The Alt Factory: Strigimaga

Primary role: Damage dealer
Birth Date: April 20th 2008

Rolled initially as a PVP 19 twink to relieve the boredom in the early days of Wrath. This didn't last too long as I tired of pugging BGs solo even with the ability to one shot folks 9 levels below me because it felt like shooting fish in a barrel.

The name Strigimaga was one that I actually did a lot of searching for and is a very old name for a witch. The full text that drew me to the name is below, and was taken from the book: Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany by Sigrid Brauner:

In Roman folklore, the striga (derived from Latin strix, or “screech owl”) was a birdlike female spirit of the night who was believed to render men impotent and to feed children poisonous milk. Clerical writers used the term in the Middle Ages to describe the night-flying spirits of folk belief. But as in the cases of Hexe, lamia, and Unbulde, a term originally used to describe a mythical female spirit was redefined after 1450 to apply to the real-life modern witch.

Though less common than other terms for witches, striga inspired several etymologies and variations that tied it to modern witchcraft. The Inquisitor Bernhard of Como (Tractatus de strigiis, 1508) derives the term from the mythological underworld river Styx - because witches, he says, are from hell - and from the Greek word stigitos (“sadness”) - because witches, through their harmful sorcery, bring sadness. The Roman Dominican Sylvester Prierias (De mirandic sirigimagarum, 1521) changes the term striga into strigimaga in order to emphasize the harmful sorcery of witches. The Italian Inquisitor Arnaldus Alberunus (Tractatus de agnoscendis assertionibus catholicis, et bereticis, 1540) claims that witches are called strigae because they communicate at night by screaming like screech owls. Through such imaginative derivations and word combinations, sixteenth-century writers tailored the term striga to fit the new concept of the modern witch, adding connotations of harmful sorcery and diabolical dealings to the term while fortifying its traditional association with night flying..

Because of the gear being BiS at 19 and enchanted to the max I was able to level up fast and hit Outland still in mostly the same gear I was  PVPing in. Outland quest rewards fixed that though and I powered through the BC content and then ground my way to 74 as I levelled up my engineering grinding the mechs in the Steam Pools in Borean Tundra hoping to get the Jeeves pattern before hitting the usual quest/instance trail.

During the latter half of 2010 I changed my 2nd main from my mage, Valdarian, to Strigimaga as I was bored of the ways of the arcane mage 1 button spam in ICC raids (i was raiding with the lovely folks of All About Beer). Strig had a busy start to Cataclysm as I continued to raid with All About Beer through T11 but within 2 weeks of Firelands content coming out most of the guys in AAB stopped playing and my working schedule changed at this time as well so my alt raiding dried up until the Raid Finder. I'm looking forward to Mists and picking up the raiding on with a lock again because it was so much fun and the 5.0.4 changes will make that even better.