On writing

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my literary writing pursuits, and the sad fact is that there’s nothing really to write about. November is coming ’round the bend, as is NaNoWriMo, and I’ll admit to a little envy at those who are participating this year. I’m not; I’m not ready, and I have a couple of things on my plate that would make writing 1,700 words a day difficult, when those words need to be in some form of coherence and cohesion for a novel.

But the fact is, I’ve been keeping an eye on my “natural” writing habits, and reflecting on and off on patterns that I’m seeing. A lot of this is connected to some of the “revelations” (if you will) from my 5:30 AM exercise (which I wasn’t able to do for very long, but long enough). To quote the exercise again (emphasis mine):

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically.

I’ve gone through my morning writing, and my “unconscious” writing could probably be categorized into three groups:

Journal-esque; things that happened to me, and written in a journal style instead of in a literary vein (i.e. fictionalized). Roughly 27% of my writing fall under this category.
Essay; musings, ideas, speculation, no real story behind them. Slightly less in number than journal-style writing!
Literary; quite obviously fiction! A number of them were fictionalized versions of a few real-life events, but most of them were “original” scenes and sketches. Around half of my writing was in this category.

Actually going through them was a bit of a revelation in itself; I’d expected the general numbers, but didn’t really expect essay-style writing to be almost up on par with journal writing. I only had a smallish number to work on, but the results actually mirror some of the “impulse” writing I’ve done (for example, for One Word, for One Sentence) in the past, and continues up to now.

From these, I have both an affirmation, and a somewhat disheartening revelation.

I’ve always known that my writing and literary interests tend toward the fantastical, the lyrical, the heights of emotions. Most of my snippet writing revolves around the latter: joy, love, passion, hurt, anger, despondence. More than half of my writing have a fantasy element to them: if not outright fantasy, then hints of it. So from what I’ve seen, this is really the area that I should be working with when I write stories, because it is here where my subconscious gravitates to when freewriting.

As for the disheartening revelation: I (currently) don’t have the longevity to write a novel.

I’ve realized this (from the aforementioned exercises) quite a while ago. But I’ve honestly tried to ignore it, because I want to write a novel. Trying to come to terms with the revelation that I don’t have the capacity to write a novel was difficult to stomach. Goodness knows how many times I’ve joined NaNoWriMo, both “officially” and “in secret”. I still have files upon files of half-baked “novels”, all abandoned in the middle (or, more precisely, all over the place–I’ve never written “in order”).

The longevity can be worked on, certainly. But it isn’t something that will come easily, not anymore after I’ve neglected it since college. I don’t think it’s truly lost; but it’s buried too deep for me to dredge out in, say, a month of frenzied writing, or continuous false starts on writing a novel.

So instead I will go back to my “roots”, ease up on the pressure, and do what my habits seem to point me towards: short story writing. Certainly not as glamorous as a novel (“hey, I’m writing a novel”) but, baby steps! And I do enjoy the quick sketches that I do. Graduating from short shorts to a short story looks to be quite sound, eh?

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Baby disc heals

So a while back I’ve braved the horrors of LFG and pugged a couple of normal Utgarde Keep and Nexus runs for my then-early-70 draenei priest, Talá. My first ever try at healing in 70+ instances was UK at 69, which was somewhat traumatizing, even with a kind group (read: a group who didn’t kick me out for the number of times we wiped, or I died, or the shadow priest had to backup heals; the whole group actually either had healer mains or alts, lol).

Talá, the priest

Prior to Northrend, I’d been healing holy-specced with Healbot. As I did lowbie instances though, I realized that I was doing a lot of shielding; so it made sense to me to respec to discipline. I’d also felt that in addition to having too many raid frames (on Eilonwyn I was running with Pitbull and Decursive; on my priest I was running with Pitbull, Decursive and Healbot!), Healbot was sometimes being a bit too smart for me. It’s possible I just hadn’t configured it correctly, but knowing plenty healers went with Grid and Clique for healing, I decided I’d go with Pitbull and Clique (and get rid of Decursive).

So, a spec change and a UI change was probably not the best way to go about trying a “new” dungeon as heals. It put me off even playing with Talá for a while, as I wasn’t too keen on leveling her if I was just going to go DPS in endgame again.

After a while, I finally did join LFG, with a comment about being a newbie disc heals. Almost surprisingly, I did get people to invite me along (woo!) and was able to practice, and I seem to be doing relatively well as the parties I’ve been to have told me. The last one I’ve tried (after a long break of not playing her) was Old Kingdom; sadly we kept wiping :(

I can certainly use more practice, especially with the “rotation” (and my click-bindings!), but it’s not so bad. I basically keep shields up on the tank, drop a Prayer of Mending on a melee DPS everytime it’s up (ranged sometimes too), and shield people up if there’s raid damange going around. I can have a good bit of trouble with too much raid damage though, as I haven’t exactly found the best way to deal with it other than Circle of Healing which positively consumes mana like arcane mages (nom nom nom!).

The gameplay is certainly quite different from a DPS point of view, and something I feel keen enough to continue playing with. The pressure can be worse, and the rewards not-as-evident. With DPS there is a sense of satisfying finality when the boss dies; with Arcane there are even “exciting” phases when you pop all your cooldowns and burn mana for some extreme pew pew. With heals it’s either you failed to keep people alive, or you didn’t. It’s certainly a good thing to experience though; healing has opened my eyes to a couple things in fights I’ve done countless times as DPS, like how annoying it really is for the healer if the DPS is being stupid, or even small things like “oh, there is raid damage in this encounter?”

I haven’t really decided on getting parties and raids will be easier on a healer. I know there is a general shortage of healers/tanks sometimes but I’ve seen a lot of instances where you end up being on standby if you have a particular “role”, i.e., a tank or a healer; one raid can only bring so many tanks and healers into an encounter after all.

But, cheers for all end-game healers! This is one (squishy) DPS who certainly appreciates you. <3

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New layout, and tinkering with WordPress categories

I’ve been working on and off on this new layout for a while, but today I’ve doubled down to get it all coded and running. Nothing was wrong with the older layout, of course, but I just felt it was a little cluttered, and I felt somewhat pressured to write longer posts just to fill up all that space in line with the contents on the sidebar. Ergh. I also wanted a more obvious division between different categories, but not so much that moving from one category to the next would be a jarring experience.

So I came up with this :D I am rather pleased with it, especially for the coding that’s gone behind it. The layout has a lot of specific handling depending on which category the currently-visible post is in:

Cartoon head background and post “icon” obviously depend on the post’s category; click on each of the categories to see them all.
Where possible, I use the category’s “color” to indicate categories, such as the footer background, and the most recent category posts on the top right of the header.
The top right header obviously shows the most recent post from each category–except, of course, when you’re already viewing that post!
Post title color will also mirror the category the post belongs to.
The next and back links found at the post’s meta area will also mirror the type of posts you’re scrolling through. A brown arrow means you’re not in a category!
The contents of the footer will also vary slightly depending on the “active” category.

To pull most of the styling changes off, I needed the category of the post on the page itself, as well as on various areas of the blog to get the proper information. This wasn’t a problem for category pages, but for all the rest? I ended up doing a small bit of hackery (note this will only work on pages that contain just one post), and crossing my fingers that my blog won’t break in future WP versions:

function get_current_top_category() {
	$CATEGORIES = array(
		3 => 'girl',
		4 => 'geek',
		5 => 'reader',
		6 => 'writer',
		7 => 'gamer'
	);
	$current_top_category = 0;

	global $post;
	$post_id = $post->ID;
	$categories = get_the_category( $post_id );
	foreach( $categories as $c ) {
		if( in_array( $c->slug, $CATEGORIES ) ) {
			$current_top_category = $c->cat_ID;
			break;
		}
	}
	return $current_top_category;
}

The function works well both with just getting the current category for content manipulation, as well as adding an extra class to the body tag, as mentioned in this post via the body_class function.

All that said, I still need to get a couple of things working. I haven’t checked on IE browsers yet (and I don’t have any more plans of checking IE6… *shakes fist at it*), and I need to optimize the PNGs I used; I also want comments to show on each page, even if it’s not the single post page; and a couple more meta stuff couldn’t hurt, probably! They will all need to be done at a later date, though; I’m bushed!

Let me know if you see anything glaringly wrong :D

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Moving hosts and htaccess rewrite rules

I’ve been at this since waking up this morning! I’m currently paying for two hosts, my older reseller account and a newer Grid-Service account with Media Temple, where W.nu is hosted. I’ve been doing this for quite a couple of months now, mostly because I’d been a bit too lazy to actually move my sites over; and my, it’s quite a handful.

A chunk of the “trouble” is that Media Temple has a specific file structure and control panel and whatnot. Don’t get me wrong, it’s organized and I love it, but it makes transferring stuff over a little more difficult. Transferring Seasonal Plume was easy (what an understatement), but Aking Mahal is another matter; I’m still at it.

The biggest “problem point” is that AM.net has a lot of subdomains. That meant a lot of things: cluttering up my MT control panel with subdomains, more than half of which are just pointers to new sites or a note that the fanlisting is closed; and each subdomain has a different placement than my older host which meant just dumping a backup wasn’t going to work, too. It means uploading things manually. Err. For three of my shrines I have screencaps. Lots of files, images, jpegs. Ouch.

And since I don’t care about clutter, that also meant that I needed to automatically point a nonexistent subdomain to a particular file that says “closed” or some such. I am a dunce with htaccess, which meant I spent most of last night and a good part of this morning researching on how to do this. I was able to do it finally though! Huzzah!

I present to you an htaccess rewrite rule to redirect particular subdomains to a certain file on the main website (needs to have wildcard subdomains working):

### Rewrite rules for closed fanlistings
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond $1 !^gone
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(some|list|of|closed|subdomains)\.aking-mahal\.net
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://aking-mahal.net/gone.html [L]

Squee! It can be a bit manual (needing to put subdomains that are closed in the list) but this looks good, at least for now. And I found it out all by myself, so I feel pretty proud. ^_^ I still need to read up a couple more for another project, but I’m pleased enough that I got this far.

I should have AM.net moved over completely by end of today, with a new cleaner filesystem, ready for a revamp (when I get around to it, that is). Indisguise is another matter, though :( The biggest things I will have to move is my homegrown downloads script/repository (which also means all AM.net downloads will be broken until I get it back up), as well as various sites there, like Indiscripts, my wallpaper archive (which is in dire need of a revamp too), my LJ toys mini-site, and various other odds and ends. It’s quite daunting, but needs to be done, both to free up some money per quarter but also because I’m not too pleased with my older host these days.

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BookMooch trial run

So with the number of books on my shelf–and some duplicates, really–I thought I’d finally give this BookMooch thing a try. I’m never really able to throw my books away, it is just too cruel, really. And it would certainly be nice to be able to give these books to people who actually want them. So I’m giving this a shot. If anyone else if on there, I’m angelamaria on there; feel free to add me.

I’ve already listed a couple of books I have on hand to send off, and gotten a request for one of them too. This is quite exciting! I have yet to add books to my wishlist, tsk tsk. But I’ll get my wishlist populated at some point. It’s difficult when some of the books I’m looking for are stuff in a particular edition!

That said, their website could certainly use a bit of…sprucing up. I’ve been searching high and low for some way to get the books I’m listing on there here on W.nu, but their website is a bit of a maze. I finally find the widgets page–and the widgets leave much to be desired. I finally find the API page, but there is no API for getting books in someone’s inventory! I finally stumble on my inventory page and saw the unobtrusive RSS icon. I will have to see how well I can use that information. (Sadly, there is no “condition” field in the RSS. But that’s the field I want! Sob.)

Now. Do I add the books I have that sadly I don’t think I’ll ever get to read? Hrmm.

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Books and reading meme

Books books books!

It’s an old book meme, but what the hey, everything is a cycle ;)

1. Hardback, trade paperback or mass market paperback?

I love trade paperback. I will go for mass market paperback over hardbacks as well; hardbacks are heavier and just generally clunkier than the others, which I dislike.

2. Barnes & Noble or Borders?

Never ‘been in a Barnes & Noble store, sadly. So I will instead make a choice between: Borders, Kinokuniya, Page One and Popular/Harris, which are the biggest bookstores in Singapore (if I’ve missed any, let me know :O!). I’d have to say Kinokuniya, although I think I am biased because I am a member (yay discounts!) and they have lots of manga (granted, I don’t read a lot of manga, but still!).

Although frankly, I will go inside any book store and enjoy myself just as much.

3. Bookmark or dog-ear?

Bookmark! I used to dog-ear as a child, but not anymore. Actually, I hardly ever bookmark, too; or if I do, I use stuff like scrap pieces of paper lying around. Usually, I just repeat the page to myself, and go off; I don’t mind if I reread a bit of what I’ve previously read (while skimming to get to where I left off), as it helps refresh the memory as well.

Oh wait. Putting down a book? What’s that?

4. Amazon or brick and mortar?

Brick and mortar! Really only because it’s usually cheaper, as there’s no shipping involved.

5. Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?

Oh my. Neither! I arrange my books a number of ways, really; I first segregate by general genre, which usually mean:

Nonfiction
Classics
“Real” fiction (har har)
High fantasy, or any fantasy not included in…
Children’s/YA fantasy
Manga

(Recently I’ve had a number of books with magical realism in them, and naturally they fit in between the “real” fiction and fantasy books.)

After that, however, I group together roughly by author/series/height. For authors that have some books in another of my genres, I usually try to keep them closest to that boundary, but keep his/her books together as much as possible. And yes, height. Height is important. Having books roughly sloping downwards from left to right on my bookshelf looks very pretty.

6. Keep, throw away, or sell?

Keep, or give away to people. That said, I really have a couple of books that I should give away or something. Maybe I’ll take another stab at bookmooch, or just post on this blog.

7. Keep dust jacket or toss it?

OMG. Keep! How, oh how can you toss the dust jacket?!

8. Read with dust jacket or remove it?

Ew, remove to read. It will get all wrinkly!

9. Short story or novel?

Usually novels, but I enjoy short stories a lot as well. I should actually look for short story anthologies more.

10. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?

Ohh, tough one, but I’ll go with Harry Potter. Lemony Snicket is oodles of fun, though!

11. Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?

Stop when tired, mostly because when the chapter ends I usually just need to know a liiiiitle more… and I never get to the end of it. So I just end up stopping when I can’t read anymore (i.e., I need to do something NOW, or I can’t keep my eyes open, or…shock horror, if the book bores me.)

12. “It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?

Ooooh tough one! Tougher than Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket. I like both, but “It was a dark and stormy night” is much more gripping. “Once upon a time” definitely won’t sway me, though. I love me my Lloyd Alexander and CS Lewis.

13. Buy or borrow?

Buy! For unknowns I would rather borrow, but usually also end up buying them in the end.

14. New or used?

Depends on how “used” is “used”, so generally new, or looking-new.

15. Buying choice: book reviews, recommendations, or browse?

The books I get are usually recommendations or products of browsing; I look at reviews only when I’m interested enough in the book to possibly buy them. Recommendations are a given; as for browsing, I love pretty covers and interesting titles.

16. Tidy ending or cliffhanger?

Both are fine, as long as it’s the right ending for the book. Things don’t need to be resolved to be RIGHT.

17. Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?

Any! I can (and will) read at any time of the day I feel like reading. Recently, however, that’s mostly at night.

18. Stand-alone or series?

Either! Series books, if they are good, are absolutely fun. They can be a little more stressful though, as I have a complex about finding individual books in a series in the same edition as all the other books I have. T_T I actually have a couple of duplicates because I *couldn’t* wait until the proper edition is out, but bought it later on when it became available.

19. Favourite series

This is torture! Let’s see. I love Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles because while it’s simple and enjoyable, it’s full of beautiful insights. I love C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia for pretty much the same thing, with an emphasis on how it mirrors my faith. I love Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga for the sheer scale, magnitude, and depth of the piece; it’s truly epic. I love Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom Trilogy because it’s damn enjoyable; Yoko Kamio’s Hana Yori Dango for being absolutely fun and absolutely heart-wrenching at the same time; the Nancy Drew series for memories! There are plenty more but I should stop ;)

20. Favourite children’s book?

I’d say a cross between the Chronicles of Narnia, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I have not read the latter in years, but it remains close to my heart. And the only reason I’m not including Prydain Chronicles in this list is because I’m actually unsure if it’s classified as for children or for young adults. I would enjoy either at any age!

21. Favourite YA book?

Again with the fine line between children’s books and YA books. So I’ll just pick among those that I’m rather positive is YA. Hmm. I’ve been staring at my bookshelf for a while now, so I’ll just pick the first one that came to mind: Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom Trilogy. They’re a bit dark, hence more suitable for young adults. (Don’t ask me to pick which in the trilogy!)

22. Favourite book of which nobody else has heard?

It would be difficult to define “nobody”, so I’ll just pick two books that I don’t hear a lot of people mention: Arlene J. Chai’s Eating Fire, Drinking Water, and F. Sionil Jose’s Ben Singkol. Most literate Filipinos would probably have read at least one of the two; they’re both set in the Philippines and are both fabulously written.

23. Favourite books read last year?

Oooh. Let’s see, from my list last year:

Celestine Hitiura Vaite’s Frangipani (I love magical realism, and the story is fabulous)
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (like the overall story; yes, I cried too, but could really use better writing)
Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series (which I’ve yet to finish! sob. want rest of the series plz!)

24. Favourite books of all time?

I’m not even gonna try. But I need to give special mentions to a couple not yet included in the post, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And oh, oh, Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. And Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. Oh, must include Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and of course Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy. And Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. And Jude Deveraux’s Remembrance, as well as Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook. And–okokok. Stop.

25. What are you reading right now?

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I actually have a draft entry on it, but I can’t seem to finish it. Er, both the book and the entry. I’m trying!

26. What are you reading next?

Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.

27. Favourite book to recommend to an eleven-year-old?

I actually have difficulty with recommending books to people, of any age, unless I know more about the person or they specifically ask me with details on what sort of book they’re after (and sometimes I still have difficulties!). Books are quite personal entities to me, and everyone has a different way of reacting to books and stories in books.

So, I will cop out and pass on this question! Next!

28. Favourite book to reread?

This changes at various points in time. Right now, however, I seem to keep coming back to any one of The Old Kingdom Trilogy. I’m really glad I brought them along when I moved to Singapore.

29. Do you ever smell books?

Of course! I love the smell of new books. :D I refrain from smelling old dusty books because, seriously, who wants dust up their nose?

30. Do you ever read Primary source documents? Like, diaries or letters?

If you’re talking originals, or copies without any commentary on them (like, stuff to look up in libraries and whatnot), then no, I haven’t. I am quite interested in them however, when it comes to certain people I take an interest in, like favorite authors (Charlotte, Jane), popular heroes (Rizal), etc.

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SEO = black magic?

Occult Owl by jrbrubaker (flickr.com/photos/subconscience)

So I’ve been looking and doing some reading on Search Engine Optimization for a little project lately; though I’ve been on the web for quite some time already I’ve never really looked into SEO specifics. I suppose you could say I’ve taken some facts for granted, based on my own understanding of markup et al.

I know the usual, like:

Proper meta tag values to reflect purpose/content of page
Semantic markup
Good, “readable” URLs
Make content available on-page as opposed to post-loaded stuff, text is better, etc.

But those are kind of a given, at least if you’re a good web professional; if so, you should care about all these (and more). However, somehow it feels like SEO is some kind of esoteric undertaking, with bat wings and widows’ tears to boot. Come to think of it, I realize that do have a bit of a prejudice with “SEO professionals”, as I feel that they’re charging people/entities exorbitant amounts of money for stuff that a good, ordinary web professional should be able to do. I’m quite certain though, that there has to be more than just these things–hence the aforementioned “exorbitant amounts of money”–but what? Or is that some jealously-guarded industry secret?

(I’m talking about legit ways to improve search engine rankings. Or do these “SEO professionals” charge aforementioned amounts of money because they can game search engine rankings? Oy vey.)

Plus I came across a bit of a poser, regarding SEO and blogs. Obviously on a page you highlight important content headers with an H1 tag. But for blog index pages–what would that be? I’ve seen blogs/news sites/etc that mark the first article (headline) with an H1, and the blog/site title with a lower heading tag. But naturally I’ve also seen stuff the other way around. It all just means different views of which needs to be highest in priority, but I’m just curious about what most people practice: is it blog title in H1 and entry titles in H2 (or lower), or the other way around?

This all feels like black magic. :-s

Edited to add: I would love to have been proven wrong, but just a couple of hours after posting this entry, I ended up with “spam comments” on this entry from SEO “sites” and “blogs”. It’s spam because when your comment so does not have any connection to what I talked about in my post (other than “agreeing” that “SEO is important” and some such…which I never actually said in my entry!) that is spam.

Ugh. “SEO professionals” my ass.

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Arcane mage love

Mages’ arcane tree is fabulous with the last few changes done during patch 3.2.2 on World of Warcraft. /cheer

I’ve waited a while before posting my thoughts about the changes as I wanted to give them a couple of raids before making conclusions; during the first week, I was only able to raid Trial of the Crusader (both 10- and 25-man) with the guild, and pugged Onyxia; I saw a significant increase in damage done and DPS for all raids, but as PUGs are obviously wildcards, I didn’t want to take that into consideration.

Missile Barrage proc on Ulduar trash

The succeeding raids, however, saw the same general result: higher overall sustained DPS, and naturally arcane burst was still top-notch; fabulous enough to suddenly be called OP on the Lord Jaraxxus fight, apparently <_< I wish I had thought to take a screenshot of Recount data, though, for posterity’s sake; we didn’t have logging on that night. Heroism + Nether Power + cooldowns + procs = absolutely yummy! I’ve never been one to look at how much and how high I crit, but I had a 48k crit that night (care of my other guildies who actually looked into Recount, haha).

The way I see it, it’s a given that mana is less of a constraint for arcane with the changes done. With generally lower mana costs, and free Arcane Missiles on proc (seemingly only when Arcane Power is not in effect), mana is certainly less of an issue than previously. It’s not just the mana savings though; since the patch came out I’ve been spamming my Arcane Blast key a lot more as I felt it was “safer” to spam it. That probably counts for significant increases in damage done, too. So actual and psychological changes = win!

So what’s with the rotation?

What rotation to use when you’re arcane specced can depend on your latency in-game, although not by much. Personally, I do:

ABSpam04MBAM

That’s spamming Arcane Blast up to four stacks, consuming the Missile Barrage proc with Arcane Missiles if you either have zero stacks or 4 stacks. That means fishing for a Missile Barrage proc by spamming Arcane Blast; once mana dips too low because of AB spammage, I do a no-proc Arcane Missiles to consume the Arcane Blast debuff and start all over again. I’d have to say that these occurrences aren’t that many, since the likelihood of getting Missile Barrage on Arcane Blast has been raised significantly.

The high DPS rotation is basically the same, except that the Missile Barrage proc can be consumed at any time. Admittedly, this is something I’m still getting used to, but owing to the very real danger of me running out of mana when I blow all my cooldowns, I should really get used to hitting Arcane Missiles on proc. It has to be noted though, that there have been a couple of posts pointing out that Missile Barrage when combined with Arcane Power is not free; but definitely almost-free. 20% of the original cost, from the looks of it.

Obviously, it doesn’t mean that there is no more danger of running out of mana. There is, especially when you burn your cooldowns and you get a 1-second Arcane Blast/MBAM. The spec is more forgiving, but it doesn’t mean you don’t need to deal with the consequences. I’m also seeing a lot more occurrences of getting aggro from the tanks; never really used to be a problem before, but now Invisibility is becoming one of my best friends.

Moar arcane plz kthx

There’s more arcane love incoming! From the WoW 3.3.0 patch notes on PTR:

Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage’s party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.

Woo! Arcane raid utility! Hot damn, I’m excited. Now I’m not just the raid vending machine/mini-fridge and Focus Magic giver, but I actually give all DPS a boost! I would say that +haste to the raid instead of +damage sounds like it would fit the spec more (as we eat haste! om nom nom!)–I’ve heard of a couple suggestions like adding an aura to Netherwind Presence which fits nicely with arcane flavor. But the +damage isn’t shabby at all, and makes sense in a “enemy becomes susceptible to more damage because of arcane damage from a mage” point of view.

We’ll see how this raid utility modification pans out. \o/