What Have I Been Up To?

Not a whole lot, other than failing at NaBloPoMo. Recently, I've been spending a lot of time on my warrior, getting back into my groove.

My original character (in TBC) was a priest. I wanted a class that could heal at 80, because those are always in demand. Around level 68, the Guild told me "You are our shadow priest." WTF. I actually wanted to heal, while some other people in the guild either whined about/sucked at healing. So, despite my Primal Mooncloth Robe (which still sits in my bank as a grim reminder), I rolled shadow and became an expert at it (getting up to about 900 DPS as shadow in TBC was hard).

We had some issues with tanking, so I power leveled a warrior in order to tank. Meatgazer, my Tauren Warrior, was my pride and joy.

Slap-fight

Who doesn't love a good old fashioned slap-fight. The Blogosphere has been in turmoil about the whole Greedy Goblin V. JMTC (Just Might Try Crying) incident. This has been going on for a few weeks and a few of the bloggers I follow have commented on this very feud. Here's a quick summary for everyone.

Altcrown Citadel

Have you heard the news? Blizzard came out with some information on the patch 3.3 Icecrown Citadel raid. And everyone nods their head in agreement. They all say:

"Waitwut?"

Icecrown citadel is the raid that keeps you from raiding when you want to raid. It cockblocks you by keeping you from doing more than 4 new bosses a week (or two weeks), and no attempts at heroic mode until you beat Arthas in normal, who won't be ready for 2 months. That's 9 weeks. That means by the time Arthas is available, everyone in your 10 man raid has gear from the first 4 bosses. That means they don't need gear from the first bosses anymore. On top of that, you only get a limited amount of attempts at the last bosses of each wing. At first, it will be 5, but later on it will be 20 or whatever Blizz arbitrarily decides.

So who benefits most from this? Is it casuals? Is it the truly hardcore?

Prot Warrior PvP

Even though my main is my mage, my first 80 was actually my warrior. I started tanking in the last 6 months of TBC and got as far as tanking Gruul and Magtheradon's adds. I had planned on tanking at 80, but the tanking spot was filled and I didn't want to DPS on my warrior. We needed a mage at the time so Fricassee was born and powerleveled, and I found a new love for mages (I hadn't even wanted to play one before then).

It's Like Ellis Island

Game Review: Dragon Age Origins

Note: This review is for Dragon Age: Origins on the Xbox 360. The gameplay may be different on the PC version, but I would not know.  However, most of my gripes are with the gameplay, so if it is different, please let me know!

Dragon Age Origins is a story about your character fighting Demons for the Gray Wardens (at least, as far as I've played it). I can summarize this review in one sentence.

Dragon Age: Origins? More like Dragon Age: BOREigins, amirite?

Friday Top Five: Mage Raiding

Today's Top Five Countdown is for new to raiding mages.  These are five things I wish I had been told when I started.  For a twist, these will be delivered via puns, the lowest form of humor.

I must warn you though.  Puns have been known to drive even the most sane person into incredible fits of rage.  In fact, that German kid who raged out on his computer was fueled by his hatred for puns.  Had he not read my post, that keyboard would still be alive today.  You have been warned.

Raiding is Srs Bsns

Recently, my guild has decided that we need to be more dedicated to raiding. They published a nice long post after a nice long officer's meeting about what was going to happen with the guild. But I can't help but think that there could have been a little more input. Here's the story:

Cleveland Playhouse: Mamma Mia!

So Mamma Mia was at the Cleveland Playhouse for this week only and Jenn got tickets on discount from her school. I was going to write a review about the play, but instead I'm going to write about something else.

Tunnel Vision

Holding Down The Fort

With all the bloggers out there that are digging into NaNoWriMo, we're losing a serious source of content (read: distraction). For that reason, I'm going to endeavor to meet a different goal in the month of November

NaBloPoMo

That sounds really awful, but it stands for National Blog Post Month. The goal of NaBloPoMo is for bloggers to post every day for the month. Since I obviously missed a few days, we're going for a total of at least 30 posts. I'll hold down the fort while people more focused and disciplined write their novels!

So to all you bloggers doing NaNoWriMo, give a shout out and give us an update! You're almost half way, and it would give a little more fuel for my monthly goal.

L2Typeset Blogger

Growing up, I was a math and science guy. In fact, my writing was absolutely abysmal until I hit the 7th grade. My English teacher was a complete grammar snob above all else. He taught us the proper rules for commas (the bane of the English language), how to avoid dangling participles, and most importantly, how to follow instructions in writing. Since this was in the dawning of the computer age, we wrote a lot of papers and essays on the computer, and he made sure we followed all the rules to the T.

He was all kinds of old school so all papers had to be written in the English Typeset convention. That meant you didn't put spaces around punctuation but you put two spaces after periods, colons, and semicolons.

The reason I mention this is that Blogger apparently doesn't care for that convention, and when I put two spaces after periods it tends to put one space on the other line. As nitpicky as I might be, I'm not going back to remove spaces when it messes up format.

As much as I care for my readers to be graced with left align, it would be unethical for me to change my writing style when I'm in the right. I will simply wait for Blogger to stop raging against my typeset.

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He also taught us that it was proper to put a comma before the last option in multiple option sentence. For example, I would write the following sentence as:

That DK in the VoA pug was a clicker, a keyboard turner, and a face-roller.

Most writers won't put a comma after keyboard turner, but I want people to make sure that keyboard turning and face rolling are two separate ideas.

Steam Can Eat A Big One

Know what I love more than video games? Video games I can download on demand.  In this age of the internet where you can access any information that humanity has discovered or single click your way into bankruptcy, we need instant gratification.  Steam was designed with that in mind.  No link love?  You'll see why later.

The Truth About Quartz

Mortigan the Lock had a post about increasing DPS without gear/stat upgrades where he advocated hitting the next cast button early. He was summarily trolled to death about the quartz addon, and how it makes the job easy for you. I figured I'd lay out some information on how it actually works, and some things even long-time users may not know about this addon.

New Arcane Rotation Redux

A few days ago I talked about a mage that dominated the charts and how I thought he had a different rotation. I ended up swallowing my pride and talking to him, and it turns out he uses the same rotation. Seemed like everything I was doing was right, and the biggest thing seemed to be discipline. This goes to show that arcane is more than just ABx4MBAM. It takes practice. This guy was an arcane mage before it was cool to be an arcane mage.

I went ahead and went back to gemming hard for spellpower. I'm going to play around with my discipline on managing my CDs and my mana sources, and we'll see if I can perform better than I did before (which was still awesome, just not as awesome).

Friday Top Five: Raiding Music

I don't often listen to music when I raid.  When I started raiding, I was playing WoW on my laptop and running iTunes/Media Player/Winamp in the background tended to increase lag, so it had to go.  Now that I have a bomb computer, I could burn DVDs and run extended MATLAB calculations without adding any effect to my computer.  I still don't listen to music normally (unless I have pandora open on light raids), but when we need to buckle down and get things done, I still have my pump up music that I listen to in order to increase my DPS by 10%.

Without Further Ado, my Top Five Raiding Songs

Game Review: Borderlands

I know this might be a little late, but better late than never. Borderlands is a new game available on PC, XBox 360, and PS3. The game is what could be considered an FPSRPG - First Person Shooter Roleplaying Game. It's very unique, tons of fun, and could possibly be the way to go for the next big MMORPG.

New Arcane Rotation?

Last night, me and a few Guildies joined a PuG for ToC 25. While the pug was a failure on Jaraxxus, due to all of the melee standing in someone's legion flames, I wasn't really focused on the failing of the pug. I was focused on the fact that one of the mages, who was less geared than me and another mage from my guild was destroying us on the meters. Even in best case scenario, he was more than 500 dps higher than me.  I may ask him later what he did, but I endeavor to figure it out on my own!

Who Says Gamers Don't Give

In the past week, I've seen two wonderful causes that have been funded by WoW activities. I think both of them are very worthwhile and I'll be donating my time/money, and I hope you all do too.

First is Azeroth United's "Hearts, Hands and Voices," a donation to the Child's Play organization that gets gaming equipment into children's hospitals. As small as that may seem, toys and games for children going through therapy in hospitals helps keep their moral up so they can keep on fighting. If you have a chance, and you're a WoW person, think about donating to this wonderful cause.

The second cause is a more personal cause brought to us by Big Bear Butt and The World of Warcraft "Raid for the Cure." Julie, one of the members of the Sidhe Devils on Kael'thas US server was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. To show their support, The Sidhe Devils are having people from all around, both Alliance and Horde, show up and march to the barrens wearing pink shirts. While it's great for Julie to see all the people rooting for her, they're also raffling off some prizes for people who donate to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation via this site. Just send the receipt from your donation to the email address at BBB's post, and you're entered!

I'm just super pumped to see the gamer community giving back to the community in such a wonderful way.

Non-Meme Healing Questionnaire... Meme

Edit: This survey was actually from Miss Medicina, so give credit where credit's due.  Another blog to read! 

Gnomeaggedon decided to fill out a non-meme healing questionnaire and to challenge people who read his blog to fill it out. So I have decided to take this non-meme and non-fill it out.

My first level 70 toon was a priest, and I figured this is something I can talk about, despite him not being level 80 yet.  He's 74 now, but I'm working him up to 80 for *gasp* PvP.