Too much time?

PS: There is another version with subtitles that can be found here. Enjoy!

Jack the Skeleton

Just a quick post to say I found something awesome, thanks to Typhoon Andrew!

Skeleton Jack's DK blog is choc full of the tech info you love, and here is just the post-patch "oh noes! whatever will I do with my talents nao?" post!

I am very impressed by Jack's blog in general, as you will notice by its addition to my blogroll.

That way people >>

The Green Eyed Monster

Patch day! What a kefuffle! DKs just got nerfed 48 times in one patch! New dungeons have the raiding community falling over themselves now that there is something to do again. Today is certainly an exciting day for a lot of people.

Not so much for me though. A new end-game dungeon doesn't mean much when your highest level toon is still 8 levels from the cap, and a whole raft of DK nerfs doesn't worry me too much either, I never really got used to them enough that all these sweeping changes will upset me. (I would like to take on that badass undead blue-fire-breathing dragon thing you see here though!)

If anything they will encourage some of the 18 million Death Knights to go back to their mains, which is a plus from where I'm standing as there are just too many DKs out there at the moment, and it's kinda nice to have some other classes in the battlegrounds.

I have to say, I am super jealous of the raiders who are going to be getting a first look at some fresh content tonight. Starting to wish I got back into wow a month sooner so I might have a level 80 by now, and maybe even have schmoozed my way into a raid spot.

Oh well, that will come in time. At the moment I'm loving hanging with my ghoul and being a plate-wearing, massive-sword-weilding, melee class of uberness.

In other news, I have decided that the Arcane spec is great inside a dungeon, and not so great otherwise. I just miss my DoTs, snares, pets, Ice Barriers, Pyroblasts, Blastwaves and Combustions too much to be happy about seeing them all go. Mainly an issue for soloing and questing. I also feel that no matter how many changes happen, or how many times I respec, there is a whole lotta -this- going on with my mage, and always has been.

max range. nuke. nuke again while getting belted (maybe). nova. run back or blink. nuke, instant cast till dead. Repeat x 6 gazillion.

This has been going on since the early days, and playing a DK has made me realise that I'm sick of it. Sure there are other ways to kill mobs, sure there is AoE. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, or a mage, but for whatever reason, and in whatever spec, at whatever level, when a mage is sent over yonder to kill ten rats, unless they are in a nice aoeable pack, I bet you a stack of conjured strudel that mage will approach the first rat...

max range. nuke. nuke again while getting belted (maybe). nova. run back or blink. nuke, instant cast till dead. Repeat x ten.

AND I DON'T LIKE IT.

And that, my friends, concludes my QQ post for the month, thanks for being here for me in this emotional and perplexing time.

PS: Oh yeah. Dual-specs. Woohoo. And queuing for battlegrounds from anywhere in the world? To this I say about bloody time. Seriously, Warhammer Online did it ages ago. What took Blizzard so long to rip it off? Now go rip off public quests and dyeable gear. Go on, tell them I sent you.

I'll be waiting

PSS: Got my first spam comments. Really hitting the big time now!

Another year, another spec

I'm doing it again, but this time it wont last.

First, a very brief history of Zupa the mage to put things into context.

WoW is launched, I start playing, soon realise Horde dominate Alliance in all the fun stuff, and so I roll an undead mage.

I levelled as fire, went arcane fire for pvp for a bit, then graduated to raiding. Raiding MC basically required mages to spec frost or spend a lot of time getting resisted by great big firey monsters, and so frost I became... And frost I stayed for a very long time. Then came TBC and in order to do the most damage for the raid I specced fire again.

Well now its WotLK, and raiding is still a long way off. I have decided to give a proper Arcane spec a whirl. Now an arcane spec is something I always wanted to try, but felt I didn't have the gear to back it up. No two pieces of t5 or whatever it was to get the arcane blast set bonus meant I stuck with fire.

Well those days are over, and while my gear still doesn't support an arcane spec to the extent I would like, I seem to get by just fine. The inspiration for this latest respec was none other than Tachyon over at frostnova.ch. He has a nice 3 part series devoted to the arcane spec in WotLK, going into some nice juicy theory crafting which I love, and a bit of an analysis of spell rotations for various situations.

I have to say I'm really enjoying it most of the time.

The most fun tends to be stacking a triple arcane blast debuff and proccing missile barrage, then popping my arcane power and trinket and blasting away with some rapid fire boosted arcane missles. I have been to the Nexus and Utgarte Keep with this spec and have managed to hold my own just fine.

I do, however, miss my shatter combos. You cant use arcane blast to start a shatter combo because it doesn't have any travel time, and thus there is no way to squeeze an ice lance in before it hits. Using a frostbolt or fireball instead is a bit of a nerf to your DPS, so for the most part I haven't been using icelance. I even shifted it off my ready-to-use keybinds over to the deep dark right hand corner, where spells are put out to pasture.

I also miss DoTs. DoTs are fun by their nature, and dots are fun because they entail setting people on fire.

I wonder if I should start chasing the set bonus. Probably not worth the considerable effort for level 70 set items, but it would be nice.

So until the dawn of frostfire, which happens in a few levels, I will at long last be an arcane mage.

The Schizophrenic Mage

Thanks Tachyon for bringing this to my attention:

"Learning how to dual spec will cost a one-time fee of 1000g."

Damn. I have about 300g right now, so I'm going to need 1k for dual spec, 1k for epic flyer, 1k for cold weather flying (what a rort) and probably about 15k for all the training over the next 10 levels.

It will be nice to switch from PvE to PvP specs quickly and easily... Perhaps even nicer than being about to fly in Northrend!

... Spose getting to level 80 is step one... but not before I show some all-in-green level 70s whats up on the battleground :)

I may even spec PoM Pyro for the one-shot-lol factor.

The Prodigal Mage

My posts are not planned.

An idea enters my head, I find a picture, and start typing.

Then I press the post button... and THEN I proof read and make edits. I know this isn't the greatest way to go about things but it's just how it happens....

Very occasionally, however, I start mentally constructing a post in advance, usually when I'm not near a computer, and that idea just has to simmer until such time as I am.

This post, is one of those. I thought of the title and the story as I was driving home from work yesterday. So imagine my surprise this morning when I found Pike's latest post entitled "The
Prodigal Son" posted on the very same day.


Slightly eerie, perhaps it was a sign I should be linking to her blog today, who knows.

Like Pike's story, about a returned friend who is playing again after a leave of absence, this is about returning to the game after being gone for 7 months... So enough with the background story... Get to the point you say?

Right right.

A gaming community is a dynamic affair. People come, people go. Timetables change, leadership changes, goals change etc. It is to be expected then, that upon my return to Frostmourne, things would be different. I didn't expect things to be -quite- so different, however!

To start with, the guild roster. I counted only about 10 or so familiar names, how times change!
A few other friends have switched guilds, but the bulk of the gamers I used to play with in TBC have vanished.

There are, however, two very important gamers who remain - the old raid leaders. These two guys really held the guild together and without their leadership, Vision of Frostmourne would not have achieved the success that it has, and I wouldn't have enjoyed raiding nearly as much in TBC.

It was not without some trepidation I sent that first tell to the big tauren hunter,

"Guess who?"

How would they react to my sudden reappearance? Would there be a spot in the guild for an old mage like me? Did I even want to be back in the guild? Was anybody sore over my relatively sudden disappearance? Would I be welcomed with open arms or scolded and sent away into the cold?

Thankfully, just like in the story of the Prodigal Son, I was welcomed back with open arms, and while there may not have been a celebratory feast, my sins were definitely forgiven.

... and so begins my third adventure into the World of Warcraft! Securely Guilded, clothed in epics and only slightly overwhelmed by it all.

PS: Thanks Pike for being awesome and also for the picture above. It is an original work by Pike, please don't reproduce it without her express permission.

Hot like fire!

Didn't play my mage last night....

...Rolled a DK on Aman'Thul....

Said hi to Gnomeaggedon and co...

Scored a fancy sword, horse, set of blues and (almost) 2 levels!

...Had much fun

DK's are teh OP!

Over nine thousand!

I, for one, am a huge fan of the new improved Armory.

I like the stat summaries. I like stats of all kinds, but particularly wow stats, and particularly wow stats about Zupa!

So I was happy to stumble across my combat summary stats which contain cool stuff like my largest hit (OVER NINE THOUSAND BABY YEAH) and other cool stuff like total damage done.

I really don't see how this could be accurate, as they probably haven't been recording this stuff since the beginning, but apparently I have clocked up a total smackdown of 3019805.

3 million? Sounds to me a bit more like the total damage I've done over the weekend.... Did I mention I ran through Heroic Ramparts?

... Take one level 80 main tank, one level 80 holy priest, let a little level 70 mage tag along for laughs and you have yourself one quick and easy heroic ramparts achievement!

And I got to bonus some XP while I was doing it too :)

Here I go again!

No, it wasn't fake! Look here's PROOF I'm back!


I spent a couple of hours impatiently waiting for the entire 6.5Gb install to download on my freshly rebuilt windows 7 64bit box, and a large part of that was spent gazing at the progress bar, doing vague mental calculations about megabytes per second (which were thrown right out the window when my download speed suddenly dropped from 1.1Mb/s to 100K/s) and generally being impatient.

A little frustrating, but not nearly so bad as the patching process which followed the 6.5 Gig download! I really thought I was in the clear when that puppy hit 100%, but NO WOW FOR YOU until several rounds of (thankfully successful ) patches complete.

After almost 4 hours... I was finally logged into the game by about 8:30pm.

What a mess I found!

As it turns out I had logged out in Mount Hyjal, wearing my shadow resist set. (took a while to notice that) and of course my talents had been reset (also took me a while to notice something wasn't quite right there)

None of this stopped me from seeking out the closest mob and sending a fireball his way... only to discover I had no buffs, had lost my frost nova icon, had no keybinding for blink, and hardly any health or damage (but MASSIVE shadow resist... yay)

And -that- is how I very nearly got squished by the first random spider thing I came across!

Thankfully my fireblast was working just fine as was level 1 frostbolt so I managed to kite it around a bit and not die. Wouldn't THAT have been a triumphant return! Blood Guard Zupa, Hand of A'dal, Champion of the Naaru, dies at the claws of a level 69 bug-thing 2 minutes after logging in after 7 months long service leave!

I then spent the next hour or so playing with tool bars, trying to figure out what gear was what (damn I have a lot of options! I think I have at least one spare epic for each slot, plus the shadow resist gear...) and of course spending talent points.

I really didn't know what to do in the talent department, so I got my espionage on, looked up Gnomeaggedon's armory page and began to rip off his talent spec... Only to realise, a little too late, that he is 9 levels higher than me and so ripping off his spec may not be the brightest idea I've ever had...

In the end I cobbled something together with lots of fire talents and icey veins.

What a difference that all made! Having critical spells on my action bars (like o you know, conjure water, blink, frost nova, ice block etc... ) Actually having some talent points spent (I was running around on 0/0/0 for a while) and of course sorting out what gear to wear (back to 1100ish spell power now :) )

Take THAT spider-bug-thing! I even remembered that little old spell called Pyroblast, not to mention Combustion. Time for the you-almost-killed-me-last-time-you-bastid combo of death!

(which in actuality is a pyro, level 1 frostbolt (proccing a freeze thanks frostbite!) then a nice fireball + icelance shatter combo, all in all dropping in the order of 7 or 8K damage in a matter of seconds...)

... and THAT is what im talking ABOUT!

Zupa's back baby, yeah :)

a thousand words

Decisions Decisions

It's time again!

The expansion has come and gone,

My old guild are into the end game content,

My toon is loaded with epics at the -old- level cap...

And, just like last time, I'm thinking about playing some more WoW!

It has been about 7 months since I succumbed to the pre-expansion blues and threw in the towel, and I while I miss raiding, and I miss wtfpwning people in AV, I'm not sure that I miss the grind, the committment and the errr... grind.

It's encouraging to hear that you have only replaced a few of your epix Gnomey! I raided long and ground hard for a lot of my fancy dresses and wizard hats, not to mention the ultimate staff of eternal demonic smackdown (or equivalent) that I looted from the great Illya Hardkore Dragonspine (or equivalent). It will be nice to get some use out of them yet... maybe even dominate a few level 70 battlegrounds or something...

If it's anything like my last return to WoW, there will be lots of fun to be had, noobs to slay, monsters to vanquish, and chicks to impress.

Maybe not so much impress.... and maybe not so much chicks.... anyway

New spells to learn (and never use?) like polymorph and mirror image which sounds like it had potential until the implementation of it was bolloxed up to the nth degree...

I am, however, a bit worried about this AOE everything all the time in all situations stategy that I'm hearing about.

Keep in mind in my day a good excuse to use AOE was something to look forward to. It was a chance to show off the uberness of the mage. It was a chance to kill everything on the screen in a blinding flurry of pixels and particle effects. It was cool damnit.

Except for when it got repetitive.... and monotonous.... and boring. Like almost every fight in Mount Hyjal. Fun, but not fun enough to be the only way to play.

So what am I gonna do?

a) start playing Zupa again and rejoin Vision. Level up, start raiding, probably annoy my girlfriend in doing so.

b) start playing Zupa again and server transfer. This is unlikely as most of my friends these days play alliance, so I couldnt really transfer to play with anyone anyway.

c) turn Zupa into a farmer and roll a DK on Frostmourne (my home realm)

d) bench Zupa and roll an ALLIANCE (OMG!) DeathKnight on which ever server sounds like the most fun.

...The poll results seem to be saying I should be playing WotLK, and playing on my mage...

but what about playing with RL buddies and what about these newfangled death knights in all their overpowered glory?

Surely the nerf bat is heading their way soon!

One thing I do know for sure, is that I miss the blogging, and I miss the bloggers. It's nice to check in on all the blogs I used to read daily and see what my old blogger buddies have been up to.

I <3 you guys!

I may be a zombie but I'm not dead!

I always said I'll be back... and I tell no lies!

DON'T PANIC

Zupa can has wordle?

As Andrew says, all the cool kids are doing it!

So here's mine. I kinda like it. I might update it each week and keep it over there >>> on the right :) Click it to get a better looking version of the above.

One thing I like about this particular content cloud, aside from the totally matching colors, is the fact that this is 100% undeniably taken from a frost mage blog. No ifs, No buts.

At least I guess that means I keep it on-topic most of the time!

Zupa's Bazooka!

Occasionally I stumble across something that makes me think

"WOW THAT'S AWESOME!"

This doesn't happen as often as I'd like, but it happened today when I discovered this weapon generator.



Check it out, see what weapon your name(s) create. I got some swords, a halberd and something else, but naturally "Zupa's Bazooka" is the best.

Unfortunately I don't know who to thank for this. I have a habit of opening links in new tabs and leaving them to settle while I continue reading the original article...

... Then I start working my way through the linked pages, opening more links as I go....

...Then I get a bit aggro with google chrome because it seems to be almost but not quite there, lose half my links, and decide to hell with it im off to lunch....

... Only to discover on my return that I have this weapon generator page open. From where I know not, but if you're out there, o wonderful linker to this page of awesomeness, thank you.

I am now complete.

Zupa has his Bazooka, and all is right in the world.

Server first titles axed.

Thanks Aurdon for bringing this to my attention!

Post #107... Summary: Blue post regarding server first titles. They are being scrapped, so people won't have a reason to grind their way to the new level cap non stop with no sleep.

There are going to be some very very dissapointed people, but I think on the whole most of the WoW community wasn't really in the running for these titles and so their removal shouldn't cause too many cries of anguish.

There are still a truckload of other titles available, just not of the "first to blah blah" variety.

I still want conqueror. Approximately 300 winning games of wsg to go... ah bugger it.

My newest favourite shiney!

Ok so normally I don't provide a running update on which purples I managed to aquire recently.

Some blogs do it but I don't think anything I might come by is special enough to warrant a mention... It's just another set of bracers after all... who cares if its the haste one or the pvp one or the one with a yellow socket, the impact on my gameplay is minimal regardless of which one I wear for any given fight.

But the other day i got THIS. and THIS is really COOL.


This is one of those items that procs ALL THE TIME. like -all- the time. Sure the proc isnt massive, but I might have mentioned earlier, it happens ALL THE TIME!

And, as such, is win!

It is also somewhat hard to obtain, in that you need to get to exalted with Scale of the Sands. That means farming or wiping on Hyjal for a month or two. I use this ring all the time now, and rotate other rings through my other ring slot as the fight dictates. (I have a PvP ring, a crit ring, a spell hit ring and a mp5 ring)

On the subject of cool new shineys, This is my newest soon-to-be favourite shiney.

I think!

This one requires Exalted with the Ashtongue Deathsworn, which I am hopefully going to achieve in the next fortnight or so. Ashtongue Deathsworn rep is gained by killing stuff in Black Temple, and since Vision is focusing on BT, and Zupa is now a core raider, it shouldn't be long at all until this little baby is mine.

I hope it's as good as I'm imagining it to be, although some of my fellow mages are unconvinced. The lack of any +dmg or other stat is a bit of a drawback they say. Well personally I value spell haste quite highly, and it procs of 50% of spell crits! Yay! Combustion + bonus haste = yay!

Does anyone have first hand experience with this trinket? Should I be getting excited about it or will I get over it after a few days and keep it in my bank for all eternity?

While im waiting for someone to burst my bubble, lets do a little bit of theory crafting here, but don't panic, I promise to use an absolute minimum of mathematical symbols in this post.

So it procs of 50% of my crits. Say my crit rate is 30%, then it's going to proc on 15% of spell casts. Say im casting 3 second spells...

OK change of plan. I just did some maths, then researched some more maths, then decided this blog is no place for that kind of maths. Suffice to say this trinket is probably not that great after all, but perhaps for an AM spamming arcane mage it would be the business.

Damn.

Enter the Pyro!

It has been approximately 2 years since my last PoM Pyro. Patch 2.0 introduced new talent trees, I respecced frost, and left my beloved blastwave and pyro behind...

Plenty has happened since then, including various dabbling in various specs, deep fire, icy veins fire, deep frost, arena frost and the 'oops i spent too many points in frost and missed improved counterspell - lets see what I can do with this spec now'... spec. (very shortlived that one)

Despite all this tinkering, experimenting and excessive gold sinking, I still cannot settle on a single spec for more than a week.

The main issue here is I have one spec for staying alive when someone is trying to kill me (17/0/44) and another for doing massive damage to someone who isn't trying to kill me (2/44/11). The Fire + IV spec, along with all my haste gear and the Hyjal trash neck is simply the best thing to do for any kind of progression raid. I can keep up the same kind of DPS as deep frost most of the time, and certainly have less mana issues as a frost spec, but you really have to work for it as frost...

Doing huge DPS with fire is easy mode, especially if another mage has already volunteered for scorch duty! Its really a matter of spamming as much as possible, not being stupid when it comes to timing your cooldowns, spamming more fireballs, and trying not to go OOM on the third boss in Hyjal where going OOM is a painful experience.

On the other hand, to keep up with frost, you have 2 elementals and 2 icy veins to manage, and if you mis-manage these cooldowns there is no chance of keeping up with the fire mages in terms of damage. If your elemental goes splat shortly after casting or if you somehow waste an icy veins, thats a good chunk of the frost mage's DPS gone.

But what about arcane? I have been looking forward to trying out arcane just as soon as I get 2 pieces of Tier 5 loot. Any day now. Maybe.

Until Vision decided enough time had been wasted on Tier 5 instances, and from now on we would have one night farming Hyjal, and the rest of our raid nights will be dedicated to BT progression (which is going nicely, BloodBoil down this week, RoS next)

So it looks as though that day may never come. I am dealing with it, although I do cry myself to sleep at night.

The thing is, there's so much more to the arcane tree than just arcane spam. Take a read of this article by Krizzlybear, where he has taken advantage of the arcane mages mana regeneration abililtes, without actually using an Arcane blast rotation spec. How very interesting? Could a spec such as this actually be raid viable? Surely the points spent in arcane are going to cut into important DPS talents from either the frost or the fire tree, gimping the spec in terms of damage?

After all, between pots and mana gems, even the most inefficient fire mage can still pump out a ton of damage before going OOM. Give him a shadow priest or a shaman, and he will never look back.

So lets have a play with this. I want PoM Pyros. I want raid viability. I want PvP viability. I want it all in one spec.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not doable... I mean, surely everyone would be doing it if it was doable?

Time to play with the talent calculators!

This is what I've come up with: Starting with Krizzly's Arcane Frost tea total spec, purely for the required arcane talent, the key one being arcane meditation (bonus 30% mana regen while casting) You gotta take a few talents to get down to that as it's a fourth tier talent, but that's the important one. Is that all we need from this tree?

Hell No, we want PoM Pyros dang it!

This is what I've come up with. 39/22/0.

I dropped a point out of mind mastery to grab blastwave because I <3 blastwave.

I am sorry to be missing out on; playing with fire, critical mass, combustion, dragon's breath, molten fury, fire power and empowered fireball.

Actually thats possibly way way way too much to be missing out on. Perhaps I should drop mind mastery, spell power and Arcane Potency in order to pick up more fire talents? Can I really survive without molten fury?

I'll give it a go as it is to begin with, head straight to a battleground, and see how many people I can light up :)

Frost specs - Zupa style!

Just a quick post to record my AoE grind spec, as requested by the illustrious Gnomeaggedon!

Key talents here are:

• Frost Warding
• Improved Frost Nova
• Permafrost
• Improved Blizzard
• Improved Cone of Cold
• Ice Barrier
• Water Elemental

A link to the complete build is here

Basic Strategy for AoE grinding:

Find your mobs. Try to avoid ranged mobs and / or casters, they have a nasty habit of hitting you with ranged attacks and casting spells. This is not condusive to successful AoE grinding.

Plan your attack. Running in screaming LEEEEEE ROOOOY and spamming Arcane Explosion isn't going to cut it, you need to be aware of your surroundings if you are going to have a hassle free AoE experience. First rule - always have ice barrier up.

Always.

Naturally the first thing you do then, is cast ice barrier. Mount up immediately, and gather 4 - 6 mobs by riding over the top of them. (wait until you get the hang of things before you go rounding up a dozen, although that will be totally doable with a little practice) Drag them to the killing field. This should be a relatively clear and safe area nearby where you don't risk pulling adds or pats halfway through your AoE.

Iceblock and wait. All the mobs will surround you and group together in a nice tight bunch, which is exactly what you want them to do.

Release your iceblock and cast Frost Nova, then run two paces away from the group. At this point you need to do a quick check that none of the mobs have resisted your nova. If one has, use your macro for casting cold snap and frost nova to get another nova off instantly, trapping the loose mob and keeping the group together.

As you begin to pull larger and larger groups, you will find one mob resisting your nova more often, so it is vital to have this macro ready, as a single loose mob can be the difference between a successful AoE pull and death.

Now that all your mobs are safely grouped and nova'd, it is time to blink.

Don't blink into another group of mobs!

Run another step or two. This will put you at approximately maximum Blizzard range from your group of mobs (first 2 paces + blink + another pace) and cast blizzard on your pack of mobs. You want your blizzard to cover ALL of the mobs, but be as close to your toon as possible, ensuring the mobs have to spend as much time as possible running through your blizzard to get to you.

At this point, if you have the talent Frostbite, things will fall apart. Some but not all of the mobs will get snared by frostbite proccing off the blizzard. The group will spread out, preventing you from AoE damaging all of them at the same time. This is why an AoE grind spec cannot include this talent, no matter how cool it is.

Once your first blizzard has been going for about a second or two, all the mobs will have the improved blizzard debuff. Congratulations, that was the hard part. Next you cast another blizzard as soon as the first finishes, but this one so it is right in front of you.

By now the closest mob in the pack will be about to walk into your next blizzard, which will keep the debuff up and keep them walking at a snail's pace. They will get to you eventually, however, but since you have Improved Frost Nova your cooldown will be up, and you can snare the mob pack again.

After two full blizzards and two frost novas, the mobs are likely to be almost dead. Most of the time a crit-happy cone of cold on the freshly nova'd mobs at your feet will be enough to finish them off.

If not, don't worry, you just slowed them again with the CoC, so blink away and repeat.

Advanced AoE grinding tips and tricks.

Ok, so you can round up and destroy about 10 melee mobs of equal level to yourself and not die. Time to expand your repertoire young padawan!

How to bring them down faster:

There are a few ways you can kill your mobs a bit faster, and most of the time you should avoid using these methods as they generally result in some kind of negative trade-off for the quicker kill, in terms of excessive mana usage, excessive damage taken, or wasting a lot of cooldowns.

Sometimes, you have to employ thse techniques or you will flat out die. Best to know them, even if you don't have to use them. Of course, when you want to pull 25 mobs... You are going to need every trick in the book, so listen up.

Method 1: Hit me, I can take it.

Cast ice barrier, round up your mobs on FOOT using AE to damage as many of them as much as possible while you are gathering the mobs. Refresh ice barrier whenever possible (it is a good idea to cast it, then wait 20 seconds, then pull, so you can re-cast it as soon as it gets destroyed by incoming damage)

Do not use iceblock, once you arrive at the killing field, throw up a couple more AE's until the mobs are packed, then nova, blink, blizzard, blizzard CoC, AE, AE, AE, AE.

This method will kill the mobs faster, and unless something goes wrong you will probably only get one blizzard off. It will also hurt. Potentially a lot. I don't really do this unless I have to, as you also risk running out of mana at the worst possible time.

Method 2: It's not what you know, it's who you know.

As a frost mage, your Water Elemental is you bestest friend, and during AoE grinding things are no different. This method is great for the ridiculously incredibly big pulls. Got 25 mobs? You are gonna need help with that.

Here's how you play it. Start things off like a standard pull. Ice Barrier and mount up, then pull EVERY SINGLE MOB IN SIGHT (trying to avoid ranged and casters as mentioned earlier)

Iceblock to gather the mobs in the killing field. This is the part where you realise how many mobs you actually just pulled. It's OK, you have an entire iceblock duration to get used to the idea that you are surrounded by a very large number of (hopefully) melee mobs who are all going to hit you just as soon as you let them.

Nova, take a step, re-nova if you need to.

Blink! Now cast your Water Elemental, followed by a blizzard.

The beauty of this method is that you are now looking at a huge pack of mobs about 30 yards away from you, all are under the effect of improved blizzard and coming your way. When you use your Elemental to cast a Freeze on the pack, you can root them in place just as your initial frost nova is wearing off. This will keep them in place for another blizzard, and you will have plenty of time to re-nova them if you have to when they eventually get in range.

Another benefit of this method is when a mob gets loose and hits you, your water elemental will be all over it like a fat kid on a cupcake, leaving you to blizzard the rest of the pack in peace.

Method 3: YOU WILL DIE IMMEDIATELY. ALL OF YOU!

Commonly used on easy pulls where risk to the mage is minor, and there isn't really any need for any of that fancy kiting business. Gather with AE (Always have Ice Barrier up. Always!) Nova, flamestrike, CoC, Arcane Explosion until they are finished. Nothing too special about this method but it will get rid of a lot of pesky mobs in a hurry if they are upsetting you in any way.

Zupa's favourite AoE grinding spot @ lv 70

At level 70 a good location is between Kirin'var village and Manaforge Coruu in Netherstorm. Here you will find a bunch of sunfury researchers just waiting to be rounded up and killed en masse. A word of warning, however, they have casters patrolling around. These will need to be removed prior to your AoE killing.

Thankfully, being ranged, you can pull them with a flying mount by flying low over their heads, without disturbing their melee counterparts.

Drag your casters off to your killing field, kill them, then go gather the melee mobs. The respawn timers at this site are just about right for a single mage to grind here constantly. Once you start getting more and more accomplished at AoE grinding, you may find yourself waiting for respawns.

When this happens to me I just pop over to the Kirin'var villiage and farm some primal mana. All the mobs there drop motes and the drop rate is great. Mobs are only arcane resistant and go down easy.

Unfortunately this location simply cannot support two farmers, so if you see another farmer, particularly if it is a mage, either kill them, ask them nicely to find another spot, or come back later, depending what mood you are in.

edit: your cold snap + frost nova macro should look like this:

#showtooltip cold snap

/stopcasting

/cast cold snap

/cast frost nova

edit #2: Here is a link to my Frost raiding spec, just for the sake of completeness.

Want!

Remember this post by Euripedes about the YEM and it's proliferation throughout the MMO world?

Well they are out there!

And I want one!

Desdarii spotted this one, and you can read about her hilarious experience here!

Also - hats are available here!