Spicytuna

Here are some tools that I have found to be very useful for Mages. With these tools, you will be able to improve your character in many ways. I have also included a short description of each tool, and some information about how to use the tools to improve your character. Give them a try, and hopefully you will find them as useful as I have.

WoW Web Stats

“Wow Web Stats is a unique tool to enhance your raiding experience in World of Warcraft. With WWS, you generate and share reports of your raids, which include a tremendous amount of information and statistics.”

WWS is an extremely useful raiding tool which breaks down every fight you encounter, allowing you to use the data and information to improve your character. You can view the data to determine your spell resist %, spell crit %, and even the proc rate of your abilities and trinkets.

If you are a Guild Officer, you can use this information to compare players to help improve the raid for future attempts. It is highly recommended that at the very least, one person in each raiding guild to run this tool. The more players running WWS the better. You can merge the data for more accurate results.

You can download the WWS Client at: http://wowwebstats.com/

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The Rumored New Student! ~Full of Memories, Kid’s First Day at Shibusen?~

Episode 6 of Soul Eater was a good one. An action filled episode, that also had very funny moments. This episode finally brings all three Meister/Weapon teams together for the first time. It is Death the Kid’s first day at Shibusen, and he gives his introductions to Soul and Black Star.

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No no no. I was talking about the Eredar Twins in the Sunwell Plateau of World of Warcraft. You perverts! :P

This would be the reason why we have been slacking on the progression on the Eredar Twins. The higher ups had us adjust to a new strategy, which will make it easier (theoretically) for us to kill the twins. Also with this new strategy, it will enable us to kill the twins in whichever order we want, with no change in difficulty.

The only downside of this strategy is that EVERYONE must be on their toes, and leaves little to no room for error.

During the encounter, Grand Warlock Alythess will target and cast Conflagration on a random target, and that target must run away from the raid or it will instantly cause a chain reaction of fire damage and instantly kill the entire raid.

The problem with the new strategy is, we have all the ranged DPS and healers all standing on top of one another, so when she targets someone and begins her cast, that person has about three seconds to run out of the group to a safe spot, or it is an instant wipe. There is no recovery from a Conflagration mishap.

Also with our new raid positioning, we won’t have to deal with the little shadow spawns that Lady Sacrolash summons onto the raid. So we only have to deal with Conflagration, and once we get that down, taking them out by killing Lady Sacrolash first should be a piece of cake. When Lady Sacrolash dies, Grand Warlock Alythess will gain Lady Sacrolash’s powers, but the shadow spawns that she spawns will still have no affect us.

So if you factor in with people not paying attention to raid warnings or relying on being told to move on vent, we have been going through many many wipes. You also have to factor in latency for the game and vent. It could get frustrating really quick, but we shall be well rewarded when they finally die.

Why even bothering with killing them in reverse order?

By killing Lady Sacrolash first instead of the “easier way” of killing Grand Warlock Alythess first, will yield six pieces of epic loots (instead of five) and [Sunmote] x 4. The extra piece of epic will gear our raiders much faster, and the Sunmotes will be used to gear the raid with craftable BoE gear from the patterns found in the Sunwell Plateau.

So hopefully we can have the Eredar Twins down by next week if we make some good progress on them this week.

I am now back home after my little trip to North Jersey this weekend (I missed you Philly!).

I was without a computer and video games for the entire trip, so that left me with little option to do up at my sister’s place. I ended up watching a ton of television and taking lots of naps.

I did have some fun up there though, but I am glad to back home.

World of Warcraft:

Nothing much happened last week in WoW for me. I was only able to make it to the first raid night of the week, in which we were able to kill the first three bosses in the Sunwell Plateau. No caster loot dropped or Mage tokens that I needed dropped.

Looks like Patch 2.4.2 will be out Tuesday. You can find the patch notes from the WoW website here: Patch 2.4.2

They will be cutting down on Arena point selling and teams exploiting to get easy wins. Also Mages, don’t forget to pick up your new portals! Go to Stonard if you are Horde, and go to Theramore Isle if you are Alliance.

Movies:

The trailer for X-Files 2 is finally out! You can see the trailer of the new movie X-Files: I Want to Believe at www.xfiles.com. w00t! I can’t wait! The movie will be out in theaters on July 25th, 2008.

Another movie I am also looking forward to seeing is Star Wars: The Clone Wars. You can watch that trailer at www.starwars.com. The movie will be out August 15th, 2008. Looks like it will be an awesome summer.

Television Show:

My sister also got me started on watching a show called Dexter. I am probably going to end up watching the first two seasons of this show by the end of this week.

Anime:

Naruto and Bleach are now in filler mode in order to give the respected authors of the series more time to further the gap between where the story is in the Anime with where the story is in the Manga. So far the filler episode isn’t too bad, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Until then, go watch:

• Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2
• Kurenai
• Nabari no Ou
• Evangelion: 1.0 You are [Not] Alone

In Real Life:

My sister’s graduation was held at the IZOD center (where the New Jersey Nets play) so that was cool.

We took my mom out for dinner for her special day. She wanted Thai food, so we went to a nearby restaurant. The food was delicious and my mom enjoyed it.

The Flyers are down in the series against the Penguins 2-0 with game 3 being played Tuesday night. Lets go Flyers!

Tuna here reporting from my little sister’s iPod touch at Seton Hall. This little bugger is amazing by the way, need to get myself one. Well I will be here until Monday night for my sister’s graduation, so no bloggery from me till then.

So congrats to my sister and all of you out there getting your diplomas! Great job!

And let’s not forget our Mothers today! Show your Mommies your appreciations and take her out for a nice dinner. Me and my siblings are taking Mommy out to Sushi tonight. /yummy

Hope you have a great weekend. See ya soon.

*edit*
This post has been edited on a laptop due to the lack of formatting options on the ipod Touch. Still a cool device anyways. Also edited to add in Mother’s day >_< .

<— If only they had a Mage or Druid in their crew.

Another must-have mod for Mages: Decursive. For raiding Mages, this is an extremely useful tool for encounters where Mages have to remove curses off of the raid members inflicted. The mod will give you a visual display that represents everyone in the raid, and when someone is inflicted with a curse, their box will light up red, and you just simply click to remove the curse. Sounds simple? It really is.

When you install the mod, the first thing you will notice is a small little semi-translucent box on your screen. That little box represent your character. If you join a party of four other players, the number of boxes will increase to five, one for each party member (including yourself). The first box at the top left will always be your box. If a party member happens to have a pet, another box will be added. Same thing when you are in a raid, one box for each player or pet. This makes it a whole lot easier to decurse raid members that are out of the same group.

If you hover your mouse a little above the box that represents you, you will notice a tiny square appear. If you right-click that box, it will bring up the option menu for the Decursive mod. If you want to move you group of little boxes, hold [alt] and left-click that tiny square and drag it to a location of your choice.

25 Raiders + 3 Pets

The mod will work without the need of any configuration. Once you move the box to where you want, then you are ready to go. Let see what happens when someone gets a curse.

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<— Everyone’s favorite Potion Master: Serverus Snape!

Although being Transmute Master made me good money back in the day, it is no longer useful to me. The proc rate wasn’t too bad. It would proc about two out of ten days when I would do my daily Transmute. When I didn’t have mats to do Primal Might transmute, I would do Primal Earth > Primal Water, or Primal Water > Primal Air, depending on how the market was for those primals. The thing was, that it would never proc when I NEED it to proc.

Needed Primal Mights back in the day to craft my Spellstrike Hood and Legs? Zero Procs. Day after I have them both crafted? BAM Primal Might x 5, which was nice, but not needed anymore. Transmute Master is a decent mastery, but it just isn’t as useful as Potion or Elixir Master. It might have the same proc rate as the other two mastery, the cooldown on the transmute is what kills it. Maybe of being Transmute Master also cut the transmute cooldown by like maybe half or something, then it would be somewhat useful to be.

Why Potion Master?

Well I was thinking of doing Elixir Master, which I think is slightly more useful, but I already have friends and guildies that are already Elixir Master, so there would be no need for me to take this mastery. I did not know any Potion Masters personally in-game other than the one guildie who stopped playing, but his friend (one of the current raiders) would sign on once in a while to make potions for the guild. That was too much of a hassle and you can’t count on that person to be on when you need potions made, so I dropped Transmute Master and picked up Potion Master.

How do you drop a mastery?

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Like what the title says, I have been slowly getting Spell Haste gear on my Mage. With the latest addition to my arsenal, the [Loop of Forged Power], in my Raiding gear I now have 142 Spell Haste Rating. This will increase my Spell Casting by 9% (rounded up).

This drops my Frostbolt cast down to 2.29 seconds and with Icy Veins popped, it brings it down even further to 1.91 second casts. What happened when I also got Heroism at the same time? My Frostbolts had a 1.47 second cast time. Man that was fun on Brutallus last night!

So I have been getting many questions concerning Spell Haste Rating, how to incorporate it into our gear, and how it stacks up against our other stats. To tell you the truth, I have been neglecting answering this because I honestly am not completely sure about it yet.

I have been looking around on the WoW Forums, ElitistJerks, and searching around other sources, and the general consensus in the Mage community of experts and theorycrafters for Raiding Mages is:

Spell Hit > Spell Damage = Spell Haste > Spell Crit > Spell Penetration

Spell Hit still being the most important stat for Mages (and all other casters) until you reach the Spell Hit cap of 99%. See Spell Hit Guide if you still have questions about this.

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Soul’s Form ~Strongest Meister Stein’s Entrance?~

The fifth episode of Soul Eater continues where the last episode left off, and we find our heroes at the front door of the person behind turning Sid into a Zombie. That person is the stronger living technician to graduate from Shibusen, Doctor Franken Stein.

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This picture is Vivi, a Black Mage from Final Fantasy IX. I just used this for lack of a better picture. I actually enjoyed FFIX.

I thought I would share with you some of the things that happened this past week, which you may or may not care about.  Maybe I will make this a regular thing, who knows. Depends on if there was a lot that went on during the week I guess. Oh well, here it goes…

World of Warcraft:

It is Children’s Week in WoW. Go take your pet for the day out and around Azeroth and Outland, and turn them in for a cool pet! I contemplated on keeping Jaina’s Autograph for myself, and keeping this human child as my pet until he expires. I got Speedy the Turtle instead. I also got Eggbert from the Outland one.

Hmmm… Jaina’s Autograph and Human slave or Speedy the Turtle?

I am now 0 - 20 for Baron’s Mount, and decided to start on my Wintersaber Trainer’s Rep again when I get sick of farming Stratholme. Currently half way to Honored with them.

[Pattern: Sunfire Robe] dropped and I wished I was a tailor. The pattern was won by a Shadow Priest. The Mages and Warlocks which were tailors all cried in unison.

[Design: Loop of Forged Power] also dropped, but the crafted ring is Bind on Equip, so I got myself [Sunmote] x 5 from the guild, and I am now waiting for one more [Primal Might] transmute before I can get this baby crafted.

We decided on a new strategy on Eredar Twins. The strategy overall is much simpler than the last, but relys on everyone to be on their “A” game. One person doesn’t move in time will trigger an instant wipe. Got one twin down to 60% with only 21 people in the Raid during practice runs. We’ll see how this goes with a full raid.

The Epic Gem Vendor on my server is currently at 61%. It is going really, really slow. Come on everyone, do your dailies! I know I know, even I get lazy sometimes and not do them either.

BRK’s Running of da Bulls was a huge success. 373 level one Taurens running around Azeroth starting trouble.

Speaking of Tauren, we got a Tauren Mage in the raid one night. Doesn’t he look cool?

/mooooooooo

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So I had a crazy idea to start farming for probably the most sought after mount in World of Warcraft. Well… the most sought after land mount. The Phoenix mount would be the most sought after flying mount.

I am talking about Baron Rivendare’s Deathcharger. The [Deathcharger’s Reins] has a drop rate of less than .01% and there has been three total drops on my server so far.

So far I have been only farming Baron for about two weeks, about once or twice a day. My current record is 0 - 15 and the losing record will continue to rise as time goes on. Am I crazy for doing this? Sure I am, but it will all be worth it when I finally get one.

Plus it gives me something to do when there isn’t anything I need to in the game. Instead of just wandering around in Ironforge and jumping or chatting (I know a lot of you do it too), I can try my chance at the mount and still chat with my friends at the same time. And you can make a decent amount of gold off the enchanting dusts and shards you get from the run.

I even got some of my Mage friends trying to farm for this mount too. I tried explaining the path that I take it gets a bit confusing when read explanations without seeing any sort of visual aid. So I made a recording of one of my runs through the instance. The time it took me to complete it was a little over 26 minutes. I would be faster had I not accidentally pull some mobs… twice.

So here is a video of my run:

Here is a detailed description of the path I took and some addition information which you might need to successfully kill Baron:
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“Dear Tuna,  I have been following your blog for a few months now and you really know a lot about your Mage class. You have progressed through all high level dungeons and are currently on the 4th boss in Sunwell Plateau so you must be doing something right. Especially if you were raiding as Frost the whole time.

One thing that bothered me though was that you put a lot of emphasis on obtaining Spell Hit and how important it is, yet when I check you on Armory, you only wear 127 Spell Hit rating (should be 164 Spell Hit?).

Maybe I caught you logging out in your farming gear. Or maybe you are usually put in a group with a Shaman? Or maybe there is something I am missing? Anyways, I love the blog. I am also an Anime fan so it is another reason for me to keep coming back. Keep up the good work!

- Boomer, Undead Mage @ Laughing Skull”

The secret is out! Well I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret from you guys or anything (sorry if you think that I have), but it never crossed my mind to write about this, even though it is a pretty big thing. I found out about it some time after writing my Spell Hit article and never remembered to update it.

The reason why my Spell Hit rating is low is not because you caught my logging off in my farming gear, or because I rely on having a Shaman in my group. The reason for this is because of a little extra bonus granted to us Frost Mages called the “Ghost Hit“.

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Invoking Witch Hunting! ~Heart Pounding Extra Lessons in the Graveyard?~

The fourth episode of Soul Eater begins the main storyline of the anime. Our Meisters and Weapons are starting classes today at the Shinigami Technicians Vocational School. One of the teachers is missing, and there are rumors going around that he has turned into a zombie, and is going around attacking students.

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I have been slacking on my posts on mods lately ever since patch 2.4 came out, and there is more content to discover. I’ve had a bunch of emails asking about some of the mods I use that have been neglecting (sorry!). It is about time I start it up again. This time I will be talking about a mod that I probably can’t Raid or PvP without: Quartz.

On the surface, Quartz is just a customizable castbar to replace the dull default Blizz castbar with something bigger and more colorful. Not only can you change the size and color of your bar, you can add the spell’s icon, name, rank, or cast time to the bar itself. It even changes your cast time according to your spell haste. And that is just the basics.

Latency

If you explore the mod deeper, you can add latency to your castbar. The mod will adjust your castbar depending on your current latency by adding a red “buffer” zone of how long it takes the spell to cast so you can start the next spell cast. This part of the mod is kind of difficult to explain. Let’s see…

Have you ever start mounting up on your horse, but then move before it finished “casting” and still end up mounted? Or cast a spell and right before the castbar finishes you get interrupted, but the spell still managed to get through? Sometimes you cast a spell and you don’t see the castbar right away. That’s is all because of the game latency.

2 Second Frostbolts? Niiiiiiice! :P

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We managed to take down the first of the Eredar Twins tonight. Grand Warlock Alythess was the first of the twin to die, leaving Lady Sacrolash left to kill. She wasn’t as happy as we were though when her sister bit the dust. Lady Sacrolash then gained the abilities of her fallen sister and proceeded to destroy the main tank with in five seconds, and then the rest of the raid ten seconds later. It was not a pretty sight, but at least we made some good progress on this raid encounter.

This fight is a mixture of Twin Emperors from Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (AQ40) and the Four Horsemen from Naxxramas. The similarities being you need a regular tank for one of the Twin, and a Warlock tank for the other twin, and that there is some sort of strategy that you have to do with the debuffs that everyone in the raid must be paying attention to.

This fight is a very healing intensive fight. There was so much raid damage that we had to make a few changes in our raid setup, and had a total of four Resto Shamans, two Resto Paladins, two Resto Druids, and a Holy Priest. All that healing and we were still having difficulties keeping people alive.

There is so much stuff going on that it gets chaotic in the raid, and there are so many things that can lead to a wipe (which happens really fast btw). Besides from the obvious reasons of letting one of our tanks die, letting any of the healers in the raid die will quickly wipe the raid due to the shortage of heals. Also, Grand Warlock Alythess casts Conflagration on a random target, and that target must run away from the raid or it will instantly cause a chain reaction of fire damage and instantly kill the entire raid.

Why hello there Mary-Kate and Ashley…

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After the tough lost on Thursday for the Flyers in Overtime against the Montreal Canadiens, we needed something to jumpstart the sour mood in the City of Brotherly Love. That jumpstart began on Friday night.

I scored some tickets to the Sixers Playoff game against the Detroit Pistons and was pretty excited. The Series is tied 1-1 with game 3 and 4 at home in Philadelphia. Let’s go Sixers!

Friday: Sixers and Phillies

Everyone thought that the Sixers win in Game 1 of the series was a fluke when they beat Detroit on the road by 4, and in Game 2 it may have been proven so when Detroit won by 17. Game 3 was in Philly, and everyone is predicting a repeat of Game 2. Everyone who I told that I was attending the game gave a similar response, “Have fun watching the Sixers get stomped”. Well they were wrong…

We arrived at the Wachovia Center with little to no problems with any traffic or finding parking. We get to our seats, 3 rows from the court. Awesome seats! We were directly to the side of the basket, and within a foul shot distance from the Sixers bench.

See the dude with the white cap on backwards in the bottom left corner?
Our seats were directly behind him.

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I copied my mage over to the Public Test Realm the other day, and two days later she finally got copied over.

If you have been keeping up with all the upcoming changes in the next patch 2.4.2, then this will probably be old news for you. For everyone else, we Mages are getting a new Teleport and Portal spells! There is also a new PvP Trinket with upgraded Resilience stats on it.

New Mage Portal:

For Horde Mages you uhh… I dunno, make your way to Stonard, track your Class Trainer and find the Portal Trainer. Should be something like that :) You now have quick access to Sunken Temple and the Dark Portal.

For Alliance Mages, you can learn how to Teleport and open Portal to Theramore Isle. Hop on the griffin from Ironforge to Wetlands, take the boat to Theramore, change your mini-map tracking to find Class Trainers, and follow the ping on your map. You will find Ysuria the Portal Trainer at the bottom of the tower where Jaina resides. You now have quick access to Onyxia’s Lair, and are a quick flight path away from Gadgetzan. You can also teleport here to visit everyone’s favorite Mage Hero: Lady Jaina Proundmore.

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Bleach has also followed along with Naruto and converted to a widescreen format. Most new anime being aired are in the widescreen format, so it was about time that Bleach also upgraded.

Starting from Episode 168, Bleach will be aired in the widescreen format along with a new opening and ending theme song. The previous episode was the conclusion of the battle between Ichigo and Grimmjow (whatcha know ’bout Grimmjow Jaegerjaques?). So they chose Episode 168 to upgrade their format and to start a new…

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The Boy of Perfection ~Death the Kid’s Magnificent Mission?~

Episode 3 features our last Meister. Death the Kid, is Shinigami-sama’s son and has a obsession with having everything perfect and symmetrical. His two Weapons are Patty and Liz, who can each turn into a Gun for him to use, or for each other to use.

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… you do not talk about Frozen Orb. The second rule about Frozen Orb: You DO NOT talk about Frozen Orb. Well I am going to break some rules to educate the masses on this powerful spell.

If you ever visit the WoW>Mage Forums, you often finding yourself reading countless threads that are: 72% - QQ’ing, 20% - “Mages are Overpowered”, 3% - Educational, and 5% - “OMG 1337 Pyroblast Crit!”.

“QQ” threads are mostly about Warlocks and Shadowstep Rogues and the “Mages are Overpowered” are usually posted by Warriors and Paladins. The educational threads are pretty rare, are usually posted by the 4-5 respectable players in the Mage Community. The “OMG 1337″ threads are mostly places Mages go to flex their epeen.

These “OMG 1337″ threads are frowned upon in the Mage Community not only because the uselessness it brings to the Mage Forums, but because the fear of the small chance that a Mage Moderator might actually read what someone says (*gasp* I know! It happens sometimes!), and find something to be too powerful and nerf it.

It began with the “LOlz! 5 Consecutive Ice Lance Critz before NOva Broke!” threads which prompt the establishment of the First two rules about Ice Lance. The rules were not enforced and it was too late. It has been “fixed” and you no longer see many Ice Lances not breaking nova anymore. Everyone knew that this “fix” was to come eventually, but many Mages felt that their own forums contributed to the nerf.

The Frozen Orb. Long time fans of Blizzard games may already know of this spell. It is from an older Blizzard MMORPG called Diablo II, and World of Warcraft has taken some gameplay elements from this game. Some sound effects here and there, the item rarity level system, talent tree system… even the Item Socketing System was taken from Diablo II.

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