Episode 32: Connectivity

Here are the links mentioned in Episode 32:
http://www.preoccupations.org/2007/03/exponential_inf.html

http://www.photo-inside.com/
http://www.deviantart.com/

http://www.pandora.com/

Movie idea meeting:
February 7th Thursday 7pm central
Scarlet Crusade US, Alliance, Stormwind Park
/w Metatalk
I would love to get some ideas and whatnot on a good movie. :)

btw, I didn't mean to totally diss sites like myspace and facebook. I'm merely trying to point out the limitations of such methods of connection. They remind me a lot of high school yearbooks. "stay cool, don't ever change!"

hey booze, if you're out there, what's that acronym we came up with? lol

PvP on your knees

OMG. I have got to do another pvp episode soon. Jeebus. I just spent the last 4 hours doing 2v2s only to climb like 20 points. Arenas is like slowly cutting yourself with a razor and then pouring hot wax all over it. The amount of stuff you have to learn is tremendous! You must learn every class combination...then every class spec combination...and then you have to learn how to fight each one on three different maps. And yes, maps make a HUGE difference. okay. I'll shut up for now. Saver the rest for a later episode where I scream for like 1 hour straight. hahahaha

Alachia's RL Room

Well, you guys have seen my WoW room...here's my RL room. I recently re-arranged my room to fit the new monitor I got for x-mas. Dual screen rocks. I had no idea what I was missing. And yeah, that's not a lan phone next to my desk. It's one of those nifty At&t blue tooth cellphone receivers. So I just sync my cell phone to it (when I remember) and the base picks up all incoming calls. There's also a receiver downstairs but the range is close to 30 feet from the cell phone to the base. Technology is awesome.

Woweeeeek!

(awesome rare pet that drops in Zul'Aman. /kiss the pet and you turn in a frog yourself and he whispers something to you as well.. like "froggy style")

So this past week I played a ton of wow...I know, I know...it's all relative..BUT relative to what I had been playing...oye

I have been alternating between the druid and shaman. If Taint and Sad are on at the same time, I level the shamans with them. Otherwise, I have been leveling my druid with Felix's help. I think I have been making excellent time on both characters. I have almost every quest memorized and have mapped out (or tried to) the most efficient path for questing.

Also, we did our usual Karazhan raid on Friday (down to 2.5 hr clear). And Saturday we progressed in ZA downing Jan'alai and getting Malacrass down to 15%. I will say that the Jan'alai fight is amazingly fun. Just when you write off pve fights, Blizzard throws in a gold star.

Here's the video of the fight... it's hella fun.


Kudos to you who noticed those almost 8k holy lights that guy was healing for. hehe.

I'm still trying to get into more Lady Vashj attempts with the raiding guild. I noticed they recently kicked more of their regular healers off the team so maybe I have a good chance this week with raiding. We'll see. Not sure if I want 5 straight days of raiding. lol.

Also on the side, I try to do as many Daily quests as I can stand. My favorites by far are the cooking quests since they're so easy. A lot of people love the Simon Says quest in Blade's Edge Mountain but it makes me feel like a lab rat so I often take a pass on it! hehe.

I better slow down this week so I can get out the next episode. :)

Totem Management

On my shaman, I noticed I have an insane amount of totems. Not only that but managing the totems while always on the go was quite annoying. It kind of made me a little peturbed...especially since I'm the resto shammy and have the most mana to throw down totems. I'm the totem manager. lol.

Anyhow, I finally discovered a really excellent mod for dealing with the drudgery of totem management. It's called TotemTimers Mod. It's awesome.

No only does it set up an easy totem buff counter, it also will time shammy shields and weapon buffs like windfury or rockbiter..etc. My favorite though is that it automatically creates a macro for you that sets up a castsequence for all your totems. Translation...1 button instead of 4 on your bar. Looooving it!

Maybe there is salvation for this class yet!

Random 100

Normally, I'm a pretty bad roller. I'm more prone to roll a 2 or a 9 than anything above the 30 range. But yesterday, we had to do the a roll off for the gruul loot because of the server crash after we downed him.

I rolled on the the T4 pants and got a 100!! I was like OMG. I never roll a 100!
The next pally rolled a 6. :(
She's super new though so her healing gear is all blue and from low level instances and quests...clearly a huge upgrade for her. I was only rolling for tanking legs. So I passed it to her..but man!!! a 100! and I blow it on that!???

The Return of the Druid

SO lately, I've been obsessed with the idea of rolling HOTs and resto druids. And by chance, I got asked to go on a quick run through Blood Furnace with some alts. So I brought my druid along and finally respecced her to full Resto (she was level 60 and had never respeced since the patch that reset the talents!)

Anyhow, I just kind of got caught up in it and couldn't stop. Now she's almost 63. I'm actually having a lot of fun on her...more so than the shaman so she'll be the next alt I bring up... I just really like the balance so far between the healing and dps.

I'm collecting mostly attack power gear to help me when I'm leveling....since I know I'll get much better healing gear in the later levels. I don't even know why I specced her full resto except that I was really excited about going tree form for an instance.

I have no desire to use her for any main healing but I just think resto druids are totally awesome off healers. Having a rolling HOT on your tank is icing on the cake.
I just wish I could play my pally and the druid at the same time. lol.

Gruul down, server down

Last night JAE finally got another attempt at Gruul's...
We one shot High King Maulgar no problem.

Third try into Gruul, we get him down to less than 1%, half of the raid gets booted from the server. The remaining people online are able to finish him. Soon after he goes down, everyone but four of our guildies gets booted.

Massive server failure to everyone located in central US...but the west coasters are able to loot Gruul before he despawns. We'll have to to petition a GM later about the issue. ..as fun as that's going to be. hehehe.

BUT we downed him so YAY for that! I keep thinking what horrible timing but at the same time, it could have been worse.. the server could have gone down for us at 5%. :P

Episode 31 is up

It's a super short and sweet episode. Sweet because I kill a horde. lol.


It's just me fumbling through the Darkmoon Faire trying to turn in my Lunacy and Furies deck to get these items:

Darkmoon Card: Madness
Darkmoon Card: Vengeance

*cue super hero music*
Tankadin to the rescue!

And the toss is complete!

So I got an invite to our first attempt at Lady Vashj.
It was pretty exciting getting to see the gates open. I was just happy to be able to see it and actually try out the boss. We got the first phase down very fast, no wipes.

Second phase, we had no problems killing elementals and passing the tainted core. However, there were some major issues with dps on the Striders that have to be kited around the platform.

We were never able to get past phase 2 because we didn't down one strider until the very last attempt of the night. I think next attempt we'll get to phase 3 no problem.

I was pretty excited though because as a healer, it was my job to pass the core to the designated core receiver near the shield generator. Pretty awesome. I had my macro all set and everything. It was pretty fun. I also think I did really well with healing. I was 2nd on healing meters and 5th on over heals. :)

I'd have to say this is the most fun I've had wiping in a long time because the fight is so dynamic. It's a pretty impressive fight and stuff like this is why I wanted to be able to experience 25 man content.

Here's a video of our first attempt at Lady Vashj.

I'm a good little sycophant

Hehe. I noodled my way into the Serpentshrine raid today.
I learned a lot from the old raid days. People who show initiative and are readily available get chosen over those who don't. I remember this one rogue who used to show up in front of BWL every night waving to us as we went in...just hoping to get an invite. That dude was bad @ss. I kind of did the same. I let the class lead know I was ready and available in front of ssc... even though he was unsure if I'd have a spot.

Anyhow, we downed everything but Lady Vashj. I'm not sure if I'll get the invite tomorrow when they attempt her for the first time, but I read up on the strategy just in case. I also watched this really impressive video of the fight.

Holy cow, she looks like an amazing fight.

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/stream.php?id=42710&stream=Stage6

check out that video. I was really impressed with the level of production. The chick who made it did a really kick @ss job. Also, she uses the same music from the GM exploration movie I love.

Raiding with the flow

(One shot Fathom-Lord Karathress, only Lady Vashj left in SSC)

I will say that I've come sort of 360 on my ideas about 25 man raiding. These past two weeks have made all the difference. I think it has a lot to do with my detachment emotionally from the guild I run with.

It's very nice just to show up, do my job, see some content, learn a new fight, and then log off. I've never really experienced that before. If we do well, it's cool. If we do poorly, I did my best and will listen to what needs to be done when told but I don't have to stress bout it.

Running your own stuff can be kind of drama-prone. So it's really nice to just be solely a participant for once. The drama is out of my hands.

Also, I brought my portable dvd player to my desk and am currently watching the Firefly series during the raid. hehe. It helps a lot during the down times like rebuffs and dkp bidding.

OH.. I almost won Tier 5 pants! hehe. I bid 20dkp cuz that's all I have...but another pally won with 25 dkp. Silent bids sucks FYI. hahahaha. oh well it was fun to finally be able to bid. Who would have though I'd ever own dkp again. lol.

The Pirate and the Ninja

Hahaha. Sometimes it's the little things..

I hate being a dwarf. Besides the helicopter pigtails, it just doesn't feel right in her skin. So I like to buy Savory Deviate Delight to help my self-image issues.

This gem of food transforms you either into a ninja or a pirate. You remember the old MC days of raiding ninja and pirates?? hehehe.

Anyhow, I'm all about the ninja!!! I think the ninja is a bad@ss. She/he looks cool, has an awesome outfit, and if you've seen Samurai X, Ninja Scrolls, etc...come on. No contest.

There's this rogue in my guild who is in opposition with me. He's straight up pirate. Yarrr!!! We argue about the merits of the two all the time during kara raids. He thinks pirates are tougher, rugged, brutal and therefore better than ninjas.

I agree, they are tougher and brutal....tougher and brutal to look at because they're so hideous. They have jacked up faces and teeth and worn out cloths that look like something from a bad 70s disco movie. Who champions the pirate?? I guess Jack Sparrow.. I'll give them that one.

Ninjas are cunning and stealthy and fend for themselves. They can fly solo and without detection so that you never know if it's 10 people that killed you or 1 ghost. Pirates are about brutal force. They rely on numbers and over power. They have no integrity and will sell their own mother for a nice bag of booty. Ninjas on the other hand are honorable and are loyal to their beliefs.

Need I go on? It's no contest. Ninjas > Pirates

hahahahhaa. So I got this t-shirt for my birthday.


I don't remember signing any alliance! lol

LFG Bad@ss PvP Rogue

I'm looking for a 1900-2k rated Rogue to talk to. I swear. It is hard to find a decent pvp rogue you can actually get real data from. Most don't want to talk to you. It's probably one of the un-friendliest classes.

Anyhow. Currently, my rogue is combat mace with AR (adrenaline rush) and Prep with improved stealth etc.

I keep getting this idea that I'm supposed to be able to blow a target up with A-rush up. However, even with A-rush up, most people I duel or arena against are able to fear me, stun me, or cc me in some fashion during this time period...by the time I get back to the target, they're pretty much healed to full again and A-rush is out.

I try not to pop it until my target is at 60% so I can go all out. But maybe I'm not using the right combo and thus inefficiently using my energy.

I've seen other rogues do it. Cheap shot, poison, vanish, cheap shot, white dmg, stun, build combos, pop a-rush, and then use the combos to finish.

Maybe my attack power isn't there? or my hit rating?
I've got 1435 attack power, 84 hit rating, 21% chance to crit, and base dmg of 443-597....

I also struggle with energy a lot because I use a lot of my combo points to stun to get dps off healers. So then when it's time to lay face and burst dps....there is no energy burst.

I tried reading forums but I all they ever do is talk about builds and calculate f-ing attack power percentages... blah blah. I need the meat!! Where's the dps cycles? What do you use to burst? There are so many finishing moves...so many combinations.

Do you keep hemo up and rupture or is it worth it more to spend energy building up combos for evis ...and when is it worth it to use energy on expose armor etc.

Ugh. You can not get away with not knowing your class inside and out when you PvP.
It really shows.

Episode 30 is up

(Neil, Lisa, and their baby Gabriel)

This postcard was sent to their guild when Gabriel was born to announce the birth of their son. hehehe. How cute!

Special thanks to Lisa, Neil, Jim, and Holly for sharing their story with me.

Episode 30

I found the hole

hahaha.. editing is a total pain in the batootz for me cuz of the crappy software I use but every once in a while, it gets funny.

For instance, I was just editing my closing and I paused for some reason in recording mid thought.

The complete thought was "I found the whole thing very fascinating"

but it came out "I found the hole" long pause

hahahahhahahahaha. I just started laughing out loud.

hole.mp3

okay. maybe it's only hilarious if you're totally delirious.

Wow chat

Okay, you are obsessed with wow when you start trying to gank someone in a chat program. lol. After I did it, I was like..."omg, I really am a dork"

igoogle, you google?

I like my igoogle pages to be pretty simple but I just recently added two more gadgets.
Like a noob, I never knew there was a subscribe feature for my blog so I added that just to test it out and also a world of warcraft database gadget.

Apparently there were some changes to gadget displays recently so the tab in the middle used to be wowhead...now it's a wow database search.

In any case, it helped me clear out a lot of my toolbar bookmarks.

Subscribe to the blog

WoW database Serach bar

Next step in the evolution of wow gadagets please...AH price ticker. lol.
[Silk Cloth bid.22s bo.3g| Sword of a Thousand Truths bid.1c bo.10000g]

that would be cool. :D

1,674,888 Healing Done

Oddly enough, I got an invite to the guild's first raid this year. They're having issues with their priest or something so they needed more healers...hence I got to go to SSC tonight. We downed Hyrdoss, Lurker, Leotheres, and Tidewalker. The Tier 5 pally gloves dropped, I bid 5dkp (I only have 11). The guy who won bid 66dkp. LOL.

I think I'm still torn about raiding. Since these guys seem to know their stuff and only really invite the good players...they tend to down bosses very fast now. They make it look soooo easy too. I know it's not because they have all the coordination down...and a good leader...but they make it look like child's play.

OR maybe raiding is easy with all good players. I don't know. It's very nice learning the fights and seeing the content. I will have to say that SSC turned out to be not as exciting as I thought it would be in terms of graphics. It starts out totally impressive with this huge open underground cavern but then turns into closed areas with mobs and bosses in each hall and room... I would even say underbog is more impressive.

Also, I still think healing in PvE is a joke. Knowing when to dispel, over heal, down rank, etc is child's play. They don't even give the healers any instructions or assign healers for most of the fights. It's just free for all until we get to Leotheres. Perhaps the appeal is in the group/team effort. Again, lacking for me since I don't have any emotional ties to these people.

I plan to stick around for a bit since I'm still just backup and there's no real pressure. I do enjoy the opportunity to see parts of the game that I wouldn't otherwise be able to see....but in terms of a challenge, I guess I don't feel it since I'm not part of the leadership of the guild??? That's my only guess. I swear if there was a spectator mode, I'd be fine with that.

But maybe that's the nature of larger group activities..the individual tends to get lost and it's harder to really put pressure to make a singular person better. The only thing you can really do to stand out is to be consistent and never f- up.

I watched the video for Lady Vashj, that seems like a crazy fight which will be nice to see if I get to come to that raid.

My small accomplishment for the night was not dying during any of the pulls except for full raid wipes which only happened twice and I was able to DI someone each time :) /flex

Also, I was third on the healing meters and 6th in overheals.
Shammy #1 with 2,338,346 healing done (#1 overheals)
Druid #2 with 1,788,000 healing done (#7 overheals)
Me #3 with 1,674,888 healing done (#6 overheals)

I was also #1 in cures....

Of course, no one noticed that but me. /gives self a reach around
lol.

I bet I could be number 1 if I had their gear. I tend to take raiding pretty seriously. I don't slack off because I do sometimes think one person can really make a difference regardless of whether or not anyone notices.

....
[Libram of Absolute Worthlessness] (okay, that's not wut it's called but that's what it is. dropped off of Lurker...is this some kind of wow joke? no one wanted it)

Hardcore Raiding

I was in it.. I was responsible for it...I did it...I lived it.
But I still don't get it.

I'm reading up on my raiding guild's new rules for 2008. They've decided to ditch the casual raiding approach and go for hardcore progression. This translates into higher standards for their members...all gear must be enchanted and socketed with the best of items. You must bring required flasks, pots, and food to all raids...with threat to be kicked out. You must know the boss fights and not need explanation. You must perform to the raid standards. Anyone getting in the way of Black Temple before Expansion will be removed and replaced.

Trust me, I totally respect what they're doing. And I like how they execute everything with total seriousness and no-nonsense bs accepted. They have the correct attitude for progression.

But personally, I don't get it. Why when you have a really cool casual raiding guild with decent progression...would you try to turn it into the "beast"...because anyone who has done the serious hardcore raid progression knows...it does turn into that...

Luckily, they plan to stick with their specified raid days and raid times...which is good so that you aren't raiding every second of your life...and I'm only backup healer so most of this I won't feel too much of the effect.

I don't think people are doing it for loot...at least I hope not.. Hopefully it's just to achieve their goal of getting to a certain status in the game.

But for 3 hours of the day/3 days a week...you bring your A-game...no chatting. no jokes..no scrubs. no bs. I keep asking myself.. do I really want to go back to that.. was I ever happy doing that? Seeing new content.. YES... love it.. Grinding it out with people I don't care about..Not so much.

Holy Paladin pwns Face

I was dueling in IF yesterday. I saw this amazing Holy Paladin who was smoking bodies left and right. His 5v5 is already like 2033 so of course he's a pvp bad @ss.

He'd open up Seal of Righteousness which unleashes the seal's energy causing 208 to 228 base Holy Damage + bonus spell damage....which usually equals 900 for him...non crit.

Then he consecrated and holy shocked and continued to heal himself in between.

I even saw him beat a hunter...although the hunter was suspect since I wasn't sure why he didn't drop a snake trap before he hit him with viper sting... to make purging possibly harder....

Anyhow..I'm now trying to practice the art of holy shockadin. It's always so much fun when a healer eats dps face. I know this probably wouldn't work against caster dps as much..but it seemed viable against warrior, hunters, and rogues who don't know how to set up a decent stun cycle. I don't think it works against mace spec warrior either because of the amount of stuns they proc...but who knows.

Tacoma Beats World Boss

Why hadn't anyone ever linked this to me?? F--- Hilarious!

That Mace was Mine

[Vengeful Gladiator's Salvation]

That bad boy should be mine!!! I sometimes think the Blizzard gods like to play little games with their minions. We were like 20 points away from my 1850 personal rating this week when Boulderfist crashed and burned during our 5v5 Arena games. You know what happens when one team drops because their server crashes and the other team doesn't??? yeah... that's right. SOL.

We lost 18 points because of the first dropped game. The second game, all those who went to pick up food from the mage table lagged out. So all we had left was our warrior and a rogue. And guess what? They freaking dropped the other team's rogue with three of us missing! We lost 15 points from that team.

We met up with them again later that night and creamed um...but it pretty much started a downfall pattern...that we finally recovered from gaining close to 50 points before the night was over...soooo close!! so close!!! Boulderfist sucks!!! worst server ever. It's the first to go down...last to come up...with horrible lag issues. Who the hell picked this server? oh yeah.. me. ;(

Tales of the Past III

Darren linked me this kick ass WoW movie. Apparently it was 1.5 years in the making.
I'm really impressed. I watched about half of it on youtube then decided I want to find a high quality version to watch on my projector.

The Memories Pile On

I thought this collage is a good representation of how much of my life has been involved in World of Warcraft. And a good visual representation of what I mean by virtual experiences adding to your visual memory...thus becoming an actualized part of your "living" experience.

There is no validity to the idea of existing online yet..so right now all I can do is come off as this sort of pathetic chic with no life. But one of these days I'll get to turn around and be like "see! I'm not crazy... it was all just a matter of time"

Random Dwarf Insult Generator

Anim5 sent me this link to a dwarf insult generator he created.

Now no dwarf shall ever have to go speechless!

Mine was "Go slam yer head in a gate ye butt faced butt scratchin' turd pile!"

http://www.anim5.com/wow/generator/dwarf/index.php

"WoW Scary"

Okay, so the reports were true. Alachia is rolling a shaman. Apparently Hell can freeze over. :) Felix is on a massive vacation in Oregon so I wasn't able to twist his arm into disturbing the balance of nature with me.

Sad and I picked up on our level 12 shamans Christmas day and rolled until we caught up with Taint's shaman who was sitting at level 26. At first, I thought we would all go as a pack of Elemental shamans..Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!



hahahaha..

but as it turned out, Enhancement seemed more fitting for us. Taint and Sad went Enhancement and I went Resto. It was way more mana efficient and the dps output was faster.

Quick break down for those who don't know about the overpowered shaman class. Enhancement build is melee oriented, Elemental is caster dps, and Resto is healing spec.

So basically the two of them throw up Stormstrike in cycles, then Earth Shock, hit hit hit, and repeat.
In the meantime, I throw up Grace of Air Totem, Strength of Earth, and Mana Tide. I also throw in Earthshock when I see Stormstrike up.

Needless to say, we blow stuff up fast. KABOOM.

This one alliance paladin came across our path and saw us and typed "WoW Scary"
hahaha.

It's been kind of poetic justice with the horde too.. We just decimate all the horde in our path in seconds. Windfury weapon buff plus Stormstrike and Earthshock. It's just too easy.. At least I wasn't wrong all these years with my Overpowered shaman chant. :) Now I know what they were doing to me...bastards.

I've been considering a respec to Elemental but we just run out of mana so fast it makes sense for me to be resto.

Happy New Years

Did you guys spend your New Years's in the game too???
Oh good! Now I don't feel so bad. :)