Friday, October 31, 2008

BBL Cruise



going on a cruise to Mexico today. I get back on Thursday. If I had known when WoTLK was coming out I wouldn't have taken this vacation when I did. I probably would have taken a day or two off of work for Wrath instead but oh well.

And when I get back to the US, there will be a new President selected. lol.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Episode 38: 13 Nodes of TBC



Episode 38 is out. This episode takes a look back where I go over my 13 nodes of The Burning Crusade Expansion.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Progress Meter


(while pure dps meters don't always tell the full story, you can learn a lot from them)

I'm a really big fan of DPS meters. I usually run recount and also post wow webstats after every major raid or instance.

A lot of people think I do this in the spirit of competition or some way to flaunt status of certain characters. However, my main reason for keeping track of meters is to check progress and also current ability of toons.

If you constantly play without meters then you have now to gauge progress or loss of progress or no change. Also, meters can help you understand what's going on with a certain toon as well. Like if a mage has a lot of epic gear but is constantly dipping below 1000dps perhaps they're not spec'd right or they simply don't have enough crit and hit rating.

One example where meters really helped is with a hunter friend of mine. We were doing our ZA bear runs and I noticed his DPS dipped 100-200 points below 1000 damage per second. SO I talked to him about it. It turned out that while he had "upgrade" epic gear from 25 mans and BOJs, it all actually hurt his DPS a lot because it had little hit rating. Once he switched back to his old gear, his DPS spiked.

"Just play for fun" - yeah. I agree. I do. I've heard that argument before and I 100% agree with it but it's all about perspective. Some people LOVE just hanging out and they don't care if they wipe a million times or if they don't finish an instance. My hunter friend said that on his last server, they had fun wiping on animal boss over and over again in Karazhan.

If people enjoy their play style, that's good. My play style however is maximizing everyone to the best of their ability and in my experience, if you don't push people to be better and challenge them, they'll never know how good they can be. And excelling and maximizing efficiency in the game is what really gets my jollies. :)

I usually try to help people out with improving their character. However, if they start to get easily offended or don't show interest in pushing or simply say it's impossible, I usually let it go. Pushing people's buttons is something I only reserve for my real friends. hehehee.

Just ask Flipmax and Felix how much crap I give them when I think they're DPS is slipping. lol. JUST KIDDING!

My recommended DPS mod (also shows a lot of other great data) is Recount.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Bring back the Zombies!



Saturday saw the height of the zombie take over on my server. Every major city was completely ravaged by zombies. All bank toons dared not log in! Stormwind looked like the under city! Everyone was infected and all the guards were dead.

It was quite annoying for sure but at the same time there was something amazing about this little virtual disease. As a guild mate pointed out, it was the best cure for Gold Farm Spamming toons. All the little level one toons that love to sit idle in Stormwind spamming their gold macros were all dead. lol.

In addition to gold farmers being killed off, people who sit idle in IF and Shat who love to troll Trade Channel had to flee for their lives as well! hehehe. It was quite the little reprieve from the normal epeen slapping, hate spam we usually get in our chat channels.

Bring back the disease Blizzard! lol. I'll just never be able to retrieve anything from my bank toons but it's a sacrifice I'll make! :D

Friday, October 24, 2008

Re-AQ?


Anyone know why the AQ event reset? Is this some lame attempt at a world event?
Or is this a major wow server glitch? I heard some rumor about people trying to redo sceptor quest to get the Black Resonating Crystal. I wonder if anyone was able to do this before the event started.

Also, the mobs are way smaller than they were in the original opening of the gates. NOT the same awe factor! LAME!

I kept getting ganked trying to take a pic with these new mini giants! damn horde all over my server.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Fastest Server Shutdown


Something is up for sure. Just experienced the fastest server shut down known to all of Azeroth. 15:00 to reset, two seconds later, 3:00, 1 second later 2:45, 3 seconds later 1:50, 2 seconds after that 15 seconds still shut down.

They really, really wanted to fix something. I heard there might be a bug with AQ where the server restart exploited the AQ instance to make it think the event was happening again. Therefore, you could actually recreate the scepter to get the black resonating crystal. Would that warrant a shot gun server restart??? Seems doubtful.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

R.I.P WoWAce

WoWAce announced it's demise October 15, 2008

"Today has marked the day where this page has been officially discontinued in favor of the newer systems that have recently been deployed."

"A little over a year ago Curse.com started subsidizing our servers, and for a time that was enough to get us through the worst of it. But we just kept growing.

Things reached a critical mass during 2.4. We filled up the entirety of the 1 gigabit connection we where using and ended up pushing out more than 300GB an hour. With more than 500k users downloading updates for every small change things just couldn't keep up financially."

"We encourage all users who are looking for updates for their addons to head over to Curse.com and look around. "


As a user of many, many mods, this is very sad news. I've always really enjoyed the service WoWAce provided. Their mods were always extremely reliable and most importantly, perceived safety! Maybe it's all propaganda but curse gaming mods and the curse gaming site in my circle has an extremely bad reputation for being super PHISHY.

I have taken extra precaution by running extra spyware and protection software on my computers but nothing creeps me out more than having to dip back down into the curse gaming cesspool on a regular basis. The goods look attractive all the time, no doubt, but are they safe? I guess I'll find out. I suppose I can also look at wowinterface.com, ctmod, and wowmatrix for updaters and more mods. It just sucks that my staple is gone.

They said to stay tuned for what's next and that they needed to take one step back to take two steps forward. I hope we see their return in the future or at least an incantation of it.

Anyhow, THANKS WoWAce! I'll miss you.

Friday, October 17, 2008

The Two Real Choices for US

and by US, I mean "us wow players", not the United States. heh.

I've been very excited about the opportunities of end game PvE for with 10 man raiding in the expansion. I've started going into pre-planning mode trying to ensure the success of our future raids. The real dilemma becomes what is the 10 man raiding content going to require?

What two tanks? What two healers? With Karazhan and Zul'Aman, we saw the rise of the Protection paladin and it's amazing nature to mutli-mob tank. Obviously with the changes to warriors, the options for tanks opens up...as well as with the new Death Knight class. I just don't want us to end up in a position we were in with Zul'Aman, having to find a protection paladin and resto shammy at the eleventh hour.

Druid/Pally tank worked out really well for us. The versatility of the pally tank with being able to heal in interims we found extremely valuable as a raid. The druid over warrior was based on ability absorb extremely large spikes of damage. When you have only two healers in your raid, you're banking on not having to gamble with healing. Druid tanks offer solid reliability with their high percentage of dodge and dmg soaking.

As for 10 man healing, the shaman is a solid choice for very effective and extremely fast HPS raid wide.

So those are the known variables. I'm obviously making huge assumptions here. I'm assuming tank/offtank standards and that two-healer tandem will work for the upcoming 10 man raids.

So is druid necessarily the better main tank or should I make another assumption that Death Knights will make a strong debut in raids that are built to showcase them in WoTLK? Also, will rage starvation trump mana dependancy in the warrior vs pally tank debate? Will multi-mob tanking needs outweigh pure damage soakers?

At this point, it seems like we're going to make a gamble and hope it pans out when we hit 80.

And what about the second healer? Sure Shaman seems like a solid choice for our group. The power behind Chain Heal is unprecedented with raid wide healing followed closely by Priest's Circle of Healing. But what about the power of the priest spirit regeneration as well or the sheer healing strength of Greater Heals and Prayer of Mending? Then of course you can't ignore the sheer speed, strength, and longevity of Paladin Flash Heals??? And what if the raid fights call for sustained healing over time for unique fight cc's and crazy silences that only a Druid could offer best??

AGH! I just don't know. I wish we could just level up all our healers and tanks so we'll have the full arsenal ready to go for whatever WoTLK throws at us. I mean, I know we'll make whatever we have work. It can always work but I don't want it just to work. I'm huge on efficiency and don't just want it to be doable but rather optimal.

Oh well, a girl can dream.

Game Stop Midnight, I'll be there!

I went to Game Stop today and pre-ordered my copy of WoTLK for Taint, Sad, and myself. I walked into the shop and they guy was like "What can I do for ya?"

I was like. "stutter...stutter.. wrath of the lchhhhh.. king pre-order" yeah. I was nervous because there were like 5 other people in this tiny store. I should really be over my awkward shyness by now.

He was like "NOT the collector's edition right?"

I was like "no.. mumble..just the normal.. I mean regular"

Then this other customer who was standing near the counter was like "So, you think the expansion is going to be good?"

I was like "I think so, um, yeah" and as I was saying yeah, he knocked down a rack of game cards but kind of caught them before they tumbled all over the counter. I was so embarrassed I didn't really finish my statement. He didn't say anything either and left the store.

Awkward! I suck at RL human interaction. This is probably why I only have like 2 RL friends.

Later, I asked the clerk if he asked me about the CE because he had some or that he wanted to make sure I wasn't asking for something they didn't have... cuz I was gonna be like, sign me up buddy! hehehe. But no, he was just verifying I didn't meant the CE because they were long gone just like I read about a few weeks ago.

Anyhow, I verified with the him that the store was gonna be open at Midnight. WOoooot! They shall be open for a midnight release and I'll be there...freaked out by all the people but I'll be there! The things I do for WoW. lol.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Stormwind Harbor



Well, I got very little work done this afternoon. Patch days are hard to work through. In any case, I got into my RP vacation home server as it was the first to go live. A fellow guildy kept going crazy in Bindpoint about how awesome the scenery looked and how they must have changed the graphics cuz everything is so much more 3D!

So I logged in.. and OMG!!! The graphics look so cool and everything is so much more 3D!! And there's a new shadow effect thing etc.

We went to the harbor first. WOW!!! Crazy! Beautiful open into this huge harbor. It goes to make Stormwind feel THAT much more epic. And just when you think you're down there and you've kind of got the feeling of space, you look back up to Stormwind and WOW! It just looks so legendary from that angle. He also discovered there's now a boat that takes you directly from Ashenvale to Stormwind.

Next, we went to visit the king but because I don't know any Lore, I'm not sure what was different except this guy had some cool outfit and there's now a huge wall statue behind him. Also, in Stormwind Keep I saw my first gnomehawk. very cool!

After a quick server crash, we were rounding the corner to the Barber Shop! woot! My first achievement on that toon. She got a new hairdo. Also. we tried out the /cower emote and it's the funniest sh*t ever. /cower /cower /cower

I imagine for the next few days Stormwind will be the place to be!

Patch 3.0.2 Highlights


(new login screen)

Things that I noticed in the patch notes:

*The Barber Shop- Finally my druid gets some redemption.

*Spell casting and spell channeling pushback has been changed
When casting a spell: The first and second hit will add .5 secs each to the cast time. All hits after the second will have no effect.

When channeling a spell: The first and second hit reduces current duration by 25% of total duration each. All hits after the second will have no effect.

Spellpower: All items and effects which grant bonus to spell damage and spell healing are being consolidated into a single stat, Spellpower. This state will appear with the same values found on items which grant "increased spell damage and healing" such as on typical Mage and Warlock itemization

*Druids:
Entangling roots can now be used indoors!
Feral Charge can now be used in cat form.
Hurricane no longer has a cooldown.
Tree of Life form, can now cast all healing spell and decurse in form

*Mage: Conjured mana gems no longer disappear from your backpack after being logged out for more than 15 minutes. Higher ranks of Conjure Mana Gem will recharge an existing mana gem to maximum charges.

*Lame! Blessing of Salvation renamed Hand of Salvation, now reduces total threat on the target by 2% per second for 10 seconds while also reducing all damage and healing done by 10%.

*The Sunwell Plateau, Black Temple, and Serpentshrine Cavern Raid Dungeons have all had their mobs and bosses adjusted and now have less health points.

*New Calendar feature

*New Vanity Pet and Mount changes! wohoo. I have bag space again!!!

*Macros and keybinding are now saved server-side. AH yeah. no more copying over my WTF folder everywhere I go!

*Nothing said about nurfing the ZA Bear Mount reward!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Texas Renaissance Festival 2008



Flip, Sadd, Morgan, Morgan's spawn, and myself went to the Texas Renaissance Fesitval this past weekend. It was a very beautiful day. I consumed a sausage on a stick, a funnel cake, and an apple dumpling. I was mad at myself for not being able to eat the corn on the cobb. Disappointing indeed.

I spent a lot of the time there searching for the elusive chain mail chick. hehe. Check out the album to see if I found her. :)

Flipmax's Ball



So, is it just our crazy mage who does this or is this a standard for most raiding mages? You pretty much have to jump through the shat portal as soon as he opens it up or else you play spin the portal and never know where you're gonna land.

That pic is a portal of Shat, Stormwind, Ironforge, Theramore, and Dranassus. I took it and landed in Stormwind where there was a horde trying to gank lowbies. hehehee.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Stormwind Blows


Came across these construction workers in Stormwind while on the RP server doing some fishing. Looks like they're building up some serious TnT to blow this wall sky high. I love coming across stuff like this in the game.

It's that kind of "stumble upon" aspect of WoW that's so great. I know people probably already know all about this from reading wow forums and being in beta etc.. but again, I love the discovery factor of WoW. I admit I did a double take at first and wondered to myself if I actually just never noticed it before. hehe.

So can't wait to see Stormwind get blown up!!! KABOOM!!! DY NO MITE!!

Monday, October 06, 2008

Adventures in RP Land



I'll say the one great thing about the PvE to PvP transfers is that it has allowed me the freedom of opting to roll on a PvE server. If I do actually get it to 70, I can transfer it back to my home realm etc.

Actually, specifically, it's an ROLE PLAYING server. It's quite a cultural change for me and I have found the first 13 levels to be quite unique because of it. For instance, as Flipmax and I were running to kill Goldtooth in Goldshire, we saw two level 70 male human toons off to the side of the mountain just standing next to each other.

We paused for a few seconds and were like "OKAY! movin' on!!! Nothing to see here!"
lol.

Then when I was fishing in Stormwind (what happens when you tandem level, you gotta fish when your buddy isn't online), it wasn't long before a human warrior started fishing next to me. Then he started chatting me up in /say. It was so weird. Just this friendly sort of banter back and forth while we sat there casting out into the moat.

He then offered to take me to Goldshire to learn the cooking profession. I tried to tell him that you could learn it in Stormwind in Old Town as well but he didn't hear me or something in the /say and then he ran off.

Later, while I was still fishing, this player in fish form from the Fishing Tournament Trinket [Hook of the Master Angler] started swimming by. I was so surprised, it freaked me out actually at first. At first I had thought they must have brought back the Croc in the Stormwind moat.

Then he does a /say
You's look tasty
Careful where you swims

hahahahahahahaha. RP servers are awesome.

Brooke Marks does Azeroth

NSFW!!!!! (Thanks Boozefort for the link)
"made me laugh almost right off the bat. I was thinking, you should dumb your podcast down, make it a vlog, and wear a bra. Then you too could be very very popular" -Booze

tempting...but no.

CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO (decided the video embed was annoying for peeps at work as it screamed I'm a perv)

CLASSIC STUFF!
"Open a trade window so I can give you my boner."

I'm not sure a wow vblog could get any worse than this nor am I sure if one could get any more entertaining for my Monday. lol.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Double Trouble


(I'm on the right)

So out of shear boredom and not wanting to deal with guild shit, Flipmax and I flirted with the idea of rolling on another server. (like for realz this time). Just for fun so that we have a place to escape and just sort of play on our own terms. A lot of other people in our guild have done something similar.

So we decided to do twin characters because we thought it'd be the best way to throw people off. Twin warlocks it was. At first we were on the RPPvP server I started the RAOK guild on..and then we were like "WTF are we doing?!! we can roll on a PvE server now! LoL."
So we ended up rolling two human locks on the MetaTalks server instead.

Two locks together, OMG, Over Power to the 10th power! I can not believe how many mobs we were able to take on at like level six! hahahaah.

And what's even funnier is that we kept talking about how we would be able to deal with a lot of the horde situations in Redridge cuz of our OP.. then were like OH YEAH!!!! no ganking on a PvE server!! hahahaha. easy sauce!! straight to the top!

I will say though that being on a server with NO resources is pretty harsh coming from a place where I normally start all my new alts with 18 slot bags and enchanted gear. I'm not sure what's easier, PvP server with resources or PvE server with no resources. :)

We also named our toons almost idential. Liee and Liey. So hopefully people will always be confused. Since this is an RP server, I'm supposed to come up with our background story but am having writer's block.

So far, we're trying to even have synchronized casting times. lol. okay okay, maybe that's going too far. hehehe. Actually our plan is for me to go demonology and him to go affliction and see if that provides a good balance.

Friday, October 03, 2008

ZA Bear Run


We decided, obviously, pretty late to make real attempts at this. We started about 2 weeks ago with a half geared paladin tank. We decided it would be too difficult with a warrior/druid (not impossible but a lot harder). So we spent about two weeks grinding rep and farming badges to get the paladin geared for real runs.

In the meantime, we did practice runs. I was actually surprised how well we did on our first two attempts. The pally tank had never pally tanked before and I had never healed with a shammy in ZA before. On our third attempt, we got to the fourth boss with 1 minute to go. (you have about 45 mins to do 4 bosses)

So once we got our first real group together, we did all four bosses and lost the timer at one minute due to TWO accidental pulls.

Last Wednesday though, we made our second real attempt and downed the final timed boss with 2/3minutes to spare. WOHOO! So now JAE can finally say it did the bear mount run. Doing it with a prot pally is sooooooo much easier than with a warrior.

Of course, now they're going to give warrior unlimited-target thunder clap and deadly shield so I'm not seeing much a difference anymore in prot paladins and prot warriors. :/ Go figure. (wotlk stuff of course)

So now according to most forum posts, we have about four more attempts to get the bear mount before patch takes it out. I did it for the achievement (passed on the mount) but would have loved to get everyone the bear mount. Unfortunately we have run out of time. Don't leave everything to the last minute as my mom would say!

Our make up: Prot pally/Fear Tank/Resto Shammy/Holy Pally/ArcFrost Mage/2xBM Hunter/Combat Swords Rogue/Fury Warrior/Shadow Priest

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Bindpoint Convo: History Class

So we were talking in Bindpoint about US History class and the lore came up. It became quite clear how uneducated we were about Warcraft Lore. I thought to myself how much I miss taking history classes (basically learning really cool stories that happen to be true). It'd be really neat if we could hold a Lore class in WoW. I'd definitely attend. It would be a great interactive thing for wow-zens to do to further immerse us into the game. Any Lore experts out there?? :)


***Bindpoint***
***WoWast: Metatalks Channel***
***Scroll Mouse over text box to pause scrolling***
[Alachia] social studies is history right?
[celticlucas] Sure is :)
[Martin] Pretty much. Incorporates some political science and civics, if I remember right.
[Alachia] I USED to be great at history.
[Alachia] all that thas slipped out of my brain
[Alachia] replaced instead with mp5 and spirit calculations and boss strats in Black Temple
[Alachia] oh well.
[celticlucas] I can tell you my +spell damage, but the 15th president? yeah, no. lmao
[[Alachia] I can tell you what major accomplishments Thrall did, but wtf is John Locke?
[Alachia] lol
[Martin] He's a character on Lost.
[Alachia] LMAO!!!!!
[Kitch] ok...what are Thrall's major accomplishments
[celticlucas] ... damn, was too slow lol
[Alachia] Thrall's accomplishments: banging Jane Proudmore and getting her head cut off
[Alachia] that guy was awesome
[Alachia] all right kitch got me, my lore history needs some brushing up too
[Alachia] do you teach a class on Horde Lore, Ms. Morgan?
[Kitch] Thrall is horde, you know.
[Alachia] yes. I know
[Kitch] j/k
[Alachia] He's the ugly orc I follow around in Durnholde instance
[Martin] Thrall is the greatest hero in WoW.
[Alachia] he goes blah blah blah and then I get to kill this really cool dragon.
[Kitch] if the instance isn't bugged, yeah
[Alachia] you see, this is what happens when TC stops doing wow lore episodes
[Martin] Heh.
[Morgan] i could if you needed...lol
[celticlucas] there's an idea... WoW University
[Alachia] I only know wow lore up to Sargeras
[Morgan] thrall is also the budding center of eastern williamson county academia as well...lol
[NewKetchup] Yep Alachia, Thrall's a noob - always breaking cc
[Alachia] I'd take the class
[Alachia] we could hold it in a neutral town
[Alachia] like the thunderdome in gadget
[Alachia] lol
[Morgan] lol
[Alachia] not a bad idea
[Alachia] just need to find a lore expert
[celticlucas] the only lore expert I ever knew is now off in Warhammer land pretending to not like WoW anymore lol
[Alachia] :(

(mouse over the chat box to stop text from scrolling up)

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