides, weapon stat charts & everything else you'd expect from a nice forum.
Note: I do not get any special priviledges or money or any benefit from advertising this. I mainly do so, because I hope to see those forums expand faster, since they are a great.

Secondly, I'd like to promote the Youtube channel from one of my friends from the team I play with:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SelkiesTEO

It contains a few videos currently, yet more are added on a steady basis. I'm included in a few video's myself atm (I go by the name Pub*chaR).
I might do a fragvid myself if I can get my recording software to work properly, but it won't be for anytime soon.

Until next time!

A Month Of Modern Warfare 2: Let's Play Developer

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:05:37 -0500

It's been slightly over a month since Infinity Ward released Modern Warfare 2. Aside from a few minor bugfixes (javelin glitch sup), there yet has to be announced when the first major patch will be released & what its content will be.
FourTwoZero has hinted on the official IWforums that they were supposdly working on a first major patch, yet that's all the info we're getting for now. And I doubt the patch will make our wildest Call of Duty dreams come true.
So what do I hope to see from this patch, aside from the obvious stuff like dedicated servers, implementation of lean, fixing numerous crashes (pls, crashing every 3 games isn't fun), etc...

In no specific order:

I currently feel that MW2 maps are lacking in various ways. Apart from a few, they seem terribly boring & almost every single one is filled with 3409 possible camping spots where an enemy could pop up.
There are only few maps that I consider really good, a bunch of mediocre ones and some terrible unplayable ones that you constantly get for some reason (hi underpass)

In no particular order, here's my list:

Some remarks:
I personally really love to play Sub Base, yet I notice that not many people feel the same way, since this one is constantly voted away when I play.
I dislike Favela, simply because 90% of the games I play on it, I get gibbed out of random window no. 109 without ever noticing (even with HBS). The map could be very good if they would reduce the amount of windows by 50% & do something about the rooftops to.
Skidrow needs a small fix in my opinion. From the Big window at the C-site (using domination as an easy example), you can easily camp n shoot down everybody before they even come through the door of the green hall. Aside from smoke grenades, there is nothing you can do to prevent this, since you cannot spot your opponent at all from down there. This feels broken & should be fixed. Ive claymorecamped that spot for some games & slaughtered enemies like they were defenseless chickens.
There is no hope for Underpass. This is about as bad as it can get. The only solution is to remove this abomination.

That aside, I would really love to see some of the good COD4 maps being implemented in MW2. I'd gladly pay some extra cash to play Crash, Overgrown, Crossfire, District, Vacant, Strike, etc... again. I wouldn't even mind if this were to be direct ports from MW1. Some of the maps are simply so good, I don't get why they weren't instantly implemented in the retail version.

Anyhow, this has become yet another longass blog, so I'll stick to this for the time being. I actually wanted to write a part about some oldschool games, but I'll save that for another blog.

Charred Reviews: Modern Warfare 2

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:54:45 -0500

Aloha fellow Gamerioters.
It's been a long while since I've done an article here, but I simply didn't have much to write about. Ever since I quit WoW 2 months ago, I hardly did any gaming in general. Some of you might remember my last blog entry here, A Week Without WoW, where I totally got into singleplayer gaming. I asked the Gameriot Community to give me some good titles, which I would play & review after, yet I've hardly had any time to spare.
Shortly after I published that article, I stopped gaming in general, simply because university was taking up all my time.

Anyhow, despite that, I was still eagerly awaiting the release of Modern Warfare 2, since I had loved the original MW so much.
Last week ofcourse, I almost immediatly went to the shop to buy the game. The guy in the store facepalm'd when I asked him where I could find the MW2 copies, since the stand was right behind me (for some reason I had never noticed it after walking through the whole store twice). When I picked up my copy, I was kinda shocked to see that it'd cost me €59.95. I bought it in a major retail store here in Belgium, so I assumed the price would be correct.

Details aside, I still had to wait a bit longer to play the game, since I doubted I would enjoy trying to play it on my laptop, with only a touchpad to aim with.
Back at home, I immediatly plugged in the disc in my stationary & started installing. After easily completing the whole installation, I was ready to lock & load! Or atleast I thought so.
I had a total déjà-vu from my F.E.A.R. 2 adventure when the game already had to patch for 30minutes, despite it being released for not even 2 days.
After the update had finished, the first crashes came up, without ever even having seen the main menu. Steam got stuck on "Completing Installation", though luckily, I easily solved this by simply rebooting my computer. After that, I could finally load up & begin the singeplayer campaign!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a great game in general, but it still bears some major flaws. The singleplayer campaign is more like an expansion pack rather than a stand-alone sequel. It doesn't even last half as long as its predecessor and stops halfway the main storyline. The multiplayer looks really nice in general, but the peer2peer console ported gameplay ruins all the fun.

My apologies for any inconvenient spelling errors or whatsoever, as you might see, this blog isn't done for Eurospective anymore, thus our favorite grammarnazi Shader isn't correcting it!

Arcane 3.0.8, 25k burst by a S3 geared mage is apparantly something Blizzard doesn't want to be known.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:50:44 -0500

So after doing some testing with my new Arcane build today (55/5/11), apparantly instead of nerfing arcane for 3.0.8, they only made it way more overpowered.
Throw in a +1 Like for this blog if you agree that Blizzard is f*cking retarded and Arcane should be nerfed like f*ck.

I took some screenies & made a forumpost on both the Mage EU and PVP EU forums.

This was my post:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/6158/arcaneisfinejm0.jpg
Character performed by:
http://armory.wow-europe.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bloodhoof&n=Charr%C3%A9d ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arcane was supposed to be

Zolz: 9413 Arcane Blast on a 878 resilience hunter.
Slappywag: Same test, only his mage hasn't got horrendous gear resulting in 38k damage over an even shorter interval.
Folly: Posted the same thing in the U.S. Damage Dealing forums, deleted within a couple of hours.

Mage/Druid Strats: Part 1: The Basics

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:12:58 -0400

My next couple blogs will all be dedicated to the Mage/Druid setup. I don't give a **** if you like them or not. You're trolling still gives me visits & xp.
Besides that, there might be loads of bull**** in these blogs in some people's eyes, just because it seems to obvious. I want to write a guide that gives every player, how terrible they might be, the necisarry indications to be succesful with this combo.
That aside, let's start.

Like with all good things, you have to start from the basics before taking any other step. The way we play Mage/Druid isn't anywhere as aggresive as a normal Mage/Priest plays. I'd say it the most defensive combo you can play as a mage (following our style of playing ofcourse). I got no idea how other people play this. I never played a mirror game either.
But since the U.S. "known" mages tend to spec AP/Pyro, I suppose they play it quite more aggresive than we do.

First of all, this combo revolves all around CCing. You relay on CC chains to get the kill and you relay on CC chains to create the perfect window to get this kill in. You have to try to work around some basic CC-chains that both of you easily get familiar with, so that you basicly are able to pull them off without much communication.
This basicly comes down to being able to being so used to your partner, that you just know what he's going to do in certain situations, without him announcing it on vent. You have to know your mate's playing style in & out.
This isn't only true for Mage/Druid ofcourse. This is simply a base rule to being sucesful in any bracket with any combo.
How to achieve this? Quite simple really. Practice makes perfect, just play alot with your partner(s) and this will come automaticly!

Secondly, as a mage, this combo is unlike any other you have played before. It's more crucial than ever that you're able to manage your mana flawlessly. You have to know your own limits of your playing style. Find out how much mana you require yourself to be able to survive versus any DPS (mainly when tanking a rogue, this becomes extremely important). Personally, I always try to keep my mana above 30%, but it's of no use if you copy this. The amount I conserve is related to how I play, thus not much of a use to other players.
Mana management also means you do not pump damage brainlessly into targets. Else you'll end up losing games followed by forumQQing about "LOLZ I DID 100K DMG N NUFIN DIED".
DPSing a fully hot'd target is just utterly pointless and a waist of mana. After you dumped all your mana on a target, your druid might just get that one crucial NS hibernate off, but then it doesn't matter **** because you mashed your frostbolt key like a retard.

You have to know when to alternate defensive & offensive play.
You should NEVER just do the following (which most unexperienced mage/druid teams will do):
1) CC
2) CC more
3) Pop CD's, dps some & hope to kill something
4) If fail repeat from 1.
You should be keeping up sufficient pressure throughout the ENTIRE fight if you ever want to get a kill on non-terribad players. Get those crucial drink ticks in when your druid takes over to keep up soft pressure. Just throwing CC without keeping up pressure will never make you any kill. The only moment you should resort to this is when you're forced into defensive playing.

Your goal should always be to maintain pressure whilest creating the perfect killing window. What I like to call a perfect killing opportunity can be described as the following:
Like when facing druid/warrior, the perfect opportunity for a kill would be:
> The warrior has just intercepted something. Optimally would be that he's out of intervene range from his healer & in open territory.
> The druid has used NS & his trinket. Optimally, the druid has just eaten an (NS-)hibernate.
Don't bother trying to kill a rogue with cloak of shadows up. Don't bother to kill a druid/x with trinket up.

If they would surive your first set of DR's/CD's, but you still manage to pressure them sufficiently after that untill you're able to get a new CC rotation off (optimally your druid hasn't used NS yet), don't hesitate to snap immediatly and try to get the kill.

Anyhow, the essence of this post for the combo as a mage should be: Manage your mana wisely! It's thÃ© most important thingÂ to perform well.

Highest Druid/Mage Worldwide, Do I Get A Cookie Now?

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:14:53 -0400

So yeh, Brain finally migrated to Badout and we're put instantly on 2.2K & the highest druid/mage worldwide after 2 mere nights of playing.

This combo takes the word "countercombo" to a new level though.
The full 29 losses we had were:
> 3 disconnects
> 5 losses versus a lock/rogue
> 2 losses versus a druid/rogue
> 1 loss versus druid/hunter
> 18 losses versus druid/warlock.

The games we lost versus this lock/rogue was because the ussual tactic we have versus lock/rogue simply wasn't working out. The rogue was stacking max PVE gear, putting him on ~2.3K AP, ~36%crit. Once we adapted our tactic, we farmed them in the next series only losing 1 game where the lock resisted both counterspells :[

The druid/rogue was one of the type "lol I pillarhump at 85%hp n play loldefensive" After just having 2 insanely long games versus a simular warrior/druid (SUP INTERVENE+PILLARKITE ON 90%), I got pissed off, lost my patience and thus screwed it up. The most important factor for this setup is probably having huge amounts of patience when facing these "extreme defensive play is fun mejt : )))))"-teams. In one of our first games (when not knowing how to deal with a defensive druid/war yet), we had a 3hour 15min game vs one of these.

The druid/hunter loss is closely related to the risk of our tactic vs them. We tend to play it as a 2DPS game and basicly just rush down the hunter. Mostly this succeeds since people dont expect this. But when your burst is outlived, you're ****** up n both close to being oom. You can play this as a defensive game to, but it's not worth it imho. It's as hard as druid/lock when playing this defensive, with the exception that it isn't impossible to win.

Then we have the 18 losses versus druid/lock. We go through various steps when meeting a druid/lock.
1) First tactic, kill pet & prevent fel dom+resummon. It's already quite lolworthy kill a pet as dreamstate/mage, when you kill it and manage to prevent the fel dom resummon, prepare to be constantly pressured by a pillarhumping lock that keeps on trying to escape to get that resummon in. If he does, gratz you can afk out. Even if you kill the pet very easy and can't be pressured with resummons due to having enough mana left for a kill, this still is close to impossible. Fel Armor just heals for such lolworthy amounts that killing the petless lock is still worthy being classified as a bossfight.
2) Kill the druid in a cyclone->SF stun->bash->imp CS chain->cyclone. In the first place, this won't in 99% of the cases since this tactic is RNG dependant. Make sure the lock is stacked max debuffs, then sheep him and say a prayer it wont be devoured. Make sure you time this only when Spell Lock is on cooldown to. Once you see that the felhunter uses devour on the lock, pop IV and burst the druid after cyclone with a shatter combo+starfire. Here is where lolzy part kicks in. You'll be needing a starfire stun proc from your druid if you want to kill the enemy druid. Without that starfire proc, you just won't get enough DPS. After the starfire, your druid can bash em, followed by another shatter into a cyclone to load up some more damage. After that the druid should be dead.
In 99% of the fights this won't be the case though.
3) Incase 1&2 fail, afk out when you see it's the same team. This allows you to get the rating you just lost to be retrieved faster and thus is more beneficial then struggling for ages.

In general, I feel this combo is stronger than mage/priest and it should definatly be something more mages should be giving a try. As long as you figure out some basic tactics and manage to coordinate CC properly, you'll do pretty fine with this setup.
The hardest fights
1) Priest/lock
2) Druid/lock
3) Defensive druid/rogue teams.

I still can't see the advantages of being 8/11/42+pompyro over dreamstate+full frost. This might be due to different playing styles. We tend to continuously force killing opportunities, whilest judging from Pigvomit's Mage/Priest video, the style in the U.S. tends to be to play fullout aggresive and just get your kill with that one burst. I'm not sure how you'd do this as a mage/druid, so I'd really like to hear some more input from the people in the U.S. running this setup.

Like I already said once in a previous blog, we're planning to fraps a full movie sometime and release it.
In the meantime, I might do a strategy write-up for this combo against the most popular setups to encourage people to try it (if there is enough interest for it that is).

As a finisher, I'd like to send out a last special thanks to Diamondtear for being the most atrocious druid I've ever met and giving us the last +18 we needed to get 2202. Thanks for being the terrible bro.
CharBrain Take Three incomming to hopefully hit rank 1!

Druid: Brainac
Mage: Charred

Resist Resist Resist Resist Resist

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:08:51 -0400

I'm adressing this here in the hope that it might get to a Blizzard dev somehow. I tried making a topic on the forums, but the tards managed to derail the thread after 3 posts to a "IT TAKES ME 5 DISPELS TO GET OF A VIPERSTING BRO"-topic.

Basicly:
Resist rate in PVP is currently bugged. There is no doubt about this. I'm getting chain resists all the time. Sure, RNG etc, it can happen a couple of times that you get a 2 resists in a row.
If this was the case though, I wouldn't be writing this blog.
Ever since 4 weeks ago (when the latest minor patch was released), I've been noticing a tremendous increase on my resists.
I've been paying attention to it and I'm getting this on every class on every school.
Fireblasts, lances, polys, etc... all being resisted constantly.
Some examples:
>Shadowpriest resisting 3 frostbolts on a row
>Warrior resisting frost nova (full resist), then a poly. Second poly hits, he trinkets, then resists my pet nova (full resist).
2 first examples that come to my mind that occured in the last games we did today.

Anyhow, to back this up a bit more, I was wondering if anyone knows an addon that allows me to keep track of the amount of resists I'm getting, since I can't actually provide any evidence just like this.
I asked around some on #Cyclone and apparantly I wasn't the only one noticing an increase in the resist ratio though.
I started believing that they increased the hitcap actually >.>
This is seriously anyoing and has to be adressed asap!

[Movie]Asure, Turalyon's Last Hope, RMP BG3

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:53:56 -0400

A friend of mine recently finished his 3V3 movie, showcasing RMP play versus some of Cyclone's finest teams.

I really like their style of playing RMP. Fullout aggresive & not afraid to blow cooldowns early to force alot of pressure to give them the upperhand from the beginning of the game.
They play a really aggresive game, not at all focussing on topping off everybody, but with Mutilate Hero Choke-kun & Hokage of the Mage Community Imotep-sama pulling off some sick damage whilest Asure (IlÃº) pressures the healer insanely.
All of this comes topped off with some sweet coordination setting up the perfect kills.
RMP like it should be played!
Besides this, like IlÃº also states in the movie, he has only been playing a priest for aprox 2 months. He was previously playing a pala under the name Asure. In this short span off time, he managed to learn a completly different class and compete with it at top arena level. It's quite an overhaul imo going from a paladin, which has no offensive tools at all, to playing a priest so aggresivly. This movie was some of the most aggresive priest play I've seen since Hydra's last movie.

Anyhow, I don't really know what else to say bout the movie. It rocks, I love their style. Nothing else to say so gtfo this worthless piece of **** blogentry n go watch it already!
For now, I'm back to farming to ripping some more +29's of Badout's finest teams with my druidpartner playing an account with 300 resil, 9K hp, 180MP5 & 1.4K healing.Â Apparantly, only the sight of a mage/restodruid team entering is enough to make them tremble.

Downranking Change, The Best Thing In WotLK For Me So Far! - FoF Change

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:05:47 -0400

As the latest beta-build was released, apparantly they changed most spells to now be based on a fixed % of your base mana.
I can only say this is a great fix for my beloved mage-class and that apparantly they listened to our concerns! We got way to many spells to keybind and thanks to this change I can throw most of them off my bars.
This change affects:
> Rank 1 Nova
> Rank 1 CoC
> Rank 1 Frostbolt
> Rank 1 Poly
> Rank 1 Arcane Explosion
> Rank 1 Blizzard
> (probably) Rank 1 Focus Magic

This means I have atleast 4 spells rendered useless aka 4 free binds! I can't wait!!!

In the latest build, there were 2 other changes included to. A small buff to Torment of the Weak & Fingers of Frost changed to a fixed 4 second duration.
The buff to TotW is rather insignificant, the change to Fingers of Frost is rather awesome though.
A zero-haste mage will most likely spam double lance and deep freeze on FoF procs followded by a shatter combo on the deep freeze etc... (cba going into detail on Deep Freeze's potential atm). Whilest previously, it would only be one lance followded by DF.
This is another situation where haste shows one of it's true potentials. A full-haste geared mage will be able to get in three lances and a deep freeze on the same FoF proc.

I'm starting to like WotLK more each day (excluding the ******* nerf to rank 1 spells which of all ******* classes, affected mages the most ofcourse). I'm actually having trouble making a talent spec now because, rather than just leaving out the bad talents, I know have to elaborate which good ones I'll be leaving out.

RNG Is Apparantly Half The Fun Of The Game; Dreamstate/Mage 2s Preview

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:50:54 -0400

In an infatuation of boredom, I decided to browse the official forums again for a change, thinking of having a half-decent discussion about RNG.
Keeping in mind how my previous visit from a while ago ended (druid/priest/x counters cleave m8 x))))) ), I really wasn't expecting much. Yet I decided to give it a go, because I supposed it couldn't really get much worse than that.

The only thing that I'm a bit dissapointed about, is that a clip like this shows nowhere the amount of coordination & strategy that we are having. The clip on itself just shows a druid CCing, a mage kiting some. Yet almost every single spell is thought out & planned. I could spam with more walls of text in the movie, but /meh.

Other than that, nothing much has happened. My mage is back on Bloodhoof, playing some with my old arena-partners Prizzt & Tarandor. I'm slacking terribly on my mage on Stormscale and playing some rogue again lately in arena. Any insighteful rogue-tricks are appreciated, since I'm quite **** at the class (not like cleave is any hard, open-5Point EA-queue next).

WotLK, Not So Much Of A Nightmare After All

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:30:15 -0400

I woke up this morning, got some breakfast, turned on my computer and started WoW. Still struggling within myself again whether I should continue leveling my mage on Stormscale or just reroll Death Knight when the xpansion hits because my class I played for 3.5 years was gonna be terrible. That was until I checked mmo-champion and saw the latest WotLK releases.
For those who are to lazy to click the link, this is what I found:

- Shattered Barrier - New Tier 6 talent that gives your Ice Barrier spell a 50/100% chance to trigger a Frost Nova when it is destroyed.
- Winter's Grasp - Renamed to Fingers of Frost, which gives your Frost damage spells a 5/10% chance to apply the Fingers of Frost effect, which treats your next Frost spell cast on the target as if the target were Frozen. Lasts 10 seconds.
- Brain Freeze - Changed to give your Frost damage spells have a 5/10/15% chance to cause your next Fireball spell to be instant cast and cost no mana.
- Improved Water Elemental - Changed to increase the duration of your Summon Water Elemental spell by 5/10/1515 sec and your Water Elemental heals all party or raid members 1/2/3% of their total health every 5 secs.
- Chilled to the Bone - Changed to increase the damage caused by your Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt and Ice Lance spells by 1/2/3/4/5% and reduces the movement speed of all chilled targets by an additional 2/4/6/8/10%.
- Deep Freeze - Damage added, causes 694 to 806 Frost damage and stuns the target for 5 seconds. Only usable on Frozen targets.
(source: mmo-champion)
I was quite overwhelmed by these changes really. Having seen no major mage changes apart from Icy Veins and Hypo-LOL-thermia, I believe we only saw a half-decent revamp back in classic WoW. TBC brought out some nifty new stuff, but never really revamped anything for us.
Anyhow, needless to say that all 3 trees look very nice now and that, despite some of the downsides of Frostfire Bolt that Radikal posted on his blog, this makes Elemental w FFB look very atractive again for PVP. Needless to say this especially appeals to me, having been an elementalist from the early 60 days where we would be declared mad for taking a spec with no Evocation nor Instant Arcane Explosion.
An updated talent calculator can also be found here. I've been messing around with it a bit already, but I havn't find thé spec yet that appeals to me.
As an elemental spec the first thing I came up with was this, though it isn't exactly yet what I want it to be. The main problem now is that there are to many good talents to pick rather than to few! I'll work on a more fire focussed spec lateron and a 2/3x/3x one to, but some talents in there require some serious playtesting imho before being able to debate on them.
Full Frost still looked very appealing to me to. I came up with this as a starter. Though just like with my elemental build, this isn't anywhere near what I want it to be yet.

Anyhow, I believe I should remain somewhat not to enthousiastic, to prevent a mass depression like we'll see when paladins are back nerfed to normal, because most likely some of these talents will be toned down a bit again.

For now, I suppose I'll continue leveling my Undead Mage on Stormscale, since I havn't recieved a beta key (qq) and continue playing my dreamstate druid/mage combo a bit in 2s.
We're currently at 2059 rating since a week after 1 night of serious playing n a couple of play-5-games-and-stop-days. I'm hoping to break 2.2K somewhere soonish when we get in a second night of serious playing so that I can fully focus on leveling my new mage on Stormscale. The combo is ok to play I suppose. Druid/Warlock is mass qq even with my spell penetration gear and druid/hunter isn't the easiest around either, but we manage.
My PVP-guild on PVE server project sorta diminished slowly n came to the point where there are hardly players left on Turalyon to play with. Now that some of my guild migrated to my old server Bloodhoof which resides in BG Blackout, one of Europe's most terrible BG's, to have some fun (whilest leveling new characters on Stormscale) rather than serious competition before S4 starts. Perhaps I should go there to and pick up an easy Brutal Gladiator's Silk Amice with a normal combo rather than pushing dreamstate/mage to it's limits and getting a top20 spot with it in BG Cyclone...

WotLK, A Nightmare For Mages

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:16:26 -0400
As for now, I'll keep my rant short, just because I want to hear some other opinions before writing the longer discussion regarding mages & WotLK.

Hunter deterence buff to 60% spell resistance, Chimera Shot+Viper Sting instant mana burn, Camouflage,... Not like hunters were overpowered enough yet AMIRITE?
Just comparing stuff like Chaos Bolt to any talent or skill we get makes me wanna cry patheticly in a corner.

/rant over (for now)

Serennia & MLG Orlando

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:22:13 -0400
Quoting Serennia in a reply after they lost to COM at the WWI, where they played with Inflame.

"With Glorin we would have gone all the way"

You went all the way indeed.
All the way down to the dump where you belong.

kek

Spell Haste Pt.2; ESD > CSD: Discovery Of The Day?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:44:24 -0400
First of all, when I started off this blog, I planned to write atleast 1 blog/2days and mainly a blog a day. Besides that my real life is kinda ****** up now (trouble with the girl, last year of highschool ended **** with re-examinations), I find myself lacking a source of inspiration to write decent blogs.
Sure I could go on the dramatour like Ming does, but I really can't be arsed with being the next tabloid writer of WoW.
Since I'm European (Belgian to be exact), I thought that maby I could do some interviews with some of the e-famous EU arena players/teams/guilds. This is something I'll prolly do, but thats material for like, one blog a week?
So, to improve my blogging qualities, I'm asking you, what you'd like to hear from an all-time mage veteran.

After I read some of Affix' comments on my last blog about spell haste, I decided to do some more theorycrafting on the ideal amount of spell haste.
My conclusion was the same as his after doing this. Stacking haste to a maximum and neglecting any +dmg is most likely thé way to go.
The lack of burst potential & the decrease in DPMPS ofcourse remain and become worse the more haste you stack. Though, unless this has a very noticable impact, the other strenghts of haste will easily outweigh this.
I toyed around some with CharDev and came up with the ideal gear, which is quite close to what Affix suggested. The gear, gems and lots of more info that comes with this nice site can be found here. Note that the S4 Boots and Bracers aren't included yet in its database.
For the upcomming calculations/comparisons it might be useful to be able to watch this profile to, which is a maxed out damage mage, as I currently have it for season 3.
I was hoping to be able to post some numbers here, though unfortunatly, my PC crashed, which resulted in the loss of about 3 hours of theorycrafting on spellhaste in any possible situation (boredom ftl)... Word decided to act weird once more and not make any recovery file. I can supply some allround info though:
We shouldn't forget either that due to the faster casting, less frostbolts will be interupted by LOS. So the total damage will be far from lower, if not higher. To make this even better, when we start looking at shorter casts, who take less benefit from raw dmg (scorch, instants,...), I found myself looking at a point where haste was taking over on dmg in terms of DPS! For the disbelievers, with the spell stats on CharDev, you can easily do some quick checks for yourselves.

As you might've noticed on the profiles, I picked the Ember Skyfire Diamond over its, way more popular, Chaotic brother. On my current armory, I'm also using the ESD instead of the CSD, though for the sole reason that I couldn't be arsed replacing some gems and thus ESD was the easiest way out.
When I discussed this some with Kuningas, a good paladin friend of mine, said he had his thoughts on swapping to the CSD gem over the ESD one.
When I did some number crunching on it (based on my spellhaste profile!), the following results came out (vs 0 resilience targets):
Total damage of 100 Frostbolts with ESD: 164723.65
Total damage of 100 Frostbolts with CSD: 165448.5444
This is a difference of 724.8944 damage in favor of CSD. Though from my POV, which means the fullout haste gemming & gearing we gotta keep some things in mind:
1) ESD allows us to stack another +10haste gem without sacrificing any bonusses. CSD requires us to stack another green (blue) gem. At first this might seem a small difference, though we could say the same when taking epic gems over blue ones.
2) This doesn't calculate in the 2% intellect bonus from the ESD, which in my gear results into +150mana or from casting frostbolts this adds 748.7438636 total damage. This might only be the case when you are oom, though I feel that with an amount of spellhaste like this, we'll be running oom more frequently than with other setups.
On top of that ESD offers 2 other big advantages:
3) ESD adds up to every spell, whilest CSD only applies to crits. When calculating in resilience, we see CSD dropping to almost below ESD. The new numbers were calculated vs my own S4 resilience (see CharDev):
Total damage of 100 Frostbolts with ESD: 149597.625
Total damage of 100 Frostbolts with CSD: 149557.7187
A difference of 39.9063 damage in favor of the ESD!
Now my S4 geared mage is far from a resilience stacked monster, which means the gap will grow even more vs classes like warlocks, priests,... & count in the other advantages of the ESD and I believe ESD is the clear winner here.
(note: Might be good to mention that I did calculate in the CSD bug that gives 6% critdmg to frost, though I am not entirely sure I did it the proper way. But the way I did it only benefits CSD more then it does ESD I believe. If somebody feels the urge to do the perfect theorycrafting on this, feel free to post it here so this crapping becomes useless)

And to finish, let me link the track I've been listening to on repeat whilest writing this article: Pendulum - Visions (<-winz)

Mage S4 Itemization & Gemming, Spell Haste Is The Way To Go

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:48:59 -0400
With my return to WoW approaching shortly, I decided to theorycraft some on how I'd itemize for the new season.

First of all, I'm very pleased with the fact that Blizzard finally decided to put some Spell Haste (SH) on PVP gear. I've always been a vast believer that this is thé best stat a mage can get for arena, even before it reduced our GCD on top of the normal effect. It's the only stat that both increases our offense and defense at the same time! And that is exactly why I believe that this is thé stat to go for.
To make it even better, there are SH gems out to now (which didn't exist yet when I quit).
All of this makes it perfectly possible for mages to get a nice spellhaste set for arena now.

Why do I believe SH is the no.1 stat for us and why exactly is it so good for us in arena?

First Entry, Introduction, Mage's New Arena Partner For WotLK?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:00:12 -0400
Having been a gameriot (read WoWriot) reader for a while now, I finally decided to start my own blog here.
What to expect? First of all mage tears, lots of then (j/k).
On a more serious note, random ranting about how I see the game and what I hope to see soonish. There is no day there can't be ranted about WoW.
Aside from that I suppose I'll be posting useful (hopefully) info on my beloved class, mages, here too.

So you'd be asking yourself now, who the hell is this guy?
I suppose I can say I'm a veteran when it comes to the mage class. I have been playing WoW since shortly after the release and since day one, I've always played mages.
I first started off on Bloodhoof (PVE) EU, together with some friends under the name "Charade". Stayed there from the moment I started WoW uptill the release of season 3. Shortly after season 3 went live, we saw a mass migration from Blackout --> Cyclone. Needless to say, since we sought competition, we moved to Turalyon EU in BG Cyclone to face some real competition.
On Turalyon, I was the founder of the guild <Overrated>, which is a project to attract all the top PVP players, who are stuck on PVE realms to 1 guild/realm. It worked out very nice, though it seems that the guild has regressed a bit in terms of quality players ever since I decided to take a break from WoW for a while (more info later on).
As for achievements, I believe I've done fairly decent, having achieved top 10 2V2, top 5 3V3 and top 15 5V5 in early season 3 in Blackout (when saying achieved, I mean we maintained that position for a while activly). When we, Tarandor (Rogue), Prizzt (Priest) and myself (new name Charred when I moved), moved to BG Cyclone, we swiftly got to 2.2k rating with a mere 5 losses. After that my old Dell decided to bid me farewell (<-lol rhyme, quality blogging) and I had no computer availible for just under 2 months. By the time I got my new beast, my roguepartner had quit the game. Since I didn't find a new rogue that I could get as synced with as I was with him again, I decided to give up on the game to for a while and focus on my final exams (last one tomorrow luckily).
Now though, I found some renewed interest in the game and decided to try & get my account back.

Aside from that, I'm not really a known player in the community (except for holding the title of ex-Dramalord on Bloodhoof I guess). I've made few PVPmovies who weren't really succesful (nor worth showing tbh). My last one was released in the first few months of TBC, which can be found in a link at the bottom incase you'd like to see some terribad play

With my newfound interest in the game, I decided to look up some info on Wrath of the Lich King.
I came to the happy discovery that apparantly, the sync possibilities between Mages and Frost specced Death Knights are awesome! From Death Knights for mages, abilities like Frozen Rune Weapon, Hungering Cold, etc... are just to good to be true (I just hope that nobody will tell me now "DK abilities don't affect mages). Having a mage as partner, a DK can deal out some insane Howling Blast damage.
I've never been so excited about WoW changes before!!!

http://armory.wow-europe.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Charred
http://armory.wow-europe.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Tarandor
http://armory.wow-europe.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Prizzt
http://armory.wow-europe.com/guild-info.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Overrated&p=1
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=38765