Summer is upon us, 2023 edition.

 When I start writing this post, it is Monday the 17th of July. Next Thursday my summer-vacation starts, so playtime will go down, outside time will go up. I will be spending 5.5 weeks away from my home-PC and trusting on a 6-year old MSI-laptop. With Innovation's current schedule, I can raid 3 more times, and after that 10 raids will be very tentative. So, 3 more raids for a Sartharion-kill...oh my.

With the RL-injury of the other mage in Innovation... I suspect some dumb raids  :)

In other news, next patch will bring heritage armor for both Night-Elf and Undead. So bot Lurge and Mardah need to get that, maybe it is even time for Mardah to do the Blue Dragon-flight quests for the mount. There will also be new customizations, well.. no idea about that.

In the Alt-department, Timicin is trying to get a sword from LFR-Echo, and my lower level toons going for heritage armor on lvl50 are slowly progressing.

Today is Wednesday the 26th of July, so yes, sometimes it takes a while for something to be finished. Which is not what Innovation did with the raid last night. I hope they succeed during summer. Timicin is more lucky, and found his sword in the Vault. And Lorinthe, Green Destro lock also has joined my army of seventies last week

At least I got two Mega Dungeon runs in this week, time for vacation now.

Lurge listening to some Dragons

C-c-c-c-changes

I have to look it up, but somewhere it was mentioned that they removed the permanent option on Water Elemental, now it just spawns with Icy veins, because people where not actually speccing it anyway... well.. no shit Sherlock.. it was paired with Loneley Winter which was just a very big DPS-gain. It's not that people didn't want a permanent buddy, it's because you made it a dps-loss, and mage is a DPS-class....

Having that out of my system, the new Frost is interesting, and it forced me to change my Standard UI. I lost one spell, that is Rune of Power, but I gained three, Comet Storm, Glacial Spike and Ray of Frost. And I gained an utility, Mass barrier. That is 3 spells that at least need to be hot-keyed. And I also needed to have bigger acces to Damage reduction spells.

So I activated a new bar for all my DR's and put them all there. It has to be seen if that is handy, but at least I can see them more clearly now, and they are no longer on my hotbar, which may become a problem, have to test that in the next few weeks.

I already 'played' with the new spec on Tuesday's Raid (pre-patch). It was actually not that much of a dps-loss, and because we were farming lower-HC, it didn't matter much. I died several times because I was trying to figure out what to cast, instead of looking below my feet, but that is training. One thing I did noticed was that the new 'combo' can take a while.

In a situation that actually happens a lot imho, the 'combo' can take upto 10 seconds. I am talking about the next situation: Frostbolt-Flurry-Icestorm-Glacial Spike-Ray of Frost. On a boss like Experiments, where globes spawn that need to be killed fast, I noticed a lot of lost Winter Chills because I couldn't start the combo at the spawn. I should really learn to not use flurry, if I know target will not make it for the next 3 seconds.

So, the new casting memory is:

(with first spell having higher priority to following spells in case of choice)

Shatter-window:

Cast Flurry if last cast was Glacial Spike/Frostbolt or if Icicles=4

Cast Comet Storm

Cast Glacial Spike/Ice Lance

Cast Ray of Frost/Glacial Spike/Ice lance

Out of Shatter-window:

Cast Ice Lance with FoF-proc

Cast Frostbolt

Cooldowns:

Icy Veins on CD

Frozen Orb with Ray of Frost on CD and max 1 FoF-proc

Temporal Warp in Icy Veins

Shifting Power when IV,RoF,FO  are on CD (plus if you can do this in range)

.... and now it is Sunday, and we have Evokers, and we cleared it all rather easy upto Echo of Neltharion.. and this was what I was looking at after Magmorax: 

I guess Frost is better, and I promise not to eat the Evokers?

Who are all these people?

I know, I didn't played for three months, but still.. who are all these guildies?

I just re-read Eight years in Azeroth, and that got me on some memory-trips. The guild in that blog, Descendants of Draenor, had a rough time between Firelands and Dragon Soul. And this was just after they actually did all the achievements in Firelands. And I remembered what it as for Innovation. And if you don't, look at the posts from Januari 2012, and count the number of people in the kill-shots....

Innovation kills Normal Deathwing... with only 10 people

There are actually still a lot of people around now from that dark time. On the picture we see Eva, Synth, Moreor, Aletia and myself as Mardah. That is 5 people still raiding. And some names that still pop up often like now and then. And people long gone, like Charli and Zese (yes, we had an imba-rouge before Gestalt). Now, 7 people that signed up that evening couldn't come due to having to do it on 10, not 25...

But there where raiders before that, that have gone, like the infamous Wenny, Miralocolix,Juliej. And not that ago lost to the Aether, and hopefully returning one day Kris and Fuzzy. I actually have list of all players that partook in Mists of Pandaria, it's at the end through the whole of the following video:

To be honest, some of them may still be around, and I just forgot their old names  :p. But where was I going when I started writing, oh yeah, who are all those people. So many new people joined in the first few months of Dragonso...rrr... Dragonflight. And I hardly know them, and some of them never heard of Mardah, just Lurge... 

So welcome to Innovation:

 

Also, posted a few years ago, my thoughts back then what should be done:

https://lurge.blogspot.com/2013/08/archive-numbercrunching-innovation.html

Innovation