Shatter the DK Mediocrity Illusion

Just posted another guest blog entry at DeathKnight.info on Shattering the DK mediocrity illusion. That means I’m calling to DKs to step up and improve the perception of our class from the inside out.

Three years of blog banners

If Warcraft has one thing apart from highly addictive games, it also has some fantastic artwork. And over the years I’ve cropped and copied a few to use as the header for this blog, or snapped screenshots in-game. Below is the 12 or so header art that I’ve used on the blog over the past 3 years of blogging.

Update: A few more, now over 4 years.

Holiday Break, yippee

Once again I’m slowing WoW, and also slowing my online presence during the holiday season. Although the more perceptive amongst you will know that slowing from playing computer games from one night a week to almost none does not really change the speed by much. Its all relative I guess.

I plan to return to the Internet early in Jan, and take up the frozen gauntlet of Warcraft once again.

That, and also preparing a large can of anti-troll, to deal with the newb comments that I’ll encounter. I have a small hope that when the irate scrub talks down to me about being in pug-gear and a casual-newb, that I won’t mention a social life or family; as the poor idiot has no point of reference for either family or social life. I get the impression that some of the oxygen-thieves online true fantasy is a loving family and friends. And yes, it was a bad pug, but nothing I have not encountered before.

Every year we see folks going offline, and I’ve noticed that each year I write a small post about it, and then invariably I’m back playing like a mad man in the months following. So instead its a short post, and happy holidays to all.

Have a great break.

Kris Kringle shared topic on BattleChicken

As part of the shared topic by Blog Azeroth community, I was lucky enough to get a guest post on a very story based blog called BattleChicken by  Ambermist. My first world of warcraft fictional snippet-story, and about my main toon: Mortigen, the Death Knight.

Damn fine idea Gnomer!

Looking back to the beginning of Wrath

“What are your fondest memories from the beginning of this expansion?”

1. I thought I’d only play the Death Knight as a distraction, and it became my new toon. I came very quickly to love melee dps, and the DK combined all wonderful things of the Paladin Tank with the Druid-Cat dps. Leveling through 68-80 was time consuming because we were playing catch-up to the guys who started at 70 – that said, I didn’t mind.
2. I wanted to see Naxx in the flesh, and was not disappointed. Naxx is a wonderful instance.
3. I thought Ulduar would be game changing and was let down. It was fantastic, but also so large and time consuming that it was very difficult for me to see most of it. General Vez is as far as I’ve seen and I doubt I’ll see further.
4. The storyline was very enticing and exciting, and I think this has been maintained well over the course of the game.
5. I was stoked about new gear, but think the gear has also been too spread apart, which now means we are seeing iLevels beyond what I thought was possible. For example an early epic to be around iL 200, and we can now get 265 gear! Makes you wonder what level the L81 Blue items will be.

… a shared topic on the Blog Azeroth Forum

… the Impatient

A wonderful guest post brought to you by Gnomeaggedon and Blog Azeroth. Enjoy!

I’m a patient kind of guy…

No really I am!

• I’m the kind of guy that’s happy to stop at the amber traffic light rather than racing it.
• I’m the kind of guy that is happy to give up the last car parking space on Xmas eve to go looking for another one for an hour or two.
• I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t knock grannies out of the way in a supermarket when a new checkout opens… I might as well stay where I am, I will get out eventually.
• I’m the kind of guy that get freaking pissed off when 8 random instances NEARLY start… but one person doesn’t click ready.

Why are you not ready?

You are a tank, you know you will get an invite as soon as you join… why join if you aren’t ready?
Was it you that joined 3 times, or was it you and two of your spanky tanky mates?

Why are you not ready?

DPS being not ready at 1st glance is pure stupidity… they waited 20 minutes THEN decided they weren’t ready?

On closer inspection it’s understandable… you fell asleep at the keyboard waiting, or couldn’t cross your legs any longer, or your Mum called you to bed… or, well there are a million reasons why.

The Inpatient

Squidly is already going 1/2 insane with the new LFG insto-PuG interface. I am hanging somewhere between relieving myself in empty Carlton Draught stubbies and slamming the ESC button and quitting out of WoW.

It is quickly sending my insane.

I used to be able to handle waiting in LFG for an hour or two for a raid or an instance, because I knew I could do something completely different while I waited… battlegrounds!

I know the very mention of battlegrounds sends some people into an anaphylactic shock, but for me, it is the perfect tension and boredom relief.

• PuGs getting you down… go kill some Horde.
• Quests becoming way too monotonous… go kill some Horde.
• No one studying your T7.5 armor on the Dalaran bank steps anymore? … go kill some Horde.
• Haven’t got the requisite 10,000 gearscore or the Hard mode achievements on day 2 of the patch release… go kill some Horde.

Now Squidly has it hard… there is no time to ponder the unfairness of it all (generally), click join queue and the invite is starring him in the nose.

Gnomeaggedon is a different story.

No matter how often he tries to check the ITANKIT! or IMHEALZ! options, he is always just lowly DPS, waiting at the back of the queue.. wondering if he is even in the right queue, but too scared to leave it because he will lose his place.

So boredom… can’t do BGs while I wait.. can’t even fish in the big raid pond, just have to wait until a tank and a healer both join the queue so 3 more DPS will leave.

Maybe Blizzard don’t realize this, but you should never let a Mage get bored… definitely don’t let a Fire Mage get bored.  Even twiddling our fingers has drastic results.. cause you know we twiddle our fingers right before the Fireballs explode from our finger tips.

Gnomer does Origami

Gnomeaggedon once took up Origami, but the very act of folding the pieces of paper represented an Arcane Blast…

Paper meet Arcane Blast…
Arcane Blast meet dust….

I don’t even have that spell on my tool bar!

yeah so anyway… I think I am just bored…

I have spent 5 days waiting for Internet to be connected at my new home… 5 days of being forced to watch free to air TV.  I probably should have gone to the Melbourne Town hall and showed off my latest Blundstones (http://www.blundstone.com/)...

I log on and join a queue and I have to wait!  I’m a healer and you are forcing me to wait?!? Then I have to watch as I rejoin the queue time and again when people don’t join… so in the end… I didn’t join.

I’m a Healer, I don’t do Gearscore or Achievements!

I grabbed a VoA10 pug that was being  organized… Then they asked me to link achievements.. boring… I just ignored them… did they want a healer or not?

If they were that fussed about it, they could have used their own Internet to find out.

While they were waiting for my response an old mate whispered asking if there was room… there wasn’t, but I dare say there would have been no place for a guy that probably has a gearscore bigger than the rest of the raid put together.

I ignored them long enough to get going and the only people that died were the stupid people.

Hell, I play a Fire Mage as a main… I know Fire hurts, so why on earth would you stand in it?

Then Wintergrasp popped and we got kicked out…

Then we lost Wintergrasp… that bores me to tears!

How could we lose Wintergrasp?  There aren’t enough Horde players on Aman’Thul to field a full raid group!

Then WoW crashed while I was repairing.. they asked me what I was doing.. “Buying Crack from the Dalaran Commerce Exhange”… I must be bored…

The true sign of impatience

But apart from all of that, Christmas is too bloody far away…. I mean, as I write this it is 11.40pm on December 23rd… that’s like ONE WHOLE DAY I still have to wait!

It’s a little bit more, a few hours more, because really I just want to experience Christmas through my 3 year old son.

Some people want to relieve their sporting prowess through their children… I just want to regain the joy of Christmas… I intend to stay up all night trying to get a glimpse of Santa.

If I find out he dropped by Typhoon Andrew’s place before he came to me, I will march that 5 kilometres down the road and…..

Wish him and his family a very Merry Christmas…

I guess while I am at it, I can wish you all the same!

I must be bored…. so bored I am going to log back into WoW as soon as I send this off…

Gnomer and Out, Squidly and Stout!

TyphoonAndrew here – just wanted to say thanks and wow to the BA guys and Gnomer. These blog posts just write themselves! kek.

Warcraft Year in Review

This blog is primarily about World of Warcraft, so at years end this is the time to ponder some questions raised by the good folks out there in the community.

Q1. What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

A1. This is the first year that I’ve purchased pvp gear, and then gone on to enjoy using it. I’m starting to understand the appeal and reasons for pvp in world of warcraft. The time and gold spent in getting the gear ready was made really satisfying when I started to hold my own in pvp.

Q2. What was your favorite new place that you visited?

A2. Has to be the ToC instance, simply due to the fact that it has such an odd reason to be there, the story was large in terms of the experience we had, and yet I found it misplaced in the overall grand scheme of the game. The fact its strange makes it appeal, as it keeps me thinking.

It was certainly not Ulduar, as the boss fights in there have to be some of the worst for “cheap theme” or “trick mechanic” I think I’ve had the displeasure to experience.

Q3. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

A3. More time in game. My game time was basically back to being a casual player, and that is hard to take after playing a lot harder for a while.

Q4. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

A4. Probably getting the Crusader title, but I’m not a heavy achievement nut. Getting consistent top dps in some runs was nice for a while too. Or not reaching through the internet and killing other players…if I had force powers…

Q5. What was your biggest failure?

A5. Missing raids, and the way my real life wrecked my raid attendance. Going from a raid leader to a casual was a blow, but had to be done.

Q6. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

A6. A few things:

• Patch 3.3 – hopefully the best patch they add until the xpac.
• the flying book can be used by Alts
• All the heirloom items

Q7. What do you wish you’d done less of?

A7. Pugging with asshats. I bet the spread of asshat will be wider, but somehow we’ll still have failure with the new tool too.

Q8. What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

A8. Outlandish podcast because they are a silly munch of folks who sound much like my guildies from years ago. Great songs too.

Q9. Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

A9. Gearscore means nothing. Your rep with old world means nothing, and the fact you can speak leet means less than nothing.

This post was brought to you by the shared topic/meme in the Blog Azeroth forums.

Oh, and my 5 blogs to spam with a similar post:

• BobTurkey
• dps we deliver, as maybe she’ll blog again
• Pink Pigtail Inn, sure she’s already done it, but need to make sure.
• Skeleton Jack
• Gravity,

Death Knight Future?

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Thank you to Script Generator, click for full version.

How to tell characters apart?

What differentiates characters from each other? When is a game finished?

Almost my entire wow career I would have said Gear. But it could also be seen to me the pets, achievements, and such. Hmm. Maybe my dislike of these side distractions is all wrong?

Then I hear about the guy who has all but completed wow, and pretty much sacrificed his non-gaming life to do this. I’m not in any danger of doing that, but I have to question the religious and destructive devotion it takes to get to that degree of game play.

Popular comments were bound to target the “no-life” stream of comments, and at a base level I agree. But I also think that this demonstrates the tiny percentage of what is possible in the game, and why Warcraft still has something to offer people (even if the do need to be a bit OCD).

Off I go to see which of my Reps need the most attention.

Champions Online Trial Weekend

Champions Online had a free to play weekend a few weeks ago, and I’ joined the heroic fun to see what it is like.

Right out of the box download this game is made for comic fans.

The character creation (much raved about by folks online) lives up to its reputation, and the selection of powers is staggering. No 6-9 classes here, you want it, you can create it. I honestly had no idea on a character concept before I started, which made the choices even harder. If anything the 15 or so default power sets make the choice so varied, you’re not stuck for choice, as you have huge freedoms.

The “random hero costume” option has yet to show anything which was not totally strange (and I mean friggin bizzare). Shark head with cybernetic legs and zombie feet? OK. I’ll called him Robo-Zombie-Jaws, or RoZoJaw. Uh. That said it was also hard to not think of toons that are straight from comics themselves. I made a sniper, a robotic tank, and an ice-blaster.

Awesome news for tweakers and power gamers – this is a must try game. I guess a goal I had was to know what the “end-game” content and experiences are like, but trialing from level one will never do that.

So after a very short weekend I think had wow not already have my regular income, and the patch not hit recently; I’d be playing Champions. But keeping closer to the curve in wow is more appealing to me that starting again in Champions.

WoW Patch 3.3 is calling

Fall of the Lich King, or patch 3.3 is live – and while I’m still to get anywhere near it, I really feel a pull to return to regular playing to see this content. The video teaser tells a good story, and basically flipped the switch on my wow hiatus. I’ll be back in game soon.

Ohhh, yeah!