2012

So I seem to have arrived slightly behind schedule for blogging this year! Actually, I just prefer making a fashionable entrance, at least that is what my Mother used to call it when we were late going somewhere. At any rate, I figured I would catch you all up on what I have been up to lately and then from there we shall just have to see where we go!

This expansion has kind of been an odd one for me as I typically will focus on one particular aspect of the game: PVE or PVP. This time around, I have not put a lot of effort into either. I think for me the main reason for this is that I do not have room on my server for any additional toons and thus I have missed out on the majority of the new content. This has given me a "ho-hum" attitude towards this expansion. Now I realize that I could create a character on a new server and experience the new content via the new server, but I hate rolling on new servers simply because you do not know anyone and you have no resources to assist in leveling. Also, the time spent on a new server is time that is not spent assisting my current roster of characters and my guild. So to that end, I truly hope Blizzard increases the number of characters allowed per server by at least one for the next expansion.

In terms of character development, I have leveled seven of the ten characters to maximum level with my main focus remaining on my Paladin and Rogue. At the beginning of this expansion, I liked my Paladin enough, but things just felt off. This caused me to not play him as regularly as I have in the past. When the guild decided late in the expansion that they wanted to raid I was drafted into healing for the runs. I do not know if it was because I was once again healing in a raiding environment, but the healing just clicked for me again and I once again embraced my role as a healer.

During the small period of not healing regularly, I was moonlighting with my Rogue. I have to admit that I was having a lot of fun with Whoopy and things clicked for me with him. Now even though I do not raid with him full time, I was fortunate enough to get the first set of daggers from the legendary quest chain. I doubt that I will acquire the next set of daggers simply because I do not have the time to run multiple raids during the course of a week; however, that will not stop me collecting them when I can.

As for the rest, I use them for different things. My Shaman I will use to heal for PVE content when we are not actively looking to down a new boss. While I find the Shaman healing to be a fun change of pace, it just is not as much fun to me. My Hunter and Priest are sitting around in Silvermoon City and Orgrimmar just chilling. My Death Knight I split between both PVE and PVP. I love the class and would consider tanking in the future, but the guild is extremely deep in terms of tanks at the moment.

My latest project is in relearning Warlock PVP. Right now I am going through the painfully slow process of collecting gear from the random battlegrounds. The nice thing is that every new piece of gear provides me a slight bit more survivability. I am looking forward to getting fully geared and then having some fun in arena. As for now, I just have to put my time in on the gear and learning the small intricacies of the class in terms of PVP.

Well, that is where I stand presently with my characters. In terms of raiding, the guild has been running the Dragon Soul raid content on and off for the last month with decent success. Presently we are five out of eight on farm with spending only two to three hours per week working on content. Due to the smaller size of our raider pool, we typically run the full raid instead of locking out and working on one particular boss. This has worked out well on gearing up our core raiders, but it has probably cost us the chance of clearing the content before the end of the current expansion.

The PVP this expansion has been dismal at best. We ran a couple rated battlegrounds with moderate success, but we lacked the dedicated PVP base to capitalize on the early success. I did have some fun in arena this expansion with my original partner Bigdog; however, he has gone back into hiding for the remainder of this expansion and with him so too did the arena fun go.

Well, that is all I have for today, but check back every now and then as I plan to get back into the swing of things in terms of blogging and WoW information. Heck, I may even provide some information on a few other things as well! See you all around!

Still Here

It always amuses me when I come back and write a post at how much time passes between posts. It also annoys me because I truly enjoy writing down my own thoughts and opinions; however, lately finding the time to write anything has been challenging to say the least. When I am at my house, it is very difficult to find some time to just sit and organize my thoughts. I use to do the majority of my writing while I worked, but since joining my new company I have discovered that they block you from logging into Blogger. Now I have looked over some alternative options like writing the posts ahead of time and scheduling their listings, using my cell phone to write posts, and other such options. To be honest, I simply do not like any of these. The only other option that I have available is to switch from Blogger to WordPress. While this is a viable option, I do not really enjoy the thought of moving the articles of this blog to a new blog.

In comparing Blogger and Wordpress, I have to admit that they both have some positives and negatives from my own personal view. So I guess I will ask you all what you think. What do you like about Blogger?What do you like about WordPress? Is there anything really good or bad that you wish you would have known when you first started writing? Any and all information will definitely be appreciated as I weigh my options over the coming weeks.

With that being said, I am looking to return writing more regularly as I miss you all. Now I know I have said this in the past, but things are looking to be lining up in a positive way for once and I definitely want to take advantage of this. Some things I am looking to do with the blog is expand some of the topics that I discuss. Of course that is all dependent upon actually settling on where to keep the blog. Well, I appreciate everyone who continues to check in around here and I promise I have not forgotten the blog or you all. I am unsure if I will be posting anything between now and the first of the new year so allow me to wish you all a very festive, happy, and safe holiday season!

Gotta Catch Them All!

So I have been feeling a little under the weather lately, but this has given me some time to think about how I want to approach some of the information that was released from Blizzcon. To be honest there was so much information given out from the panels and interviews being conducted between the segments that I felt it would be best to look at the major portions individually. So today I want to talk a little bit about the announcement of the Pet Battle System.

I have to admit that I like this concept. I am going to openly admit that I have a few of the Pokemon games for my Nintendo DS. I actually use to take this into my work and would play some of my co-workers on days where things were slower. It was a lot of fun. The thing I found the most fun in was trying to collect all of the hidden Pokemon. I remember in one week, we created something like twelve games in order to share all of the starting Pokemon via trading. It was something that was so simple, yet was a lot of fun. I truly hope that fun experience can be brought over to WoW's version of this game. As a parent, I like that there will now be something for my son to do with me when he is online. We can go out and hunt for wild pets or spend our time online together training our pets against one another. I also want to say that I understand why Blizzard is making this move. It makes perfect sense for them to do this. They have a very large player base with entire sites designed by fans for these pets. For some of these people, this is the only thing that they do. They love to collect their pets and work on their achievements. This simply adds another layer of the game to this core group of players.

I know there has been some criticism against Blizzard in regards to things such as stealing ideas from other companies or adding more useless features, but I do not see it in that light. If we look at almost any game that came out after WoW became successful, at least in terms of MMORPGs, you will see that the companies took what they considered to be the best parts of WoW and added to them as they saw fit. It is an evolution of sorts and there is nothing wrong with this. In terms of adding useless features, Blizzard has to address the millions of players that it has, not just the vocal minority. Blizzard is monitoring a lot of data, not just in terms of the game play but also in terms of why have all of these people left the game recently. My own belief is that many of the features revealed at Blizzcon in relation to WoW are a direct result of the questions you are asked when you cancel a subscription.

Such A Long Time

My goodness I cannot believe how long it has been since I took some time to post something around here. I truly miss writing, but right now I just seem to not have enough time to do everything. That simple truth means that I have to start cutting back on the extra things like blogging. The good news is that things are normalizing (for lack of a better word), and with that comes a little more free time here and there. So hopefully in the near future we will get a little more regularity around here. Now that being said, who is excited for Blizzcon?

I find that I am a complete geek and love everything about it! One of these years I am going to have to actually go. Oh well, until that happens I am content to hang out at my house and watch the event happen on my monitor. Every year I look forward to the Lore Panel and the eventual Red Shirt guy moment! The other thing I love is the streaming of the actual tournaments for both WoW and SC. I am blown away by the level of skill of some of these players and how quickly they not only can process everything that is going on, but also how quickly they react and seem to know the perfect counters. Simply amazing!

Well, I know this was just more of a quick note than an actual post, but I hope all is well for all of you and I will see you next time around!

The Sound of Crickets!

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately haven't they? Well, the truth is that I have not had a lot to write about and when something does cross my mind, it is usually at a time when I cannot sit down and actually formulate a thought. I do miss writing and sharing my thoughts on things and so I have managed to sneak away from my daily routine in order to give an update on what's going on with me in game and out.

One of the things that has been consuming my time is clearing out all of the old video footage on my computer. I had a ton of stuff stored up from old raids and the previous arena season that I wanted to get rid of. The only problem is that the process to create a video and/or delete footage is really time consuming. If you have never messed with recording in-game footage and then using a program like Vegas, then let me tell you that a simple five to six minute video will typically take an hour to two hours to edit and upload depending on the quality of the video you are trying to produce. I had hours of footage...

Aside from the video editing, I have been working a lot on my Rogue in both PVE and PVP. The PVE side of things is coming along nicely. I feel that Combat is competitive in most environments and so far has been fun to play. In PVP it has been somewhat weird. I realize that Combat is the least useful of the specs. So much so that Arena Junkies (last time I looked) didn't even have a guide up for PVP Combat builds. It has made it fun, but also made it challenging as I feel somewhat alone out there. So on Monday night, my arena partner decided that we would try using the Rogue on our 2v2 team with his BM Hunter. We came out fairly strong and won the first six, but then struggled to get two more wins to cap of my Rogue. I think we ended up going 8-8. At the reset on Tuesday, we ran some matches and ended up with a 1-8 record. Not so good, but about what we expected. The humorous part was watching my partner sit there and not use his defensive abilities because he was waiting for a heal. Priceless! On a side note, quite a few of the matches were lost because I do not have the trinket to break CC effects on my Rogue. Bad PVPer! Bad!

The guild has finally decided to start doing some raiding in Cataclysm and so I have been devoting Friday evenings to healing for the BWD runs. We are seeing good runs each week. The only down side is with raiding on only one day for a couple hours, you really have to make that time count. That is where we struggle. The first week in, we downed Magmaw on only a few attempts. I was actually surprised at the success. Then eventually, after fifteen thousand breaks for various reasons, we one shot the Omnotron. We then proceeded to eventually check out a couple other bosses, but lost too much momentum to random breaks. The second week, we went in and was a little bit more focused and downed four of the bosses in BWD. We did have a third week, but we were missing some members due to personal reasons and so it was more of a let's go in and goof off kind of run. We had fun and people got gear and seemed to be enjoying it. All and all it is working out well for shaking off some raiding rust. Hopefully over the remainder of this month we will return to our fine form of previous raid teams.

The only other thing I have been doing with WoW is messing with my Hunter. Basically if someone asks me to run a random with them, I give them my Hunter. When I am bored I log on him and some random BG's, which have been God awful. Now that is a topic that I may look to explore in the future. Anyway, I have leveled my Hunter to 84, but have no real plans to play him on a serious level.

Something I did do just recently was reactivate my Star Trek Online account. I had read some stuff about the Foundry and a few other things that made me curious. I really enjoyed the time I spent in the game yesterday. Although I did delete my character because the game had changed so much from a year ago. The thing I really have enjoyed the most is the player created missions found in the Foundry. There have been some seriously annoying ones, but the majority of them have been well written and founded very solidly on the lore of Star Trek. By the by, if you play STO send me a shout because I literally know no one in the game.

So in my absence from here, what have you all been doing? Anyone dabbling with a new class or new game? Maybe an old game has drawn you back in?

Back!

So I had recently been suffering from system issues that knocked my computer clean out! (Look for a weekend post probably about that!) At any rate, I have recovered the system and have it running nice and smooth and figured I would share what I have been up to recently:

That is a Twin Peaks battle that resulted in the Alliance only managing one single kill for the entire fight. Let me zoom that picture in for you!

Since my system melt down, I have only configured four of my characters and have been spending a lot of time with my Rogue, Whoopy, lately. I have never been a huge lover of any melee classes, but I decided to give Whoopy another look since I was enjoying my Warrior, Galran, so much. Next thing I know I am running through battlegrounds looking for that one person who will be my new best friend (aka: BG Ganking). I honestly cannot say if I will pursue using Whoopy or not, but it is definitely a lot of fun right now.

If you are wondering I use two Combat specs, one for PVE and PVP. I know it is not recommended, but I am just really comfortable with the spec. I am debating on trying out some of the other builds, but I am a pretty stubborn fellow and will probably just continue playing the spec I know best. That and I hate changing macros and hot keys on characters.

Well, hopefully barring any more issues with my system we will get back on track with posting around here!

The Proper Way To Do Things

A few days ago I came across an article that had some really good information that was presented in a very bad way. To be quite honest, the whole article just rubbed me the wrong way. The best part of this article is that it was about how to be a better writer. I truly wish I had marked the site so I could link to it, but you are just going to have to take my word on things. The heart of the article was a how to piece on becoming a better writer and it really was more focused to the "amateur" set who write blogs. Not my words, but theirs.

I know something like that should not have bothered me, but it did. You see when I write, I try to present things in the same light as I feel about them. Sometimes this will be in a very nice articulate, well rounded thought. Other times it will just be an emotional pile of stuff. No matter what though, it is me. I think that is the thing I didn't like about what this person was presenting. They wanted you to no longer be you, but be them. Be cold and calculating and write to increase readership in order to capitalize on the opportunities that come from having a larger reader base.

Maybe I view blogging differently than others, but the bloggers whom I admire, are the ones who have a personal touch to their style. What do you all think? Do you like someone who is technical and follows a rigid pattern for their blog or are you like me and like the people who write from their heart or share a part of themselves through their blogs?

Mastery Sucks or Does It?

So I was reading the Holy Paladin thread at Elitist Jerks yesterday, and can I just say that they need to moderate that thread a little. I believe there were two distinct conversations going on, and a few side comments from some folks who had no clue what was going on. Of the two conversations, the one that drew me in was a debate about the viability of a Mastery stacking Paladin in a twenty five man raid. It was actually really interesting to read, but extremely confusing to read if you really did not understand the finer points of Paladin healing.

In the end, I do not know if either side gave on their opinions and I do not think it matters, as something like that is going to be very dependent on the overall set up of your healing team, which was a very valid and recurring point in that thread. Another thing I would point to with most of the forums there, is that the majority of the stats are coming from perfect conditions that many of us, the average players, are not going to have in our own raid teams. So why are the resources like these so popular? They are popular because they provide you with a clear cut goal of what could be.

Quite often, if you really read an entire thread at places like that, you will discover that there are a very strict set of conditions that must be met in order to obtain those results. Usually this will involve variables that you may not always be able to control such as a proc occurring at the right moment, having a specific class present with the perfect build or perfect timing for an ability that is needed for your perfect heal.

So what is this post all about? Am I bashing on places like that? Hell to the no! I am constantly going there and a few other sites to review builds and check in for new concepts in order to improve my own game play. No, what I am saying is that you really need to make sure that you truly understand the entirety of what is being said and not just the last page or two of a thread. I bring this up because I have seen far too many people who like to throw out links and tell people they are playing incorrectly, when in fact they are probably playing correctly for their own conditions. Knowledge is power, but ignorance is bliss.

Holy Paladin DPS?

I saved this post for a weekend because it is more a behind the scenes kind of thing, but one I found amusing and thought I would share. I rarely look at numbers that much in regards to my blog. Yes, I care if someone is showing up and reading what I am writing, but it is not an obsession. I typically look at the blog's stats on a weekly to bi-monthly basis. This means basically when I get bored and nothing else crosses my mind to do. So a few days ago I was looking over the numbers and I decided to take a peek and see what sites were referring people here. Thank you to HolyPaladin.net for being the number one referrer! Go check out the site as they have a great list of Paladin blogs! Okay, now that the cheap pop is over (wrestling reference) let's get back to the point of this post shall we?

So I went below the referring sites section and I saw a list of key words that were used to search for something that led people to this blog. Naturally there were the words "Holy" and "Shock", but there was one phrase that just tickled me: Holy Paladin DPS. So for the person who found Holy Shock by searching for Holy Paladin DPS, let me be clear in saying that we are incapable of doing any serious DPS in current PVE content and our role in PVP is to apply key pressure at precisely timed moments in order to get a kill. The Shockadin build, as much as I loved it, is a build that will only get you ridiculed and spoken down to. We have been fortunate to have fun with different versions of the build at different times during WoW, but it is not something that you want to put any serious time into. Trust me, others have tried to make it work and they will tell you that it is just not viable.

Sorry, I had to make sure that we were clear on that. Another funny thing I noticed is that during the history of Holy Shock, we have had a decent amount of referrals from sites that talk about making money, selling inexpensive furniture, and my personal favorite... a sex health blog. I am not linking the sites because I personally cannot vouch for them being clean and viable sites. It really is funny to see how people find your site. If you haven't looked at this information, then I would encourage you to do so. If you have, then have you found any funny referring sites or search words?

Burning Crusade Burned Me!

So I have been sitting here trying to formulate my thoughts around talking about my experiences recently in Burning Crusade heroics and unfortunately no matter how hard I try, everything keeps coming out negative! It is not negative about the instance design, but the random players I had in 75% of the dungeons I ran. At first I started thinking that I was being too harsh. One bad apple ruining the bunch sort of thing, right? Wrong!

I have to be honest here and say that it was not bad tanks who annoyed me. Actually I was pleasantly surprised that the crop of tanks who are coming up were taking time to mark things and ask questions if they did not know the run. Believe it or not, but it wasn't the DPS who annoyed me either! Do not get me wrong, there were a few folks who struggled but they said up front they had never done the instances before. No, the group that I am glaring at is the healers! At one point, after having died to trash in heroic Mechanar, I wished that I had a healer in that range to log on and provide relief to the groups who were being subjected to very bad healing.

So I have to ask the community, is this how it always is? Do you guys encounter this sort of thing as well or is it just my random luck?