Rift raiding video collection

As you may know if you've been reading this blog, I'm in the Rift guild, Ascended of Corthana, on the Faeblight server. For a while, now, I've  been doing a series of videos for them. Some of them are funny. Some are semi-serious. I've collected four of them into the above playlist for your viewing pleasure. I'll add more to the playlist as I create them, so feel free to subscribe for updates.

The music is all free, mostly from Jamendo and a few indie netlabels. If you're interested, you can check out my free music blog for more.

Rift Mage: Having fun with uitily

In Rift, I play in a guild called Ascended of Corthana on the Faeblight shard. We're a casual raiding guild that had some pretty severe numbers problems right around the time that Infernal Dawn came out. We've fixed that, and after we merged in another, similar guild we're now back on track and raiding ID while still clearing the last few bosses of HK for farm loot.

But our raiding Mage count is still very low, and as Mage class lead, I've had to bring the heavy utility to raids so that we don't end up with none. Obviously, I have to have a support (Archon) spec so that I can buff the raid if need be, but fights like every ID boss thus far in our progression along with HK bosses that I still farm from time to time like Prime and Prince require pretty specialized Mages for specific utility roles.

I've long had multiple specs to handle all of these, but now that utility is starting to become the primary thing that I bring to raids, I've been trying to consolidate. To that end, I now have two basic utility builds:

Saturnalia: 3-Manning World of Warcraft

Saturnalia is a guild that some friends of mine and I started, and almost entirely by accident we started 3-manning lots of the old-world instances. Turns out it's quite hard to do, but fun in ways that most of the stuff I've been doing in World of Warcraft for the last few years just isn't. We've done all of the old-world (Azeroth) instances from RFC to BRD and now we're working on the level 60 instances and will then move on to Outland. We should hit level 70 just in time for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, and we'll just keep 3-manning everything we can in that expansion.

Some things we've discovered about the game:

• A paladin as tank can make a lot of content much easier
• Shamans are wonderful at healing and dpsing in whatever ratio is required
• In general the hybrid classes are more valuable for undersized groups
• Twinking with outrageous gear is definitely not required
• Voice chat is a must if you're not in the same room

It's been a fun ride, and I hope it continues to be. See you in the game!