May 2012
1 post
Roleplaying a Death Knight
In the past couple weeks my attention has swung back to Traxy. I’ve been focusing not just on gearing her up, but also on roleplaying her. I think I’ve developed a bit of a feel for her character and I wanted to share my thoughts.
I want to make clear up front: this is not a “how to” post. I do have some ideas about how death knights should be roleplayed but they are my...
April 2012
12 posts
Traxy Ysiel'thar
Approximately four hundred seventy years ago, Traxselina Ysiel’thar (“Traxy”) was born in Auberdine. She was the daughter of Telenderia and Selenaria Ysiel’thar, and the younger sister of Saxsy Ysiel’thar. Upon her birth the clouds parted, birds sang, and nightsabers and thistle bears decided to put their differences aside for the moment in order to have a grand party...
Baby Traxy Comes of Age
It was a little over a week ago that one of the higher ups in Dedicated Ending announced a change to the raiding schedule. Up until now, we had been doing Firelands runs on Wednesdays to get the guild leader the legendary staff. A couple weeks ago that was finished up, so we needed something else to do. That something else turned out to be an alt Dragon Soul run.
The problem with the alt runs,...
On Hiding Eggs
The Great Blog Noblegarden Egg Hunt 3.0 has ended, and the winners have been announced. This is the first time I have participated by hiding an egg in my site. I didn’t go looking for eggs, because I’m horrible at that sort of thing, but I thought it would be fun to participate by hiding one.
My egg was one of four rated as “difficult” to find by Kamalia. I didn’t...
Heroic Kills
I have a number of things I could write about: Saxsy’s retcon and the AoE possibilities for fire mages in MoP are things I’d like to get to. But I think it’s necessary to acknowledge Jana’s raid last night and document it while I am still thinking about it.
Jana’s raid downed heroic Yor’sahj and heroic Ultraxion last night.
This feels like a small step toward...
Saxsy Ysiel'thar (Take 2)
Sachaselineria Ysiel’thar was born almost seven hundred years ago in the remote village of Auberdine. Her father was Telenderia Ysiel’thar, a druid primarily focused on the restoration magic. Her mother was Selenaria Ysiel’thar, a powerful sentinel warrior charged with guarding Auberdine and the surrounding area.
Very early in her youth people got tired of calling her by her...
Five Hundred
This is my five hundredth post on I Like Pancakes.
Five hundred is a pretty big number for anything. If each post averages a thousand words (not that I think they do, but it’s as good a guess as any and some posts are pictures), that’s ten times as many words as my second book. I Like Pancakes is undoubtedly the longest as most detailed set of writing that I’ve ever done.
One...
BETA: Fire Mage Strategy
The following post contains predictions about the spells fire mages will cast in Mists of Pandaria based on a little bit of testing I’ve done in the beta.
Based on my experimentation with various spells in the beta, I’ve come to a tentative conclusion as to what the fire mage priority list will be like in Mists of Pandaria. This could change, not just because better theory crafting...
BETA: Inferno Blast Armchair Theorycraft
The following posts contains theorycraft about the fire mage rotation in Mists of Pandaria.
In my last post I suggested that one of the more interesting issues for fire mages to be addressed in Mists of Pandaria is the timing of inferno blast casts. Inferno blast is guaranteed to crit, and thus is a way of forcing a Hot Streak if you can reactively cast it while Heating Up is active. (If these...
BETA: Fire Mage Single Target Strategy Predictions
The following posts contains specific predictions about fire mage strategy based on information from the beta.
In single target fights, fire mage, not considering long cooldown spells, has remained pretty much unchanged since the advent of Living Bomb. You applied Critical Mass in some way (or whatever the buff was called back then), then weaved fireballs, living bombs and pyroblasts based on...
Changes
Something happened to me last night.
Every once in a while life comes around and slaps you in the face, and tells you you’ve been doing it wrong all this time. That you’ve traveled down a road too far without knowing where you’re going, and really you ought to have been on some different road the whole time.
It really started so simply. It was a joke, almost a bet between...
March 2012
13 posts
RP Fun By Classes
I think any time someone pours their heart into something it deserves to be recognized. Undoubtedly this link will be like the old woman urinating into the sea,* but if you’re at all interested in warlocks go read Cynwise’s series on The Decline and Fall of Warlocks in Cataclysm.
A young boy was walking along the beach when he happened across an old woman urinating into the sea....
BETA: Fire Mages in Pandaria, First Impressions
The following blog entry contains specific impressions about the changes to the fire mage play style, based on very little actual evidence.
I haven’t had much of a chance to play Jana on the beta servers. There is no new content available for 85s yet, and after ten minutes I got tired of waiting for a queue for an Hour of Twilight heroic. I’ve taken Jana to a set of target dummies and...
BETA: I Like Pancakes Policy Statement
This post contains nothing that I would consider to be a spoiler.
There. That’s a good way to start off a post, and a good demonstration of a policy I will have regarding the Mists of Pandaria beta. I was one of the lucky ones to be invited into the first wave. My impression was that everyone who signed up for the Annual Pass would be getting a beta invite but apparently there are just so...
Jana and Saxsy's Comprehensive Roleplaying Guide
Contents
Introduction
Character
Basic Roleplay Assumptions
Finding Roleplay
Roleplay Mechanics
One on One
Small Group
Large Group
Adversarial Roleplay
Canon, Non-canon, Retconning and other Inconsistencies
Summary
Introduction
A while back I did a guide for how to play a fire mage, which is one of my passions in the game. I thought it might be useful to write a guide for another of my...
Saxsy's Trinket Night
Last night was time for Saxsy to go back into Dragon Soul for some good old fashioned raiding. We had a little trouble forming up a group at the start, as our off-tank couldn’t make it. That required a bit of juggling as one of our healers switched to tank and we brought in another healer.
This reminded me of one of the comparisons between Jana’s raid group and Saxsy’s raid...
Status Report
Every once in a while I feel it’s useful to take a step back and assess where my characters are and what’s going on in their lives. I feel that it’s especially useful now because of how things have changed. I feel like I’m at a tipping point again and it’s useful to note that.
I want to talk first about Jana. Things on Jana are going absolutely fantastically....
Deception
There’s a story I tell about Jana. It goes something like this:
(warning: mature themes ahead)
Back in the middle of Burning Crusade, I was playing as the character Tatjana on the Thorium Brotherhood server. During that time I developed a friendship with a guy named Seth, who played several different characters there. Our characters hit it off well, so he revealed to me that he was a...
cellys-pie asked: Why did you choose the name Saxsy for your night elven mage? Spur of the moment? Name you've used before? Because it sounds cute when you add sexsy Saxsy? Also! Why did you pick to play a mage ingeneral?
cellys-pie asked: If you could change any one thing about the World of Warcraft (except things such as taking out a faction, and or a faction's race from playability), what would you choose, and why that over something else? Why do you think you'd change that for?
Meeting Up
In just about a month I will be attending a convention that is of interest to many Warcraft players but not specifically related to Warcraft. Attending this convention will be three people, possibly more, who I know within the game but have never met outside the game. This is a familiar experience for me and I thought I’d share some thoughts about the experiences I’ve had.
I’ve...
cellys-pie asked: Out of your three characters whom would you rather talk with and hang out with? What would you talk about? Where would the two of you go and why?
cellys-pie asked: Why do you like pancakes? Why does your three characters like pancakes? Because of their floppy fun nature? Their awesomeness when applied with syrup? What other sort of foods do you and your characters like? What would each of the do to acquire a plate tall stack of pancakes?
Anonymous asked: As players, we often develop our own personal likes/dislikes/preferences in Azeroth - for specs, for classes, for races, for faction. In game, we've numerous examples of cross-faction allegiances (Argent Dawn/Crusade probably being the best representation of this), friendships (Asric and Jadaar) and fanon romances (Thassarian/Koltira) - how would you approach a cross-faction relationship,...
February 2012
17 posts
Someone Like You
It’s easy to get down on the game, and I suspect a lot of people will over the next seven or eight months or however long it takes for Blizzard to release the next expansion. Deathwing is dead, and killing him will just get easier and easier as time goes by. Heroic modes may not interest a lot of people, but those too will become easier. Challenges will be overcome until there is a point...
You Can Tell A Lot About A Person
One of the things I do a lot of is browse for MRPs. I will go to crowded places like Cathedral Square, the Auction House, in front of either Stormwind Bank, the Blue Recluse, or Goldshire, and read MRPs.
For those who don’t know: MRP stands for “MyRoleplay”, which is an addon that allows you to share a description of your character with others who have compatible add ons. I...
Mists of Pandaria Wishlist
So I saw this Mists of Pandara Wish List from Among the Elements and that got me to thinking about my own wish list.
Wish Lists are like the Santa Lists one might have made as a kid. Ordering the wish list was very important, because people would naturally start reading the list and never get toward the bottom. So you wanted to put the things you really wanted to get near the top of the list. At...
Dragon Soul Hijinks
Jana’s raid crew went into Dragon Soul last night for the weekly raid. Because some people weren’t feeling 100%, the raid lead decided to forego a shot at Heroic Morchok and instead we did everything on normal mode. We actually started the run about forty minutes early, as nine of us were on and ready that early. We cleared all the trash before Morchok (and by that, I mean all the...
Firing Cannons
I was in an LFR the other night. No sooner did I say “Hello” in raid chat than someone replied with an insult of Moon Guard involving a British word for cigarettes. This happens every so often, and I usually just console myself with the thought that I will completely destroy the damage meters and carry their ass to victory. This LFR was no different; 3 of the 4 top damage dealers were...
Heroic Modes
Saxsy’s raid team went into Dragon Soul last night with the intent of starting on hard modes. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, we decided to start with heroic Ultraxion rather than heroic Morchok. Clearing the way to Ultraxion took a little over an hour, leaving us with a little under two hours to work on Ultraxion.
I am of a couple of different minds about heroic modes....
Tagged
Kamalia tagged me with a meme that’s been going around. I’m not a big one for memes but I’m trying to get to 500 posts before the end of March and there’s no better way of doing it than being willing to do something silly.
Here’s the meme:
* Go into your image folder
* Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
* Publish the image! (and a few words...
Fantastic Raid
Tuesday night, Jana had a raid spot with a guild named Dedicated Ending. This was the group that several weeks ago, on a wonderful day, invited Jana to go kill Deathwing for the first time. I did well enough in that run to be invited back for raids, and from what I can tell, I now have a standing invitation. I was looking forward to yesterday’s run because last week I was unable to run with...
Dissection of an MRP
Now that I’ve finally completed Jana’s background post, I thought it might be fun to put up her MRP description here to both give a sense of what she looks like now and what people would see when encountering her for the first time. If you haven’t already read it, you should go back and read my post on making an MRP profile. Jana had an MRP description from long ago, but I...
Valentine's Day Rhymes
I was having far too much fun today rhyming on Twitter. I thought I’d share my Dragon Soul themed tweets:
Shaman are blue, Death Knights are red, while I was rhyming, Morchok got dead.
Mages are smart, warriors are strong. Zon’ozz is easy, it’s just ping-pong.
I like Yor’sahj, his oozes are dopey. When one is black, Combustion is OP.
When fighting Hagara, it helps to be...
Tatjana Natalia Aliston
Tatjana Natalia Aliston (“Jana”) was born 32 years ago, the first child of John Aliston and Alexandra Aliston. Her father was (and is) an administrator within the Stormwind city government. Her mother was a mage in training but abandoned her practice to raise her family. Two years later, Jana’s sister Anna was born. Alexandra died shortly after giving birth to Anna. Her father...
Freaks, Part 2
So I was in Cathedral Square the other day, talking with friends and looking for interesting MRPs. As I’ve noted before, a hobby of mine is to look at character descriptions and see if I find anything entertaining. A few days ago, I saw one that made me do a double-take.
Warning: the following text content may not be appropriate for kids or the squeamish.
In the “race” field,...
Fairer LFR Loot
One of the common gripes I hear in LFR is that loot is not distributed fairly. Sometimes I am one of the people making such a gripe (although I suspect not so much anymore, now that Saxsy has her 4-piece set). That got me thinking as to how I would change the LFR loot system if I could, with the idea of making it an ideal system. This is more of a thought experiment than anything; I don’t...
Dragon Soul Tactics
Dragon Soul is becoming old hat. I’ve been in a total of five complete clears on normal mode. Including LFR, the armory tells me Saxsy has killed Deathwing 12 times, while Jana has done it 10 times. By now I’ve gotten beyond the basics and have gotten into some specialized ideas for each particular boss, which I’ll share below. I don’t actually know if these tactics are...
Gear List: Saxsy
My guild leader asked our raid team to make gear lists. These are lists of our current gear and locations of upgrades. In my experience it’s a good way to figure out what to hope to drop for and to whom to assign things when gear drops and more than one person can use it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about something like this. I didn’t raid much in Cata before...
Tale of the Tape: Saxsy vs. Jana
Jana raided Dragon Soul last night with Dedicated Ending, a guild that my one of my newer good friends K is in. This was the same guild she went with to kill Madness of Deathwing She got very lucky with loot, leading me to believe that maybe I should have been raiding with Jana all along (not really). Mosswrought Shoulderguards dropped from Morchok, and Jana won them, uncontested. Then on Hagara...
January 2012
13 posts
Contextual Fire Mage DPS
The typical boss fight in WoW is a simple matter of burning things down as quickly as possible. Think of Ultraxion for a moment; with the exception of hitting the Heroic Will button every once in a while, the fight is about pushing as much DPS as possible. On those fights you have a set priority list that you follow: combustion if it’s up and you’ve got three dots on the target, flame...
Madness
I’ve downed Madness of Deathwing three times this week in ten man mode, the first three times I’ve ever done it. I did it for the first time on Saxsy on Monday night with most of RRT’s regular A team raiders. I did it for the second time on Jana on Thursday night thanks to a surprise invitation from a friend to join her guild’s run, as they were one dps short. I did it for...
Why I Play
I complain a lot here.
I complain about not getting loot. I complain about people who are bad in dungeons. I complain about being depressed. I complain about people RPing things incorrectly, rudely, perplexingly, or whatever.
In some way it’s because this blog can be an outlet for that frustration. In some way I think complaining about idiots can be funny.
But I also think it’s...
Coming Home
“I think it’s time for you to come home,” she said.
On Friday it was hard to imagine that this would happen. I had done everything I could to distance myself from Red Royal Trading, to cut off ties, and just generally make it so I could not go back.
On Sunday night I rejoined Red Royal Trading. I rejoined as a Roleplayer, not as an Officer. I’m not sure if they would have...
…
Leaves are falling all around, It’s time I was on my way. Thanks to you, I’m much obliged for such a pleasant stay. But now it’s time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way. For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s headed my way.
So I’ve got to ramble on.
This is one of those entries where I have no idea what I’m going to say when I start...
The Morning After
A long time ago there was a film called “The Day After”. It was a television film, endlessly hyped, set to show the aftermath of a full scale nuclear war.
Kind of feels like that now.
Jana and Saxsy have been guildless for about ten hours now. The fallout continues to rain from that, and will continue for some time, undoubtedly.
Does a part of me think I made a huge mistake...
Things Blow Up
Well, that was quick.
Or maybe it was slow. The writing was on the wall a few weeks ago, I think.
There’s no good way to leave a guild. It is, at its heart, a rejection of what the guild is, and what it stands for. It is a rejection of the people who have worked hard to make the guild what it is. And that can sting even if an average person who’s been in the guild a couple weeks...