Holding Place

This post is basically a temporary placeholder that says, "Someday, I will continue to write valuable posts."

Sorry my loyal and faithful readers (there must be 1, somewhere?... No? Oh well) but work is busy pumping out stuff that has been put off for several years, so the Government doesn't have a giant hissyfit... have they seen what they take out of my paycheck? They should get about 1/100th of what I'm working on and be happy to get it...

My plan is to experience the leveling of a mage, although with all the cool sounding quests for low levels, it almost seems like a good idea to wait, guess I will have to delete my mid 30's hunter to start this mage, and that's ok, 'cause I didn't really enjoy managing a pet, this is probably why I don't like my warlock either. My imp is always like, "What should I do?" "I have no idea, attack my target... No, not the CC'd target, damn you...." Now all that lock does is make tailoring stuff, and hold my guild name until all the members come back for Cat.

Why does he have to hold the guild name? Well, because we reformed it on the Alliance side? Why did we do that? A challenge, on my server, the alliance side is near dead, and it was fun to be a part of the rare win in WG back when we were still all playing and decided to go. That's right, we did it for the challenge... in the end, people liked being their horde characters more, although I was pretty hot draenei with my pigtails. Yea, it went female for a little while, mostly cause I hate the way the Draenei dudes look, kinda like troll females...bleh.

Oh well, I'm off to kill two dwarves...

I mean, do some work...

-B Rab

Memories

I was talking with a friend this weekend when somehow this got brought up and made me think of how good it is now to be able to drop 4 totems with 1 button...

Here's the macro:

/castsequence reset=8 [combat] Windfury Totem, Grace of Air Totem

Yup, Totem Twisting, RIP

Oh, and rogues and fury warriors who begged for the above.... screw you

Another alt?

Well hello there from, uh, beautiful (not really) CT. I'm sorry if you live in Connecticut, your cost of living sucks, taxes suck, and traffic sucks. It's pretty much the worst of all worlds. It makes me sad that I will be back every 4-6 months, but at least I found a few places that have decent food. Luckily, some friends took the train from Manhatten and we went out on the town in SoNo, some people will know what that is, others can just imagine a po-dunk place that thinks its fun.

While I was on my trip here, I got a message from a guildy, asking about leveling up an alt for Cat since he wanted a priest... Now me, I'm a sucker for leveling alts, so much so, that I have 1 spot left on my character screen for my realm, although I was considering deleting my hunter since he hasn't made it near 80 yet. The only classes I have left are a mage, priest, or a hunter when I end up deleting him (I gotta save a spot for a goblin something or other come Cat).

So since hunter's aren't fun, yea yea, at least to me they aren't, even though I only made it to 62, I think my only choices are either mage, or roll around as double priest wanding the hell out of stuff at lvl 10, you know how it is, haha.

Hmmm... big decisions ahead. The bad thing is, although I love leveling, I love going fast, then dropping the character when they hit 80 most of the time. I just don't like redoing the same stuff over and over on 1 character, let alone several. Like I really want to run a raid on a tank DK, a tank druid, my main shaman (whatever role im forced into to make things happen), a warlock, an inappropriately named rogue (Side note, its funny, because in TBC, all I wanted to do was play assassination, so I did, and now that it's viable, I just play combat all the time...), and then a tank warrior (who actually prolly cant hardly tank a heroic right now anyway). My paladin is still just sitting around level 70 in tanking gear, but I have been considering just switching her to holy (yea, I said her, big deal, wanna fight about it?). I think I just like to stand around safely outside of cleave zones and do what I do.

I almost wish heirlooms had never been created, sometimes they are nice when you need to powerlevel something to fill a hole in the raid comp, but I miss actually going through the zones completely and following the story somewhat. Nowadays, you can just do a zone, skip the next, etc. When's the last time you were in Netherstorm or Shadowmoon Valley to do an actual quest for experience, or for that matter, even Blade's Edge Mountains? You know?! That place has a pretty epic storyline if you think about the books in combination would the area. I haven't been there since I had to do like 4 quests there to hit 68 on my deathknight, ohhhh so long ago. And to think about the old zones, well it's nice that they are being revamped, because when's the last time you did a quest in desolace? I guess I'm not sure about you alliance scum, gaarrrrr, but the horde quests there are just out of your way with the decrease in xp needed combined with the increase of xp gained from things.

Anywho, just thought I would drop some thoughts between my plethora of fun meetings today...

"So I went to this troll spa the other day and I wound up with dreadlocks and a frigging bone in my nose! I mean come on! Who PAYS for that?"


I'm out like a light bulb...
-B-Rab

It's Friday!

1. Riptide should allow you to see through someone's shirt, you just soaked their white-t!

2. Healing rain in Cat better fix this issue... Hello wet t-shirt parties in Org, cause I know everyone loves orc boobs


3. http://shutupwomangetonmyhorse.com/index2.html
It's random, funny, and its a cartoon, but if someone is looking over your shoulder at work I'd be careful, there is a cartoon depiction of horse junk at one point, albiet very quick.

4. Careful the next time you think you are playing it safe by not getting into this van, he might wait for you to go to bed.



Cause....





5.Enjoy your weekend, try something new, listen to some MC Chris... ha!

Random Musings

Yes, I think we can all agree that this is really the lull before Cat. Summer has been upon us, loot will be replaced within mere months, and we've already done this dungeon one too many times.

Now seems like a great time to catch up on achievements, leveling those alts middling in the 50's and 60's, or just planning ahead for the future. Maybe you are gather old world materials because you're a goblin and you know they will only increase in value as people power level a new worgen/goblin.

Or maybe now is when you take your break from WoW, pick up a classic, or try something new. I know I have been busy with SC2, League of Legends, and Diablo 2. All those coupled with a new job makes the weeks just fly by.

You know what the best part is? I showed a friend who never played D2 the game the other day, so I let him make a character on my account. Can you guess what he picked? I bet you never will (and that's sarcasm for those who played D2).... Yea, a necro... big suprise right? Remember when it first came out? I know, we all read about it, decided on our classes, but lets be honest, that first day when you got everything finally installed, you went with the one with the coolest animation at the character selection screen.... The necro.

What does everyone else think of the abundance of cinematics in SC2? I have heard some grumblings about there being so many of them from many of my friends, personally though, I love it. I think they look terrific. SC2 has really made me one of those people that has to watch everything and click on everything between the missions. I suppose that's why it's taking me a little longer to beat it than it should have, but since the whole RTS thing against real people is not my thing (I have a friend that I work with and just take on as many bots as possible, 6 was our max in SC), I don't think I'm in much of a rush.

Blam! Healing Rain!

B-Rab

Twiddling Thumbs

Cat previews have me interested in WoW again, not enough to make an effort to come back now, but enough that I will start when they drop 4.0 on us all.

Until then, the rest of my friends that will compose my 10 man raiding guild (thank god we don't have to scrounge up 25 any more, on our tiny server there are just too many bad/ignorant players) so that news was well received by all of us (Plus we have never been accused of being people-persons....), have been messing around with old games. Things like Diablo 2, Lineage, League of Legends, hell I even went back to an old MUD to start a character again and do some random things, ha.

Enjoy your summers, I'll be in an office building calculating fun risk models and what not. Maybe I'll finally start using some of this modeling knowledge to do sometihng useful towards WoW, well for shaman at least.

Until next time, may the spirit of the wild heed your call.

It's my time of the month...

To get out a post! Duh...

It appears that the latest job has not worked out well with me also finishing school, doing research for a professor, and also teaching. I was forced to take off the last two weeks to avoid getting my grades smoked by the last minute homework which was handed out the same day as our final projects in all of my classes. They did not appreciate that me driving 3 hrs to get there would be a slight hindrance to the minimal time I already had for getting things done. So today I turned in my completed project (on schedule...) and it will be my last day.

At least now maybe I can get some WoW time in while I prepare to do one of two things: I will either be returning to school and getting a PhD (Yay! Professional student status!) or getting a job. This means that while I study to pass my departmental exam at a doctoral level, I will also be flinging applications at any one who will accept it and has something to do with statistics, or analysis, and all that mumbo jumbo. When it's all said and I done, I'll see what's happening and choose what I really want from there...

The tl:dr version: Time to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

With this semester being over though, and me no longer having anywhere to go, I guess that means its time to get back into WoW, maybe even raiding. I have several friends asking me to come back and blow stuff up with lb's and keep people alive with those bouncing green lazers, and I think I am going to take them up on it.

This is going to require a transfer back to horde, and although I'm going to miss the cute pigtails, I won't miss people on the Alliance side of my server, the grass is not always greener on the other side.

I am happy to say that this shift should be happening on Tuesday, right after I get arena points, since we have landed above 2k, and I need some cute shoulders, of which I am around 200pts shy. Curse all the times I got sick of trying to win a random BG...

Switching gears, I am noticing a lot of noise happening over the 10 vs 25 player lockouts and what not. I know I am late to the party, and I don't have much of anything to say about it, other than that I'm happy that if I really do start raiding again, and that is the plan, that I won't have to run a 10 man and a 25 man every week just to keep up. I think that will help avoid burnout for a lot of players, which is always a good thing. I have had to many close friends just give up because of the excessive amount of things you "had" to do to stay competitive with other good guilds.

I know most people are looking at 25's in that they will just get more loot as drops, but I also am under the impression that your points for gear (whatever they are calling them now) for the current raiding ilvl will increase faster by raiding 25's rather than 10's.

Whether that is enough to keep people at 25's, I'm not sure. I know there will still be lots of 25 man raids, don't get me wrong. But I think a lot of people, when getting the exact same loot as a 25 man, and especially on low pop servers, will forgo the difficulties that can arise when attempting to fill out that last 5 slots for a 25 man with as Gevlin would say, the ms.


My last thing, I promise... Last night I was talking to a few friends about beta, for whenever it comes (I'd expect May, but wouldn't be surprised if it was later than that), and if they would play it. Personally, I appreciate all the people that go play beta and get the bugs out, but I'd rather see everything as a whole new experience at midnight, you know, while I keep getting server crashes and what not. My question is what do you all think? Would you like to play beta for Cat, or wait for it to come out?

Don't Hate

Yea, Yea, I know my posts are few and far between, but that's just the way life is. Even sleep is losing its slice of the pie that makes up my day's activities.

I thought today I would try and switch things up a little bit, I just don't play/raid enough anymore to keep dolling out advice about things I can't test, so I'll leave that to someone who can. Google it, I'm sure you'll find something if that's what you're interested in.

The last couple weeks have kept me busy enough that I have struggled to get in 10 arena matches either week, and somehow just barely made time to get a daily heroic and daily random in (nice feature, btw) to keep things rolling along. Now that these last couple of weeks are over though, I think it's time to make the push for 2200 to get myself some hot pants, and by hot pants, I mean a sweet new pvp weap. It's gonna be so crazy, that instead of casting spells, I'm just gonna show it to people and make them run, and if not, then just show them my sweet capped daggers skill. Pro, amirite?

Anywho, maybe when the semester ends, work begins, and cat beta is out, I'll start talking more about things. Someone should obv just give me their key as I am way above WOTLk by now... Yea, I know, we all are, but we can look back with some fondness... *Queue 80's montage music* Maybe that's a good side project, a WOTLK memories slide show? I'll start looking for random screen shots and see what happens. If you have any good ones, let me know.

p.s. - LvB on anyone with less than 15k health is now very funny to me, since that's where its at dmg wise

F Titles

Since this is about the rate of my posts, I have decided I am going to switch from attempting to give awful advice, to just talking about the little things I find entertaining from time to time in the game.

I noticed after all the time playing I have developed some very strange habits while in the game. Anyone else always jump/fly through a dungeon portal? I can't walk through it, it doesn't feel right.

Or how about the jumping right before you mount? Yea, some days I'll miss-time it, but I think after so long I finally have it down to an art.

Lately, I have been leveling tanks, lots of them, in fact, every type. With all the free emblems being thrown at me, and no raid gear upgrades to buy gems for, I just buy heirloom gear. I think I have the full set for any class in the game I want to play now. This means that I have been trying part of wow where everything in a dungeon tries to beat your face in, but can't, which is nice. Of course, you have to throw out some nasty insults to keep everything pissed at you, but it's going well. I got a feral tank to 66, a prot pally to 58, and a prot warrior to 35 over the last couple weeks.

I think the only reason I really go for tanks is that I have enough down time already on my main, I want quick queues when I am going to level and such.

I don't know, this post is random, so it gets no title...



Get a bottle of something nice so when Garrosh comes to town you can pour one out for your homie Cairne...

Pee Vee Pee?

PVP as an ele shaman? NO WAI!? Actually, I think, for some time now, we have all known that the burst done by ele is crazy enough to blow someone up in an arena. I mean, you can flame shock, lava burst, chain lightning, ele. mastery + lightning bolt, and then frost shock for some pretty sick damage. Enough so that a silenced druid out of tree form is pretty much a free kill and then it's mop up the dps.

Yes, I think it's funny when someone goes from 100% to 0% in just a couple gcd's, it brings a smile to my face.

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Now that I am back to work part time, doing some risk analysis 20 hrs per week, finishing the masters in statistics, and working with a professor on possibly continuing on to a PhD, I have basically been roflstomped in the time for WoW section. This means less raiding, more pvp than normal. In fact, pvp is something I normally only very rarely did, to see how fast I could blow people up in near BIS gear for the patch. But since arena is something I only have to rely on a handful of people for, instead of 24, it's much easier time constraints. The good news is that I'm obtaining a fair amount of experience pillar humping, thunder****ing, and just generally nuking down people.

One of the first things I noticed was how beneficial a PVP spec really is. I will try to add a link to one later on, but my firewall here at work leaves me pretty limited. Taking 6% less damage at all times, and 30% less damage when stunned or feared, is a major shield wall the next time that rogue locks you up. Add that to the ~25% damage reduction you are getting from resilience, and that you are taking around 40-50% (can't think of the number off the top of my head) less damage from physical attacks due to armor, and all of a sudden, a lot of people can't do much damage to you. Arena is not a bg, you need pvp gear (there are exceptions caused by set bonuses, such as with t9 where you just grab 4pc, and then gem resil in everything else).

So far, success is pretty good playing a wizard cleave using mage, ele shaman, and disc priest. We probably don't have the best healer for our group, but it works out really well since our disc priest is actually very good.

This is only the second real week of 3's that we have been playing, so I expect a rise past 1800 this week, or at least somewhere close if we get enough time to play. I'm gonna miss rocketing to 1500 as we tore apart laughable teams and learned a little more about our comp.

- B Rab

Planning for the future...

Immediatly after I decided to get back into blogging as a way of relaxing my mind from things, I up and leave. How typical right? Not permanently mind you, just for temps!

I had a nice vacation down to Florida to visit some friends, went to some theme parks, saw some ocean, and most importantly, traded 10 degree weather of the northern US for the much warmer 65-70 degree temperatures of Florida.

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There are plans to do several BIS lists in the future, probably for elemental only, sorry resto and enh, the feelings just aren't the same. In actuality, I have no clue on how to really even play enh, short of downloading that mod that tells you when to do what, I forget the name for now..., and resto, well that BIS depends on your job. Some shaman raid heal, some shaman tank heal, both are viable, but your BIS depends on what you are doing.

The idea is to create a reg 10 icc, hm icc 10, reg 25 icc/reg 10 icc/hm icc 10, and finally a hm 25 icc list. I know, big things right? Hopefully I can follow through.

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Is anyone else excited for Cataclysm? I know I'm just like a kid on Christmas Eve, and just the same, it's taking too long to get here. Don't get me wrong, I haven't even cleared all of icc yet, which is strange for me. Especially after we were the 2nd best guild on our server, until our rl got a diff job, strange hours, and couldn't raid. People slowly gravitated out. Our 5 man core that we started with faction xferred to alliance, now life is even more interesting -- want to do VOA? Hope you're up between 4 and 10am, cause thats the only time we control it. Wanna get a pug rolling for ICC 10/25? Good luck finding a hunter without stam gems in almost every slot, caster dps with the int trinket from badges, etc... At least they don't go oom right?

Now I'm all for helping people get gear faster nowadays, heck I wouldn't have gotten here after I came back without being able to grind out all the emblem of triumph gear and such, but there needs to be some check, some sort of difficulty in this game somewhere. The other day I ran a heroic with this terrific hunter, every pull he would run up, drop his traps, then melee the mobs... I kinda laugh about his tactics for a while, so I inspect his gear... What a mistake, yellow sockets all got defense gems, some even with +20 (cause purples are better!), blue with stam, and red got int/ap or something like that. Do people still buy characters off ebay? Sometimes I wonder...

Anyway, here's looking forward to 3.3.3 and the bg finder... kind of exciting, but it will be a lot better if people can only queue for one at a time. I know, longer wait, but then there will be less Isle of Conquests for me that start with 40 horde vs around 25 ally... just sayin'

May your lightning bolts proc overload,

B-Rab

Been a while...

Sorry to anyone who still notices that it has been so long since the last post. September 1st was the last time actually, and as I went back to school last semester I didnt like the recent switch in guilds, and it killed my spirit for WoW. Luckily, some friends came back to the game and got me back into it, so in the beginning of January, I started trying to catch my shaman back up.

Since then, I've got some ICC experience, although it seems like the people I came back to play with are solely interested in pvp, which is fun, but I want to see Arthas die as well.

Other fun stories, in coming back, I switched from Horde to Alliance and have discovered some important things on our server. Both sides have their share of annoying kids, adults who need more meds, and teenagers who need to get outside and stop nerd raging over little things. Unfortunatly, the Alliance side on our server is pretty far behind in progression, so getting a couple decent pugs to fill our 10mans has been difficult.

Anyway, now that I cut my week into half school, half work 3 hours away from school, I think I will find some more time to write, need those breaks from work every now and then, and hopefully get back into the community.

PS - good thing I threw chain healz into the name of this blog because due to the lack of good players on the alliance side, we all switched from dps to tanks/heals, except out one tank who turned into dps...funny how life works.

PS - on the PVP side of things, good thing that auto-crit LvB t10 bonus didnt go through...crap for pve, but woulda made a nice pvp bonus.

To wish you off on a good note, hopefully your random heroic isn't CoT: Strath...