Hands shaking, need better pc (joke)

The “back-up laptop” is not all I’d hoped or remember. True it is a significant step down from the old MacBook Pro that my old work gave me, sheesh its slow. Was the Internet ever this slow? Celeron 1.4 gighz, 256mb ram, Windows XP.

I’m going mad.

Expansion news is distracting

All the damn expasnion news is distracting, and especially irritating as I can’t play at the moment. I can say that “I told you so” about all these guild changes. I knew it was a tad obvious, and if wow is going to stay ahead of the new MMORPG curve, then need more stuff like this. Need more shiny stuff. And I suspect they’re slamming the news at the moment to take momentum away from Aion and Champions Online. Good luck Blizzard, I know at least 10 people who have left wow and are trying either game.

The player base in World of Warcraft is getting tired and wanting new games. Good on them. It makes total sense to me that people would want to not play the same game 2-3 nights a week for several years. Even if people end up playing the same amount of time, the change is healthy.

I’m not sure either of Champions or Aion has longevity to shutdown WoW for good though. Both games don’t have a lot of content as yet (from the blogs and reviews I’ve read – pure speculation). That means that folks might try, play, enjoy these new games, and return to WoW later. Its not like wearing epics will hurt the leveling process from 80-85.

That said – I saw the character creation screens of Aion on Tuesday and the options are off the scale. So are the pc system requiremements, so that game won’t see me any time soon, unless I find an awesome laptop in a trash compactor somewhere (I wonder how many you’d have to dig through?).

Some Sexy Upgrades (and a short break)

Well its been a screamingly busy work + WoW + life week just gone, and as it should be as I’ll be offline for at least a few weeks due to the move. I made my last week a mad-house of H zerg runs, and tried to always say yes to everything. It paid off.

This lead to yesterday’s solid session where I ran almost every H dungeon. This was great fun, but no way in hell I could run 11 instances every day. The idea of running more than 3 n a typical day is a bit of a push. I know that some folks say that the 226 gear is too easy to get, but really you need to be doing a crazy amount of instances every week to make fast progress.

I was in LFG for Obsidian Sanctum all week, and I think its being run less and less. ToC5 and VoA10/25 get a lot of attention, and the 5 mans; but for some reason EoE and OS seem rare. This is disappointing, as these runs are not hard, and the drops in 25 are still ok.

No way I was going to do Naxx again on my Death Knight, there might be a few upgrades there for 25m drops, but its just not worth the hassle of getting 24 other folks to do it. Naxxramas I bid you farewell.

The result of this was a new set of Tier Shoulders for DPS (the Death Knight t9 2 set is nice and I want it!), all the last 226 items I wanted from Conquest, and also enough badges to buy my last piece of Tanking gear at 226, but the rest of the Tank gear I have is so haphazard that I can’t really apply the 226 Helm until I get some better items to fix the Expertise and Hit levels.

Mortigen has never looked better.

Leaving Adelaide

In a week or so I’ll be leaving my home of four years, to return to Melbourne. Its a strange time, and I find myself often contemplating the past four years. When we moved here from Melbourne I was very skeptical that any other city would be able to feel as much like a home as Melbourne did. I knew nothing really about Adelaide except it was a “city of churches”.

In retrospect this was fairly stupid, as it was the first time I’d relocated cities in my life and to expect a bad experience will only mean that you find the bad rather than the good. Instead I do feel like I live here, and am a little sad to go.

It has been wonderful.

Confessions of a WoW’er

1. I’m a drooling maniac when it comes to WoW, particularly doing dps. I like it. Love it. Wants it. Tanking is awesome too, but not dps by half.
2. No way in hell I’ll play WoW (or any game) when I’ve a perfect partner at home wanting to head out and do stuff. While she’s studying or working though…
3. I don’t believe anyone is really in the game for anyone except themselves, or very close friends. ie. If a guild talks about being a Family, they better be folks that you have met and know in real life, or been playing with for a very long time. Otherwise your family vibe is a bit of a stretch.
4. I’m a loot whore. So is everyone else.
5. I will never have enough gold, even if I had max gold I’d spend it on something.
6. Healers are almost always praiseworthy, as they’re doing something I don’t like doing.
7. Gear will always date, and mean nothing 1 year later. Its like that link from Terminator “in 100 years who is going to care?”.
8. You think your Alt is way cooler than I do.
9. I honestly don’t care much for WoW RP. I respect it, but can’t get it to click in my head.
10. PvP still feels like a disorganised mess to me, and making PvE content do PvP is a reason to stop. Not a big reason, but its plain silly.
11. I think your vanity pet is vain.

Raid leading Ulduar 25

A few nights ago I led my first 25m Ulduar, and it was certainly a challenge. Raid leaders have always had my respect, and as a participant I tend to follow the instructions from the leaders even if they make little sense. You never know when somebody has a method or tweak that will change the encounters. That said – its a prick of a job.

It is a strange sensation to lead a raid rather than just do my job. Kind of like thinking in two spaces at once, the first is my normal role of melee dps killing the mobs, and the second is watching what else is going on, seeing and correcting the actions of others.

Raid leading seems like a good role to keep the game interesting. I’ve always been an advocate for knowing the roles of other classes, and understanding what powers, strategies, and potential the Tank, DPS and Healer roles use. And now I get why often raid leaders have several alts, in each of the three roles in the game.

My concerns were:

• Trying to give brief instructions to the players who had not seen the content, without covering everything and boring the experienced players to tears.
• Moving at a pace that let us not feel to slow. Now to my mind, the last run was really slow, especially in the first prep. I aim to speed this up significantly.
• Giving advice without being a prick, or sounding too harsh. I hate saying the same thing 3 times, and if a set of players are just not doing what they’re told that irks me. (eg. melee dps need to switch to the XT002 trash if it is getting too close to the boss)
• Being ok, or not being ok when instructions are not followed.

I find in the heat of battle people stick to what they know rather than what they’re told to do in advance. That means that moving them mid fight will help, but also saying it afterward will help too. Post-wipe looks to me to be a good time to outline what we might have to do better. I think it willstick more in everyone’s heads after a small beating.

What went well:

• Considering it was the first time that a lot of the raid had seen Ulduar 25, and first Ulduar run for a few players we did ok.
• Killed Flame and XT, but had a frustrating time with Razorscale.
• Morale was good, they’re happy to be seeing 25m stuff.
• Overall everyone did what they had to in a really efficient way.

What I’ll do next time:

• We tried Suicide Kings for the first time in the run too, and I think there was a lot of confusion. I am definitely going to re-cover the loot rules at the beginning.
• Quick in, and expect players to know the fights. Get in, play, wipe if we need to, then cover next steps. Better to start playing that spend 20 minutes talking about it. Setup and go in 5-10 max for a new group.
• Next run will be Flame, XT, then Kolo. Razor can be killed when we’re all a little better geared and more coordinated.