Quick Blogroll updats

Not a major post today. I'm making a few updates to my recommended blogs and wanted to share that.

1. BRK moved! No longer at blogspot, and no longer even using blogger, he's made the move to a custom domain and wordpress. Hope you find everything you packed in your hasty move, BRK.
2. Kestrel once said, "You find the best blogs by reading comments in other blogs." I find this to be true and offer up Og's Ledger. It's all about the accounting.
3. Since young master Bremmie was dinging in at 56, I'm finding myself drawn to more roguish content. Adding Doomilias to the blog roll. (Gah. With the number of AC blogs I read, maybe I should have just transferred to Drenden and joined them instead of /gquitting and staying where I was.)
   

I finally have some success

No sidebar image cuz I've got some real images in the body of this post. These are screenshots from over the weekend. These are personal firsts for me. First up Nightbane from Karazhan. Unfortunately I didn't get the healing neck that dropped, having gotten the Ribbon of Sacrifice from the Opera event a few minutes earlier.

And here's Terrestrian Illhoof lying dead on the floor. Not a bit of loot for me here either.
And in breaking news, I realized I'm too dumb to take screenshots of both The Shade of Aran and The Prince laying in pools of their own blood. Maybe I should socket some Intellect Gems in my tee-shirt.

On a more serious note, I really do need to re-socket or something to get my stamina up. My hit points are very low and this led to lots of problems for us on Aran, Illhoof and Nightbane. If anyone has some advice, feel free to post. Here's my armory link so you can see what I've done.

Slash Gee Quit

I've been feeling this coming for a while. I've been pretty disengaged with my (old) guild for several weeks now. In fact, it had gotten to the point where I was playing only my upcoming rogue, Bremmie. I've not done dailies on any of the guys that can for a long time. I've been raiding, but again not with my (old) guild. Really, I was taking up space in both the guild and in the officers corps. It was time.

So Saturday night, I typed those six characters. Of course I typed them about 4 times in a row. Because I have that many alts.

Now, I'm in a different guild that seems to better match what I want out of this game. We'll see.

Baking and Speccing

My good friend Owaru has said to me (and anyone else that would listen) that WoW has become a thinking person's game since the advent of Burning Crusade. What he means by this I think are that there are a number of things that you must consider when making choices about gear, spec, rotations and other things. Thankfully just at the same time we were required to start weighing different things that we were used to looking at, Blizzard handed us another way (through jewelcrafting) to customize our gear choices. We already had enchanting, but now we have two ways.

Today I'm going to look at Building a Mage (a class I don't run, so therefore I may be wrong) and baking bread.

Making a mage	Baking bread
The two main ingredients for making a mage are some increased spell damage (mages are all about DPS you know) and some way to make it run. Mana is the power source used for every mage.	The two main ingredients in bread are some flour and some way to make dough. Water turns particulate into fluid and in this case it will make a dough.
Run your mage with only these two aspects for a while	Bake.
Did you find your mage lacked something? Some staying power or something else?	How did you enjoy the cement slab that you baked? Not very satisfying? Need something more? I think what we’ve made here is a tortilla?
Let’s give the mage some staying power. Basically, playing a mage is a resource utilization problem. You have your mana which must power spells. Your life total is also a resource. If you haven’t spent all your mana, but are dead you’ll never get to spend that mana. “A dead mage does no DPS.:" But do we need as much stamina as spell damage? Probably not. The primary goal of the mage is to stay alive long enough for their massive DPS to have an effect. A little stamina (for a mage) goes a long way.	Let’s give the bread some volume. But we don’t need the same amount of yeast as flour and/or water. We’ll use a little yeast and that’ll go a long way. You see, yeast is actually tiny organisms that give off bubbles as a by product. Those bubbles get caught in the dough and make it more voluminous. Bake.
The mage is getting better. But there are still some things missing. Sure, when the firebolts start flying (and actually connecting) they do massive sustained DPS. Awesome. But we’re missing way too often. Let’s add some spell hit rating.	Well, the bread isn’t as flat as last time but it’s still not quite there. Let’s take the extra step of dissolving the yeast in the water and maybe giving the yeast a little food to work with. We’ll add some sugar (or honey) to feed the yeast. Well fed yeast, produces more bubbles and that’ll give us more lift.
Wow. We’re really getting there. But we’re still missing that something. It must be the big number syndrome from when we land a critical strike. We could make that go up by increasing our spell hit just a bit.	Wow. Really close. But it’s missing that certain something. Let’s add just a pinch of salt. It’ll be so subtle you probably won’t be able to identify it, but if it’s missing you’ll know something is.
So very close. Now, it’s a matter of pushing the buttons and doing things in the right order.	Let’s do things in the right order. Yes, follow the recipe. Do all the right things in the right order. Let your dough rest at the appropriate times.
Congratulations. You did it.	Congratulations. You did it.

Now. If you really want to make some bread, I recommend getting this recipe. It makes good stuff.

Questions I have

From what I've been reading about me and my blog, I'm apparently good at generating lists of things. So, today we have another list of sorts.

There are things in the game that I've accepted just because that's the way it is. But it doesn't mean that I don't wonder about them. Actually, I usually don't wonder about them right away, but instead later it strikes me that something is not quite right. For example:

1. Silverleaf and Peacebloom are well known as "starter herbs." These are the things that all beginning herbalists harvest. But exactly what kinds of herbs are these. Think about it, they grow in Durotar--an almost desert like zone. They also grow in the lush forests surrounding Stormwind. They grow in the rolling temperate hills of Mulgore. They grow in the perpetual wintry mix of Dun Murogh. They even grow in the area of an active starship crash that has mutated much of the life around it. How hardy are these plants? And are there any "real world" plants that show this kind of fortitude?
2. Dun Murogh as mentioned above is in constant winter. Granted it's located in the mountains. But if you've flown from Ironforge to Searing Gorge, the mountains don't look to be that tall. Certainly not tall enough to account for the volcanic zone right next to a permafrost zone. What kind of magical physics is going on here?
3. Just what are the Scarlet Monastery dudes doing in there. Real world monasteries would have the bulk of their residents performing some manual labor or at the very least praying. It seems to me that everyone inside the monastery is just standing around waiting to be killed. Sure, there are books and places to pray. But no one actually seems to be engaged in that. And another thing, during pulls I can clearly see the guys at the end of the hall. I have to assume they can see me and my party as well. And they must see us killing their buddies. So why is it they only object when I try to kill them DIRECTLY? Don't they care at all for their buddies? And this isn't only SM. It's just about any instance.
4. I can fly to from Skettis to Blade's Edge on the back of a nether ray (because they like me just that much). I can practically fly through a dragon doing that and the dragon pays me no mind. However, the moment I get on my own (flying) mount, the dragon takes great offense. What kind of cloaking technology are these Shatari Skyguard using. And when can I get the same kind of tech?
5. Finally, the quest for 225 cooking culminates in Gadgetzan. What kind of master chef lives in a town that doesn't even sell the needed materials for cooking? C'mon guys, give me at least a spice vendor down there!

So, that's it for today. Feel free to attempt to explain my questions or add your own.

Tagged - Part Two

Ratshag tagged me and four others to be named later to answer the five things I've learned from playing WoW.

Here they are in no particular order.

1. Be as prepared as you can. I read. Alot. That's one of the reasons that when we fight a new boss somewhere, I've read the strategy five or six times already. Then I read it again just before the fight. There is nothing like preparation to help you succeed. Whether we're talking WoW or IRL.
2. Hard work pays off. Granted this won't happen for everyone, but I worked VERY hard to get myself ready for Karazhan the first time I ventured in. And I think we managed to take down both Attumen and Moroes that first day. And I got the gloves from Attumen that made me a happy camper. Loot is sometimes the reward for hard work. And my hard work paid off that day.
3. There are bad people in the world. Our first raid leader for Karazhan (see #2 above) turns out to be one of these not nice people. In fact, he wound up leaving the guild and not only taking all the friends he came in with out, but about 1/3 of our other raid-worthy players. I honestly think that his intention was to get into a starting out guild and cherry pick what he needed. I think he had no intention of ever staying in the guild. He was a bad people. And these exist IRL too.
4. If you're too good, you get a reputation. As I said before I read alot. And I work hard at this game. These two things together have given me semi-photographic memory about places in the game. To the point where I remember quests I've not done in a LONG TIME down to the quest name and the quest giver's name. So, I've become the go-to guy to ask obscure questions. It's one of the reasons my Vent Phonetic is "Encyclopedia Bremtanica."
5. The same things don't appeal to everyone. I want raiding and progression. That's the way I test and validate myself. Others don't. They want to PVP, fart around a long time with content, just chat, give (or receive) run throughs, make money. To some degree I enjoy all of those things. But raiding is where my passion is. It's not the same for everyone. There are a good many people in my guild who LOVE to PVP. There are folks who judge how well they're doing on the size of their bankroll. This is all fine. It's just not for me. Much as my obsession with raiding prolly isn't for them.

I'm stopping here. I've fulfilled my duties as tagged by Ratshag. However, since this meme has been around for over a week and has hit many of the places I would want to tag, I'm not going to tag anyone. Except for Pelides. Since he didn't get it before!

Tagged - Part One

Pelides over at Hunter Mayhem started his own meme since he didn't get tagged in the other one that was circulating. His meme is about the five worst wipes. And believe you me, he tagged the right guy!

1. Garr in Molten Core. This is the rock elemental guy that starts with 8 adds. The general strategy is to have 4 warlocks and 5 tanks. MT gets Garr, each of the other tanks gets an add. Each warlock banishes an add. Kill the first 4, kill Garr, kill the 4 banished guys one at a time. Simple. Wipe. We're setting up for the next attempt, raid leader calls for buffs. Suddenly without warning for no apparent reason, my favorite paladin healer, Qerk, takes off at a dead run for the boss and his eight friends. Qerk dies, the other 39 of us die one by one by one. We find out later, Qerk has fallen asleep at the keyboard, finger firmly pressed on the run key!
2. High Priestess Jeklik in Zul'Gurub. Back in the day before Burning Crusade, ZG was where my guild spent a lot of time. We never had the forty people needed for other end-game stuff, so we ended up in ZG a lot. And we wiped a lot. I could likely write up 5 wipes just on this boss alone. But I'll coalesce all these wipes into one. Drawing any attention to yourself (unless you're the MT) in this encounter is a bad thing. The wipes generally started when some thoughtful healer sent me a Renew about half a second after I'd pulled her when I was tanking. I had the aggro of a single gunshot on her. The priest now had more. And died. Then the rest of the raid died.
3. Trash in Mechanar (Heroic). I was healing a heroic Mech before my gear was uber. I had enough healing that I knew I could do it. Sent the paladin tank a bunch of love as we were fighting one of the three robots at the beginning. Rogue took too much damage, sent a flash heal then back to tank. Greater Heal - No discernible change in health. Another one. Still no change in health. Another. Another. Another. Still nothing what gives. Tank dies. We run out. Then I notice that I. Have. The. Wrong. Party. Member. Targetted. At least the rogue had awesomely full health (and I did a TON of overhealing)
4. Ragnaros in Molten Core. We were on about our tenth (felt like the hundredth) attempt on old Rags. We were out of pots, out of bots, out of food. We were spent. And he'd been getting a little lower each time. We had someone hearth and pick up mana and healing pots, some food, a bot, fire resistance pots. Anything we could think of. Chipped gold together and made one last attempt. A mis-timed heal wiped our best tank out just before the sons. By the time we got him battle rez'd it was too late for the raid and way past most bedtimes. Final health of Rags somewhere about 50% greater than the best previous attempt.
5. Zul'Farak runthrough. Bremmie got a run through of ZF from a 70 lock. Apparently, when you target a far scarab with Seed of Corruption, it runs towards you bringing its buddies. Then when it detonates, you have about 9,000 level 40-ish scarabs beating on a lock. And it doesn't last long.

There. Five wipes. Maybe not the worst, but definitely bad. Who should I tag..let's see. First off, the three folks who've started blogging since I have: K, Owaru, Iron(shield|helm), Then two others Pike and Kestrel. I owe a responses to Ratshag from his tag. I was scared to tag him until I have completed that previous tag. But notice the title is part 1.