The Final 40.

The count down has started, and I doubt the natural ability to sleep is going to take over me. And I have to work tonight. It's crunch time and Im running over all the processes in my head. My motivation, my spec, my strategy, everything! And last wishes or advice are much appreciated!

Lillim, My Mage

Wow Party! And the best pull I have ever made in Magic Boosters

This Tuesday, when Cataclysm is released, I'm going to a 4 day LAN party with some guys from my guild. I seriously doubt that any of us are going to get sleep. So my plan is to buy Monster Energy Drinks for $1 and turn right around and sell them for $2 at the event. Even though Monster is considered the shit tier of energy beverages, right now the Kroger that I work at is having a massive sale on them and gamers love convienence. Go me!

Also, the other day I bought a few Worldwake boosters and pulled Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Non foil, but this card is currently worth $90. The feeling that I felt was just through the roof.

AHHHHHH The Lens Glare!

This card is sexy. However, as soon as you bring it out, Jace paints a HUGE target on his head screaming, "KILL ME! KILL ME BEFORE I TAKE YOU DOWN YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

Thanks for all the Support so far!

Thanks for the comments about my soon to be adventure in WoW. Even if the server first achievements are gone, I do plan to get to 85 as fast as possible. This way I can get into Tol Barad, get my portal, and start charging people for it! Might sound mean, but its a way to earn pointless currency!!! Horray me!!

Anyways, before the 7th I plan to have 25 quests completed in my log, and as soon as I'm able to log in and level, I'm going to turn in all the quests I have and then teleport my way to Orgrimmar and then go to Mount Hyjal. Im still not sure if I want to go to Mount Hyjal or Vash'ir. The pictures below shows my expected path from 80 to 85. Tell me what you think!

From the map above, I will be starting in the middle of Storm Peaks to start firing off daily quests until my quest log is empty. Once I finish up turning in all 25 quests in Northrend I will port myself to Orgrimmar to fly straight to Mount Hyjal.

I will start power questing in Mount Hyjal and when I'm done questing there I will fly straight to Uldum down below and begin the questing there until I hit 85. If for some reason I don't hit 85, I will then quickly go over to the Twlight Highlands over in the Eastern Kingdoms.

Thanks for reading, and as always, comments are appreciated! Even the mean negative ones!

My goals in WoW for Cataclysm

I really want to get a server first achievement. I'm looking for server first Mage myself. Over the next few days I will explain about what I have in mind for how I am going to get this achievement.

Today I am looking at 80-85 speed leveling specs. Out of all three specs, Frost and Arcane look the best. I choose not to go fire because even though it looks aoe friendly, Blizz has stated that aoe in general is not the direction they wanted to take.

I am thinking about Frost as a leveling spec just because it's the traditional leveling spec pre 4.0.1. That, and with the ranged frost nova from the Water Elemental, and the Frostbolt Chill Cleave, it might help when I aggro more mobs than I can currently handle.

I am also thinking about Arcane because of talents, Arcane Blast can be talented to also put Slow on my current target. That, and with the high damage that Arcane Blast can pump out, I can imagine I can just shred through mobs. Improved Polymorph is going to be helpful for that needed stun.

Overall I can see myself going both ways, and with just a week left before Cataclysm, I need to get my shit together and find out what I am going to do!

Let me know what you guys think!

Recent haul in MTG

So on Saturday I bought 6 boosters of Rise of the Eldrazi, and 6 boosters of Worldwake. 12 total and down $40 bucks. I actually didn't do to bad for my haul of rares and mythic rares.

Rise of the Eldrazi Rares:
1 Surrakar Spellblade
1 Disaster Radius
1 Devastating Summons
1 Conquering Manticore
1 Momentous Fall
1 Awakening Zone

Over all not bad. With my plans to make an Eldrazi Spawn deck Awakening Zone is gonna be really nice.

Worldwake Rares:
1 Lodestone Golem
1 Talus Paladin
1 Jwari Shapeshifter
2 Strength of Tajuru

Worldwake Mythic Rares:
1 Omnath, Locus of Mana
1 Avenger of Zendicar (foil)

As you can see I did alot better with Worldwake boosters than I did with Rise of the Eldrazi. It makes sense though. Last week I bought a Rise of the Eldrazi Fat Pack and pulled Emrakul, The Aeon Thorns foil and non foil in 2 different boosters. I was pretty excited when I pulled a foil mythic rare, and after reading the card, I don't even know if I want to use him in anything. More than likely I will just sell him.

I apologize for not having a video of me opening up the boosters, my camera wigged out on me and just stopped. My phone did get some pictures and if you want I can show you the cards I got.

I was just at Walmart.

It was midnight. All I want to say is, FUCK THAT!!! National consumerism at it's best. Yeah I won't go there again on Black Friday. All I wanted to do is see what the crowd looked like and I could barely move.

On an unrelated note. Saturday, Meijer is having a sale on Trading Cards at 20% off. You can bet that I will be buying quite a few packs of Magic cards and recording myself opening them. Is there anything that you want to see me open? Ill make a poll and hopefully I can get some responses!

MtG Mondays

For the past few weeks I have been playing Magic: The Gathering on Mondays up at a restaurant called Tim Hortons. It was epic this time! Usually I don't do so hot since alot of people like to play RDW (Red Deck Wins). And since we play casual table top style, I can get creamed.

Well this time I had my semi decent vampire deck against two RDW decks. My partner on my team in the THB was using a rat deck with alot of sick control. The game went on for about 40 minutes because our opponents couldn't keep creatures out due to our creature control, and neither could our Vamps and Rats stay long because of just retarded burn spells. We were hitting them for about 4 a turn, and they were burning us for 3 a turn. one of the RDW pulled out a Wurmcoil Engine and really started to lay down the hurt. The last round we were at 1 life, and they were at 8. No more burn spells in their hands, and we had no more creature control cards. we attacked for 4 and it went through due to a swampwalk combo I pulled. They took it, and we had a defender left. Their draw. They tap a mountain, and lightning bolt us! We were so close to winning and it was almost our victory.  Then the next game I pulled out my elf deck and smashed them into the ground with an assault of 75 damage. That made me feel better.

A long time away.

First off, I want to apologize about my extended absence. Ive been having it rough in life and I haven't been able to commit much time to this blog. I will deliver more exciting content and awesome things in the future, I can promise you that. There are some changes that I want to make and any suggestions I would love to hear!

First off, I kinda died down on playing World of Warcraft. Maybe its because it's the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I hear alot of people are feeling that. However the amount of excitement for Cataclysm is just through the roof! What I want to do is record myself talking live about my experiences in the new content as soon as the servers go live. I will be talking live on the videos that I will be uploading to Youtube. That way you will be experiencing everything as soon as I do. What my overall goal is to get Server First with either a Mage or Blood Elf. With these videos, I wont hold back any "bad word" so if something pisses me off, I probably gonna say those naughty words like "FUCK!" or "SHIT!" or even, "FUCKING COCK SUCKING SON OF A BITCH FAGGOTY ASS ALLIANCE!!" Just ask my Guild mates, I've done it.


Another project that I want to start is something to do with Minecraft. You know the game, you love it. Now here I sit at a standstill. I don't know whether or not to do somthing like a "Let's Play: Minecraft!" or make videos of things exploding with TNT. If I get permission from our server admin, I might record whats going on in the server and how to build interesting things. Overall I have so many ideas in my hear I dont know how to sort them all out. leave some suggestions in the comments below!

Finally, I've been playing alot of Magic: the Gathering lately. I've spent alot of money and I'd like to document, hopefully by video, of my experience. One way is to show mock up games, or how my decks are constructed and how I play with my friends. It could even be something like recording myself opening up boosters and showing you guys what I got.

Overall I'm going to take a more active approach in my blog and actually commit myself to doing a good job. Would any of this interest anyone? Please let me know!

Mage Cooldowns in 3.3.5

In this post, I will go over ever single Mage cooldown from skills to talents. I'm not going to go over any changes in Cataclysm. Nor will I go over consumables, racials, or most damaging spells with a cooldown. I will, however, tell how best to use the Cooldown and when to use it in a PvE scenario. The format for a Cooldown will be as follows:

Talent Tree

Skill
CD length. Cast time. Description with a good way to use the CD.


Arcane

Arcane Power
2 minute CD (1.4 minute with talents). Instant. This Cooldown is amazing! Every 1 minute and 24 seconds you can activate this ability and do an additional 20% extra damage to all mage spells at the cost of 20% increased spell mana cost.


Blink
15 second CD. Instant. Blink can be used to get out of stuns and snares that a boss might put on you. It's biggest feature is moving you 20 yards in front of you instantly. Best used when you are standing in fire and you need to move immediately. Be mindful where you will end up.

Counterspell
24 second CD. Instant. Counterspell is great when you need to interrupt a spell cast from a boss or caster mob. This is extremely useful when other classes (Rogues, Enhancement Shamans, Death Knights, Warriors, I'M CALLING YOU OUT ON THIS) refuse to interrupt the boss when they can do it more often than Mages.

Evocation
4 minute CD (2 minutes with talents). 8 second channel effect. Evocation is an amazing ability that restores a total of 60% of our total mana over the duration of the channel. This can be interrupted and knocked back by enemies, so be careful and make sure you can get the full 60% back. Best used when you are at 40% mana.

Invisibility
3 minute CD (2 minutes with talents). Instant, 3 second fade time. This is a major threat drop. If you are about to pull threat, its best to stop casting all damaging spells, hit Invisibility, and wait three seconds. After that point, you drop ALL threat that you had, and you will then have a total of zero threat on your target. Do be careful though. If you are hit with an attack the fade on invisibility will stop and you wont become invisible.

Mirror Image
3 minute CD. Instant. Mirror Image will create 3 additional copies of your mage that do minimal damage and cast Fireblast and Frostbolt. The main point of this spell is the massive threat drop. As soon as you cast this spell, you get a threat drop of 90 million. No joke either. If you have aggro, hit Mirror Images. For the next 30 seconds, you will not be attacked by a boss or mob. One the 30 seconds is up, you gain that 90 million threat right back. If you are soloing content, the Images will aggro the mob instead of you.

Presence of Mind (Talented)
2 Minute CD (1.4 minutes with talents). Instant. This is a fun little spell that makes the next Mage ability you cast that as a base cast time of under 10 seconds an instant cast. Basically anything besides Teleports, Portals, and and channeled will become instant cast. This is best used when you need to move just slightly and you need to get off another Arcane Blast.

Fire


Combustion (Talented)
2 minute CD. Instant. This is a nifty spell that increases your crit chance by 10% for every fire attack that you land on the target that is not a DoT of some kind. This first effect will last until you score a total of 3 critical strikes. The other part of this ability will give you 50% increased Fire crit damage bonus. This is a kinda interesting ability because while a critical strike from your Living Bomb dot will not use a charge, it is effected by the increasing crit percentage. However, the final blast from Living Bomb will use a charge if it crits.

Fire Ward
30 second CD. Instant. This is a good spell to use when you are under attack from bosses that use Fire damage as their main source of pain. It absorbs 1950 fire damage before modifications to your spell power. Both Fire Ward and Frost Ward share a CD.

Frost


Cold Snap (Talented)
8 minute CD (6 minutes with talents). Instant. This nifty spell will immediately make any Frost spell that is on CD come off of Cooldown and you can then use it right away. This is best used when you want to use Deep Freeze twice in a row on a boss fight.

Deep Freeze (Talented)
30 second CD. Instant. This spell will stun any opponent in place for 5 seconds. If the opponent is immune to stuns, (Bosses), then instead it will do a huge hunk of damage. The kicker of this spell is that you can only use it on enemies that are frozen. This is why you talent into Fingers of Frost to make spells like this act as if the target was frozen.

Frost Nova
25 second CD (20 seconds with talents). Instant. This handy spell is good when you rip aggro off of your tank and you run for your life. You hit Frost Nova and all targets are frozen in place for up to 8 seconds. If too much damage is taken, the enemies will break out of their frozen ground and attack the highest threat target. This is also good for AoE packs when a lot of mobs are just chaotically going to random casters standing in the back.


Frost Ward
30 second CD. Instant. This is exactly like Fire Ward except with frost damage. Both Fire Ward and Frost Ward share a CD.


Ice Barrier (Talented)
30 second CD (24 seconds with talents). Instant. This handy utility CD is best to prevent damage from coming your way. You help out your healers, and you don't die as fast. The other nice ability is that you don't suffer from normal spell pushback effects when Ice Barrier is up. The amount of damage that Ice Barrier absorbs scales with how much spell power you have.


Ice Block
5 minute CD (4 minutes with talents). Instant. This spell will save your life. Literally. When you hit Ice Block. You encase yourself into a block of ice and are immune to all types of damage. The downside is you are unable to move for the duration of 10 seconds. If you pull aggro, you can hit Ice Block really fast. This will cause the enemy to attack the next highest threat target available. After Ice Block expires, the enemy will begin to attack you again. What this is super useful for is clearing a nasty debuff away. Whenever you cast Ice Block, you can literally get rid of almost all types of debuffs that can be put on you. Fear, DoTs, and most magical debuffs will go away.


Icy Veins (Talented)
3 minute CD (2.4 minutes with talents). Instant. This handy spell is an amazing spell when you need to start casting like a mad man. This spell increases your spell casting speed by a total of 20% for 20 seconds. Icy Veins will make you feel very powerful when you start seeing your spells fly out of your finger tips one after another. The other benefit of this spell is that you will suffer no spell pushback when you are under the effects of Icy Veins.

Summon Water Elemental (Talented)
3 minute CD (2.4 minutes with talents). Instant. Summon Water Elemental is a temporary pet under your control. He will stand next to you and cast Water Bolts until he disappears after 45 seconds (60 seconds with talents). His second ability is a secondary Frost Nova that you control where its placed on the battle field. This CD isn't that interesting unless you glyph it on 3.3.5, which will make him a permanent pet to attack anything that you do. The downside of glyphing him is you no longer have that secondary Frost Nova. However, with the increase to your DPS that he gives you, its worth it to lose that Frost Nova

Thanks everyone for reading this! If this is well liked, I will do Mage Talents, Rotations, Gear, Stats and more!

Quick MtG update

Before my post on Mage Cooldowns, I wanted to say that today I bought 3 m11 packs of boosters and got Chandra Nalaar and the Inferno Titan. Not the best cards ever, but still pretty decent for 2/3 mythic rares.  I guess its time to make a red deck.

A World of Warcraft look into Mages

I have been playing the World of Warcraft for sometime now. And with the power of blogging, I thought I just might share some of the interest I have with one of the greatest classes ever created!

I've always has an affiliation with "magic" of the sorts since I was a kid. Growing up watching Dragonball Z religiously, I stared in awe watching as Goku or Vegeta shot some kind of ki blast at one of the numerous bad guys hoping that maybe one day I could do that too. Then came WoW.

My first class that I played was the mage. The idea of flinging fireballs and turning people into sheep was just to priceless. I didn't understand at the time what cc was, nor did I grasp the concept that having every skill you have on your bars was a bad idea. But dammit was teleport fun!! Then I got to 80 and immediately realized that taking all 71 points into a single tree was a huge waste of resources and just fucking stupid. I spec'd into Arcane right off the rip out of the thousands of guides that are out there. Fresh leveling greens, a proper rotation, somewhat of a cooldown management and I was raiding with pugs and not being laughed at! Infact, I was usually in the top 3 for overall damage in raids.

Then I got into an actual guild. This guild that was composed of friends that lives around me and played just as much as me, if not more. We started to raid and rocked it!!! We had no earthly idea what we were doing. We never heard of Tankspot at the time. Nor have we heard of things like what a strategy was, or what loot is actually good for our class. I had a basic understanding that I didnt want over a certain number of hit rating, but spirit seemed like a good stat for me. HA! I even seen a Hunter roll Need on the Essence of Gossamer in Heroic AN before.

Once our guild started to read up on strategies and ask people on tips and tricks of some of the bosses in the Raids, we started to progress somewhat. We became somewhat decent, but never amounted to much. We still haven't killed the Lich king on Normal mode. I blame the scrubs that can't move out of Defile.

In a future blog, maybe tonight, I might go over some of the cooldowns that Mages have and when is the best time to use them. I might even talk about the PTR's and where Mages sit right now.

Magic: the Gathering

So today I splurged and bought 9 packs of m11 booster packs. Was that a smart idea? No, it was not. Was it fun as hell? You bet your ass it was! I only got a few good things out of it though. I got a Grave Titan, a Traumatize for my blue mill deck, and some neat rare land cards. Any thoughts, suggestions for the Grave Titan, or YOUR DOING IT WRONG for my mill deck?

YAY!! First blog posting!

Well I thought that I would make a blog because of many things that I have on my mind and other things that I feel that I should discuss.

A few things about myself really quick, I play World of Warcraft pretty frequently. I have an 80 mage, dk, and pally. The Mage and DK are  ICC geared and ready to rock out Cataclysm.

Other things huh? I love video games and recently I have been taking it apon myself to learn and build some really good Magic: The Gathering decks. Anything else you want to know? hit me up.