Ve vill haf compliance!

I'd like to dedicate this post to Mr BRK just because I know how fond he is of the particular item of head wear my little magey has equipped in the picture below. I like to think that Katiya is looking particularly dashing as she salutes. Hopefully dashing and also militant enough to drive fear into the hearts of murlocs everywhere.

Katiya has now attained the mighty heights of 41, in no small thanks to friendly guildies who have been kind enough to run her through a few instances. I sometimes wonder if this is doing my learning of the mage class a disservice since I haven't really had to pull my weight in your typical 5-man as I've been leveling. I'm fairly confident that I'm getting the hang of things though.

Turning 40 was exciting for two reasons.

Firstly, I got in contact with my friendly dwarf paladin bank mule (got to level 4 before I gave up on her) and arranged for the purchase of my beautiful Black Stallion. Note to the wise: The lumbercamp in Elwynn is the place to get your riding skill but to get the black stallion head over to Menethil Harbour and the horse breeder near the stables. He always has a black stallion available.Secondly I reached the talent Ice Barrier in the frost tree. This spell is my new very bestest friend. It makes soloing soooo much easier and more efficient.

I also completed my mage quests so Kat is running around with her shiny new frost wand. If things keep on this way Katiya will soon pass poor Sephiroh who is currently mouldering in Outlands at 61.

Ice Ice Baby

Sometimes it's nice to take a break from your level 70 and run around on a 'lowbie'. I'd had enough of raiding, farming and PVPing this weekend and decided to log onto my sadly neglected frost mage. I had to spend some time configuring the UI since I hadn't set it up properly since the great primary disk drive meltdown of 08 but before long I was ready to start killing stuff.

It ended up being four of us on our alts running around STV hanging out with old friend Hemut Nessingwary jr. Amusingly all four of us are skinners so there was much fighting over the right to skin including some decidedly ninja like action by a certain rogue. By the end of the evening Katiya had gone from level 30 to 32. Hooray for faster experience gains!

It had been so long since I played Katiya that I had forgotton what all the different abilities were so I kind of had to relearn how to play her. I found myself spamming Frostbolt mostly and got to wondering if I was doing something wrong. It seems from my recent reading however that Frostbolt is pretty much the main damage attack for a frost mage - at least until you get Ice Lance. I threw in some Frost Nova's and Arcane Explosions and paid homage to my Ice Block on a few occasions too. Hooray for the mage version of feign death - bound to the same hot key as feign death is for my hunter hehe.

The next day Katiya also got an outing to the Scarlet Monastery with a group of high level characters. That was fun since I didn't have to watch threat quite so much and got to do AoE which is one of my favourite things about playing a mage I've decided. I also came away with the Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade which was pretty sweet plus a couple of upgrades for my gear.

I'd been wondering about gearing up as a mage and thankfully got some answers from a helpful mage guildie. I'd been running around in some tailor made threads (thanks Emelin) which gave me plus frost damage, however I'd started getting some other gear which had better spell damage and spell crit chance and I was uncertain whether I should stick with the frost specific gear or not. The answer I received was definitely 'or not' since a mage, even when frost specced will be using all schools of magic. This made a lot of sense to me once I thought about it. The hot tip from my mage friend was frost bolt, arcane explosion and scorch. I'd been using the first 2 but now I'll be throwing in a little scorch action too.

Funnily enough I'd had this kind of feeling that if I am specced frost then I shouldn't use fire spells. Kinda silly huh. I mean you're going to use your frost cast over time spell over a fire one but that shouldn't inhibit use of instant casts like Scorch. It's quite interesting really the kind of paradigms you'll build for yourself based on the limits of your knowledge. What I need to start doing now is playing with the newer abilities Katiya has like Cold Snap and Icy Veins and work out how I can use them to good advantage.

I have feeling Katiya will be seeing the light of day a bit more as I get re-enthused about playing my mage.