Baking and Speccing

My good friend Owaru has said to me (and anyone else that would listen) that WoW has become a thinking person's game since the advent of Burning Crusade. What he means by this I think are that there are a number of things that you must consider when making choices about gear, spec, rotations and other things. Thankfully just at the same time we were required to start weighing different things that we were used to looking at, Blizzard handed us another way (through jewelcrafting) to customize our gear choices. We already had enchanting, but now we have two ways.

Today I'm going to look at Building a Mage (a class I don't run, so therefore I may be wrong) and baking bread.

Making a mage	Baking bread
The two main ingredients for making a mage are some increased spell damage (mages are all about DPS you know) and some way to make it run. Mana is the power source used for every mage.	The two main ingredients in bread are some flour and some way to make dough. Water turns particulate into fluid and in this case it will make a dough.
Run your mage with only these two aspects for a while	Bake.
Did you find your mage lacked something? Some staying power or something else?	How did you enjoy the cement slab that you baked? Not very satisfying? Need something more? I think what we’ve made here is a tortilla?
Let’s give the mage some staying power. Basically, playing a mage is a resource utilization problem. You have your mana which must power spells. Your life total is also a resource. If you haven’t spent all your mana, but are dead you’ll never get to spend that mana. “A dead mage does no DPS.:" But do we need as much stamina as spell damage? Probably not. The primary goal of the mage is to stay alive long enough for their massive DPS to have an effect. A little stamina (for a mage) goes a long way.	Let’s give the bread some volume. But we don’t need the same amount of yeast as flour and/or water. We’ll use a little yeast and that’ll go a long way. You see, yeast is actually tiny organisms that give off bubbles as a by product. Those bubbles get caught in the dough and make it more voluminous. Bake.
The mage is getting better. But there are still some things missing. Sure, when the firebolts start flying (and actually connecting) they do massive sustained DPS. Awesome. But we’re missing way too often. Let’s add some spell hit rating.	Well, the bread isn’t as flat as last time but it’s still not quite there. Let’s take the extra step of dissolving the yeast in the water and maybe giving the yeast a little food to work with. We’ll add some sugar (or honey) to feed the yeast. Well fed yeast, produces more bubbles and that’ll give us more lift.
Wow. We’re really getting there. But we’re still missing that something. It must be the big number syndrome from when we land a critical strike. We could make that go up by increasing our spell hit just a bit.	Wow. Really close. But it’s missing that certain something. Let’s add just a pinch of salt. It’ll be so subtle you probably won’t be able to identify it, but if it’s missing you’ll know something is.
So very close. Now, it’s a matter of pushing the buttons and doing things in the right order.	Let’s do things in the right order. Yes, follow the recipe. Do all the right things in the right order. Let your dough rest at the appropriate times.
Congratulations. You did it.	Congratulations. You did it.

Now. If you really want to make some bread, I recommend getting this recipe. It makes good stuff.