Can Tank, Will Travel

smiling

2012-01-11T16:23:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to flip the lights on in here in the ol' blog. Shake the dust off.

Tanking going just fine. Paladin tanking is solid right now. Druid tanking is still awesome-fun, however does not have the oomph as covered in recent dev-chat posts in the forums.

Rogue is a blast to play. Well on his way to legendaries.

Hope all is well with you!

Fishing Tips

2011-11-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

Level your fishing - the time efficient way. There are a lot of philosophies on how to level Fishing - there are any number of advocates for actually not leveling Fishing at all and just as many advocating innumerable ways to go about leveling it and what to level it with.

Having leveled many toons and for most also their professions, I've tried out several different ways and found several "time efficient ways" to go about it. This post is not about telling you the 'best way' - not sure there is one given that some people simply enjoy fishing in game, some like to do it as they level, and some do it because it serves a need (alchemy, cooking, or simply checking that box that something was not left "undone"!).

There is a very time efficient way to level your fishing and it falls generally into the following two steps:

1) Fish while you are unavoidably waiting. Invariably, you will have downtime during which you are waiting: waiting for a cool down (e.g. hearth, other profession CD, heroism, mass summon), waiting for a boat, waiting for a respawn, waiting for your friend(s) to get online, waiting for an invite, waiting for your quest mob to rez (thank you other faction for wasting our time), or simply the invariable waiting to then again be waiting again. Find a pond, stream, shore, water-body within a city and cast a fishing bobber into the water. You might find that you are in a zone that requires a higher level of fishing than you have currently, use a lure, Use ability on a rod or hat or what not - or simply pass up on that moment and don't stress it.

2) Fish while you do your fishing dailies. Have no fear, you will get to max cap level and there will be dailies and you will level your fishing simply casting to complete the daily; however, you can begin doing your fishing dailies much sooner (pretty much right away) and as long as you are hearthed at a major city, you'll be able to do them - wait for it - daily. The added perk of doing your dailies often is that you also get guild xp and rep.

For extra time efficiency bonus points, do your fishing dailies while you are waiting. Oh yeah!

If your guild is looking to accomplish achievements associated with # of fish fished out of pools, leveling your fishing while waiting near a fish pool is a great way to contribute. You can also participate in guild events structured around fishing - for example, if they are giving away one of those snazzy other faction non-combat pets to the person that farms up the most fished fish from fish pools that week (typically conditional on the guild passing a certain milestone (half way mark to the achievement for example).

2011-11-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

On the cusp of the 4.2 to 4.3 transition, and with fresh eyes having just returned to the game recently, the State of the Paladin is very healthy. Overall, without feeling imbalanced, the paladin class feels strong in all three of its roles.

Tanking - Even with Holy Shield manually (or macro) applied, the tanking rotation has returned to a natural-feeling and physiologically/mechanically comfortable rhythm with ample room for spice and options. You can easily slide in an interrupt if your Captain America shield is on CD with Rebuke without missing a beat in holding the pack or single target mob. You can heal yourself or the group and spread Hands or other helpful spells all while doing your primary task of keeping the targets under control, moving to stay out of the bad, and keeping your friends from harm's way. Most of all, something that I am hearing confirmed by many healers, is that the Paladin tank is not squishy and is not difficult to gear with a little focused discipline. As a healer and in speaking with other healers, DK tanks continue to be very squishy and bad can go to ugly quickly for them; warrior tanks are either rock solid or highly squishy and the former are far more rare than the latter - this may be more that they are DPS warriors putting on the gear for the shorter random queues; druid tanks are a mana hole in the ground however if you are not in such a rush that you cannot drink between every 1-2 fights, it is not that much of an issue. Of all of them, the Paladin tank is coming across as the easiest to heal with average mana pools and without constantly having to trip CDs under code red conditions.

Healing - Long gone are the days where the Paladin was immediately set to tank healing role and our capability to take on any healing role and task is now well established. I highly doubt this will be reversed even in future patches or releases now that Blizzard has found how to allow any class to take on any healing role. Whereas the tanking role is really about control and moving the boss when the boss needs to be moved and if someone is standing in the bad it is someone else's problem, the healer's role is to try to find the places from which they can reduce movement as much as possible, heal the people standing in the bad, and if the boss needs to be moved, it is someone else's problem. And healing people standing in the bad (as long as they do it only for limited times as exposure to the bad is now designed to be fatal) is brisk and does not interrupt keeping the tank alive - in fact, it contributes to keeping the tank alive with Beacon and well-placed shocks to build up LoD or single-target WoG.

DPS - Mercifully, not seeing anywhere near as many Ret paladins swamping the 5-mans anymore. That ravaging swarm has phased out and passed on. Those that remain, have learned - for the most part - how to play their role within a larger group rather than be an individual who happens to have 4 other people in the same instance with them! Extremely well-geared Retadins are certainly out-dpsing other classes, however, for the most part they are running a strong 2nd place with respectable dps output and enough utility spells to be a strong contributor to the group success - especially when things go bad.

In summary, while I am hearing a lot of "they need to fix this" or "hope they improve that in the next patch" for other classes, I am not hearing the same for the Paladin. Fabulous. Play on!

Rest Bonus

2011-11-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

Over the greater part of 2011, I parked my interest in wow in 'the inn' and came back just recently after much-needed break... and the rest bonus is helping me compound my interest for the troll heroics and the changes since I left early Spring.

It wasn't a 'much needed break' because I needed time away from the game for any negative reasons within the game but rather that I simply needed to focus more time on things offline. Work had me traveling a fair amount and when not traveling, there were plenty of things at home to catch up on.

That being said, when you have time to get some distance on something, you have opportunity to see things in a different light than you typically view them in. And what I was hearing from players still playing the game, and what I was reading online from time to time, or hearing during the occasional log on all pointed to a rather negative prognosis for the game. That being said, how the heck would I know? I wasn't there.

Having recently returned, it is still too soon to speak authoritatively; however, perhaps it is the strength of the rest bonus, or perhaps that I was hesitant due to the negative image I had heard and hence it seems far more positive than those claims, or perhaps it is something else. Regardless of what it is, I can assert that within the game, I am finding lighthearted (no pun intended) camaraderie again - even amongst strangers in pugs. Sure, there is the occasional asshat, however it is by no means the majority as I saw in early Spring as I was headed off for some wow-rest bonus. It is nowhere near the levels described to me from those still steeped in the game while I was offline. And I have not heard much to do about negative reports in the past few weeks - so perhaps as a community, we have moved past that phase and are back at it again.

One way or another, we're headed off again in a forward direction.

A long time ago, I tanked and healed (back when you paid the gold to re-spec each time and had to go to the bank to get your other set of gear because 14-slot bags were *huge* -- come to think of it, even the bank seemed huge even though it did not have bag slots). Therefore, it seemed appropriate to return and seriously dual-activity (not just dual-spec) into tanking and healing -- and what a fabulous amount of fun variety that provides!

I needed the rest bonus. It is making things so vivid now and that's a great way to spend time with friends.

(If you look at the image with the post previous to this one, obviously the toon has come along quite a ways in just a short few days: the clown suit is gone, and he appears to have greyed quite a bit - that might have to do with his player!)

Clown Outfits Again!

2011-02-05T21:28:00.000-08:00

There seems to be an uncomfortable stage again as evidenced by the image of my paladin above. He is clearly wearing baby blue, aquamarine, green, yellows, red, purple, pink and many other colors in the palette. This is what happens when you have a good range of gear from i316 to i346. Sadly, none of it went very well together at i316 or i325 either for that matter! On the upside, the clown outfit performs very, very well. His healing set is significantly more cohesive and toned down - healing, after all, in Cata is no laughing matter!

Druids Use Agility Trinkets, not Tanking Trinkets!

2011-01-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

It is good advice that when you cannot say something nice, do not say anything at all.

Heroic pugs with uninformed, lazy and disrespectful players that interact in a manner that I cannot fathom they would do in real life is how I have been spending my time.

I guess I have nothing to say on the topic. = )

From 85 to Raid Ready Timelines & Expectations

2010-12-31T19:07:00.000-08:00

The leveling and "raid ready" timelines have been completely inverted from the BC and Wrath models. In the BC and Wrath expansions, it took longer to level to the new end cap level (70 and 80, respectively) than it took to gear up to start raiding the new tier. However, players would be well advised to change their expectations on how long it will take to be ready to join a raid group after they hit level 85 in this Cata expansion - it takes much longer to gear up to be raid ready than it takes to level from 80 to 85.

Depending on how well players aligned themselves while leveling to the faction reputation gains they need in order to purchase the blues or epics, they may have a short or long road of faction reputation grinding ahead of them before they have those requisite pieces to hold their own in heroics (the epics translating also into pre-raid readiness).

If they managed their gold well, they will be in a great position to purchase mats or finished crafted pieces; however, there is a chance that they may have some significant grinding to do in order to finance crafted gear and certainly in order to maintain a good supply of flasks which are easily selling for 250g a piece.

Of course, with so few guilds currently unlocking the new fish feast, every raider needs to either cook their own 90 stat buff food, or buy stacks of it. They will need these in the heroics anyways.

Last but not least, there is surviving the heroics over and over in order to get those requisite i346 pieces in order to perform at an entry-level in raids. A tremendous benefit of how Blizzard has set up the end game pre-raid is that rather than spend a lot of time practicing leveling and little time practicing raiding like in BC and Wrath, in Cata we spend very little time practicing our leveling skills and spend a lot of time practicing our raiding skills in fabulously interesting boss fights in the heroics. In effect, we are spending our time practicing the skills we need to be successful for the majority of the expansion (unlike in Wrath and BC).

While it will take most people only a small handful of days to reach level 85 from level 80, it will take them a much longer time to run the regular dungeons to prepare for heroic dungeons to then run the heroic dungeons to prepare for raids.

Raid leaders and guild officers are well-advised to manage these expectations to reduce the chances of people getting frustrated with an unexpected delay in gratification.

As a rule of thumb, I tell people that if the random dungeon finder tells you that you are not geared enough for heroics, you aren't and you should do more regular randoms. Also, if you do not have at least an i346+ average item level on your character sheet (and that doesn't mean stacking items in your bags that are not your main spec!), then you are not ready to start raids and be helpful to the raid group. Btw, items in your bags are averaged into your character sheet Item Level average - putting them in your bank and checking your average item level when the only gear on your character is worn gear will give you a more accurate average.

There are no hard and fast rules and we all hear about the ultra guilds that cleared Naxx wearing T6 still. Sure. However, for the most part if someone is not wearing the epics from reputation and crafting, I don't believe they have put in enough time to get ready to join the rest of the raiders that have. They are also the ones that have not read up on the fights.

Time in preparation is never wasted.

Top Gearing Early Leaves You With No Raids - Help Guildies!

2010-12-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine brought to my attention that we were rather well ranked on our server -- granted, it is early in the expansion however it still speaks to our ability to triumph over the heroic hurdles to be in a position to equip the gear that gets tallied up. It also speaks to just how difficult the heroics are given that we rank in the top 100 on a server with a population in the 13,000s hosting Premonition no less - the originals.

Still, while ranking 25th, and 4th druid (#3 is a cat so we aren't going to really count them given that this is more of a tanking blog) is pretty nifty, the reality is that suddenly, I have no raid groups to run with! That's right!

Basically, in order to hammer into the content that is at my i350 level, I would need to be in a raid group plowing into BH, BoT and BD consistently. However, the only guilds on our server doing that at this time are the hard core guilds - which we are not. We are first and foremost friends that raid together - some RL friends and some friends met in game - and we are mostly seasoned professionals, married with families and with real world demands on our leisure time.

Certainly, I was able to get into one of the first pugs of BH being lead by a highly respected and capable rogue raid leader (/props to Saintdomingo). However, the pugs capable of downing the bosses have all but dried up now that enough of their fellow guildies have geared past i340.

Naturally, the top end guilds have their own tanks and once again we see that all too true problem re-surface: not enough tanks for heroics, however not enough tanking raid seats for the number of serious tanks.

The course of action I am picking is to help gear up fellow guildies as often as they want to come without pushing hard on the topic. It means there will be a fair lag between when I geared for raids and when I will see those raid bosses downed. However, one of my best friends in game and out said it best: "What's the rush?"

= )

I love that simplicity. You may also be in the same position where you geared faster than anyone else in your guild because you wanted to do your job and be a well-prepared tank. Now you have options in front of you (if you plan on staying with your guild) which include: patience and helping others; organizing gold DKP raids for the new content (people always come to those); and pinch-tanking for a guild when one of their regular tanks is away (contact those guilds and give them your name and interest voucher!).

What are you doing at this stage of the expansion?

The Order to Contact Gearing Approach

2010-12-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

A topic that'll get your tanks and healers and dps throwing empty mugs at each other in a dwarven tavern or that causes so much guild drama over the past several years is loot distribution. I've participated in all of the mainstream and named approaches to gearing. My experience is that each "approach" is not necessarily well-suited to all situations and that over time, one approach ceases to be applicable to a given raid group or guild because the situation or environmental conditions change. However, I am a firm believer that the basic premise behind the systems continues to be valid - to wit: fairness, reward support and progression.

When it comes to gearing approaches, I am a proponent of something I call the 'order of contact' approach. It cycles through the present members according to the cycling contact order of an engagement. It prevents the syndrome of hoarding or gearing "x" first and then "y". I was the beneficiary in BC of "gear the tank first" and I was outspoken against it. Many of my peer tanks on the server who I believe enjoyed the benefits of being geared first didn't care for "some idiot" busting their cushy lifestyle and while we were all friends - they reminded me from time to time that "life was good getting these benefits". Privately, with the other raid leaders, I would have long discussions on how we needed to rotate gear around the raid group rather than immediately gear the tank as soon as something new dropped. I felt the same way about healers and dps. Granted- the gear was far more delineated than it was in Wrath and than it is Cata. All the more reason now, I feel, for the order of contact approach.

(tldl version)

The cycling order of contact is (or should be pretty close to):

the pull/threat gen - tank gets added to the threat table
the heal - healer gets added to the threat table
the dps - dps are added to the threat table
re-cycle

Common sense and general experience wisdom will avail you that if:

the tank dies between the pull and the heal, the tank (unless they failsauced it) needs gear
the tank dies between the heal and the dps, the healer needs gear
the healer dies between the heal and the dps, the tank needs gear to gen threat/land taunts
the dps die between the dps and the tank's next cycle, the tank needs gear to gen threat/land taunts and dps needs to open slower

that covers the first few seconds of a contact, and now we cycle through again.

Throughout the rest of the fight, if:

the fight lasts too long , the dps needs more gear
the fight does not last reasonably long enough for dps to have time to drain the mob's health, and the healer had plenty of mana left until the tank died, the tank needs gear for survival and mitigation
the fight does not last reasonably long enough for dps to have time to drain the mob's health, and the tank had plenty of health until the healer ran out of mana, the healer needs gear to increase mana pool and replenishment of mana
the tank loses the threat generation race against dps or healer, the tank needs gear to improve threat generation

So the next time a piece of gear drops, don't just immediately reach for the logic that gearing the tank will improve the chances of downing the encounter. Analyze what the "state" of the group is when the boss does not go down (who died first, how is the mana pool doing on the healer, how much dps did we have, what conditions lead to the wipe and which were preventable - e.g. crowd control). Then as you continue to work on that boss or gather gear elsewhere, respond to those conditional states by gearing the group accordingly.

I am positively convinced that there were several weeks of no progress in raiding in the prior expansions because we looted gear to a tank when really what we needed to do was shorten the fight by gearing the dps. Yes, I know that tank survivability and healing longevity are intertwined with damage delivery to create the result: fight duration. However, enrage timers were created to remind us that in every fight, simply having well-geared tanks and healers is a bad idea.

That is my order of contact gearing approach. If you have better suggestions, I would very much like to hear and learn from them.

Tank Gearing for Heroics at 85 - Use Common Sense

2010-12-14T08:52:00.000-08:00

If you check with Elitist Jerks, they tell you to reforge everything to Dodge Rating. If you check with other camps, they say Hit/Exp > Dodge; although they also recommend reforging haste and crit to Dodge Rating. To make it more confusing, EJ suggests all stam gems and others suggest agi+stam gems, agi or stam gems depending on bonuses.

What to do?

Stop. Drop and roll. Then calmly think about the situation you find yourself in most often. Gear to compensate for that.

For example, if threat generation is a problem right now because your dps is better geared than you (how did you ever let that happen?!!) and you are missing too often, then you need more hit/expertise. There really are not any fights right now where two tanks are taunting off of each other (yet) and most mob-level heroic taunts are going to work out fine with a lack of hit/expertise gearing. However, if you are simply not generating enough threat in the first 3-6 seconds of a fight due to misses - you need to patch that hole.

On the other hand, I am finding I have absolutely no threat issues and am so far ahead of dps and healing threat that I really should stack more stamina and agility for improved survivability and mitigation to give the healers fewer gray hairs while they are gearing up.

In other words, for me right now, stam and agi stacking is more important than hit or expertise; however, I fully expect once the healers gear up appropriately, to be able to convert some of that stacking to hit and expertise.

And then of course, we will see epics change all of that in the first tier of raiding! Invariably, pre-heroics, heroics and raid gear are all balanced around different stat levels. And we need to adjust to that as we progress and as our group progresses. Common sense, right? Well you'd be amazed at how many people just look up EJ and gear without thinking about it. They forget that EJ really was targeted to a very skilled group that took many assumptions in stride and did things as part of the SOPs. When EJ became "mainstream", their audience took on people who do what EJ says without understanding why to do it that way or more importantly when it is most appropriate and when it is more appropriate to alter the advice.

So gut check your fights and see where you need to patch holes. I'm a huge fan of the "order of contact" gearing approach.

The what?

The order of contact gearing approach. Separate post.

LW Glitch Understood!

2010-12-12T16:18:00.000-08:00

Turns out that the LW skill level required on the recipe (425) on the vendor is incorrect. The recipe can be right-clicked and learned if you are LW skill level 525. The recipe, unlike the other 525 recipes is not red at 425 because it is listed as able to be learned at 425, however it cannot be.

What is interesting is the behavior that has been programmed into the UI. In this case, rather than getting the error message telling me that my LW skill was too low to learn the pattern, it told me if could not find the pattern.

Anyways, solution was to level up and learn it at 525!

Glitched! -- LW Patterns Sold in Twilight Highlands

2010-12-10T17:32:00.000-08:00

In a sad turn of events, at a rather unfortunate moment, we discover that the new high-end LW patterns are glitched. You can 'buy' the new patterns from the vendor, whom will gladly take your Heavy Savage Leather (10) -- which amounts to about 1,000g a pattern right now -- and will give you the pattern. The pattern will sit in your bag. Then, when you use the pattern to learn it, you will get the horrifying error message that the item was not found. You may click on it several times if you would like to see the error messages several times. You will check your chat log, it confirms you received it. You will check your bag again and there it is. You will cursor over it to make sure it is the right one. It is. you will try with futility to learn it. Then depending on your nature, you may need to buy a new mouse, a new monitor or you may simply hang your head at what it preventing you from obtaining a realm first!

There is good news, sort of. When you zone into SW, and open your bank, the pattern will miraculously disappear from your bags. It will not refund you the Heavy Savage Leather; however, at least you won't be tempted to click on it again. Of course, you will portal back to Twilight Highlands and exchange another 10 Heavy Savage Leather (1,000 gold right now) just to confirm that indeed, you can repeat the bug.

Sadly - it isn't really the 2,000g you just lost. It is the Realm First, the 6K you spent leveling LW to this point to try to get a realm first or be ready to gear for heroics. It is the tens and tens of thousands of gold of all the "first leather and mail and melee/tank cloaks" you cannot make and sell on the AH as the first on your server as people gear up to get heroics to get raids.

Alas - foiled! Nonetheless, smile, and go let off steam by grinding rep! Just don't do it in a heroic because you cannot get in because you cannot craft high enough iLvl gear! = )

New BRC 5-man Instance: First Impressions

2010-12-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Fabulous Fun. Within 8 minutes of Cata launch, I was inside BRC with a group and it was a great experience after Wrath. Point blank, I know that BRC existed, however did no pre-study on it so that I literally hit it not knowing what would come around the next corner or how to tackle the bosses. We wiped twice (first one was due to party not knowing what to do on the first pull although those of veterans of Kara knew right away; second was due to healer pulling a pat AND another group! It was grand! We died. We laughed. We rez'd and smote them. Wait - we died three times because I learned about the mechanic on the fire armor boss. = )

After that run, I queued again and this group stayed together for 4 runs. At which point we dinged 81. Then I ran a full guild group through.

Noteworthy:

Fun. Fun. Fun.
Brings back some old mechanics and memories.
Pretty easy-going on the tank and pulls. AoE even was not so bad (I expect that to get rougher as we progress in levels).
iLvl 251 was not replaced by drops. They are slightly below what I have on so I might not be replacing until I'm leve 83 -- we shall see. (This was on a bear tank btw).
Blizzard has made the "in-instance" quest system AMAZINGLY convenient -- whoever the developer was that thought that up and implemented it - give him a RAISE and a PROMOTION! Then send him over to the department that thought it was a good idea to remove portals from Shatt and Dal and let him take over!

I would recommend wearing the Gilneas tabard before going in there if you are doing it straight out of the gates. I earned no reputation while in there since I had on an old tabard (I had anticipated - mistakenly - that we would get some rep in there and wanted to see which and how much.)

Note sure if everyone else has Skull keybound however I do and a quick Shift+F1 marks the target I want dps to pour into and it made life very quick. Healers had no mana issues (other than when dead). I won't ruin it any further... go enjoy!

T'is the Season for Leveling, again!

2010-12-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

This is almost better than the night before Christmas Day! Have you completed your "pre-Cata bucket list"? Where will you be parking your characters for the night before Cata? Have you used all your Honor points? I heard they might be resetting. Wowhead.com has up and running all of the quest loot rewards under Items (search by slot and filter by your class and spec) - so if you have any left over Justice Points you want to spend rather than hoard, this will help you not spend them on something that will be immediately replaced at level 80 or 81 with a quest reward (yes, there are those - e.g. a trinket for dps that renders all 264 trinkets worthless). Do you have a specific role in your guild for the guild achievements? (ie are you supposed to help with the fishing in order to get the new raid chow recipe?) Good news on the new BoA's: the xp bonus stacks with the current BoA's! So once you get up to 85 and your guild unlocks those BoA's, your alts will zip up zoom zoom.

All in all, wishing you all a great leveling experience - and see you all on the other side of midnight!

/afk movie -- thumbs up!

2010-11-21T13:49:00.000-08:00

I have been tracking the release of this gem - and I have to share as while it is not 'correct' and 'true' to WoW mechanics, it still put a fabulous grin on my face to watch it! Enjoy part 1/2 and 2/2!

Metered Progression - Preventing Welfare Epics from Keeping Pace

2010-11-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

Right. We've had plenty of information and patches to begin to make some concrete observations about the game after Dec 7th. Not speculation, pure play factual observations. Blizzard has put in place the mechanics to meter progression from buying gear with points - what used to be called disdainfully obtaining 'welfare epics'. Fact.

There are weekly points caps. You do not use points to collect gear that drops from boss kills. You use points to buy gear.

OS began a crazy road where people with no skills could pug every raid they could get into until they had enough emblems to buy gear good enough to offset their lousy play skills. Which allowed them to join more pugs with less scrutiny since they were no longer at the bottom in meters. This fostered more drops, more access to RNG benefits, more emblems, more purchases.

Clearly, Blizzard recognizes that there is a place for purchasing gear - I can think, immediately of how annoying it is to see a trinket finally and then see it go to someone else :: this would definitely be a situation where purchasing a relatively fair facsimile would be highly useful. Not every guild has the raiding momentum to take down bosses straight out of the gate in all new raid instances and raiders frequently clobber lower end tier instances to farm emblems/points in order to purchase gear to help them gear into the new tier. Farming easier tier to get comparable tier purchased is not what Blizzard had in mind I would haphazard.

OS3 zergs frequently began happening by button-mashers world-wide whom where happily geared from pugging everything under the sun and buying gear.

Brute force, versus finesse.

Having said that, there have been plenty of battles won IRL on pure play brute force and lack of finesse. All is fair in the eyes of those victors writing the history books.

The points cap will not be that impactful when you look at a single week; however, look at the effect over a span of weeks, and you can see the mathematical trending to support that guilds that have the skill to down bosses, start in week 6 to outstretch by far the raiders gearing by purchasing their items. To keep pace, those pugs are going to have to be downing the bosses at the same rate as the strong guilds (both of course are collecting the same # of points if they are downing the bosses).

The real duct tape that holds it all together as a strategy to both support fledgling guilds that need to purchase gear and strong skilled guilds versus unskilled mass-pug raiders is the new mechanic that enforces you do each raid boss only once. The well skilled raiders will do that boss once that week, not once with their guild and then once in a pug for extra emblems/points (which is when the pug raiders have been going along for the ride).

All in all, a good thing. We should see very quickly the gap widening between those with skill and those without. The mechanic of raid bosses being 10 or 25 man and not 40 man versions means any guild with skilled raiders can see all of the content. And you won't have to keep that annoying infantile idiot that simply has more time to pug everything!

Tank Balancing is Challenged

2010-10-31T14:34:00.000-07:00

Blizzard has been making some sweeping changes related to tanking, recently - all in the spirit of making them closer balanced to each other. The recent spate of changes managed to address earlier offsets that were creating imbalances. However, at a fundamental level, Blizzard is going to remain challenged when it comes to balancing tanking classes, truly.
At it's most basic level, you see course corrections such as the recent changes to the druid tanks whom were having a level of survivability that was unauthorized! Initially, Blizzard ratcheted up boss damage in Beta in order to do damage to Feral tanks; however, it was killing the other tanks. They have nerfed the Feral tank, and can therefore reduce the intensity and frequency of boss damage. In fact, they homogenized (overused word lately) the tanks such that now all tanks have 12 second CDs and a damage mitigation "oh crap!" button that brings 50% mitigation to the fight. All tanks, same way across the board.
The real problem arises when making sure that any of the tanking classes can tank equally, that classes bring "extras" which make them unequal from the start. So we've figured out how to make sure that all of the tanks generate about the same threat per second, can all invoke 50% damage mitigation, can all pop 12 second CDs. Warriors still, however, do not have heals or battle-rezes. And while DK tanks do have a degree of self heals, they are no paladin nor druid when it comes to cross-role raid functionality.
Now add to the mix that Shamans now get +30% threat and -5% damage when using Rockbiter, and combine that with a legacy of being able to tank instances, and the general trend of bringing back Vanilla and BC flavors of mechanics (e.g. crowd control) and you have to at least raise an eyebrow at the chance that Shamans might be able to pinch-tank or even outright tank a 5-man (remember that most classes will have approx similar health pools).
The "preventer" to Shamans becoming tanks [again] is damage mitigation. GC recently blue-posted (when making comments about why the recent changes to tanking mechanics and class changes) that damage mitigation will be the most critical aspect of tanking in Cataclysm. For a company that wants to break down the stereo-types of warriors as the best MT, they are driving home that in Cataclysm, your best class for MT role is a warrior - THE best mitigation tank in the game. Then again, they do not have heals, or BRezzes, or other whiz bang spells.
However, we are back at the problem of giving one class an edge because it has a lot of tanking tools in the tool box but no tools from any of the other raid roles, versus making all of the tanks viable for any encounter so that you "bring the player, not the class."
All in all, "balance" is a shifty term interpreted by many in many ways. There is balance across a role in a raid such that all classes with specs designed to fulfill that role can fulfill it fully. There is balance across classes such that one class is not more powerful in a specific role or by virtue of "mixing roles" on the fly (eg. tanks healing). There is balance in the populations of each class where too few of a specific class highlights that something is amiss with its playability.

ps. When Cata lands, Taurens will be the king of tanks - name another race that can be a druid, DK, warrior and paladin? Interestingly, it also makes them the only class that can be all of the healing classes: priest, shaman, druid and paladin.

Now Enjoying 4.0.1 - Served Up on a Realm Near You

2010-10-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Hosed up. SNAFU. As good as Win98.

That was the immediate effect of patch 4.0.1 on most machines that comprise the 12,000,000 subscribers.

They hot-fixed it. They re-balanced classes. Aye.

What they did not catch, is that if you set in game the settings to use Windowed (Full Screen) and 1920x1200 resolution, you get what can only be described as the Black Screen of Death -- appropo given the apocalyptic arrival of Deathwing, prime leader of the Black dragons. The deed becomes double-visioned (see image) when you think you have out-smarted the in game menu and use the Game Preferences in the WoW Launcher menu. You switch it and find that it is exactly as you set it before you made any Launcher-based changes. So you smartly make the changes again using the in-game menu thinking you'll sync up the Launcher options and blamo! Double vision.

The good news is that there is a fix - or workaround: launch the game per usual and at the login screen, open the Options and make your changes there. Turns out that is one piece of the code that Deathwing did not screw up... for now.

I know. I could just play Full Screen - not in windowed mode. O.o I "need" to see the vent window so that I can tell who the hell in the 25m pug is talking! Alright, maybe I do not need to see that. However, I have gotten used to it over the past 4 years.

I got used to Auctioneer, too and look what they did to THAT! You want me to single load every single auction??!! Forget QQ, I'm going straight to pew pew!!

No really. Post 4.0.1 is great. Once you get past the disruptions of what you knew and accept what you know, it is really quite impressive.

I've never seen a warrior or druid with so much rage - unless it was in Vanilla when a healer complained that pulls were too slow and then went AFK without telling anyone. Seriously, warriors with full rage bars all the time? /standing ovation. Now if only the dps they can do with all that rage wasn't worse than a Shadow priest's was in ICC. You'd think a healer with Thorns was doing more dps. However, we digress - the changes are great. Change is great.

Now, Blizzard, go change that I have to single sell each auction and give me more GD bag space!

Cataclysm Release Date Announced: Dec. 7th

2010-10-04T21:55:00.000-07:00

It's official, the month of December will witness furious amounts of leveling and new race/class combinations. WoW Insider has a post up http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/04/cataclysm-release-date-december-7th/ on the subject of the release.

This gives us a solid marker in the sand to plan towards for those of us that have leadership roles to tend to in guilds or mixed-guild raid groups. It lets us know exactly how many weeks we have left to accomplish those things that will be lost once the expansion arrives.

Knowing the target release date means we can also breathe a little easier that we have an extra month (I had long been forecasting early Nov. as the release date) to hammer home those achievements that will go bye-bye come the expansion.

Who's the Tank

2010-10-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

This is an old piece, however it is a great one.

Proposed New Character Bank Screen

2010-09-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

Seeing as Blizzard seems to have problems designing an update to the long-outdated Character bank form, I thought I would help them.

This should present how easy it is to add either a second row of bag slots or tabs (like we have in the guild bank) - or both!

Another option, would be to allow us to simply buy more slots in the main bank form (currently shows 28 as you can see in the traditional 7 across x 4 down "Item Slots") and expand the bank form screen to allow it to show all the slots.

Summary: there are many ways to expand the amount of bank space we have available to each character and frankly, we need it. Blizzard has done a good job of making some really cool things that we are bound to want to collect and as the game gets older and older, there are more and more things that we will want to collect - they need to give us more space to store them in.

Fast Buck with JC in Dal

2010-09-13T22:23:00.000-07:00

If you're hanging around Dalaran with nothing to do until Nov 2nd (I called it, first week of November), and you happen to be a JC as well, then you might as well visit your local auction house and buy eternal earth and some gems; then make jewelry and last but not least, either vendor it or DE it if the infinite dust prices are worth it.

Tonight, Azgalor's infinite dust prices are not worth spending the time it takes to DE everything. For hourly earning potential, simply vendor them.

10 Quick Observations

2010-09-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

1. Starcraft II + pre-Cataclysm summer + Cataclysm Beta = empty Dalaran.
2. Individuals that sign up and don't show up can be the last straw.
3. Groups of raiders that complain about not enough raiding however refuse to help organize more raiding spawn faster than murlocs.
4. Still no sign of expanded bank/bag space coming in Cataclysm.
5. Preventing cross-server mail within accounts to stymie 1,000 gold sellers prevents 11,000,000 legitimate users from sending gold and BoA gear to alts spread across multiple servers since software vendor has not thought of how to let friends raid together - although they did figure out how they could send status messages to each other; status: "raid group missing a tank - wish you could be here!"
6. AH is a great server gauge as to the volume and success of raiding on that server.
7. Mal'Ganis is a great horde server if you like to see content and get achievements. Azgalor is a great Alliance server if you like to make gold on the AH. Alleria is a great Alliance server if you like playing with people you like. None of the three servers have figured out how to have more than one of those traits!
8. Guild gold will be moot since the guild coffers will get 10% of gold (in addition) value that guildies collect out in the wilds. Hence guilds will be able to loan out gold easier, hence surplus of cash, fools and money theory = we should expect inflation on the AH. Your gold today is worth less now than it will be after Cataclysm. Buy AH items today, buy vendor items tomorrow.
9. Rogue population on servers is tiny over level 80, however all the leveling zones are covered in rogues!
10. MMO unearthed (he he) that an AQ scepter might come available that allows you to summon AQ mount. Hmm...

Endangered Species: Feral Tank

2010-08-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last night while repairing after tanking the first section of ICC 25m, I heard an often gawked upon situation forming up: bear dancing. Sure enough, druids were calling more druids to come dance around a fire pit - with all the usual onlookers and "wannabe-druids". What was very surprising a few moments later, was that they all shifted into Tree Form - resto spec all around, except me.

Several re-spec'd and went boomkin. None however, were feral tank spec other than myself. So even with dual-specs being heavily present among druids, *still* we have a shortage of true bears.

Like any dedicated druid player, I wonder why there are not more druids being selected at the character creation screen; however, as a druid tank, I have to wonder why they are not more feral tank spec's chosen by the druid players. Recall, I had just come from ICC 25m and with barely iLvl 245 gear had had absolutely no problem tanking next to a well-geared warrior and 245/251-geared death knight. It was easy to be second on threat and hard to not be first. So the actual tanking is not the deterrent (it's not like we are awfully suited to the task).

It can't be that we can pick herbs and get quest items like carrots for the daily cooking quests without 'dismounting' (aka flight form for the win) - and that we get flight before the other classes. Nope, not that.

It can't be that we have the insurance of being able to perform any role at level cap - tank, healer, ranged dps, melee dps - and hence someone with limited play time would not have to re-roll a toon to accommodate a guild's needs. Nope.

Maybe because we get an extra hearth - to Moonglade? Nope.

Because it is hard to get gear? Can't be. Most of the awesome sauce gear easily drops or is bought. Nope, not that.

So you basically have a shortage of the only tanking class that can also perform any other role, gathers gear easily, has movement buffs/forms earlier, has zero downtime and pretty much everyone (rogues, healers, etc) loves to have in a raid?

Hmm....

Ah... one second... oh, right... I have it now: Hunters! Those damn hunters and their Dalaran stables! C'mon now, you've all seen it: suddenly there is an explosion in the "bear mount" population and there are far more "bear pets" that the hunters are coaxing along at gun point.

Ouch.

Right then, time to hit the BGs for a lil' while and give them hunters a whatnot!

I Can Haz Raven Lord

2010-08-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

Another item checked off the Pre-Cataclysm Bucket List. Speaking of which, it is looking like I might be a lot closer than I thought on the release date! I called November 9th!

But we digress... Reins of the Raven Lord, thou art mine!

Progression Pains

2010-08-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

Our guild on Azgalor recently hit a sweet progression point: Sindragosa. It is a great fight by all accounts and more especially when you are doing it with people that are genuinely not over-geared for the fight and are often seeing it for the first time.
Progression fights are great places to really test your raiding mettle and offer opportunities to sharpen your raiding skills. I posted my thoughts on the value of progression fights and why I think those 'pains' are great ways to sharpen your raiding skills at http://legendsreborn.wordpress.com/.

Mercenaries Make Poor Fixed Structures

2010-07-30T19:26:00.000-07:00

Somethings we know. When more serious raiders get frustrated by the lack or reliability of more casual raiders, they often gquit and move on. More serious raiders are not self-declared, they behave in a manner that demonstrates their approach to raiding to be more serious. More casual raiders resent people holding them accountable to show up when they said they would show up, or when expected to be prepared - both strategy-wise and gear-wise - and they certainly resent people when they are goofing off and it causes the more serious raiders to complain aloud. These are things we know. We all know them.

However, during summer times - more especially prior to the release of an expansion - we end up mixing more serious raiders and more casual raiders into the same raid group. This does not work out. We know this. Still, we do it anyways, because the more serious raiders want to raid and hate having to try to find suitable pugs and because the more casual raiders want to see more of the content, are happy to be carried and get a chance at loot, some even believe they will "get more serious".

Make no mistake about it, the World of Warcraft raiding scene is one mostly populated by mercenaries. These are players that are not loyal to your guild. They are not loyal to your raid group. They are loyal to their own interests and temporarily join ranks with you for as long as that best suits them. When it no longer suits them better than somewhere else does, they leave. They often leave without even having a discussion about the problem in a mature effort to improve the organization and address the issue. Hence, they make for poor fixed structures in any edifice or organization.

However, mercenaries make up the bulk of raiders. You will have to rely upon them. The key is to not rely on them in a manner that renders your guild or raid group brittle. I suggest:

Staff your key positions with people you know in real life or in game that genuinely share the goal of running a raiding guild with you.
Keep your more serious raiders and your more casual raiders herded into serious and casual raid groups respectively to reduce stress and gquits.
Recruit purposefully into your more serious raid group (i.e. have a "set" roster and recruit for gaps in it) and keep a string of back ups to those roles - that way, for the most part, your 10-man raids with the same roster from week to week except for those few exceptions (people take vacations) during which you reach back into your reserve list of back ups
Confirm your raid rosters early in the week so that you can notify the back ups before they get saved to some other raid ID
Find a way to make the guild something significant to each of your core raiders - that way, the longer they raid with you and the more significant the guild becomes to them, the less likely they are to gquit on the first bump

Food for thought from a 4 year raid leader veteran. Not the "most authority" on the subject, however certainly very experienced with the things that do not work and the things that do work.

Everything changes briefly when the expansion comes out and everyone focuses on leveling instead of raiding, and then it is back to managing your mercenaries and converting those that you can into loyalists.

Of Raids and Expansions

2010-07-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

It is a curious thing, the timing of expansion releases and the construction and release of content between large expansion releases. In BC, the player base pretty much ran out of content ahead of the LK expansion - not the case so far in LK.

Granted, I will caveat two exceptions:

In BC, many players did not progress on to complete the content (e.g. Sunwell and BT) prior to LK and languished long before the expansion; however, this was fed heavily by an inability to progress due to raid size requirements and the intricacies of being geared for content that you cannot get into often enough to get the gear to be geared for it largely due to the large raid size requirements.
A small group of players have completed "all you can have" in WotLK; however, they are not the majority of the bell curve by any means - most players still do not have the Kingslayer title, 10 or 25 man.

And perhaps it is in that small element that we find the difference: a title. A title that says, "Yes, I can do the hardest encounter in the game." This keeps the raiders showing up every week. Blizz done good on calibrating the LK fight to be hard as nails to give it endurance until the next expansion.

From classic WoW where the majority of the player base did not get to see the end content due to not being in a guild that could perform 40-man raids, to BC where a large portion of the player base did not get to see the end content because they did not have the gear to get into the large raids (there were many pug raids - if you had the gear), to WotLK where everyone is getting a shot at the end content. Good times! I'm excited to see how Blizzard lays out the encounters in Cataclysm.

Hogwash and Poppycock

2010-06-23T13:46:00.000-07:00

It was nice that Blizzard attempted to create some social networking in the game. I am sure that they will have some successes. I would have rather had them spend that time programming the ability for me to raid with friends on other servers instead of being able to inform them that I wish they were able to fill an empty tank slot that is keeping us from raiding that night.

Every raider in your group that is serious about raiding could have a twitter account in their toon's name. They could all be following the guild twitter account or the raid leader's account. When you are short someone and they are offline, if you aren't the kind of guild where you have each other's phone numbers, tweet out that you need some pinch raiders. Before you know it, your friends in the other guilds are following you and they can respond if you have no one available (your raid leader typically does not have the cell numbers of all raiders on your server, however all your friends can certainly follow your raid leader's twitter account).

There are some fantastic modern tools out there.

You hear a lot of talk around Azeroth during these summer pre-expansion times. Much of it is a bunch of bed-wetting hand-wringing about the state of raiding or level of challenges remaining in the game. Then there is the age-old dilemma of trying to get a group of individuals each with their own life schedules to get together reliably for a non-paid activity. You'll hear people say that we cannot possibly start from zero and be raiding in ICC and clearing to the LK in a matter of weeks. Hogwash! Poppycock!

Maybe they just need a good slap upside the head with a wet fish!

There are a lot of management tools that are missing from the guild tab and that Blizzard really has no business introducing into the game. Fundamentally speaking, we should not even want Blizzard to try to spend programming time and dollars on building tools that already exist in the world - much less spend the time and dollars to try to keep up with modern advances in those tool areas.

Let's take polls as an example. Really, you could have any reason to do a poll, but let's focus on the bed-wetting and hand-wringing crowd that do not know when to schedule a raid in order to get the highest number of available raiders signed up and showed up (yah, I said "showed up"!). You could simply browse on over to www.SurveyMonkey.com and create a free account for your guild and create a poll. Ask some questions that cover what raid roles they play, which toons are theirs (so you can be sure to avoid scheduling both their tank toon and their healer toon into the same raid), how many times a week they would like to raid, and the golden question of what times and what days in a week they are most interested in raiding.

BAM!

Suddenly all that guild chatter about starting to raid sooner is awash with cold data suggesting that our best raiding window (in this example case pictured above) is a late raid on Friday. The picture is a snapshot in time, however with more survey completions, you can quickly discern when are the 2 or 3 best slots to raid, you can discover whether you have the right roster mix coverage on those windows, and then you can schedule the raids and let people sign up. If you need to nudge particular roles to a specific raid (e.g. need pair of tanks on the Friday early raid, too), you specifically invite them to that one or tell em like it is.

I don't need built-in social networking that is already better in the wild. I don't need a polling mechanism in game (in case they get that hair-brained idea). I need to be able to send my BoA items cross server. I need to be able to group or raid with my co-workers and my friends- all on different servers.

We can hope that in a few patches, they will have figured out that we the buyers would like to be able to decide WHICH of our toons WHICH of our friends can see across servers and games and factions rather than wholesale all or nothing. We can hope that this whole social networking actually did not cost them any development time from building cross server BoA mailing or raiding groups and was just a nice-to-have-shiny-thing along the way to those goals. But it is summer, and it is warm, and their heads are closer to the sun than their feet. So they might be frying the ol' gray muscles a lil too much in the ol' HQ parking lot and not thinking so straight.

DPS: Wake Up!

2010-06-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

For all the kicking and screaming that I hear about long wait times for the DPS in the Looking For Dungeon queues, why does it always seem like it is the DPS that hold up the start and often 'X' out sending us back into the queue?! Seems no matter whether I am in the queue as a tank, healer or dps, it is always a DPS that makes us wait or resets us. I know there are many reasons that DPS will throw out as to why (they died of old age waiting); however, you'd think that they'd be the first to click 'accept'.

You can get Loremaster AFTER Cataclysm drops! W00t!

2010-06-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

For many, this is a huge -- HUGE -- boon! Simply put, our favorite Greg Street - or Ghostcrawler - has provided through a one-on-one interview with WowHead.com that it is not necessary to complete the World Explorer or Loremaster achievements PRIOR to the launch of Cataclysm! Granted, we should expect incomplete quest chains to get interrupted where the remainder of the quests get obliterated (obviously not all old school content will remain in the game). However, while they injected 1,000 quests into the game with WotLK, they are injecting 3,000 new quests with Cataclysm!

Awesome-sauce! That takes a lot of pressure off in case I start to run out of time on the multiple mains and certainly relieves the concern that future toons can get the achievement - which always made sense.

Shammy FTW

2010-06-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are questing in southern Kalimdor where it is green and also full of bugs/desert/twilight cultists and your LFG queue springs. The loading screen gives way to a Tauren warrior headed towards pulling one of the last of two pulls before the Emperor (BRD). Apparently, he saw a healer joined and was about to Charge in - regardless of whether the healer had mana or was even in spec or for that matter might be still wearing enh gear! One fast ItemRack switch and totems are down! Which is good, because turns out he was a terrible tank and I was going to get very little other precious time to do anything else.

It is not the first pull he bungles so much, rather, it is the second pull which he pulls and then fails to do anything about the pull, having of course disturbed the Emperor, he is far more attentive to picking up the Emperor and ignoring where the large second pull is headed.

Ironspirit dies fast. Not without dropping a chain heal. The mobs run back to the tank. It looks grim. People begin to curse him out in party chat. Shaman reincarnates and chain heals them all back through the fight with pretty much no mana + a worthless lowbie mana pot.

We win. Fight is over. They go about looting. I sit in the throne for the requisite screenie. They leave party without so much a word.

We know two things for sure: 1) they wiped before I got here and the healer did not return; 2) they were hell bent on wiping again, but my shammy denied them!

That shammy challenge I took a while back: yeah, level 54 now. Damn, they are addictive!

My decision on Worgen (and Goblins)... for now!

2010-06-11T21:48:00.000-07:00

Quite simply, I will play a Worgen (and Goblin) through the starting areas until out in the real world. Then I'll stop and wait until I can racial transfer one of my high level toons. It's not because it is a slog to have to level all those levels again. It's not because I want to get to 85 quickly and don't want to have to get there from level 1.

It's because by the time Worgen come out (and Goblins), there are going to be a lot of things that you cannot get anymore that I like knowing I have on my toons. e.g. prior Winterveil gifts, old school faction rep and tier sets, olympic tabbards, the list goes on.

Yes, once I have gotten to 85 and have gotten all of the toons on all of the servers to the place where they need to be and are geared enough to do the jobs they need to do, yes, then I might level one for slogs and grins. However, I now know I absolutely have no interest in having an 85 Worgen without some of the cool things I have on other toons - or rather, I'd rather have a Worgen with them, and the only way to do that is a racial transfer whenever that is available to us.

Your class is OP? Don't be over the top!

2010-06-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

Paladins are a bit over-powered. Depending on which circumstances, they can be very OP. This does not mean you should play over the top and up in everyone's face! The same can be said about tanks in general and the tank shortage. I'm seeing a lot of posts around the intenet that de facto accept that there are a lot of jerk tanks that take advantage of the tank shortage to treat people poorly. Don't be one of those tanks.

Cataclysm is coming and with it will come the return of many players that have hung up their spurs for a break. If you earn the black cloud above your head through mis-treating others or plain and simple rudeness, you can bet your jellybeans that the others will throw you out as soon as they can replace you with a returning friend.

It takes less than a couple of weeks to gear into ICC acceptable levels. All the gear in the world is not enough to make people put up with disrespectful behavior, and they can replace you in a week or two of running emblem farms.

I recently had an opportunity to draft from scratch a raid FAQ for a guild. One of the things that I put in there was that "we recruit in your character and gear up your virtual character." Which is to say, we want to recruit you based on your real life personal character that you demonstrate through your behavior in a virtual world, and we don't care how well progressed or equipped your virtual characters are - we can gear up your virtual characters, however we cannot "gear up" your real life character, your interpersonal behaviors.

It simply takes far too long an investment of time to teach someone to be respectful even under stressful and disappointing times (like wiping non-stop so close to downing a progression boss). Frankly, in a hobby like WoW where players can guild hop as much as they want (with some constraints, of course) and where they are not bound to a guild like they are to a well-paying job in real life (some people are, some are not), investing that much time to help mature a person is not a good investment for a guild - it is for a person in the guild that wants to take an interest in helping someone out, however it is not for a guild. The guild is better off just recruiting a replacement.

Gearing up a virtual character nowadays to enter into ICC and start gathering ICC drops is literally about a week and change. Two weekly raid quests (10 emblems of frost) and random heroics every day (20 emblems of frost), add heroic FoS, PoS and HoR, 10m and 25m ToC and you have an epic-geared 80 ready to gather emblems of frost clearing through at least Saurfang two weeks in a row (carried pretty much first week and maybe second week) and can buy T10 shoulders start of that third week. Blamo! GS4.7K for those that care. Definitely contributing for those that don't care about GS. Either way, you're now geared to hold your own on 10/12 bosses in ICC which is about as much as many guilds are doing anyways!

As the buff creeps up in ICC, it is just getting easier to perform better with less gearing.

You get to choose how you will react to every situation you face in game. Take the high road and do not go over the top! You'll make lasting friendships and it's just the better way to go.

Too funny!

2010-06-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

This particular detention slip in Keredia's humorous post has to be re-posted for your enjoyment! Mr. Adam Hilliker, wherever you are, I hope you have learned by now to stifle your insecurities, augment your humor, and to never again blindly miss what is clearly an American sitting in your classroom. It is terribly unfortunate you did not have the good sense immediately upon being challenged to confirm your facts using the internet or, [insert deity] forbid, a book. You missed the opportunity to show a classroom of future adults how to research a fact and how to lose graciously. Thankfully, a quick search shows that no Adam Hilliker teaches in my kids' school district - I advise you all to check lest the moron prepare your kids to look like idiots when abroad.

Lich King Learning

2010-05-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

We're getting the Lich King down to 42% on first night of attempts which is great progression, of course. However, Defile is kicking our strong position into a wipe. We need to manage our Defile footprints better. We are handling the transitions just fine, and killing off the Valkries before they drop our friendlies over the edge. But we are wiping hard on the second Defile. The good news is that I think that is simply a lack of familiarity/muscle memory issue that gets resolved with more exposure to doing the fight.

If you have tips or pointers, I'm taking 'em and the ego is checked at the door!

Can't Touch This!

2010-05-26T22:24:00.001-07:00

"That's all I got to say about that!"

Happy Dance

2010-05-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling when you finally get something that you have been chasing for a long, long time? My rogue-bank-toon (actually a Rogue) went a muck and leveled to 80. That was fun. Then he fell into raiding. That was more fun. Then I decided he would casually gear up to take advantage of the 2 pc bonus with TotT. And of course, then I went off and played other toons and classes far more. Today, he managed to be in a great raid group that landed him enough Emblems of Frost to buy the shoulders that go with the pants that bring him 15 energy for Tricksing anyone... preferably even one of the tanks! Been a long road. It would be sweet to down the final boss before RS comes out.

The Man has no Pockets!

2010-05-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

No, really. I tried. And I'm leveled up good on lockpicking in case there was something good in the King's pockets. Alas, he apparently has people to carry things for him...?!!

On a side note, Arthas has no time for evasion tankers - that approach lasted all of about a millionth of a millionth of a trillionth of a second and then I adopted the floor tile mimic position.

Pre-Cataclysm doldrums? Heck, not enough time I say!

2010-05-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

Congratulations Velhadin of Nouvel Riche (Alleria-US)(A) and her guild for a spectacular clear to and first attempt on the Lich King tonight! As always, it is an honor and a pleasure to ride shotgun with you guys. Looking forward to seeing a king about a slaying.

I believe the key that these folks bring to the shutout that is Sindragosa to many guilds is a great attitude of fun and business. They have a great time while raiding - yet, they take each and every fight seriously enough that mistakes happen far and few between (entirely mine, really!).

What a great feeling to finally accomplish something you have been wanting to get done! You know that feeling? I was stoked to see Sin downed, especially with so much room to spare. Great job, Vel! Love to get that title before Ruby Sanctum (RS) comes out!

Nice buff...

2010-05-25T22:15:00.000-07:00

Nice buff... 58+k on trash from the +5% dps raid buff patched in today helps clear the instance quicker. Gets me home for dinner sooner!

Interesting Raiding Schedules

2010-05-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

All at once, I found myself rescuing two guilds from closing the doors - on different servers. In both cases, I found that listening to the concerns people had and then simply scheduling raids and running them solved problems. Getting them past the question of 'whether we were going to raid again' and onto the question of 'when are we raiding next?' shifted the morale entirely.

"Great news everyone, we are raiding again!"

Naturally, one of the problems that raises it's head almost right away is a standard issue that even healthy guilds face: how to set up the raiding schedules so that enough people get some raiding time. It is usually exacerbated when you have more than you need for your raid size but not enough to come close to two raids, even with pugs or alliances.

I've had the good fortune to make some great friends in an unrelated guild and they have a really interesting approach to scheduling raids: they raid ICC 10m one night... 4x a week. That's right! Sign up your toon(s) on any of Tues, Thu, Sat or Sun raid groups, however know full well that there is no follow on to 'finish clearing'. Each of the four nights is a fresh raid group with a fresh raid id. If you do not clear enough or want to see more bosses, then clear more efficiently next week!

The reason I find it very interesting is because I have not seen anyone else do this. Yet it is so obvious! It is difficult, to say the least, to pick a raid day and time that ten people can accommodate in their real life schedules, let alone find ten people that can accommodate *two* days in the same week where all of their real life schedules coincide to give them leisure time. Even less of a chance is that they all ten have two days a week back to back.

The aforementioned guild simply decided it was tired of scheduling a "follow on day" to finish up the raid instance only to see the majority of those folks not show up. So it moved with the current direction where you raid one night only that week on that raid id and only the toons originally in that raid use that raid id. No other groups come in piggy-backing on the raid id to pick up at Sindragosa and finish it.

For us, it has become a point of clearing to Sindragosa and making two attempts before we run the raiding clock out at the 3 hour mark and we disband after a grand ol' time. There is some talk of communicating next week that we will either run one specific raid group to do two days (second one picks up where we left off and hopefully makes a run at Arthas) or will extend the raid ID one week on that specific raid group. Either way, looks like we are taking a run at the Lich King in the next two weeks. The rest of the raids will continue as normal.

As I continue forward with the two guilds that are re-bounding onto their feet, do you have any other methods of scheduling raids that I should think about?

What if Bosses got Harder, not Easier?

2010-05-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

This week, while randomly attempting Marrowgar on Heroic (steroids) with some really great friends, it occurred to me: what if instead of bosses getting easier over time, they got harder? The more guilds that wiped on the bosses, the stronger they became? Or that their level of difficulty scaled over time such that you'd *need* that better iLvl gear to get them down.
Obviously you could not have Marrowgar be that toon - he guards access into the rest of ICC, but a side boss would be a good option (ala VoA) - one unrelated to completing the raid instance.
It would put a spin and change on "same old same old" syndrome - the more you played the harder those particular instances became, the more challenging.
Imagine if a heroic version of Van Cleef scaled with each release such that if patch 4.0 meant you needed iLvl 300 gear to take him down, by patch 4.3, you needed iLvl 400 gear to take him down?! And he gained new abilities. Content would not get boring - it would rise to the occasion. Instead of it being that some raid instances can only be done by certain guilds on a server, it would be that all guilds could do all instances and all bosses; however, later on, only some of the groups could do a specific boss in an instance - around the time that the majority of the player base was moving on "to the next new shiny instance". The idea has its issues. However, I'd enjoy it!

What Are Your Summer Plans?

2010-05-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

Every summer there is a lull, more especially the summer before the release of an expansion. The time is a period of challenge to guild leadership and to the players themselves. What to do to keep engaged?

Without engagement, little things can quickly spark catastrophic fires, people become disinterested and raiding attendance can be impacted. People who had been working up to get into raids suddenly find that the veterans disengage and they no longer have enough roster to raid successfully. Players get bored and take time off. Keeping engaged as a guild or as individuals takes effort and sometimes feels blah.

Compounding the situation is the rising occasions of 'poaching'. An activity that seemingly all guild leaders say their guilds do not engage in, however then who is doing it because poaching is going on?! The logic of it is straight forward: a guild that has advanced more than others in content suffers from the summer lull and loses raider attendance; said guild still has some raider attendance and they want to keep raiding; raiders bring in pugs or friends to fill the seats; said pugs or friends are barraged with "join us" until they do; Operation Poach completed.

Guilds that are still working on progression (whether that be normal mode, heroic mode, whatever) suffer the pains of the lull less than then the guilds that have cleared an geared all content and have nothing left to progress into; however, if the still-progressing guild has hit a progression wall, it often precipitates departures due to the "irritability factor" of waiting for the next expansion.

What does it mean to guild leaders and raid leaders? Work harder. Now is the time to double-down and be creative and more energetic. Now is the time to poll who wants to take a break and who wants to push on - then plan the change and manage it smoothly rather than let it fall apart in your lap. It's not just a game: it's just people who happen to be playing a non-paid, leisure activity and often taking partner-aggro for doing so. Organizationally, knowing you are about to hit the June and July doldrums before an expansion, get your officers stood to and _working_ the people skills to manage the known changes. If you know in advance that a tank is going to take a break and either log off for a month or level an alt instead, find that replacement tank and gear them up over 2-3 weeks to prevent interruption of raiding or misgivings.

As individuals, think about what you really want to do and how you really want to spend your time this summer, then communicate that to your guild encouragingly so that, informed, they can plan transitions or accommodations. In many ways, this is no different than a local soccer team - a group of people that can only accomplish group activities if enough of the group show up and even then if the right roles show up.

Anticipate what we know happens every summer, communicate about it, plan accordingly, then manage the plan's smooth execution.

One of my druids is very close to having far too many reputations to exalted than one would ever admit other than in a very private geeky WoW forum! I want to get those completed and snag a couple more titles. I'd like to see him get world explorer, too. I think Loremaster would be prohibitive if I also want to get some of the other toons to their respective "ready for Cataclysm" places. Then there are the small handful of toons that I'd like to get to 80 that are within striking distance and of course, there are all the old school achievements to be completed before the expansion on all toons - including gathering full tier sets and the missing pieces for partial tier sets (here's hoping they come out with a better way to store old gear or give us more bank space!).

What are your summer plans?

Which toon are you going to level to 85 first?!

2010-05-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

The very question 'Which toon are you going to level to 85 first?' rhetorically states that there will be a 'second' and perhaps more. This does not, however, resolve the question as posed. Players everywhere, will soon face this question if they are not already having it begin to claw annoyingly at their minds, drawing attention.

In my case, the situation is... erh,... um... complicated. I mean if we whittle it down to a number of toons that are genuinely played a lot, I'm still looking at an "out of 8 on 3 servers" situation; where we have to ignore most toons within striking distance of 80 now and all social or 'support' toons. (Social toons being those that you leveled just to hang out with some friends that are on another server - why do they do that?! Support toons being those that you leveled to get to a certain point in a profession, or serve as mules.) Even if we stick to one server, I've always got a couple that are closely vying for favorite!

Players with only one 'main' likely do not have this problem (versus those of us who if we were honest would accept that we have 'several mains' hence defacto defeat the principle of 'main') although they do have to look at those shiny new races and world first [race] [class] achievements! Then again, we also could be de-railed by trying out the new races...

My advice to players that want to be one of the tanks for their guild stands: be one of the first tanks in your guild to get to 85 and get geared immediately to start raiding. There are no tanks I know of that got there first and then were replaced involuntarily as more tanks got geared. Unless the tanks get bored or burned out and quit tanking, they were still tanking the last time I checked.

If you have multiple types of tanks at end cap, well then you share my pain: which one to 85 and geared first?

In Classic, I was barely end cap before BC rolled out and my tanking was limited to pre-raids; nonetheless, I was a warrior tank. In BC, I was a warrior MT, paladin OT for fun, Bear tank when running stealth (outside of guilds). In LK, I went all over the map: we had the time and the opportunity for diversity! Naxx was paladin tank and bear tank. Ulduar was rogue and boomkin and paladin OT. Dead Big-Shot's crib: rogue, boomkin, bear OT. Cataclysm... hmm...

Compound fracture: Shaman class is far too fun! Blizzard should charge extra per month to them! = ) I'm sorry, if you don't know what it's like for a mob to disappear the moment you walk up to it, it's just because you didn't level a shaman past level 40. I enjoy mine very much and will continue to level it up although I doubt it could ever be my true 'main': it cannot have the option of tanking in a raid, it is not as sneaky-cool as a rogue, and thematically it is tied to the elements and I don't reflect that in my RL, more of a 'is everything in balance' guy, ie. druid. I assume not everyone looks at their class as a partial/heavy reflection of themselves, however I know I play something more that I relate to.

My mage has incredibly high utility and levels fast and they are easy to gear and do respectably in a raid (even while cooking dinner at the same time), however despite the ease of not having to run in and run out constantly and better time-on-target than a rogue, I find them boring compared to the romance and mechanics of the rogue. And they can't tank... for long.

Hunter has become an abomination of mana management versus dps output - I mean really, give them a CD like evocation except maybe instead of swirly, blue arcania, it is a shot injection in the bicep or downing a RED BULL caffeine drink; just get rid of Aspect of the Viper! It's a tribute to the hunter mains that they are still playing them. If we told the mages that when they were low on mana they'd have to cut their dps in half for a while, they'd overload the forums with QQ.

And then, we should all (but we won't) gut check the 'why' of 'why is it important to rush to 85 anyways?' It's not like as dps or healers that they won't take you into a raid once you get there. They are always short on healers and there are far more healing seats in a raid than tanking seats. Tanks, you got no choice if you want a serious key tanking seat: there are 2 of them. Go go go leveling! If you are a healer, get there relatively quickly, but you don't have to be first. If you're dps, arrive when you do, just make a big entrance and voila! I watched what must be the most polite player I have ever met show up as a rogue to a pug 25m ToC and drop such a brutal amount of dps, that every core guild raid on the server wanted to recruit him into it. Personally, I think he was playing ON the Blizzard server machine to have had that low a latency and that high a dps!

But really, why do we feel like we must rush to 85? What is it that drives that feeling?

Which toon are you going to level to 85 first? And why?

Worst Achievement Ever!

2010-05-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

The [School of Hard Knocks] achievement has battlegrounds up in arms. Players were getting seriously irate and agitated. Fundamentally, it is an example of stubbornness and poor business practices.

By Blizzard's own admissions, this achievement is meant to be 'endured' rather than 'enjoyed'. They know it is painful and not something people want to do.

In the battlegrounds, the PVP players genuinely dislike the tremendous surge in PVE players into their queues and battlegrounds and the PVE players genuinely dislike being thrown into an environment they do not chose to enter normally and into which they have both a lack of practice or knowledge and a lack of gear/tactics. PVE players that enjoy PVP and vice versa report having fewer issues with the achievement.

Most respectable institutions of business education, and most successful business people advise against forcing your customers to do something they dislike - even once. If you know your customers do not like it, do not make them do it. Do not ever give your customers a reason to find a single legitimate grievance with you. Not by design.

This achievement flies in the face of common sense and is strong evidence of a misplaced "we know better" attitude. Every year, your customers remind you that this is a very disliked piece of content. Every year and for every character a customer invests time and money into, you force them to do it.

Blizzard, you should attend the school of hard knocks and learn a thing or two about customer satisfaction.

Robin/Wow.com giving back to the blogosphere

2010-04-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

A thank you shout out to Robin Torres, one of my favorite writers over at www.wow.com - the one with a yarn dependency! Robin runs a column that I always find valuable in that it re-directs me to great reads, often introducing me to some truly skilled and interesting bloggers. I highly recommend you add it to your feeds or reading list. Being listed by her is a great way to be spurred on to blog better!

Robin's done a great job of rounding up some interesting perspectives ranging the full spectrum of reactions to the blue posts on raid changes coming in Cataclysm.

(side note: I think it also spurs huge cross-blog commenting and discussions! Larisa posted a piece that at current count has 56 comments! Granted, many already visit her site - but still, Robin causes viral commenting and cross-blogination.)

Changes to Raiding Announced for Cataclysm

2010-04-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

Changes to raiding arriving with Cataclysm have been shared by Vaneras over on the European forums. Key highlights are 10-man and 25-man versions of the same raid instances sharing lockouts and loot tables (the 25-man version bosses being slightly harder but dropping more loot), heroic mode being decided per boss, and of course that the first raids will be set for characters dressed in heroic blues and crafted gear.

The news shares a lot between the lines. For example, when Vaneras says

"For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid."

He is both stating that there will be many small raid instances (derived from "first few raid tiers" and "multiple smaller raids") early on that are not a burden to raiders with fewer hours to lock in to raiding; however, we can also read from that "after the first few raid tiers" their plan is to not have "multiple smaller raids" - and hence the larger more epic-story raid instances. We're getting both! W00t! Clearly, Blizzard is stamping out the misinformation that had started to circulate that the small raid instances were dead due to the success of the larger, gated raid instances. Instead, we are going to see gated content and both small and large raid instances.

There is an obvious tie-in to the upcoming guild talent system which favors raiding as a guild and by the above announcements, not forcing raiders to hit the high end raids in pugs or with other guilds. Steady progression guilds of any size will be able to see all of the content - 10-m or 25-m.

If you're planning on tanking in Cataclysm, take a page from history and note that guilds have typically kept their tank roster that they start tanking with during that expansion. ie. if you have multiple toons you can level to 85, you may want to consider leveling the tank first if you want it to have a tanking role in your guild's raids.

Another offshoot I expect to see is that guilds that currently have many alts that raid with pugs will get smaller: those alts are going to siphon off into newly formed guilds made up of those same pug raiders in order to get the benefit of the guild talent system.

All in all, interesting upcoming changes.

"Mobility" vs. "Maneuverability" :: Tanking Differences

2010-04-18T16:59:00.000-07:00

There was a post recently that did its job: it made me pause and consider a moment. It was a particular sentence that characterized warriors as tanks designed for 'mobility' back in the day. Hang on! No, sir! Put ya tankard down until we are done 'ere, mate!

Old School Moment: Warrior tanks had no way to Charge in combat and could not, in fact, even charge in Defensive Stance. Chain-pulling without changing stances (not that it really existed back then as the poor blighters tasked with the yoke of healing needed to drink between fights) required being close enough to shout some obscenity at a mob, shoot/throw something at them, or debuff them. Warriors were bastions of defense, standing their ground, pulling mobs to them, then maneuvering to make sure none were poorly positioned or taking advantage of flanks/rear. You'd see a warrior Charge in from time to time, but prolly nevah on a boss - too risky you'd get flattened like grandma's cake with no yeast.

Paladin tanks (obviously this is a BC moment!) were mostly a run up and plop down their fiery mess and stand there hoping the healer would not be shortly ta blame for a wipe. Real tanking engineers they were,... not! Have to give em their ground though - they could hold a group of mobs 'round 'em like a naked cheer leader.

Feral bear tanks, the new baby to tanking in BC, well they could right cause some aggravation fast with their lacerating claws and all, but they had no all around area of effect tanking tool like they do now (Swipe really should have a new animation). What they did have, that none of us had, was mobility. Man could they move about in a fight! Enough to make a dwarven shaman eat his beard if he dared to put down totems hoping to have the fight stay on one place. Good luck, sonny! That there bear is going to pinball around the joint.

Fast forward and warriors now can charge in Defensive stance and in combat almost as much and as often as a bear tank. Paladins not so much - they be slow learners me reckons. And the new kid on the block is the emo tank with the smoldering eyes and the "I wasn't always dead, ya know..." pick up lines - bunch of lazy gits they are and can't be bothered running around, they split reality and yank opponents right to them (that's not going to get them out of the fire fast though!).

'Maneuverability' keeps you from pissing off your healers and your raid, and it keeps the rent bills down on the armor upkeep. 'Mobility' keeps you from getting pins and needles in the feets and is a great way to chain pull whole instances when your healing starts complaining about being bored.

One is for every run, and one is made for fun.

Carry on then, back to drinking!

How to make $2,500,000 in a day:

2010-04-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

Offer a $25 mount and have a queue of 100,000+ customers at the register.

I've seen the hullabaloo over whether to buy or not to buy or is it the Pwny or is it... whatever. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-blah.

You like it? Buy it.
You don't like it? Don't buy it.

If that is too confusing, just print this post and keep it on hand when looking at the mount in the Blizzard store or in Dalaran and refer to it as much as needed.

This post is not about whether you like it or not. It isn't even about to micro-transaction or not to micro-transaction. It isn't either about whether the Celestial Steed is a micro-transaction or not.

This post is about genius business savvy: /gratz Blizz!

(Note: the day Blizzard lets add on developers make things they can sell in the ~~app store~~ Blizzard store, I become a full time add on developer!)

GJ Paragon! And look at all those druids and rogues!! = )

2010-04-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

Gratz Paragon on your World first LK 25m H! And thank you for making such a great vid of it!

And I have to say, how great it is to see *that* many rogues and druids in your raid! Awesome sauce!

Cataclysm Class Changes: Go Active!

2010-04-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

Good times, these. Exciting, too. And this time, there are a lot of blue posts to help guide our highly-speculative, wild-farseeing into-the-blue-yonder-mile-high of pre-beta banter. One thing, however, is quite clear: the WoW designers at Blizzard have found us inactive and passive and are changing that! The overall theme, from class change announcement to class change announcement is clear and loudly articulated: they are removing everything they can that is passive and making it an active aspect, again. Clearly, a time to sit and ponder the implications of all that we have read, and to read between the lines and in the context that we understand GC and others' writing styles compared to subsequent end results... the reading of the tea leaves, so to speak.

Maybe they decided too many people were coasting and still getting good performance, maybe they decided it just isn't that much fun to 'play' a game where the game is doing a lot of the 'playing' for you. Whatever the driving reason, 'passive' is so last decade and 'active' is the new black.

Now, there is simply something that I have to make commentary on (excerpted from wow.com):

Hands down, I think GC actually plays in one of my guilds and has heard me on vent and decided to see if I would put my money where my mouth is! And I have to say, "yes!", I will now do some healing on at least one of my druids! At least once they roll this change out. I respect all of you that genuinely love your Broccoli. It is perhaps the single strongest reason I have never been Resto spec on any of my druids ever... ever. I have been lamenting for weeks in vent that if there was an option to NOT turn into a tree, that I would go Resto for at least one spec on one druid. Fine, even if GC only has close confidants in our guilds, come Cataclysm (and mebbe a wee bit before so I can learn how to heal, I'll go Resto!)

If I put on my tin-foil hat for a second, and I consider that Cat and Bear forms just got updated (scratch them off the list of work that needs to get done before I can tell the boss we can roll a new expansion and make another boatload of revenue), and I consider that we are already working hard on the damn increased polygon count of the boomkin form - and you know THAT is not cheap or fast since it is feathers and fur - and that it is not yet done, if I had to find ways to crash the schedule and get the expansion out without significant delays... I'd look to find one form to not have to update... hmm... found a forum thread where the resto druids were 50-50 on love-hate for the form...

... or it could just be exactly what they said: it makes no sense at all that to pull even with the other healers in the healing department, a druid has to forgo all the other utility in the class while the other healing classes have to make no such sacrifice.

I, for one, won't mind temporarily shifting into Broccoli in order to get some extra oomph healing; however, spending most of my time in Tauren/NE form with some cool armor! Hmm... about that cool armor, can we request that the designers for the Shammy gear work on the Druid gear?! That gear has been hawt since Vanilla!

Note: I have to give props to those on the twitteratti that reminded everyone that there was a lot of "sky is falling" noise going on about the posted class change ideas from Blizzard these past few days. Also a nod to those commenters on wow.com saying the same. It is easy to get negative when someone moves your cheese.

Egg Snatching - The Morning After

2010-04-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

Under the best of intentions, I was going to publish this post much earlier in the week while peeps could still take advantage of it. Regrettably, it is what it is. However, I'm sure all of you fell into a groove and determined where your favorite egg farming spot was and what the best means to the end was.

I'm very much grateful to a friend of mine that mentioned - only in passing - that he no longer does all the holiday events on all of his toons (he has something like 7x or 8x 80's now); instead, he just focuses on getting them on one and does the pieces that are relevant to the others.

Case in point, there is a bag maker on a server and she is both Horde and a mage. She needed (*NEEDED*, I say) that rabbit spell. And she lives in Orgrimmar. It seemed illogical that the village closest to the main population city on a heavily populated server would be a good place to farm 100 eggs. However, turns out that the spot pictured above is within 5 spawn spots. 'E' to move right and pick the one under the burner and immediately 'Q' back to her current spot. Eggs spawn under that burner, under the wagon, behind the plant behind her, to her left where you see one now, and one in the corner by the plants around to her left (she has to jump over and back again).

They spawned so quickly I decided I might as well get that pet rabbit. Ran into a problem there: in the process of another 100 chocolates, got all the other items. Well, and there were some relatively untravelled younger types who wanted to get the title, and well, I did have that portal spell didn't I now?!

Yeah. Zip-zip-zip and presto: "the Noble". Oops. Ok, so two toons got it this year.

Anyways, if you are Horde, next year, don't go to that incredibly successful spot I pictured above. It would be ridiculous to do so!! O.o

And if you are title-gathering on the Alliance-side, yeah, Azuremyst is a *terrible* spot to go! (wink wink.)

Going Against the Stereotypes

2010-03-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

We cannot get into the semantics of whether it is appropriate or not as to whether a druid has a staff that summons undead things.

We cannot do that because that opens a whole can of worms about what is appropriate and inappropriate druid behavior - I give you Exhibit B:

And where did such a fine environmentally-polluting vehicle come from you may ask? Of course, from the sale of a BoE found in an RNG bag.

Warriors, Refridgerator Doors, Orcs and Twirly-tanks

2010-03-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Well going back to look at how my warrior tanks look and feel was a complete mistake: now I can't stop logging in to them "for one more thing!"

It also prompted me to go back and read all over again a lot of the gems out there on warriors, the warrior culture (very, very unique perspectives at the peak levels of play) and general warrior play.

Matthew Rossi has to have one of my favorite quotes about leveling a warrior as prot: "Part of leveling prot is hitting things in the face with a refridgerator door you found inside a boar's stomach or something." (source)

Tru dat.

The one thing that keeps me from rolling an orc warrior is that they look like they have been punched in the gut and winded the whole time. If we get new models for the orc in Cataclysm - or at least get the choice of body models - where the orc model can be upright, I'm rolling/race-transfering.

While they are on the matter, I suggest they enable Trolls to walk upright also, undead I can see not having enough ligaments to keep it up, but really, why not for them, too.

It will be interesting to see how many Blood Elf warriors we suddenly see - not I, however. Again, it is a cosmetic thing, I cannot stand (for myself) the whole special action jump in the air and twirl as a tank move. Who the hell came up with that model mechanic as a 'solid-balanced-combat-move'? If hit by a raid boss when in the air like that, a BE should be sent flying across the room and definitely be crit/splat. No good self-respecting orc or tauren warrior would ice-skating-twirl to pound a boss. Definitely not. If you think I'm lying, just ask Ratshag!

Warriors are back with a Revenge-nous!

2010-03-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, you have the greatest laid out plan on how you are going to spend your time [in WoW] for the next lil' bit to get all set up right for the next big thing, and along comes a patch that throws it all hilter-kilter!

You gots blasted Matthew Rossi, Ratshag, Darraxus and [the lovely] Kadomi all making a helluva noise over the new Revenge all shiny and new straight outta patch 3.3.3 ... (fine, Ratshag didn't post about Revenge, but he posted and being a warrior, that's close enough reminder of all the fun!)

Well crap, now I gots to go see fer meself, don't I?!

/ loggingon

[post- blogpost note: wow... simply wow! I ran some content with a couple of my high level warriors and a couple of my low/mid range warriors using the /lfd system and they are performing superbly! The new changes are very impressive in the resultant handling of the class in situations; however, I did not really get a chance to check in on a raid boss fight, so I'll have to poll you guys for that so far. Very amusing to do SM instances in basically 2 or 3 pulls!]

Newcomers' First Impressions Set Stage for Warriors as Main Tanks

2010-03-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, entities such as governments, companies and educational institutions spend millions of dollars each year collectively on marketing and advertising and yet often, the most obvious of things is that which most eludes us. Blizzard has said in various blue posts that Warrior tanks continue to be the most played and accepted main tank despite their best intentions to homogenize (while keeping distinct) sufficiently that all four classes (death knight, druid, paladin and warrior) are viable main tank options. They have attributed much of the warrior-for-main-tank following to nostalgia and generally to the sentiment that because those main tanks were the main tanks back in Vanilla WoW and their guilds are still relying on the players who are still playing their warriors.

I would posit a slightly different observation: first impressions are almost never overcome. In the case of tanking classes and main tank class population density, you need only look as far as Blizzard's information on classes page: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/index.html.

Warrior: Type: Primary Tank
Druid: Type: Hybrid, Primary Healer
Paladin: Type: Hybrid, Secondary Healer

Curiously, they also have: Death Knight: Type: Primary Tank

Combine the above with the write ups and the 'Comments:' fields and it is no wonder that first impressions lead you to believe that warriors are the primary tanks. Next stop: main tanking population density study showing we have more people that got the impression that warriors are the main tanks - wonder how we got there?!

If Blizzard thinks that the warrior main tank population density is due to a player base that has a nostalgic perception of the warrior being the best primary tank, and if Blizzard understands Marketing 101, they can likely draw the line from point to point without my help.

Update your class descriptions, sirs! It is affecting new player decisions ( a couple of newcomers to the game that I have recruited recently were confused between what I was explaining to them and what they had read on the 'official page describing the roles the classes play').

Most organizations have a difficult time just trying to keep their organizational charts and phone lists up to date, it must be an enormous task to attempt to keep all of the product-related information correct and up to date in all of its various locations and formats (I chuckle thinking about what must be in the printed documents shipping in the store-sold boxes) - so we should cut them some slack; however, a fan-based competition to re-write those descriptions could have occurred during Burning Crusade and there is plenty of time between patch 3.3.3 and 4.0.

'Paladin... Secondary Healer...' /lol

I need to be sure to remind a few of my friends that they are at best, secondary healers -- 'course, I should expect no heals from them after that!

2010-03-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

Finally, after what, something like 4+ years of playing (?), I have finally seen (and even won fairly on open rolls) the elusive Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade drop.

Cannot begin to think about how many times I have been in that instance either on one of any number of toons on any number of servers, let alone through all of the run throughs I gave in that instance - especially with a particular shaman by the name of Heinkel of Legends Reborn on Azgalor (I believe he ran it more than all other WoW players combined!). Had never seen it drop - much less win it.

What piece of elusive loot continues to elude you?

Congrats to Modk of Juggernaut (Mal'Ganis) on Shadowmourne

2010-03-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

Patience, dedication, good RNG and /gratz to Modk of Juggernaut on Mal'Ganis for landing world first

Shadowmourne

Well done!

Take the Shaman Challenge!

2010-03-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

I have accepted the Shaman Challenge.

The Challenge: play a class you have not played before, in a role you have not played [seriously if at all] before.

So there you have it. Break out of the mold of the roles you play [typically] and the classes you know [like the back of your hand]. Mine is the healer, shaman. Number of reasons I chose that role/class combination as my challenge:

always played a tank, lately also dps melee or ranged; never a healer
tinkered with a priest, have lvl 80 druid and paladin; never a shammy even to lvl 10
last couple of weeks, had rather limited game time; thus is a good time to do short bursts of low-level quests
never heard any shammy player complain about their class or express that they were not having fun playing it - zero regrets
pretty sure that the graphic artist working on the shammy gear is the best artist Blizzard has! Best damn shoulders in the game - tier after tier

Take the Challenge - What is Your Choice Going to Be?

(side note: I think he is holding a new iPad - he's just that damn cool!)

Making Peace with Tanking Irritants

2010-03-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

Much like coming to terms with and overcoming inner turmoil, tanking requires you to face the inevitable distaste for players with a lack of class, a lack of strategic thinking or a lack of mechanics maturity. I recommend you find that or those which brings you the most enjoyment in the game and keep them steadfast in your mind when facing the challenge of trying players.

More especially in the beginning when you are under-geared and learning *everything* about tanking: the role, the gear, the stats, the mechanics, the formulas, the shot rotations, the best way to handle situations, the other classes and how to best handle situations given their strengths and weaknesses and in the end, the way to enjoy what you are doing without becoming burnt out.

Advice I have given recently:

at the beginning of a pug heroic, say "hi" to everyone and then tell them that you're glad to be there and will do your best to get them through the instance as efficiently as possible; ask dps to gauge your threat generation and dps accordingly; ask the healer to let you know whether you should slow down on pulls or move quicker from pull to pull -- all of which establishes that you are polite and intelligent enough to recognize that you may be completely out-geared or not and that as you go, the group will establish how fast you can move from pull to pull
if you are doing a new fight or new content, tell the group you are with and ask them for advice or preferences -- this underscores that you are open to advice and recommendations and sets the tone that they need to be helpful if they want to succeed
if the group is really being rude, be polite and ask them if they would prefer you drop group to let them find another tank better geared/skilled to their expectations; if the rudeness continues, then drop group after saying something polite like: "well thanks, but i don't need you being rude to me, gl" -- it has the added advantage that they might /ignore you so that they don't have to be "burdened" with grouping with you again - which saves you having to put up with them again!
before you delete all your tanking gear, talk to other tanks -- almost assuredly, they will be able to relate and like spreading a weight over a larger surface area to prevent breaking through the ice, spreading frustration across friends will dissipate the chances you do something that might prevent you from really enjoying a tanking role in the game

Most of all, remember what makes you enjoy the game (and also that any tank can be a dps but not all dps can be a tank!) Tank on!

/pull

Discovery!: Why Horde is Cooler than Alliance

2010-03-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

Club Thrall

(check it out right about minute 16)

Newbies: Then and Now

2010-02-25T11:10:00.000-08:00

Over the past two weeks, I have had a chance to talk to quite a few newcomers to WoW, and several old timers that remember what it was like to be a newcomer back in the day - five years ago. There are some very stark differences.

Newcomers today are - typically - very well informed. They often already know about WoW.com although they might not know it used to be WoW Insider. Wowhead.com is already one of the tools they use regularly. Many of them were brought up fast and furious through the levels by a friend using the Recruit a Friend program -- during which time they learned how to play without necessarily playing all the zones or seeing all of the classic Azeroth and Outlands. Few have any idea what Allakhazam is or when you used that versus Thottbot. They almost have never used WoWWiki - which is good because it still says things like Shamans are tanks. Mind you, one of the best wow fishermen I know reminded me that wowwiki still has the best maps for showing you subzones within zones (especially useful if you are missing some for those explorer achievements). Newcomers quickly become aware of raid data websites for analyzing performance and have access to tremendous resources like the fight guides and videos of bosskillers and tankspot.

They also do not usually know a world of 4-slot bags where a 14-slot runecloth bag is worth the world. Or leveling [painfully] up to level 60 end cap knowing full well that they will never get to see the top content because there is simply no hope in hell of getting into places to get the gear to qualify to go to a 40-man raid.

What newcomers today do have over those newcomers of yonder year is patience with regards to patches, and a stomache for downtime or changes. They have joined us at a time when they expect to see changes non-stop. They expect from Blizzard fixes to known issues whereas the old timers I have spoken to tell stories of no expectation of known issues to be fixed and rather it was a matter of just dealing with it and moving on as players.

Today's newcomers expect to get to end cap fast and that Blizzard deliver non-stop streams of fabulous end game content; yesteryear's newcomers expected to slog endlessly to get to end cap and to enjoy the gorgeous scenery and lore on the way while side-stepping technical and mechanical issues hoping to see some of the cool end game.

When you think about it, that is really - from Blizzard's shoes - trying to satisfy two very different customers markets. Perhaps Cataclysm is their "one expansion to unite them all"?!

WH40K MMO! 2012 = WoW Cataclysm

2010-02-09T11:20:00.000-08:00

First and foremost, wow. THQ is scheduling a WH40K MMO release for 2012. Maybe the prophecies surrounding 2012 are slightly on mark! At least for Blizzard's world. Done even moderately well, it will have a very strong effect on the WoW population. Done very well, Blizzard will need to have some very ingenious counter-attacks. Granted, WarhammerOnline by Mythic was an epic fail. /facepalm THQ on the other hand is no Mythic and the cult following for WH40K is massive. Massive. This can really only end well: one outcome is that we get a new game to play to replace an old one; another outcome is that the new game forces the hand of the older one to become better. Either way, THQ had best release this for Mac OSX also!! Just sayin'!

Tanking is back to skill again, finally!

2010-02-04T21:51:00.000-08:00

It has been a long time coming [back]: tank survival is dependent on skill, again -- instead of gear-stacking. "Good news everyone!" Tanking is fun again - "fun" like heart-beating, exhilarating again. Sure, stack your gear; however, that alone will no longer get you through the encounter. /cheer!

Longtime readers know that I have been lamenting the lack of skill needed to overcome encounters in Ulduar and Naxx. Those were purely "hours in game" to stack gear requirements: the more time you played, the better gear you could acquire and stack until fights became so easy that even mediocre-skilled tanks could MT 25m content. Granted, there is a large body of players that feel this is a good thing: it gives more people 'access to content' or a chance for less-skilled raid groups to see end game content.

Back in classic wow (yes, with all of its issues etc), there were multiple raids and while there were factors that prevented some guilds from being able to access some of the content (e.g. 40 man raids was a limiter, as was the rarity of the only viable tank for 40 man raids - warriors), mediocre raiding groups could access some of the end game content (just not all of it). Skills came into play - which allowed formidable guilds to recruit the better skilled players and the reward was seeing more content than the mainstream.

I don't necessarily agree with shutting out a large section of the content, however I never really liked what they did with Naxx and Ulduar where I feel the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction - everyone could access the content and hence did not need to truly hone skills unless they wanted to do hard modes.

With the initial release of the first Icecrown Citadel wing, Blizzard re-adjusted that pendulum to a more moderate position and I think we are all the better for it. I'll use Lord Marrowgar as an example: it will not matter how well you stacked gear if not one, but two tanks are not skilled enough to tank, move and stay within 5 yards of each other - LM will one-shot them with Saber Lash! It won't matter how leet the healers are, or how big the dps meter numbers are. If the two tanks cannot skillz the movement in coordination with each other, it will be wipecity on what should otherwise be a straight forward fight.

Blizzard went as far as to make it easy to gather good enough gear: e.g. druid gear that you can pick up with emblems are amongst some of the best feral tanking gear you can get. The same can be said for the plate wearers. Stacking gear is easy and it does not take that much of a time investment to collect up decent gear and epic gems. It takes a moderate amount of effort more to stack quite nice gear based purely on the time it takes to gather Emblems of Frost; however, even this is not nearly as bad if you are running daily randoms, weekly random, 10m ICC and 25m ICC.

With the new 'pendulum position' on the balance of gear and skill as limiters for progression tanking, once you have geared, you better bring skills to get them wings cleared! Which is making it far more interesting to tank again.

For Those About to [Black]Rock...

2010-02-01T22:32:00.000-08:00

Oddly, most people did not know what that head was - they were caught by surprise at the /y announcement that rolls over SW when you turn in the quest. I won't spoil it any further; however, I will say this to those "new blood" tanks: go raid old school stuff - especially at level. It will leave lasting impressions.

Even with the tweaked up spells and talents, even with the ratcheted up gear stats and BoA hand-me-downs, rolling a 40-man raid or a 20-man raid, at level, in the old school content will provide an exhilarating ride you do not often get anymore.

Most likely, there will be barely any knowledge in the raid group on how to *do* the raid, the content will be tough as nails, and there were will be a lot of "wtf?!" elements, such as the slowing mechanic in BWL.

Just dinged 60? Sporting those Outlands pieces? Nice. Now go impress your lads by taking on a lil' undead, or bugs, or fire elementals... yah go ahead - try on that dragon or fire elemental lord for size. Pack a lot of pots and food - you'll be needing those after each wipe!

= )

How to Avoid getting Hacked: Alt + F4 Lesson

2010-01-16T13:06:00.000-08:00

You can avoid getting hacked after Alt + F4 - or at least reduce your overall exposure to getting hacked - by simply not using Alt + F4 to exit the game.

You have all heard the horror stories: people getting their accounts hacked and losing all, characters deleted or transfered, guild banks cleaned out, long long delays in getting restorations from a suspicious Blizzard, and then nasty post-restoration threats from assailants.

Bottomline: It feels personally intrusive and is a frustrating hassle.

Recently, a really, really great person I know got hacked - and of course he was a guild officer so the guild bank got trashed. There is a lot of good advice out there on how to reduce your exposure to the threat of hacking so I will not reproduce it. A lot of it is common sense: don't buy gold; don't buy accounts; don't go to weird places in the dark without a druid tank. However, what prompted this post is a shortage of advice against using Alt + F4 for any reason in WoW.

Your WoW experience is created by connecting the wow client (the application on your machine) with the wow server (at Blizzard) by wow traffic (lil itty bitty packets of information flying back and forth between the client and the server).

Alt + F4 is a client-side command that terminates only the processes on your machine and is not a command to anywhere else - and specifically I am talking about not to the server at Blizzard. What we do not see behind the scenes is that Alt + F4 only dumps the client-side processes (the software running on your machine) and that the server-side processes (running on the Blizzard server) are still running and thinking that your client is up and running and that they should be sending you packets of information. The client and the server are locked in what is called a 'session' when the software is up and running. When you close out the application normally (exiting with buttons or escape), a message travels from the client on your machine to the server at Blizzard and tells it to close the session and don't send me more packets. When you Alt + F4, no such "close the session" message goes to the server.

When you use Alt + F4, the server continues to do its job of trying to get packets of information to your machine. These packets can be mis-appropriated by someone or malware to hijack your session and pretend to be you.

Traditional session hijacking ("jacking") is a manual process using tools like WireShark to sniff network packets and analyze them for trends (such as an interruption on your end of client-originated traffic or the server repeatedly re-sending packets due to not receiving delivery confirmations). Current jacking trends are bolstered by software (malware) to act much faster on trends.

Malware on your machine can detect incoming unattended packets and pick them up and pretend to be you and further stand up a fake login and prevent you from legitimately logging in. Unless Symantec and MacAffee etc have seen that malware before, it is not on their list, so their software will not remove it. That's how they jack your session on your machine when you use Alt + F4.

They jack your session downstream at any point between your machine and the Blizz server by doing pretty much the same but not hosted resident on your machine - it is on theirs, or more likely, on a machine they have infiltrated that is a "hop" on the way between yours and the Blizz server (you do not have the privilege of a direct connection, your packets hop many times to get to their destination). As an example, if you live in an area where there are a lot of subscribers on your cable or dsl subnet, crafty folks know how to watch the traffic for all households on that subnet - let's face it, the tools ComCast uses to know if you are hosting a web server at home against your Terms of Service, are the same tools hackers use.

Is there a prevention to session jacking? Even when it is not on your machine and is somewhere further down the internet pipe? No.

What you can do is reduce the amount of times you are exposed to session jacking. You cannot control when you get disconnected from the server unexpectedly, or when you have an unexpected failure that causes you to re-boot.

You can control how often you use Alt + F4. Just don't do it.

Festergut: Totally a Druid Tanking Opportunity!

2010-01-10T22:01:00.000-08:00

Festergut is a great, fun fight. It is a whole-package fight: tank check, dps check, heals check, coordination check. There are several good write ups on the details of the fight all over the net at the usual spots (I recommend tank spot).

Bottom line for this fight: have a lot of health, a lot of avoidance, and great whopping heals. Perfect for a druid! This guy hits like a mac truck... and THEN some! He is dishing it out over 20K a hit and hitting fast and furious. Keep in mind that the raid debuff in ICC puts a dent in your usual dodge. This puts the hurt-locker on DK tanks something fierce. Warrior tanks have enough tools in the tool box to keep the fight alive just long enough to land some huge heals (have huge heals with you or amazingly fast and bountiful smalls). Have not seen it yet on the pally version.

Soaking up multiple massive slams to the health pool: is a druid dream tanking situation! We've got a druid in guild with over 60K health - looking forward to seeing him laugh off those hits!

Have to Recommend Selserene's Machinima

2010-01-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

Was reading Michael Gray's post on Wow.com on highlights of Machinima for 2009 and came across one I missed - and I have to say, Selserene's got a great film noir twist to the machinima. Her work on In For A Penny 2 is amazing and the twist is fabulous: wow film noir! No character is good - they all have a lil bad in them!

I recommend this link as it has the full movie: http://www.wow.com/2010/01/01/the-moviewatch-2009-highlight-reel-iv/

Now I just need to figure out where in the world of warcraft she found that pool to use...?! Don't think I have seen that anywhere, yet -- they'll revoke my Explorer title!

Wishing You a Happy New Year - of Cataclysmic Proportions!

2009-12-31T13:24:00.000-08:00

Wishing all of you a very happy New Year.

(Recent picture above brought to you by a cadre of good friends that enjoy the past as they look upon the future: Molten Core for those of you that have not shared the holiday cheer and warmth of Ragnaros with your friends, yet.)

Tanking Tip: ICC Trash Rep Farming

2009-12-22T19:27:00.000-08:00

So you've seen the fancy rings some folks are wearing. They got them mostly by farming trash in the first gated approach of ICC. Just like back in BC, you can earn reputation in ICC (as you did in Kara in BC) and at Friendly, you can claim a ring from a vendor *inside* the raid instance. Upgrade it at Honored and so on and so forth. Right. Now you want one, too.

If you're a phat-lewt-geared tank, you are likely already dialed into a rep farming group. If you're not, give your fellow raiders wearing the ring a firm look and remind them to invite you next time!

However, if you are not sporting the ICC goods yet, do not worry: you too can easily farm rep in ICC. The key minimums you want to have are:

35K health
~30K armor (bear)
40% avoidance

If your gear is really not up to snuff, farm emblems in Heroics until you are up to snuff. 'nuff said. Once you have cleared the 35/30/40 rule above, you are ready for some ICC trash farming - in small pulls.

Key tips to keep your raid from imploding due to tank death:

Have two healers - one spec'd and skilled at keeping you, MT, alive; other raid heals.
MARK the Servants for kill order. Remind the raid that no one is looking to be impressed with big dps aoe numbers if there is a skull up - single target those Servants until all gone. Then aoe.
Each "level" you staircase up to has a doorway, with mobs front, left and right. Pull SMALL. Very small.
Pull SMALL (yes, this is worth mentioning twice). These are NOT your heroics pulls and while we have all gotten used to huge pulls with huge aoe dps meter numbers, just don't.
Remind your raid up front that the rogues (yes, you need a rogue) will find the hidden traps that let out the ginormous mob and that everyone needs to keep a small footprint in there. There are no mobs that will knock you back into other mobs, but you don't need to back your boomkin asp into a hidden trap and unleash death and destruction either.
Clear the immediate center, left side (full to the back in multiple small pulls), right side, then the big group in the middle. If you have shackle (you brought a priest right? see tip #1), lock down one of those Servants or it will rip up your casters. After all visibles are down, you can trip the traps - don't send your rogues in to do it - they die and it makes for bad dinner table conversations later on.
Remind your raid at the beginning and every time a newcomer rotates in, that you are doing small pulls and giving the tank a couple of rotations to get sufficient aggro in order to not wipe. If they don't like it, they can leave. Having a couple of rotations where only you and your healer are on the threat table will better assure that you stay ahead when the raid really drops the hammer.
Since your priest is shackling (see tip #6), move the tanked mobs AWAY from the shackle - and I am not talking your normal "away" so that *you* do not break shackle - I am talking AWAY so that dumb asp [insert aoe dps class] here does not break it inadvertently.
Should "it go bad" run back towards the entrance and the mobs will reset - if you are dead, tell your raid to do so.
Do not engage the boss. That defeats the basic premise of farming trash and saves everyone preventing further farming should you down the boss.

The screen shot above actually is useful this time (!) as it has the map clearly showing the "Stepped areas" and the left and right side segmented areas from which you do the small pulls. It also gives you a good sense of how much ahead a tank can get on aggro if he gets at least one rotation head start. And why yes, we are 9- manning it with one healer! But that was not planned!! We lost a healer and were in the middle of replacing him. Again, you can get away with these things if you are doing small group pulls and are not triggering the traps carelessly.

Warriors are going to have a tougher time with preventing early aggro rips than others from what my pals are telling me (have not gotten mine up to that level yet) and from what I have seen, due to the large groups that also have mobs that tend to not cooperate well unless you have a strong aoe capability. Having said that, warriors are going to do equally well if the rest of the raid lets them get at least one rotation down on the mobs before reaching for their trinkets. Strong amount of physical damage in there - well mitigated by the warrior tank.

Paladins will fare the easiest in the run especially by dropping consecrate and moving it around to keep the mobs engaged and away from shackles. Again, great mitigation.

DKs - have not yet seen one brave enough to try it. = )~

Bear tanks are going to take some deep health plunges - good job they have lots of it. Bring a stong healer - a bear tank in low gear farming trash in ICC will not be for the healers with weak stomaches. There are going to be some deep-cutting cleaves and the damage sponge is going to grin and love it - but the healers will be close to cardiac arrest, more especially a paladin healer. Beacon and shield. Beacon and shield. Bears like to move it move it move it (shake it) when tanking - try to use small dance steps in there, remember, there are hidden twaps.

So go forth, and claim your ring.

New Row of Bag Slots Coming?!

2009-12-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

Looking at the form for the bank window, it would appear that now there is room for a second row of bag slots!

We know Blizzard is aware of our bag space issues: it's be widely acknowledged, they shifted pets out of the bank slots, and mounts. There has been the beginnings of discussions of shifting tabbards out similar to the pets/mounts set up.

Given the space that they have on the bank window form, my money is on another row of bag slots in the not-too-distant future.

Does anyone have any screen shots of the bank window from earlier to compare if they have changed it?

Moar Snow = More Emblem Farming

2009-12-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

So I looked out my window, and that's what I saw. I went outside to dig out the jeep, and that's what I saw. I drove to get some chow and Starbucks, and that's what I saw.

Ok, back to emblem farming!

(Note: Clearly, Starbucks does not employ Canadians nor New Yorkers from Buffalo?! Cuz *every* store was closed. It's not a storm, folks; it's only 2 feet?! People in VT and CO must laugh at the mid-Atlantic. Then again, they have those cozy wool sweaters with cool chalet patterns on them and toasty lil mugs of hot chocolate - mid-Atlantic has humidity... hmm.... "honey, we're moving!")

AQ40 - For When You Want Your Asp Handed to You

2009-12-18T13:21:00.000-08:00

Feeling a little OP? Farmed everything you could with Emblems? Your middle name is "BiS"?

Go AQ40.

Not only will you be spanked, but when you stop to consider that when people were really visiting the place, they were not level 80, it will really dawn on you.

Ok, on the upside, where else can you race friends on your bug mounts?! Seriously?! And no, there still is no easy way to get there, but don't worry, once you are there, it will take you so damn long to clear it that you'll zone out there!

Tragic, tragic Winterveil Turn of Events

2009-12-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

AUBERDINE - In a tragic turn of events this Winterveil, the mysterious return of mass Moonkin deaths has begun.

Inexplicably, each year during the festive season of Winterveil, entire populations of Moonkins are found face down in the dirt.

While the cause of the mass deaths has not be ascertained, there are many leading experts willing to offer their differing opinions including mass cult suicide, airborne fatal parasites, to the more outlandish "every use of Holly kills a Moonkin somewhere".

Foremost Cenarion Circle researchers are stumped. They have invited Azeroth's collective Moonkin researchers to join them in Auberdine for an emergency investigative conference on the subject. Try the egg nog they are serving, it is fantastic this year.

Not All DPS Are Created Equal

2009-12-12T12:54:00.000-08:00

An observation, open to change with further advances in wowcraft: Not all DPS are created equal.
Case in point: my rogue, with far better gear than my boomkin (tank hiding in feathers), has to work *much* harder to approximate DPS numbers that my boomkin in lesser gear nails with little effort.
It may well be the case that in the end, end end game, when everyone has max'd out BiS gear, that the DPS numbers soften out and get comparable results for effort; however, I doubt it.
The rogue has a lot to do, especially in the new 5-mans with all the necessary interrupts, and the boomkin just stands and nukes. That's not to say the rogue cannot match the boomkin numbers, just that it has to do a lot more work to get there.
Do you feel there are toons in your raid that barely have to work to hit the big performances?

The new 5-man instances are FUN!

2009-12-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

The new instances are fun on regular mode and epic level of awesome sauce on heroic mode. I was fortunate enough to be a in group of friends each of whom are magnificent players. And despite how good they are, it took every ounce of our knowledge to use every ability we had and to communicate when we felt it was their time to do something.

/hats off to you Blizz - gj. !!

New Heroic 5-mans Revealed

2009-12-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

I need to give props to Knights of Utopia on Alleria for being the first people I know getting the new achievements of the new Heroics. While most of us were portal-humping the 'no additional instances' message, some of them were tagging and bagging the new 5-mans. I was fortunate enough to log on in the evening again and immediately get an invite to a group that had just gotten in. And for the first time in a very long time, I got to see new content on the first day it went live.

It was fabulous to once again have a sense of - shall we call it trepidation - as we delved deeper into the frozen, seething saronite-walled dungeons. To once again need cc? Love it! To not know the fights and not know which mobs in a group pull others or which has which abilities and have to look it up - only to find that there is barely any information yet! Awesome!

You can grab the starter quest in Dalaran and then fly a short trip North and enter into the general zone in. Then get into The Forge of Souls and meet up with Jaina to keep the quest line going. Tremendously novel was that at the end of that instance, you can go ahead and enter a portal into the next one: Pit of Saron. And again at the end of the Pit, you can enter a portal to the Halls of Reflection. Now, you can access each of them individually from the summoning stone area once you have completed each one; however, it was a novel trip to simply follow the quest line and go from one to one.

WORD OF ADVICE: DO NOT SKIP THE TRASH!

iLvl 232 drops a galore from the trash! (My own rogue walked away with a new cap and wpn from a couple of nice trash fights.)

Tanking Tip: when fighting the third boss of the second instance (no spoilers here!), it starts with the boss talking a lot -- use that time to find a better place to pick a fight than right in front of the cave you just came from: it should be common sense that picking a fight with your back to a tunnel with rampant cave ins is a bad idea, but just trust me on this one, your healer will appreciate it. I won't share more as that might spoil it - and really, playing new content with virtually no idea of what is to come is just damn cool.

Blizz did a very nice job visually and mechanically with the new content. We needed to call it quits after clearing instance #2 (we have to get to bed at some point ya know!) and are looking forward to clearing #3 tonight. When was the last time you heard yourself saying that? "I'm looking forward to clearing a heroic?!"

Good times.

[Note: the image is from the Pit of Saron, with no spoilers!]

Patch 3.3 has landed... time for Denial of Instance

2009-12-08T18:13:00.000-08:00

So far, this is what I have seen of the instance - it's awesome! However, seriously people, chill, it is patch day with new content. Of course we can't get in. On the other hand, that new LFG cross-server is working sha-weet!

Looks like Blizzard is bringing back some significant challenges to raiding!

2009-12-04T13:58:00.000-08:00

Just read an interesting post by Mike Schramm over on wow.com. He brings up two blue posts and what caught my attention is the thinking at a higher level: shifting the focus from brute force models to strategy models.

It could be a game saver for them. Already, there are far too many voices clamoring that the game is getting too repetitive and easy - a bad combination. We've already lost too many good players from the game that Blizzard is really only going to attract back by putting some serious mind-bending, instantaneous decision-making forced situations: aka, making raiding less about big numbers (all of them: dps, heals, etc) and more about what can *you* do with *your* numbers.

Just the information posted gets me excited to think of what might make it through the dev process to release! Will crowd control make a comeback out of necessity?! Will tanks have to actually know how to position themselves again versus just aoe in order to still tank and yet not marginalize avoidance?

Speaking of the return to general avoidance as a tank in order to foster the duration of your healers' mana pools, that speaks of coming long fights... /salivate... epic fights?! Yes please! YES PLEASE!! Give me group quests at every level up - 80-85 yes, but also in the re-done 1-80 - that actually are hard to do even with 5 players in the group! Oh yes, make sure those group quest fights are not soloable and that they are epic long fights in their own right. And give us again some world bosses that spawn randomly!

Who wouldn't love a few dragons that only pop into presence once in a while that are tougher than the rest of the content (incl raids) that you need a 40 man to defeat?! C'mon!! It would not impact raid progression, just give ya a cool achievement! But you'd have limited chances of getting the achievement because: a) boss rarely spawns and anywhere in the world; and b) when it does spawn, good freakin; luck downing it!! Perfect opportunity for Blizz to bring back 40 main raid without actually impacting raiding progression.

Yes, Mr. Blizzard, please do give some of us the whole game in 'hard mode'.

= )

w00t!

Blizzard Artwork Reveals Coming Fights

2009-12-02T16:16:00.000-08:00

You've seen it: the Blizzard Background Downloader. Doing it's thing. Looking beyond the logo/label, glaring back out at you, challengingly, are some of your upcoming foes.

Nice artwork!

And a special shoutout to a dear friend who has finally had a chance to level to end cap! Awesome sauce. You have so much more, now that you are reaching end cap, to do. Starting with dailies... = )~

grats Rin!

Fishing Pools in 3.3 Guarantees Fish

2009-12-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

We've seen some updates and long posts in the forums clarifying fishing changes in 3.3 - and they are being rec'd with mixed reviews. Moving past the QQ, I see clear and distinct sides:

Pro: If you did not level your fishing, but need dragonfin angelfish or glacial salmon for raiding, you can now get them post 3.3 by fishing the appropriate pools.

Con: If you have been quietly making thousands of gold selling dragonfin angelfish and glacial salmon, you need to venture into new markets.

At the end of the day, you are still going to be able to sell fish to those that cannot stand fishing. Additionally, if you were not one of the ones selling fish in the first place, you will not have to buy them for outrageous prices anymore! Now you can fish your own and spend your money on things like pets!

I'm Tank - the movie series!

2009-11-30T19:08:00.000-08:00

If the characters above are familiar to you, /smile. If they are new to you, go visit:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=130277&stream=&h=8835bc792ae2ff2053e07345ff9459ca

You may want to google him up or follow the links and find the starting part of the series and dig through them all. My old links to the starter one have disappeared (this one in Spanish subtitles). Feel free to post links in the comments!

For all your wow movie watching needs: http://www.warcraftmovies.com/index.php

Note: found this to get you started!: http://www.tierraderol.com/foros/videos/serie-im-mt-16/

When did we get so many buttons?!

2009-11-29T12:45:00.000-08:00

The last time I played my hunter earnestly, was early TBC. We didn't have many buttons to click back then once we had launched the pet and kicked off the Bestial Wrath sequence. Today (ok, some of last night *sheesh!*), he got some air time and I was amazed at how much more complicated hunters have become.

Hunters have a huge amount of tools in the toolbox now (my hunter is still only 74) and they seem significantly more utility in a group than they did before. DPS is fine even with switches into Aspect of the Viper. Plenty of time to drop a mis-direct to help out a tank or use something to pull a mob away from the healer.

One thing that has not changed: that sad feeling you get when your pet dies. = (

Look Ahead, Skill Up Now

2009-11-28T11:38:00.000-08:00

It is too easy to get entrenched in your day-to-day or weekly routines and before you know it, the next time you look up, you realize you are in a rut. Worse, you may have missed opportunities to act had you once in a while looked up and peeked around.

Do it. Look up and around and most importantly, ahead. You may find that now is a great time to pick up some new skills and level them up before Catacalysm or 3.3; on the other hand, something like Fishing will come easier later once Blizzard alters the profession.

It is fairly certain money that Blizzard is not releasing Cataclysm before or during Winterveil. (Yes, I am intermixing RL and wowL just for all you diehards who actually know your wow holidays better than your RL ones.) Cataclysm release date has nothing to do with it - other than making sure you have set yourself up for 'optimum' opportunity to take advantage of the release before it happens. e.g. if making gold is your thing, be set up that way to take best advantage of the coming changes; if being the first X of race Y on your server to ding 85 is your thing, take care of any distractions ahead of time so you can focus purely on power-leveling.

For those of you with multiple 'mains' (especially those on multiple servers), you have more complex planning to do, however the coming 3.3 patch will likely resolve a lot of the grouping angst. It will be interesting to see if you still need to server transfer to the better servers to level on in order to get groups and level a toon quickly to be ready with a new class if that is what you are doing pre-Cata. Yes, leveling is faster now. BoA helps. BGs help. But being on a server where you don't have to spend eons waiting for a regular instance is a boon.

Patch 3.3 promises to bring us some relief in this regard: you will be able to mail cross faction your BoA items and you will be able to get groups regardless of where the tanks or healers are server-wise at that moment. If you are thinking of starting a new faction toon, this is a huge patch for you.

Most people will be anticipating the new races before they start leveling anew in the new faction - or so I hear in the chatter. I recommend buying your upcoming toon's bags now: those bags are going to be ridiculously priced when the expansion comes out and demand scales beyond supply.

Enjoy the weekend!

(Note: extra points if anyone can guess the location of the image.)

Same Faction Race Change Available!

2009-10-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

Well then... time to finally fix that Draenei paladin...

As anticipated, Blizzard rolled out Character Re-Customization (aka sex change), Faction Change, then Race Change in advance of Cataclysm. It should have been anticipated - if you were Blizz, would you want to have just rolled out Goblins and Worgen, have the masses clamoring at the gates and *not* have race change already coded? Despite what may be the impatience of many, I do hope that they do not add Goblins and Worgen to the XYZ Change services until *after* players have had a chance to genuinely level to the new level cap. i.e. the first Worgen/Goblin anything to 85 should have leveled up from level 1 - not race changed at 80 and leveled 5 levels. After someone dings server firsts, they can open it up and I think that would be fair game.

Right, off to change the race on that paladin!

Hallowed Holidays

2009-10-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year, again! Strap on your gear, head into the same single instance over and over and over again hoping to get the mount to drop! Kindly, old Thomas will drop his broom for you and if you aren't quite yet tanking level 80 bosses, you can always grab a rickety broom from quest rewards!

As soon as the clock struck the time, our guild had groups slamming the boss to see what fell out and we were already tearing into the achievements. My group had 8 boss summons going into the fight only minutes *before* the reset so we were able to get 2 in beforehand and hence a total of 10 summons in one visit! Pretty much everyone got a pet or broom. We saw the cloth head (for the achievement) once and there were rings all around - no mount!

Then it was off to Goldshire to knock out those quests fast and early. Don't forget to pick up your 'orange buff' - this is key to tanking anything as it makes you 'huge' which as we all know, increases threat and damage (ok, that last part may not be true at all, in fact, we suspect it was outright not! But it does make you 'huge'!)

It will even turn your old world griffon (flight point ones) orange!

There was of course, one asshat that felt obliged since they had the Hallowed title, to mount up on their massive lelilumph and park it over the water bucket so that no one could get water buckets to do the achievement - they didn't do it all the time, just when the fires were burning down the houses. Sod. I already had mine completed (it pays to do these things early) and when I thought you just could not witness more asshatery, the guy goes on to mention that people got mad at him *last year* when he did it, too!! LOL - I think my friend Darraxus would shield slam him!

What is your list of 13 today?

2009-10-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

It's October 13th and it's maintenance day - show us your "list of 13"! Mine is a list of the key word searches that people use in Google that lands them at my site.

Which is indicative that I surely should make paladin tanking macros easier to find on my blog!

So c'mon bloggers, since it's maintenance Tuesday, post YOUR list of thirteen!

A completely random tangent is that in a raid last night, my under-geared rogue placed 7th in a 25-man and there were *no* ret paladins -- /blink /blink -- huh?! None?!

Eggs are good for your epic mounts, too!

2009-10-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

With a look of outrage and his arms raised to the sky, the glowering, orc warrior bellows at me, "Say what?! What nonsense are you talking about?! We don't have to feed our mounts *anything*! [Note: Why is that, by the way?!] Much less feed them eggs!"

*/cough* "You ARE farming eggs, right?!"

You'd think he was a plant given the change in his shades.

"Eggs, you know... these things:"

"You are a freakin' n00b!" he sputters and starts to walk off.

"A freakin' Mr. Wealthy N00b to you, sir!"

"Huh?" with a look of diminished mental acuity.

"Oh, I get it, you *are* a n00b! You have not been playing long enough to know anything about Winterveil!"

[Note: While correct, I do believe that the bloody carcass that orc warrior left behind him neither won me the battle nor helped him get any richer. Do yourself a favor, go to the BE starting area and farm Dragonhawks for eggs. Bank 'em. At Christmas/Winterveil, you'll thank me. Did I mention they are a 100% drop rate!? and are worth at least a gold each?!]

The Ubiquitous Netherweave Bag

2009-10-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

Some things come and go. In our favorite MMO, think about all the hype, QQ, hand-wringing, hours spent analyzing patch notes, expansion leaks, hints from blue posts and the multitude of blogposts surrounding one basic thing: change. Your class spells change, their talents change, professions change, everything seems to change - all the time. Buff this, nerf that. It seems so few things resist change. Around the world, server after server, factions everywhere, one thing has not changed: the ubiquitous netherweave bag.

Before everyone jumps on the pre-TBC bandwagon and clamors about runecloth bags, yes - over 3 years ago, the runecloth bag still was trump. Since then, however, netherweave bags have held their own.

Sure, your main decked out in all frostweave bags as soon as it could. Replaced those bank slots with fw bags as soon as it could. You might even have upgraded your alts or bank toons' bags - you would be one of the few. Most people interviewed did not. Most of them equipped fw bags on their main, but kept nw bags in their bank slots. Their bank toon/mule: sans fw bags - all nw bags.

It seems, Tailors simply never brought about the magnitude of market shift for fw bags that nw bags did for runecloth. It would not be fair to say the nw bags did not face the same issues fw bags did. They did. They had to overcome runecloth bags. Worse, rc bags were not BoE like nw bags making them less likely a choice for bank toons and mules due to not being able to reuse them if you needed that character slot. NW bags were a marginal space upgrade from rc bags - same for fw bags. NW cloth became the defacto cloth drop after you got past the starter area of the expansion - same for FW cloth. NW cloth bags were a large slice of leveling tailoring - same for FW bags. Again, same for even making the bolts.

What I saw tailors do early in TBC was to sell their nw bags for close to or less than their rc bag counterparts - and this is where I think things fell apart for fw bags - that never happened. Tailors still charge far more for their fw bags than they do for their nw bags even though there is far more supply of fw cloth than there is of nw cloth. On six servers that I monitored markets on both factions, what I saw is that tailors have to close to price for the nw cloth mats to make the bags that sell for less than the fw bags for which the mats are slightly higher in price to the nw cloth mats! The fw bag price makes it 'undesirable' for everyday use on alts and bank toons and hence it has not managed to displace the nw bag as the nw bag did the rc bag.

All of which leaves us pondering the future of the fw bag as we head towards the next expansion: will it go the way of the rc bag, or worse (/fear) the way of the imbued netherweave bag?! Who knows. In the meanwhile, we will watch as those faithful bank toons scurry back and forth between the auctioneer and the mailbox stuffing and emptying their netherweave bags.

Author's Note: Netherweave Bags have easily paid for at least two epic flying mounts. They are ridiculously profitable ventures - especially since you can start a DK anywhere, get it out of the starting zone and it has enough starting cash to level up tailoring immediately to start making bags! Within 48 hours you can have several hundred gold on any server ready to support whatever toon you really want to level.

Fun with Faction Transfers and Hunters!

2009-10-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

Recipe: Serious Shootah

Step 1. Take a foomfy long-eared type and goblin/gnomish transmogrify it into something that can shoot nukes. Don't forget to change its Willow-wispy name into something more 'big shootah'.

Step 2. Go shootah.

So you have your freshly minted new faction hunter and he has done the starter area quests and on he moves (could be a she, but we will use a he in this example to keep the images from being confusing!) to the hunter quests. When I used my already learned tame pets skills, the boar immediately leveled up to 5 levels under mine and the quest did not complete. Using the quest item the quest giver provides you allows you to complete the quest (again!) as you can see at the top of the image below and it allows you to have a pet that is over 60 levels below you!! hehe.

Now, most hunters that I know have always wanted to be able to have their pet out while they ride their mounts (Blizzard, take note, hunters want want and it is not game unbalancing!)... well found a way to do it! And this time, there are no gnomish transmogrifications required! Simply re do the hunter quests to learn how to tame a pet! After your faction change, naturally, you already know how to tame pets however you can pick up the quest line again and go through it again (gaining reputation); however, when doing this, do not use your normal tame pets skill (otherwise the boar levels up right away - mine went to level 67 immediately) and the quest does not complete for you. Just go out and use the quest item to tame your pet, then mount up! voila!!

Another funny thing that is left over from a faction change is the effect it has on the class-specific quests and their experience allocations. i.e., they give gargantuan amounts of experience compared to what they would do at the correct level.

The Debate to roll Horde or Alliance...

2009-09-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

... oook, belf that likes to brewfest-it-up -- debate over!

(Ok, mebbe der is more to it dan dat - vwaht do you tink?!)

Examples of WoW IRL...!!

2009-09-27T19:07:00.000-07:00

I have a friend. He is a really great friend. He is also an awesome druid. And he has the largest damn non-combat pet collection of anyone I know. We share a friend. This other friend insists that we level up our fishing - we shall call this friend "Brem". But back to our awesome druid friend with the awesomest non-combat pet collection... recent evidence points to growing a NE beard, toting a staff, and leveling his fishing... hmmm ...

Do you have RL friends (or self) that either just look like their damn characters or have 'behaviors' that seem wow-ish?! *grin* (He is going to Moonfire me now!)

Mage Portal Suggestion for Cataclysm <-- Blizzard take note

2009-09-08T09:25:00.001-07:00

Once Blizzard/Deathwing is done carving up Azeroth, they should add a change to the mage teleport/portal ability:

Create a new teleport and portal spell that is not tied to a specific city or location but instead allows the mage to teleport to or create a portal to a place they have already visited.

While mages have been well-trained on how to port to known locations like cities - don't you think that it is time they used that skill to port to places they know other than cities?

* It would be very useful (think "utility", Blizz!) without being overpowering - which might help make mages have a little come back from being one of the lowest played classes in the game now according to warcraftrealms.com

* It does not break lore and actually fits well with people like Jaina P. just showing up in the swamps of Theramore surroundings to lay some smack down - or popping into Thrall's bedroom/throne room.

* It encourages world exploration - and mechanically, the game already knows when you have not been somewhere - hence 'discovered xyz zone/area' announcements.

* Offer it at a low level if you really want to encourage faster leveling for everyone grouped up - or at least the mage!

* Mechanically, all the pieces exist in game: cast the spell, it opens the world map, you zoom out/in, place the portal circle where you want it and you have been before, voila!

* Perhaps not allow it in arenas or BGs - or maybe allow it in one BG because it would be amazing to see a mage portal open up in a tower and have the enemy pour in through it! Wow, that would even align well with the lore!

* It is a very, very easy way to make mages feel very happy about something that is not at all powerful - kinda like Engineering... doh! O.o

Blizz, put it on the drawing board and work it!

Paladin and Rogue Nerfs coming in 3.2.2

2009-09-05T10:44:00.001-07:00

Looking at the patch notes from 3.2.2, regrettably we are looking at a nerf to two of my favorite classes. Arguably, Paladin threat has long been a bit uber. The nerk to a rogue's throwing specialization definitely means that talent will not be selected anymore in the combat tree - it just became wasteland talent option.

Best WoW Movie So Far

2009-09-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.gametv-fr.com/retribution/streaming_EN.html

(give yourself about an hour to watch it. Oh... and you will need a drool pan.)

Also... this one is awesome, too!

What was your first toon? Do you still have it?

2009-08-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

In my travels across several servers, both factions and many friends, I have noticed two strong trends: i) people who do not make many alts - and I mean 'many' - leveled their first toon to end cap and still play it (it is often their only toon); and ii) people who have many, many toons, never leveled their first toon to end cap. There are not only two options, just two strong trends that I have observed.

The two toons I spend the most time on are now on Alleria, the server I started on, originating from Azgalor where I spent most of my time for a couple of years. Probably equally, I then balance time between Azgalor, Dark Iron and Kilrogg. My two first characters, native to Alleria never made it to lvl 60. From time to time, I 'dabble' in them. One is a bank toon and spends less time exercising now that the mail box is closer to the auction house door. The other, however, is in Winterspring, seeking an elusive new pet.

How about you?

(Faction + Race Transfers) + New Racial Classes + New Racials = Hmm...

2009-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

So we know what Blizz is working towards, and we know that faction transfers and racial transfers are on their way pre-Cataclysm. And we know what is coming in C. What we do not know is which of our toons is going where as a result!

Hmm...

Anyone else in this quandary?!

The changes are genuinely giving me cause for pause. There are some obvious statements to the effect, that like everyone, there will be just reason to level a new toon up from level 1 just to see all the new content in the old world and to see the changes. Also, to bring back some 80s and pick up Loremaster as we clear through all the new content in the old world.

But really, unless all you have is one toon - do ppl do that?! - then it would seem to me that a lot of us get to re-think which race our class will be and for that matter, which faction.

I've got friends spread across multiple servers and both factions. It can get tough spending enough time with each of them in a week that already has a lot of RL in it to begin with. However, these new changes actually look like they might help all of that. I can narrow down to just a few toons, move some of the higher ones that are on the same servers onto other servers/factions - and hence be nicely spread out. Keep most of them 'social toons' and 1-2 serious raiding toons. (Yes, I did say 1-2 'serious raiding'.)

I think the toughest part is going to be that 'distraction' from getting to 85 - that thing I like to call my new worgen level 1-85. Haven't picked his class yet - depends on what I do with my other toons...

Have you picked your Worgen's class? Your Goblin's class?

Bremm covering BlizzCon: Live from Anaheim!

2009-08-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

Bremm will be keeping us all posted to the second using his Palm Pre photo shots down at BlizzCon! Wait... yes Loremaster Bremm has revived his blog! Ah, most excellent!

Felicia Day (The Guild) Video! Geek Out!

2009-08-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

The ever so talented Felicia Day and the whole crew of The Guild have released a fantastic (fully punny) vid which you simply have to check out, especially if you are headed to BlizzCon.
If you have not caught wind of The Guild yet -- what scum-covered rock have you been under?! -- you really need to check it out. You can google 'theguild'.