Holy Shock

Still Here

2011-12-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

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!

2011-10-26T08:00:00.003-04:00

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

2011-10-21T08:00:00.001-04:00

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!

2011-08-10T09:30:00.000-04:00

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!

2011-07-25T09:53:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-16T09:10:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-07-12T09:29:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-07-09T03:23:00.000-04:00

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!

2011-07-06T09:37:00.000-04:00

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?

Happy 4th of July!

2011-07-04T09:10:00.002-04:00

Wishing everyone here in the states a happy fourth of July! Be safe out there today people!

Strange, But True

2011-07-02T09:20:00.002-04:00

I have discovered that I love playing a Warrior! One of my oldest characters is actually a Warrior named Galran. He was actually the character who originally set up the guild charter for MAS. I chose him because back in the day, my main and the majority of my alts were already in a guild that was stable. My selection of Galran to start MAS was because I despised playing my Warrior! Now over the years I had picked him up here and there, but always ended the attempts at leveling him (and other Warriors) after very short periods of time.

Something has changed though and I would love to say it was completely Blizzard, but the major change is in myself as a player. When I first started playing WoW, I turned with my keys, did not know anything about using hot keys, and would never have dreamed of attempting to use a macro; however, over time I have learned to move with my mouse, become extremely comfortable with my hot keys (and binding abilities to my mouse), and definitely have learned a thing or two about macros (not a pro, but not a nub). Basically, I have grown up as a gamer!

You see my biggest issue with Warriors (and most melee classes) was that I felt slow in responding to things. So this left me disliking the melee classes for the most part. I would say for me it was a gradual progression. I wanted to become a better healer and not just be reliant and point and click reflex healing or being stuck with being a bot healer. So I started experimenting with some rarely used abilities that could be useful in certain situations. I would set these up as hot keys, and then look for the opportunity to use them. This then led me to exploring macros to combine abilities. I am not sure if this was because I was a lazy player or because I wanted to better myself.

Then one day I decided I wanted to level my Rogue. This made me really start looking at how my key binds were laid out in relation to when and how I might use certain abilities. It was during this time I was talking with one of the Rogues in my guild and they mentioned that they bound their two most common abilities right on their mouse wheel. They would simply scroll up or down to activate the move they desired. I decided that I would try this and so I began experimenting with some pretty crazy and often times funny bindings onto my mouse.

All of that has brought me to a point where I feel really much more at ease playing my Warrior. Am I the best Warrior out there? Hell no! I am, however, having fun with my Warrior for the first time in a long time. I am definitely still learning and studying the class as I am leveling, but it is definitely a lot better than I remember. So how about you all, any classes that as you have grown as a player you have decided to give another look at it?

Shoo Crickets!

2011-06-30T09:02:00.002-04:00

So much to discuss and so little time! So by now I am sure everyone is knee deep in 4.2 stuff! I know for the last two days, I have spent probably 75% of my WoW time running random dungeons (both regular and heroic) in order to test out the changes to the Holy tree. I have to admit that it felt really, really good. Now I will admit that my group completely overpowered the regular dungeons, but baby steps right? In the regular dungeons, I cast whatever I wanted, however much I wanted and never noticed a drain on my mana. At one point I dared my arena partner to pull down four sets of mobs and that was the only time I heard my low mana warning go off. Pretty damn impressive really.

So, I kicked it up a notch and went into heroics on day two. Now I did go in again with a group that was pretty solid. Not quite as strong in terms of balance and skill, but still pretty damn good. First run out of the gate was heroic GB! I will not lie that my heart sunk just a little bit. Honestly though, on the mobs that were dealt with properly (think utilizing CC), I did not even flinch in terms of mana consumption. On the mobs that we just zerged into on purpose or accident, it really didn't bother my mana either. On the bosses, I did notice that my mana was used a little more than I am accustomed to. I dealt with it easily enough by timing my arcane torrent (love my Blood Elf racial!) with my trinket (go go spirit increasing trinkets) and the sporadic use of Divine Plea. DO NOT FORGET TO JUDGE FOR CHEAP MANA. All and all I am happy with the mana change.

The flip side to this increase in mana cost is that Blizzard returned to us the ability for Beacon of Light to provide 100% of Holy Light to pass through to the target of our Beacon of Light. In other words kids, we are healing two people for the cost of one (at least for Holy Light). To be quite honest, that should cut down on the heavy use of Flash of Light and Divine Light. In my experience, I rely on the larger (more expensive) heals because I fall behind when having to heal Joe the Warlock who doesn't try to avoid Blitzkrieg (sorry Warlocks, but I was in a run with one of your kind who ate 90% of all Blitzkriegs!). Now when Joe stands his ground, I can spare a Holy Light or two in an attempt to keep him in the game.

I wish I could try out the PVP side of things, but my partners were not on and I did not really feel up to doing the Wargames alone. (If you can even do them alone.) I am assuming that the new season should start this coming week barring any sort of set backs on Blizzard's part. However, if you are looking for some information, then go check out YouTube and watch this video. So what do you guys think of 4.2? Angry? Happy? Could care less either way because you said eff it and started playing some other game?

Guild Entry

2011-06-25T09:58:00.000-04:00

Blizzard's guild finder tool is quite a great idea, but it rather rough around the edges. We currently have twenty-four people who have expressed interest in joining the guild. The problem is that we are not always on to talk with the people about joining the guild. We attempt to reach out via the in-game mail system, but it feels so cold. What I would like to see is a form of communication that is set up via the tool itself. Among the options would preferably be a way to actually invite members when they are not signed in. Just a thought on a way to make life simpler. I wonder if anyone has found a way to use this system effectively?

It Is Finished!

2011-06-23T09:27:00.000-04:00

That right there is the end of a years worth of work. Well, more like three years, but I am not counting the first two because I disliked achievements back then. I went this morning and purchased 35 juggling torches to complete the final achievement for the Midsummer Fire Festival. It took quite a bit of juggling to get all 40 done in fifteen seconds, but with some patience and the ability to drum roll like a heavy metal drummer, I completed the task and watched as achievements started popping on my screen!

Now adding my Violet Proto Drake to my collection led to me finally completing my 100 mount achievement! Thus I added the Red Dragonhawk to my collection as well. I know I have red a lot of people complain about having the simple dragonhawk model as our 100 mount achievement, but I like it. All I have left is one Hawkstrider and I have every Blood Elf mount in the game! Go Team Blood Elf!!!

Oh and now I can fly really fast! Yes, I was cheap and waited six months in order to get the 310% flight because I knew I could get it for free.

A Post Missed

2011-06-22T09:06:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I had a post scheduled, or at least I thought so. Instead I marked it as draft and so nothing came out yesterday. My apologies, but it was more of a filler post and I shall leave it in a draft status for the time being. That having been said, anyone else notice that the Midsummer Fire Festival has started? For me, this is an important event this year. It is the final holiday achievement for Ruhtra to get for the What A Long Strange Trip It's Been meta achievement. I stayed up last night, later than I should have, flying all over Azeroth and Outland to knock out as many achievements for the holiday meta achievement as I could.

Is that not a gorgeous shot? It looks amazing in HD, simply amazing! Anyway, I managed to sneak into all of the Alliance capitals with nary a shot fired at me, except for the Exodar. That has to be the single worst city design I have ever seen. I charged into it on my Mechanohog, since sneaking wasn't an option, and made my way straight to the Draenei's bond fire. I was covered in guards and so I resorted to something I rarely do... bubbled! I then grabbed the fire and ran like hell. May I say that being in Prot spec with a mixture of PVP gear and tanking gear saved my life.

I felt bad on the way out because I saw two Horde Hunters going the wrong way below and they were being chased by a mob of guards. My assisting them though would have killed us all and so I decided to just make my way out the exit. Bubble plus Lay on Hands immediately upon being permitted to cast it is a winning combination!

So as I sit here right now, all I have left to do is juggle 40 torches in Dalaran and the long achievement chain is over! Oh and so is the collecting of 100 mounts! Have to love multi-tasking complex achievements right? Oh, and if you are working on the Seeker title for doing 3,000 quests, then make sure and do the honoring/extinguishing of fires as each fire counts towards your quest achievement as well.

Should Kids Play WoW?

2011-06-20T09:41:00.005-04:00

I was reading the forums the other day and I came across a post that asked if anyone knew of any add-ons that would assist with making WoW more child friendly. He stated that he had disabled all but a handful of chat features (things such as general, say, and trade). It was an interesting forum post to read as so many people had so much to say about it. The comments ranged from him being a bad parent to it being great that the family wanted to play together. So it made me start to think about when is the appropriate age to play Wow?

So let's take a look at what the biggest fears of allowing children to play are:

Addicted
Exposed to Inappropriate Material
Unhealthy

These were the three most common complaints brought up in the forum post that had valid points to them. So let's examine these three fears a little more closely.

Addiction is a legitimate concern with WoW. There are countless articles and reports that have been done on the subject. So is there a danger to a child exposed to WoW at an early age becoming addicted to it? I think that there could be, but it is the parents responsibility in this situation to not utilize WoW as a substitution for their attention. In other words, the parents must make sure to maintain a healthy mixture of activities in the child's life. Is it unhealthy to have a child doing sports? I think we would all say no, that sports are extremely healthy. What about when it is the driving force in someone's life? Why do you think that we see people who will risk their health in order to take "performance enhancing drugs"? They do this because they want to be the best. They are driven to excel and when they reach their own physical limitations, they then resort to utilizing these substances to take them beyond their own limits. Why do they risk it all? They risk it all because at the very root of the issue is that they are addicted. Not just addicted to the actual drugs, but rather to the feeling they are getting from the drugs. Naturally we could substitute any sort of drug into this, but addiction comes in many different forms and not just in a little pill.

The second legitimate argument was in relation to the content of the game and if it is appropriate for young children? This is something that is mildly concerning due to the mild language that is used in some of the narratives during some the newer quest lines that take place in locations like Silverpine Forest. While there is not much that you can do in these situations to lesson the impact, I have to ask if we are so naive that we do not believe that our children are going to hear this kind of language elsewhere? If anything, the language found in WoW is not nearly as bad as when we are just scanning cable channels looking for something to watch. Let us not forget about the older kids in school who find it cool to use language that we adults deem to be improper. Also, we should remember that perhaps not everyone views certain phrases and words to be offensive and so their children may be using this language already. So while we want to think that we live in a perfect world, I think we need to face the facts and actually start to listen to the sounds going on all around us.

Others associated this second concern also with the community which has several individuals on every realm who enjoy spewing as much inappropriate material in the general and trade channels as possible. To me, I do not worry so much about the issue of the community since Blizzard provides the tools to be able to turn off any number of the communication channels. This will effectively remove the community at large as an issue, but I felt it worth noting here at least.

The last major point of concern that I felt presented in this discussion was the question of is it healthy to let a young child play WoW? I think the simplistic answer to this question is that it is as healthy as you make it. If you play it, or allow a child to play it, all the time with no other activity, then it is completely unhealthy. However, if you limit your child to just a couple hours a week, then you are in fact teaching the child to develop a healthy habit out of playing all video games.

I think after having spent some time truly thinking on this subject the answer comes down to creating a balance in a child's life. Too much of anything is unhealthy in my opinion. I have spent the time thinking about this subject because my son has expressed an interest in playing WoW with us as well. To this point we have not allowed him to do anything more than mess with my wife's Hunter in Dalaran. We have decided though to use the ability to play WoW as a reward for behaving good throughout the course of the week. I sat down with my son on Father's Day and together we created a character especially for him. We explained that if he behaves throughout the course of the week, then on Saturday we will permit him to play WoW for an hour with us. As he gets older and is able to comprehend things better, we will then look to expand the time he is permitted to play throughout the course of the week. So what are your thoughts on this subject? Good, bad, or non-issue?

P.S.: I will not be noting the name of my son's character.

Technical Stuff... Sorta

2011-06-18T09:05:00.020-04:00

So I have come to the realization that not many people actually read blogs on the weekend. This is not going to stop me from blogging on the weekends, but I may use the weekend as the days where I post the stuff that I think some of you may not find very interesting. Now this doesn't mean that all of the posts will be mindless dribble of nothingness, but instead may sometimes focus on the more technical side of things. While I do not consider myself to be a great web page designer or technical guru, I have learned a few things along the way that may be of some use to some people. That is a long way to say that on Saturdays, Holy Shock may not be the read for everyone.

At any rate, I did want to point out that I have started working on a list of my characters! I prefer to use signature generation sites simply because I am lazy and they save me time. I previously was using zebit.com (I think that was their name), but they recently switched how their signatures work and quite frankly I do not like it. So I pulled up old Google and did some searches and came across a site that is ran by Guild Launch (the people who help some guilds create websites). The name of their website for signatures is called Sig Launch (go figure right?). Now they claim that they automatically update your character as you level and your stats change, but I cannot guarantee this to be correct as I just recently came across it. It does generate the signatures in several formats so that you should be able to use it just about anywhere. It is extremely easy to use and takes next to no time to generate a code for your character(s).

The one thing you may have to do, as I did, is adjust the height and width of the signature. I will show you how I did this in hopes that maybe it can save you some time if you are not the world's most tech savvy person. So when you first generate a code, it will turn out like this:

img src="http://sigcdn.siglaunch.com/sigs/wow/8/1/5/6/2/4581562cdNDh.png" border="0" (I removed the < and > at the begging and end of the code so it does not display the banner.)

This is one that I just created for Ruhtra. In order for me to fit it here on the blog, I needed to add some restrictions to it. The code that was generated however does not have the necessary structure to do this and so I had to add a little extra on it. So I replaced the section that says:

border="0"

with:

style="border: 0; height: 95; width: 425px;" /

Which gave me a perfect looking box that lines up evenly with everything on that side of the page. Now if you need to play with the height or the width, then you simply replace the 95 or 425 with whatever numbers you think would be necessary. It is more of a trial and error for me, but I figured I would share with you guys how I got that to line up so nicely. I hope this didn't confuse you more than help you.

One Day I May Quit... Not Today!

2011-06-17T09:53:00.001-04:00

It seems like every day I am posting up another mount that I have added to my collection, and today is no different. Today I present to you the Sunreaver Hawkstrider!

I am now only missing one Hawkstrider (that I am aware of) to complete owning every Hawkstrider in the game that I can obtain. I do not know why, but part of me finds it important to have all of the racial mounts for the races that I play. Do you find this odd? Do you have any quirks that you have in WoW?

Holy Smoke!

2011-06-16T09:04:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday nights, my guild has been running what we refer to as retro raids. I started this a while back so people could get to see older content that they never had the experience of seeing for whatever reason. I also started it as a way for myself and those achievement hunters in the guild to go after the achievements that we want. The very first thing we do every week is go out and zerg OS. We do this so that every member in the guild can acquire the Black Drake if they so choose. I am not gonna pretend to be a saint. I have organized this simply for the chance to get the drake myself. That selfishness paid off last night as I added mount number 98 to the collection!

Typically after this we go and hit up Onyxia's Lair as well. We have not even seen the drake drop yet from there, but perseverance is the key to mount hunting. This week we stopped by and kicked the snot out of Malygos as well. He did not relinquish any of his mounts, so I imagine we will head back there again as well.

The Cow Throwing It Down!

2011-06-14T09:26:00.000-04:00

So last night I was feeling a slight bit burned out on running stuff with Ruhtra. So I did the daily quest to try and get my white polar bear mount, did the argent tourney dailies for more tokens to eventually get another mount from there, and then I ran some 2v2 arena with my partner to cap my points for the week. Now at this point in the season, I am just collecting the conquest tokens to turn in and buy some PVP gear for my Prot build. I doubt very seriously that I will ever use the gear in a serious manner, but it is a nice comfort having it on while doing dailies and what not. After all that I decided I wanted a change of pace and so enter the cow!

I switched to Holeycow and decided that I would run a couple of random dungeons and work on acquiring some new gear for him. Now my goal with the cow is to get him geared for PVE first and then PVP second. So I queued up for my first run and got a pretty good group. Well, everyone was good except for this one Death Knight. Why is it always the Death Knights? So we are in the Lost City of Tolvir (?) and we get to the second mob which is the individual mob that does the Shamanesque (?) type earthquake move. The poor DK stands in it and proceeds to die. Yes, I still refuse to heal stupid. So after we finish the mob, I apologize for not healing the guy and rez him. Well, I tried to rez him, but he didn't take the rez. I asked him if he got the rez and he tells us he is on a two minute timer. Really? I couldn't help but laugh to myself. He eventually rezes and then we proceed to the first boss.

The tank had whispered me and said I was being extremely nice to the DK at this point and I responded with some jokes and we started in on the boss. Things were going smooth for everyone but the DK who stood in every AoE that the boss had to offer and promptly died because of this. We waited for him to run back in to us and I mentioned to him that he may want to move out of any spell that pops underneath him as the nasty stuff was killing him. Remarkably he didn't get mad at me for making the suggestion. He did end up needing to go and get his gear repaired and that took him quite some time to do. He finally managed to find someone to fix his gear and he returned to us. He actually managed to stay alive on the croc boss, but made sure to make up for it by going out in the second phase of the next boss. I do not know why, but he decided to stand in the bosses AoE and die rather than do what everyone else did. I covered for him some by dropping my elemental totems and popping bloodlust.

At this point I figured this guy was either new or trolling us. Either way, I just wanted to get done. So one the last boss I made sure to tell him to kill the adds and then let him know when it was okay to attack the boss. We completed the run and no one had died except the poor DK. So at his point I really do not know if this guy was really that bad or just trolling. Either way it made for a fun night of laughing at the many ways he found to die. I can say though that he killed he my desire to heal any more dungeons last night. I retreated to the relative safety of Backyard Monsters on Facebook.

So you guys had any runs like that? Where someone was so bad it was just funny?

Finally

2011-06-13T09:46:00.000-04:00

So after quite some time of farming fairly regularly, the boys over in Magister's Terrace finally convinced their boss to give me the damn bird!

So this leaves me now to move on and start focusing on the Barron's mount more closely and the Blue Proto Drake. This also puts me 3 mounts shy from 100!

Holy Talk

2011-06-11T09:04:00.000-04:00

Well, I finally forced myself to take a look at the patch notes currently available for 4.2 (updated 6/10) and I am really not happy or mad. I am somewhere in the middle, which is where my feelings have been about the game overall since Cataclysm's launch. This is largely due to the constant barrage of quick fixes, nerfs, buffs, and patches that have since followed. Unfortunately, I think this is going to be the way it is for this expansion and we might as well just learn to live with it. Alright that is enough of that. Let's get into some patch notes specifically focused on our favorite class spec, the Holy Paladin!

So the very first thing I see is that they are increasing every healing spell we have by a few percentage points, except Holy Shock. This fits in with their desire to have healers be more selective of what heals we are using for certain situations. I really do not care about this one too much because my mana regeneration has been so good during this expansion that I do not think I will mind it too much. That and I would rather have them mess with my mana than an outright actual nerf to the amount we heal.

Moving on we see that Beacon of Light can no longer be dispelled, but wait... what is this? It is now going to transfer 100% of Holy Light to our beaconed target? In my own opinion, that is the single greatest thing that Blizzard could have done. Yes, I am greedy and would like to see them return it to its former glory of all heals going through, but at least it will now work for the spell that many Paladins use as the spam heal. Very good news and I cannot wait to get out there and see what effect it truly has. My guess is that it will make life a little bit easier for us!

The change to Denounce is pretty much useless for PVE. As trying to DPS as a Holy Paladin simply will not work at 85 due to the lack of scaling for our class. In terms of PVP, it is slightly interesting, but honestly how many Paladins are taking these talents? I have messed around with different builds in an attempt to incorporate the talents that provide me with a little punch, but have come to the conclusion I would rather take talents that simply help my overall healing. So again, it is interesting, but unless they come out and try to make Holy a viable caster DPS spec then I feel it is just wasted talents.

Now the change that was added in specifically for this most recent update, as it appears in red, is in relation to our mastery. For me personally, I have avoided mastery rating like it was the black plague. With this change it makes me somewhat curious as to the overall effect it will have. If you have not read the patch notes for this one I will post it for you here:

Illuminated Healing (Mastery) has been adjusted slightly so that if a paladin refreshes an existing copy of his or her own Illuminated Healing on a target, the new absorption amount will be added into the old absorption amount and the duration will be reset. The total absorption created can never exceed 1/3 of the casting paladin's health.

It sounds really nice and it makes it seem like it will add up to be quite a large amount when you see that it cannot exceed 1/3 o the casting Paladin's health. The problem is that in the higher end content, a lot of the damage coming out will eat your little absorption before you get a chance to stack another one it. Do not get me wrong. It is a nice start, but I do not think that in a lot of PVE situations that it will be as useful as it appears. Now I could be wrong, but I think it is one of those changes where it sounds much cooler than it actually will be.

In terms of PVP, I think it can be used to a slight advantage for the right type of team in arena. What I mean is that if we start healing before the match begins, then we have a good chance of building up the absorption to the maximum level and all we have to do is simply spam our strongest heals once we have our partner(s) buffed up. That could provide a nice little buffer and make certain comps approach teams with Holy Paladins on slightly different. I do not think this is a make or break change, but I do think it is interesting and I look forward to playing around with this change on my own arena teams. (I sometimes feel sorry for my partners as they are just giant guinea pigs!)

The Infusion of Light change is a nice one if not abused. I say it that way because if we abuse that and cast Flash of Light at the speed of light too often, then we will find ourselves in a sad place very, very quickly. I say it that way because as I have ran on some alts that were not healers, I have come across quite a few Paladins who flirt with running out of mana becuase they are using Flash of Light far too often.

The changes to Speed of Light are interesting. Triggering it off of Divine Protections, as well as Holy Radiance is going to be extremely useful for Paladins in both PVP and PVE. After all, more PVE situations now cause us to move and we are always running for our lives in PVP. To me it is a minor change, but one that can improve our quality of life. Oh and let us not forget that we can hit Holy Radiance more often as well!

The last change listed is the one regarding Walk In The Light. This one is nice because it is boosting Word of Glory by 30% in addition to what it has done since they rolled out the new talent trees for Cataclysm. I use Word of Glory as often as I can and I welcome any increase in healing to any of my spells.

So there you go. I think a lot of what they are doing with the Holy tree is interesting to say the least. To me it is a lot of experimentation with tweaking minor things in order to see if it helps improve the overall feel of the spec right now. The increases in mana cost for our hard cast spells would be significant if they were not providing us with so many minor changes. As I looked at each one individually I was not overly impressed. It was when I started thinking about the overall picture that I felt much better. We get more healing off our beacon now, we are much more mobile with being able to get our speed boost off of Holy Radiance and Divine Protection. They reduced the mana cost of Holy Shock, which feeds us Holy Power and that in turns allows us to cast Word of Glory which will now be healing for 30% more. It is a give and take change, but one that I think offers us a lot more for a few percentage points of mana.

I think of all the changes they have talked about up till now, the one I could care less about is going to be in regards to mastery. In my opinion, I would still take haste first, crit second, and if all else fails then mastery. I know a lot of people have made suggestions about how to better utilize the Paladin's mastery rating and I too have my own opinion. I would personally like to see them scrap the absorption concept and have mastery allow an extra percentage of heals from all of our spells to pas through to the target of our Beacon of Light. The percentages would have to be carefully set up to not allow this to become too overpowered, but I feel it would be a better overall boost to our healing and also fit much better in with the perception of the class versus an absorption. I do not work at Blizzard though and therefore I have no say so, but a guy can dream can't he?

So what about the patch has you excited or scared? Any nerfs to your class that makes you want to reroll?

Minor Additions

2011-06-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

I hope everyone is having a good end to their week! This post is more of a quick note of a couple minor changes I have made to the blog. The first one I wanted to point out is that I finally enabled all of the old posts from Holy Shock. Most of the information in these posts are severely out of date, but it may be fun to go through and read some old posts every now and then. I was reading a few of them last night and I couldn't help but chuckle at some of the first few I had written and also at some of the more colorful posts from Rather when he was writing here as well. Anyway, feel free to browse through them for a good laugh!

Another addition to the blog is the little link that I have on the right side with our Minecraft server information. I am a huge lover of Minecraft and a few of us from MAS have a great server and we are always willing to add more folks to it. I believe right now it is smaller with only eight slots, but if you love Minecraft and have been looking for a multi-player server to dabble in, then feel free to get in touch with me here through the blog and I will be happy to talk with you about that.

One thing I have not added yet is a list of blogs that I read. Part of my apprehension with this is that I read a wide variety of blogs. Some of which I really do not agree with, but I find interesting to see what things may (or may not) be of importance to them. I also do not want to get into one of those situations where I link someone's blog because they read mine and vice-versa. So for now, I have chosen to not list any. This will change in time I promise. Along those lines, if you know a great blogger or happen to write your own blog then drop me a line as I am always interested in reading different people's perspectives.

One thing I am debating on doing is adding in the posts from the other blogs that I have dabbled with while away from Holy Shock. There are only a few posts that would be brought over as I never really could stayed horribly focused on blogging when not doing it here. I may or may not do this. It honestly just depends on my own time as that would take a little longer then going under the posting options for this blog.

Well, that is all that I really have for today. Sorry it is a boring day, but I want to keep everyone up on what is going on around here. Even if it is only the mundane maintenance of the site. Don't forget if you know of an interesting blog to drop a comment on here since I am always looking for a good (or bad) read!

Time For Chores...

2011-06-09T09:45:00.003-04:00

Before I get into the post today I just want to take a moment and say that due to some personal turmoil with-in my family, there may be some days where I do not get to post anything up. This is a good thing though as far too often in life we see people put a lot of things in place of their family and friends. Also, do not worry about me. It does not directly effect me, but in life I have learned to make sure and be available for family and friends when they need you. Even those black sheep that we all have.

Now moving on to some other things. I wanted to talk just a little bit today about a limitation that has been in this game for a very long time that needs to be removed in my opinion. What am I referring to? I am talking about the limit of only twenty-five daily quests per day. Stop and think about how many dailies there currently are that are available to do. For example, many of our professions (both primary and secondary) have daily quests associated with them. On Ruhtra, I only do the JC daily personally. Now often times I will also do the Deepholm dailies because I am still trying to pick up the achievements for rescuing our little buddy and beating up that evil Glop family! Now we throw in the mix that I am still attempting to get my White Polar Bear mount and we have another one from there. I am still working on collecting all of the Argent Tournament mounts, vanity pets, and tabards as well. Is anyone keeping track of all these dailies yet? Well, lock down the number because it grows huge when we throw in the dailies for TB!

You get my point right? There are a TON of daily quests to do that have a lot of beneficial rewards attached to them. Now granted most of those rewards do not affect the current content yet. However, if you read the latest water cooler post from the Blizzard development team, then you know that they are planning to add in a ton of dailies to the game going forward. Which by the way is completely awesome and I encourage everyone to check out the article and the quests on the PTR! Some really awesome stuff there. The point remains that I think Blizzard should consider lifting the twenty five daily quest limit, or at least up the limit by five for each expansion which would give us the ability to do forty daily quests.

So what do you all think? Am I wrong in this thought or do you think Blizzard should increase the number of daily quests that we can do or remove the limitation altogether?

Forced Specs

2011-06-08T09:22:00.001-04:00

Should Blizzard continue to try to balance the classes or should they say enough is enough and make certain class specs just better at PVE or PVP? Just look at the Frost Mage as a prime example. The class is tremendous in PVP situations. They have great control, strong burst, and really good survivability; however, in PVE situations when compared to an Arcane Mage they fall short of reaching the same level of damage over the course of an entire fight. So my question is why not just draw the line in the sand and declare that this class spec is for PVP and that class spec is for PVE?

I may be completely alone on this thought, but I remember a day when not every class was able to do everything. I remember the day when balance was directed towards each faction having similar abilities and classes, but not exactly the same thing. Remember those days before the Alliance had Shaman and the Horde had Paladins? Now I will say straight up that Blizzard has never said that X class should only be doing PVP, but they never use to have to spend so much time in a vain attempt to balance every class to make them viable in some fashion or form to both PVE and PVP.

I do see them getting closer to drawing that line in he sand though now. There have been several posts that have asked why does my class (Boomkin, Hunters, etc.) suck in arena? The response from Blizzard was basically informing these individuals that while they do suck in arena, they are doing quite well in rated battlegrounds. In other words, X class is much better doing this than doing that.

I think what prevents them from doing something of this nature is the community itself. Whenever a minor change is noted in the PTR notes, the forums light up calling it the end of the known world and all the rest of the wonderful posts that we have all come to know and love (NOT!) So just imagine if in patch 4.x, Blizzard would announce that due to the feedback from the community around balance that the ______, ______, _______, & ______ classes would now only be effective in PVP! There would be mass rioting in the streets... Even if the classes named were the ones that were currently being used primarily for PVP. So instead, Blizzard very quietly continues to make subtle changes to certain classes that will endure them to be used for PVP purposes while trying to feign that they are making all classes balanced to do all things. After all didn't they say bring the player and not the class?

So what do you all think? Would you like if one day you woke up and Blizzard said that Survival Hunters were now the only Hunter who could PVP with any sort of success? How would you feel if they said screw you Boomkins, you are for PVE only?

Enchanting Argument

2011-06-07T09:05:00.000-04:00

Should enchanters continue to be forced to disenchant items for groups that they are running with? This is a question, nay I say argument, that has been going on for some time. On one side you have the camp of the non-enchanters who say that enchanting is a double-dipping profession. This basically means that they can both gather and craft with one profession which thus allows them to pick up a second profession for even greater profit. On the other side is the enchanting camp who claims they are having a hard time gathering materials to level their enchanting and once leveled are losing out on materials to help cover the cost of their profession. Now both sides have a very valid argument, but which side's argument affects the game more?

My opinion is that Blizzard should remove the automatic disenchanting feature from the random groups. In my mind it does not make sense why we force one profession to offer their services for free, but allow all other professions to reap the full benefits of theirs with no consequence. For example, in Ulduar there were plenty of scrap bots that could be broken down by an engineer. In both Wrath and Cataclysm there are multiple elemental bosses who can be mined. Let us not forget that there are the occasional nodes that appear as well for miners. Also on the thought of the elementals, some of these can be looted by herbalist as well. Do not even get me started on the skinners out there who slow groups down because they are skinning every animal they come across in the instances. That being said, Rogues and Blacksmiths are not required to use their services for the lock boxes that drop during runs either. Yet for some reason, Blizzard demands that the enchanters provide their service free of charge.

It use to be the belief that enchanters needed to offer this service because they held a monopoly on the enchanting materials and thus the enchants as well. I have to pose the question though to the majority of the player base, do you really not have a character who can (dis)enchant? I mean I know that for the time I have been playing that I have managed to have all professions covered and have a few key professions (such as enchanting) covered multiple times. So I have to wonder, is this an argument simply for the sake of an argument?

The only valid reason that I can think of to keep this system as is to prevent ninja disenchanting (?). Basically, a long time ago people would offer to disenchant items for you. Upon receiving those items, the enchanter would just log off. Now this was always handled easily enough by opening a ticket. You got your item back and the offender took another step up the ladder to being banned. The down side is that it created more work for the Blizzard staff. A simple solution to this is to simply configure the disenchanting to work similar to how enchanting works. The person requesting a disenchantment would need to put each item individually in the bottom trade window. Upon disenchantment, the enchanting materials would automatically go into the item owner's bag and a small tip could be traded if agreed upon. There we go. End of the issue of ninja disenchanting (?)!

Now I realize there are far more pressing matters with-in WoW right now, but this is something that is constantly coming back up and could have a seemingly simple fix, or does it? What say you out there? Is there something that we enchanters are not seeing? Is there some sort of benefit or advantage of this system being removed? If you think so then feel free to drop a comment with your opinions!

The Great Debate

2011-06-06T09:27:00.002-04:00

I was reading a forum post today that was discussing (or trying to) the aspects of moving with your mouse versus moving with your keyboard. This led to more posts that started to discuss the concept of using key bindings instead of clicking on abilities. This got me thinking about the two distinct styles of play and why some prefer one over the other. I think for most people it comes down to what they plan to do in the game. For example, if you just log on and run some random battlegrounds or dungeons, then you may not really see a difference between the two styles. However, if you plan to play at a high level of end-game play in either ranked PVP or true progression raiding, then you will definitely see a difference between the two styles.

So what is the difference in the two styles really? The style that people refer to as keyboard turning is where you are utilizing your keyboard to move. This typically is accompanied by using your mouse to click on abilities that you have set up on your ability bar in-game. The other style is where you are using your mouse to move and have your abilities set to certain keys on your keyboard. Now, there are also combinations of these two styles, but for the sake of time we are only going to look at the two basic styles.

So why do people view using key binds to be superior to clicking? The easiest answer is that pressing a key is much quicker than moving your mouse to select an ability that is set up on your bar. Remember that some of the biggest things that are used to measure your skill is DPS (damage per second) and HPS (heals per second). In other words, seconds are extremely important in this game and the belief is that if you are losing even a half of a second per ability by clicking on it, then this will be costing you a very large amount of damage or healing over the course of an encounter that will last anywhere in the neighborhood of five minutes and up. I like to compare it to a drag race. The difference between the winner and the loser is quite often how quickly they come off that line (barring any sort of mechanical issues).

Now the problem that faces many players who prefer to click is that they are quite often not as mobile because they are using their mouse to select their abilities rather than move their characters. In my opinion this is not as detrimental in PVE as in PVP. In PVE, you are quite often needing to move out of an AoE ability or something of that nature, so you can easily just push the forward key and be clear. So why does this not work in PVP? Quite simply because in PVE, you are doing a scripted fight. In other words, the AI is programmed to use certain abilities and move in certain patterns; whereas in PVP your human opponent may see you step forward and decide to get behind you. With certain classes like Rogues, this will permit them to deal more damage. Also, if your opponent is behind you, how can you fight them back? The real problem then becomes that if you are using your keyboard to turn, then you must wait for the character to slowly change its direction. With using a mouse, you simply need to flick your wrist and you are facing the opposite direction. In truth it just boils down to shaving off a few seconds in your reaction time. (Drag racing anyone?)

I think that over time, players naturally begin to change their play style and adapt based upon what they are doing. Most people who do any sort of serious PVP will begin to utilize key bindings and movement with their mouse because it really does matter in your response times. I think that PVE is a slight bit more forgiving because you are doing a scripted encounter that if given enough time you would be able to memorize where you should be, which will then allow you to compensate how long it will take you to be somewhere at any given time. My own personal play style is to use my mouse for movement, bind some abilities to keys, bind some abilities to the mouse itself, and then just click any miscellaneous abilities that are not used all that often. Do I look down on players who choose to not play the same way I think is best? Absolutely not. How about you guys? Do you hate the thought of a keyboard turner in PVP? Does the mere mention of someone clicking their abilities in PVE make you want to rage?

The Hits, They Keep Coming!

2011-06-05T09:49:00.002-04:00

When it rains, it pours! So yesterday I wrote about how I had managed to get lucky and come across the Time Lost Proto Drake right? After I wrote the article, I began to do my daily routine which is finish my quests for the Argent Tournament and then I run two dungeons for mounts. I know it is weird, but I only do two to avoid burning myself out. So I ran H SH, and low and behold the Raven Lord dropped for me too!

I cannot tell you how happy I am to have managed to get these two really nice mounts in just a few hours of each other. So if you haven't gotten your mounts that you are hoping will drop, then let me just encourage you to hang in there and keep trying for them!

Lady RNG, My Apologies

2011-06-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

So the other day I was talking about mounts and how I have no luck with getting mounts on Ruhtra. I went on to speak evil things about our Fair Lady RNG and she went out of her way to prove me wrong by giving me this:

I honestly could not believe it when it literally spawned right on top of me as I was getting ready to land to do my Argent Tournament daily where you catch the Snobalds! I almost lost it. I had to compose myself real quickly so I flew too it and dropped from above and hit Hand of Reckoning to get its attention and then proceeded to pummel it into submission. The worst part is I had no one to tell. It was early in the morning and everyone in my house was sound asleep. No one was on from my guild either. So I figured why not just hop on here and post about it?

So there you go. Be careful when you bad mouth something because you may just have to turn around and say I am sorry! Oh well, this was an apology that was well worth having to make. Has anything like this ever happened to you guys?

What To Do?

2011-06-03T09:06:00.000-04:00

I have come to the realization that I enjoy leveling alts. I may not enjoy playing them all at end game or PVP, but I enjoy the experience of seeing what life is like on the other side of the tracks so to say. So at this point I am trying to decide what class to level next. Currently I have a Holy/Prot Paladin, Disc/Shadow Priest, Combat Rogue, and Resto/Ele Shaman.

Now I have been on a huge kick here lately of wanting to have one of each type of healing class/spec so it would seem like I would want to either look at a Resto Druid or a Holy Priest. Way back years ago, my current Priest was a Holy one and man was it brutal! I almost want to experience that again, but I could easily respec from Shadow to Holy and have that issue solved. The problem there is I love m Shadow build for when I want to dailies or things of that nature. Although I have to admit that you have decent survivability in Disc it seems like too. I am leaning towards taking one of my Druids and leveling them. I will probably go with a Bal/Resto build simply to take advantage of all the heirloom gear I have and get twice the bank for the buck.

The big trick for me in this expansion is not spending all my time with alts. I have done this in previous expansions and then when we get near the end I feel like I missed out on a lot. So this time around I have been really forcing myself to get on Ruhtra every day and knock out a couple quests that I haven't done yet, run some dungeons for mounts, make sure and do my arena with my partners for their points, and all of those little things. In truth, I am going to try to do this with both Ruhtra and Holeycow so that I have them both in shape for their respected roles.

Speaking of roles, lately I have been really enjoying the tanking side of things. I may consider going full time into tanking for PVE and stay Holy or PVP. It is hard to say. One thing I know is that I am one of the best level 85 tanks you can get for old level 70 content! Ha! What about you guys? We are the point in the expansion where most of our main(s) are geared and where we want them. So what are you doing? Going fishing? Working on achievements? Leveling an alt? Taking a break from WoW until the next major patch drops?

Micro Transactions

2011-06-02T09:47:00.001-04:00

I have to be honest and admit right up front that on Tuesday I purchased two of the Winged Guardian. One was for my main account and the second was for my wife. I found it interesting that when I went to make the purchase, I was somewhere in the twenty-thousand range of the queue. The queue was being processed extremely quickly and so the purchase went smooth with no worries. While I waited I ran and did some dailies to earn some gold for Ruhtra so I could get something accomplished in-game besides shelling out fifty bucks to Blizzard.

It got me thinking to when the Sparkle Pony was released. I remember the outrage and sheer hatred of some people over Blizzard providing a nice mount for a nominal fee. Man there was a lot of raging going on back then. Well, come to think of it, there was a lot of raging today too! Of course this raging was more of the QQ variety since after you purchased the mount you still needed to wait around an fifteen minutes to an hour for Blizzard to process the request. All in all from start to actually mounting the lion was roughly an hour. That is not too shabby.

I also have seen that it looks like we may be getting a themed Diablo style murloc for watching Blizzcon this year. The reaction I saw in the forums tonight was kind of half loving the idea and half not thrilled that we are getting yet another murloc. I personally love the murlocs and cannot wait to get the little fellow. It got me to wondering though about what item they will include with-in their Collector's Edition Diablo III bundle. I expect they will package a little something extra as they did for the Star Craft II Collector's Edition. I guess time will tell.

While I am on the subject of wasting time collecting pets allow me to say that the rare mounts from the old dungeons must simply hate Ruhtra. Every one of my alts that I have played half serious for the last year or so has managed to get the rare mounts that elude me on Ruhtra and it is well over a month now of running MGT and SH with nothing to show for it. My friend, who took two years off, came back and ran maybe a week and got both of them in a matter of days. Oh Lady RNG is a real bitch! Oh well, the side effect to running these two instances is that I take a little extra time and pull every mob in the place and then send the cloth to Emprius to produce Netherweave bags, which still sell really well on good old Daggerspine. So at least I can make a little bit more gold while running this old content.

I would be more aggravated over it if I was being super serious about it, but honestly this gives me something to do. I feel bad for the people who have spent years attempting to get some of these mounts. How about you all? Is there anything in the game that you have spent a decent amount of time working towards?

Get Out of the Water!!!

2011-06-01T09:26:00.001-04:00

I pretty much hate anything that has to do with water in WoW! I do not know why, but after six months of Cataclysm I have yet to manage to take any of my characters through the new water zone. Did you see that? I do not even know how to spell the damn zone's name. (Vashsomethingorothercangodieinafire amiright?) The zone and its instance literally messes with my damn eye balls and you know what? I think Blizzard knows this because every other random I get is that blasted place.

The other day I did six random instances and three of them were in that damn instance. Even worse is that my add-on that I use to keep my buttons outside the screen screws up royally in there. The best part is that it has a box marked to temporarily disable the parts of the add-on that is messing things up and it still looks God awful. Even better is the fact that there is so much stuff to not stand in during that instance and none of it shows up on my screen because of the add-on. The kicker is that when Cataclysm released, I could run the instance and at least not have the issues that I am currently having.

Oh well, hopefully Blizzard has learned from this and next time they will just send someone to my house to poke my eyes out with a dull spoon.

(Yes I realize this rant may actually make no sense to anyone other than myself, but I had to get that off my chest!)

Something Borrowed

2011-05-31T09:59:00.002-04:00

I have been doing a lot of healing here lately with my Shaman, and let me say that I am jealous that my Paladin cannot handle groups as easily as my Shaman can. Now before anyone thinks that this is going to be a post filled with complaining and whining, let me reassure you that it is not. Instead it is a post that suggests borrowing an idea from both the Priest and the Shaman classes, attach a small instant heal onto the Paladin cleanse ability.

I know I am always preaching about how I hate the homogenization of classes, but this is one thing that would benefit all of the classes. I know that when I heal with both my Priest and my Shaman, I am much more apt to actually remove the nasty things that are eating away at my party members; however, on my Paladin I rarely cleanse those things because it is extremely expensive and I would rather just heal through the majority of the stuff on my party.

I think one of the reasons that I like this idea is that it would have very little effect on balance issues between PVE and PVP. In PVP I do cleanse often and getting a nice little (key word being little) heal would be a nice bonus. In PVE I would actually cleanse more often if there was a heal associated with me using a global cool down on someone. The big thing to pick up in this is the word "little". The heal should in no way be comparable to Holy Shock, but it should be enough to notice.

So what about you guys? What do you think could be some minor changes that would help to improve your role or class? Is there a minor ability like Cleanse that could be tinkered with that would give some sort of incentive to use it more?

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-30T09:24:00.000-04:00

So today is an official holiday here in the states where we take a moment to honor those who are no longer with us. I felt that this video was a very appropriate choice in honor of Memorial Day:

Warning: Personal Non-WoW Related Talk Ahead!!!!

To me this is one of those holidays that hold a special place in my heart. When I was young, my parents would take me and my brother out to honor the family members who were no longer with us. We would visit each location and leave a simple flower arrangement and make sure that the area was in good order. During the course of the day, we would hear about different family members and the lives that they lead. This really helped give me a strong sense of family and a pride in the heritage of my family.

It saddens me that over the years there seems to be fewer and fewer people who visit the grave sites surrounding those of my own family members. It saddens me because it signals that the stories of those people will not be carried on. That a part of our history, as a whole, is slowly disappearing. How many times have we said (or been told) that as long as we carry on their memory, that they will live on in us and be remembered? It seems that slowly over time that everything fades away, including the memories of these wonderful people.

My only hope is that as my son grows older that he too will embrace the rich history of our families and carry on the tradition of honoring those that have gone on before us. I realize that he may not be able to physically visit each and every grave, as even I have forgotten how to find some of them. No, my hope is that he embraces the sense of pride in the family heritage and that he carries that forward and passes it on to his children so that the next generation may look back as I have and be thankful for the sacrifices of those that have gone before them.

So in closing I wish everyone a great Memorial Day! Be safe out there and have fun today!

Playing

2011-05-29T09:44:00.001-04:00

So I almost missed writing this post today because I was too busy using my free time to play Battle Pirates over on Facebook. This struck me funny because it use to be that I would spend my free time lost in Azeroth. Here lately though I have been spending my free time with Battle Pirates, Left 4 Dead 2, Minecraft, X-com UFO Defense Force, and a few other games as well. This led to me asking why do I really continue to play WoW? Or better phrased, what about WoW keeps me coming back?

I actually have spent about an hour thinking about that very question and came up with the two reasons why I continue to play WoW. The first reason I continue playing is because of the relationships I have with-in the game. What I mean by this is that I play with a wide variety of people, many whom I consider to be my friends. Now some of these fine folks were people I have worked with in the past, while others are individuals I have met with-in the game and have come to count as good friends. Along with them, there is my wife who plays and our son even loves to take control of our characters and attempt to run them around.

The second reason that I continue to play is because I have an invested value in this game. Yes I have the currency investment from purchasing the collector's editions, vanity pets, mounts, and other items of that sort, but you also have to consider the time value that has been invested into the game as well. I have been playing since before the launch of the Burning Crusade expansion straight on through the current Cataclysm expansion with no breaks at all. In other words, WoW has become a hobby of sorts. And just like any other hobby, there is a level of commitment that I have given to the game. It's like the old saying, "time is money".

So I have to wonder what is that keeps so many people playing and what is it that has made others leave the game?

R.I.P. World PVP

2011-05-28T09:21:00.002-04:00

I think it is time to come to terms with the fact that World PVP is dead. I remember way back a long time ago when I encountered my first corpse camper. This guy was a pro. He had the tent pitched, the fire was burning bright, and he was roasting a smore on my corpse! Man, I was so pissed at first. I would try to rez and run, but back in the day you didn't get super fast mounts till forty and that meant no chance of getting away. This guy had me seeing red. However, as time went on and I struggled to level and spent a lot of time corpse running, I soon came to appreciate this sort of thing. It taught me to be alert. Some days it seemed like you spent the entire session of play looking over your shoulder. I remember the old days of war between Southshore and Tarren Mill. The battles would rage from one town to the other as each side would be trying to call in their friends and guild members. I even remember in Outland the fear of looking up and being one shot by a falling level seventy. Yeah, things like that really use to make me mad. I would dare say it frustrated me. I hated it on a certain level, but at the same time I loved it. I loved it because I knew that when I hit level cap that I would be doing the same thing because someone else did it to me.

Things have changed though. Blizzard has really stepped in to attempt to stop any sort of World PVP like the old days. For instance, try attacking a city now! If you step foot in any town and kill something, then you get flooded by level eighty-five guards. It is insane! The first few guards you can handle, but it is the fifth, sixth, and so on that really messes you up. Then there is the whole issue of flying mounts everywhere! You will never see those kind of pitched battles like back at Southshore/Tarren Mill because no one wants to be a loser. Well, at least they do not want to be perceived as a loser. So now the concept of World PVP is to perch up high and snipe at low levels or to fly around on mounts in a deadlock because no one wants to die.

In my opinion, Blizzard should simply kill the concept of PVP and normal servers. It is easy to see that their idea of World PVP is to be zones that are clearly understood to be PVP in nature. This is evidenced by Wintergrasp from Wrath and now TB from Cataclysm. The sad part is that I am actually in favor of this change. I use to love World PVP. In the old days, I would always go to Tarren Mill if word spread that there was some action going down. Now days, PVP has become personal. It is no longer just meant for good fun, but eventually you have very pathetic individuals who will whisper you on level one alts to either attempt to piss you off by insulting you or to complain about how something was unfair. Yes, I know I touched on this yesterday a little too, but the sad truth is that I am losing my desire for World PVP because it simply does not resemble anything that I remember. Am I the only one who feels this way? What has changed that you use to love, but now has become something that you really just do not enjoy?

To Gank or not to Gank, That is the Question?

2011-05-27T09:10:00.001-04:00

So last night I ran my butt off in arena. I ran my Paladin on his 3v3 team, my Priest on his 2v2 team, and then a buddy of mine was gracious enough to run with my fresh Shaman with no PVP gear. The results were mixed. We did well and we did not so well. My very first match with my Shaman though was won and I consider that to be a tremendous success considering the fact that he still has some green 289 item level gear. Thinking about it, I feel bad for the team who lost to him. Hell, they should feel bad for losing to a team with a scrub Shaman like mine. Oh well, that really has nothing to do with what I want to talk about other than to set a stage.

As we were waiting to run 3's, one of my guildies mentioned that they had been ganked in Hellfire Peninsula. I had been out there earlier on my Warrior and had seen some pretty bored Allis out there messing around. They would run into Thrallmar and wreck a lowbie and some guards on the way out of town. Apparently three hours later, they were still at it. First off let me say that I am all for any sort of World PVP. There is no prize other than just having fun, regardless of if you are the one killing or being killed. So my team decides to head out there since we were bored and there were now two of them out there playing. My Warrior partner arrived first and I was second with my Paladin. When we landed and hit them, the Allis ran! Now this is not an Alli bashing post, so let's not go there. It is however a simple question. Why go gank low level players if you do not want to fight?

I know I have been guilty of going to a low level town and stirring the pot. We did it though in order to draw out some people who wanted to fight. We never use to roll into town, one shot all the lowbies, and then run away from the actual people who could be a challenge. The thing I have noticed is that it does not just happen in World PVP, but also in battlegrounds. I know you have seen the types who come charging into you when they have you out-gunned, but take out the support and watch and see if some of them do not turn tail and run. So I have to ask this, why go and kill lowbies if you do not really want to fight someone that will actually be a challenge?

Moonlighting

2011-05-26T09:32:00.000-04:00

So far in this expansion I have leveled my Paladin, Priest, Rogue, and Shaman to 85. I have a Death Knight, Hunter, and Warlock all at least to level 80. Then I have a Warrior at 62, a Druid at 52, and a Mage at 11. Now this is just my main account mind you. My problem is that I just do not know what I want to level next. I sat down today and got my Druid all set up with a full compliment of heirloom gear and started laying out my bindings and what have you. I believe I even hopped in an instance and ran one with him. I was bored. Could it be healer burn out? After leveling three healers, that could be the case.

Now I had to run out shortly after the instance and when I returned I hopped on my Warrior. Now I am completely clueless with Warriors. I am even more clueless with one that is over half way leveled and has not been touched since probably mid-BC expansion. I quickly realized that his set-up was all wrong. I mean how could he actually do any damage while wearing his tanking gear in a fury build? So I hopped over to one of my other accounts and sent him all of the heirloom plate gear, the DPS heirloom cloak, and the new exalted guild tabard. I figured I would make him look spiffy while I proceeded to get him beat to a bloody pulp all over Azeroth and Outland.

Once I equipped the gear I think he felt a little better. I mean he could at least be fashionable while getting his beat downs right? The next thing was to examine the specs that he was in. Oh my good Lord! They were a mess. I really do not know what I was trying to accomplish with the build he had. It looked like I had set him up while being severely drunk. I figured what the hell and erased both his specs. I decided to go with Fury and Arms primarily because I didn't feel that people would want to see this poor confused Orc trying to tank for them... at least for now. I set up my fury build first and worked out what I wanted his rotation to be. I also stopped off in Orgrimmar and exchanged some honor points to pick up the level 60 PVP weapons. They were a slight improvement over his former weapons and what Orc doesn't look cool duel wielding two axes?

The only thing left to do was take him for a spin drive into Outland. I have to admit that I actually enjoyed the hour or so that we spent together. He was knee deep in bloody corpses of boars, birds, and the occasional Fell Orc that crossed his path. I may actually continue to play him some on the side. My big issue is that I do not want to invest too much time into him because I know that if I level him to 85 that he will probably join my Rogue on the bench. I always have a fun time leveling melee classes, but once they hit cap I just never quite enjoy playing them very seriously. I always end up going back to my healers, but I figure while the mood is striking me I might as well moonlight wit my Warrior!

What's Up With That?

2011-05-25T09:06:00.002-04:00

So here we are on the fifth day of my second run here on Holy Shock and we have yet to talk serious about Paladin stats, talents, and all that other good stuff and you may be wondering why that is? That is a fair question to ask of a blog that is named Holy Shock right? Well, the simple truth is that with Cataclysm, Blizzard really went to extreme measure to dumb down stat priority. I think it is pretty obvious that we are only getting Spell Power off of our weapons, and perhaps an enchant if you so choose. It is also fairly easy to see that Intellect is still the bread and butter for us as well. I think most healers at this point is in agreement that Spirit is a must have. It is also a great thing to point out that the majority of our gear is going to be loaded down with both Intellect and Spirit.

That leaves us to debate the usefulness of Critical Strike, Haste, and Mastery. To be honest, all three of these merit some consideration given how they affect the class, but quite frankly unless you are running hard mode fights it is not going to matter to the average WoW player. Sorry, but you know that is the truth. In reality, it is going to come down to your own unique play style. The majority of us are probably looking at Haste right now as edging out Critical Strike simply because quicker spells means more heals. It is really just that simple. The interesting debate should come once 4.2 drops as it will increase the critical heals substantially. That is a debate though that should be saved for 4.2 and theory crafting sites. I personally think that our mastery is simply God awful. I am not even going to go into it, but in my opinion it is completely useless for us to really take it that serious.

So as you can see, there really is not a whole lot to talk about with our stats in this expansion. I wish there was, but it simply does not merit any more mention than this single post. Now once 4.2 drops, we may be able to revisit that old discussion of Haste versus Critical Strike...

Why No Heals Man?

2011-05-24T09:15:00.001-04:00

Have you ever heard that question? Every time I set foot in a random BG as a healer, undoubtedly some random person will yell at the collective group of healers inquiring why they were not healed. For some reason this always just goes straight through me. I manage not to blow up and troll these folks, but it does irritate me. So today I am going to answer this question for all of you out there who have ever asked this!

Reasons Why I Do Not Heal You

1. My ass is getting pounded on by the other team. That is right, once the opposing team identifies you as the healer there is no running from them. They swarm on you like an angry hornet's nest. Now if you are fortunate to be in a solid BG group, then your teammates will make sure and mow down the ones attacking the healer first. Unfortunately in today's group of players you seldom find someone with three brain cells functioning on sub-optimal and therefore you die... alot!

2. You showed up in all your PVE glory! Now I am not knocking anyone for being geared out for dungeons, but if I show up wearing my PVP gear in a random heroic you guys will blow up on me. The same feeling is had by those who PVP when you show up wearing your all-star PVE gear. What this signifies to me is that you will die quickly due to lack of proper gear, chants, gems, and the all important talent tree builds. Again, there are huge differences in survivability between people geared for PVP and those geared for PVE and I am going to use my mana to keep the guys alive who look to be geared for PVP. It is a personal choice for me.

3. You are an asshole. Yes, that is right. You are an asshole. That was very simple. You are the person who arrives in the BG and begins to tell all how glorious you are. The team then hits a brick wall and you begin yelling at everyone and everything. This annoys me. I do not respond well to name such as fuckface, dickhead, moron, loser, nub (or any variation of said word), or any other negative name that you can come up with. I do respond well to someone who is polite and knows how to play well with others though.

So there you go. I have just educated you as to why your PVP healers will not heal you. This will save you hopefully from being at least in category three. Category two cannot really help it as we all have to start somewhere. Category one is the group that actually puts me in a foul mood and makes me that much more irritable towards the other two groups. Well, as the old adds use to say, "the more you know, the more you grow"!

Enter the Cow!

2011-05-23T04:17:00.000-04:00

Something I have always wanted to do, but for some reason never actually completed is role a class for each healing spec in the game. I have come close in previous expansions, but for Cataclysm this has been a secret little goal... until now! Last night I added my third level capped healer to my roster! That is right, the terror of the Daggerspine Horde Auction House, Holeycow, hit level 85!

So at present I now have a Holy Paladin, a Discipline Priest, and now a Restoration Shaman! Go team heals! My next healer is going to be a Restoration Druid and should be fairly simple since I have him already sitting at level 52. First though, I need to get this cow some gear. It did help though that I had turned all my honor into justice points and upon hitting level 85 promptly went and purchased the 346 chest and helm. I added a couple pieces of reputation gear and have hit the dungeon scene fairly well to gather a few other minor pieces. I figure in a day or two (at most), I should have enough gear to begin the trudge through heroics. Once I get him geared well enough for heroics, I will then focus on getting my Druid under way.

Is there something wrong with me? How about you all, is there a certain role that you love more than any other and are striving to fill it? Tanking? Melee? Ranged?

Elemental Bonds

2011-05-22T07:20:00.002-04:00

I do not know if I have ever mentioned it before, but I am a huge fan of the lore of Warcraft. Yes, I am one of those guys who have bought all of the novels written about the game(s). I even go on the website and read the short stories that are officially put up by Blizzard. I am actually not ashamed to admit this at all. In fact, I could very easily be one of those guys like "red shirt" at Blizzcon last year. Well, scratch that. I have a wife who would hog-tie me before I ever made it into the line. (Unless I distract her with a shiny!) Anyway, my point is that I love the rich lore of the game and I love it even more when Blizzard brings it into WoW.

This brings me to 4.2 and the storyline that they are introducing about Thrall and the events that transpire from it. Do not worry, I am not going to reveal any of the events of the quest line. I do not want to be the spoiler of a great quest chain. I am going to say though that there is a lot that gets said about certain things during this quest chain that really gives you a look into one of the deepest characters in the WoW universe and I for one loved every moment of it. I cannot wait to see the finished product in all of its cut scene glory!

So why am I talking about this if I am not going to directly give out information? The answer is simply because I feel like we, as players, miss such a large part of the game by not taking the time to actually read the quest logs or the conversations that are had by the NPC's, or even some of the common items found in the world. For instance, one of my favorite shields I have ever found in the game is the old barn door that has a phrase that says something about it being available. Sure that has nothing to do with lore, but it shows a side of humor that is missed if you really do not take the time to explore the environment of the world around our characters.

I think that Blizzard has been doing a really great job lately with their expansions on the story telling side, and they are not getting credit for this. During Wrath, all you heard were complaints about game mechanics or difficulty of the game itself. Very few people took the time to really point out how wonderful the lore was and how great some of the side stories were. I myself was really guilty of this during Wrath. I did not even realize all the really cool stories that were out there until I started working on leveling one of my Shaman recently. Now I will admit that they did not get it perfect because there were some stories that felt out of place (Argent Tourney) or did not receive the attention it should have (Ulduar and Yog), but overall they definitely brought more life to that expansion than they did to BC.

In Cataclysm, they really shine through in the story telling department in my opinion and it does not seem to be slowing down at all. I hope this continues because it makes me want to log in and see what has changed or what new secret plot twist has been revealed. The only fear I have is that they may try to take on too much at once. For instance, the latest bout with the Trolls. They could do something really special with that, but I am afraid it is more of the filler variety that seems to always fall on the Trolls. At least they do not need to feel bad since the Old Gods get no better of a treatment. Oh my, I think I may have wandered off my original topic just a little bit, but isn't that a good thing?

I remember when I was little, that me and a buddy of mine would read the same comics and then we would debate what was going to happen. We would wait every month to get the next issue to see if we were right or completely wrong. That is exactly what Blizzard is doing to me now. They have me hooked on their story line and I am eagerly awaiting each patch in order to see what is going to happen next. What about you guys, is there an aspect of the game that you feel is overlooked by the community like the story-line? Perhaps the artwork? Changes to the scenery itself? Is there any little thing that has been done that you think deserves some credit in WoW?

Welcome Back

2011-05-21T05:51:00.000-04:00

So it has been literally five months since I have written an actual post here at Holy Shock. (Unless we are counting the vague thank you post I wrote when I noticed some of the people I admired had closed down.) Now I have dabbled in writing posts at my other blog, but I failed to really capture any feeling of purpose, much less a desire to be committed to it. For some reason, it was like when I stopped writing posts for here that I just lost my desire to write. The weird part is that I had so many different topics that I really wanted to talk about ranging from the changes in WoW to different views I have on some topics that the community was discussing. The long story made short is that I did not do any of this. Instead I sat there and figured that the other bloggers who I admired would do a much better job. The only problem with this is the fact that so many of them have either officially stopped blogging or are only blogging on a rare occasion. So after some serious thought, I have decided to come back home and start back up things here at Holy Shock.

Now I am sure you may have noticed that I even spruced things up a little bit. Well, at least I hope that you noticed some of the changes. Other changes may not be so noticeable depending on how often you visited the site. Either way, I just wanted to go for something a slight bit more simple and not nearly as hard on the eyes as the orange/yellow background that was here previously. Along with some of the cosmetic changes made, I removed all of the former posts (from public view). Much of that information is out-dated or over-rated and will be of little use to anyone who is seeking actual information that may be of use to them. (Although there are a lot more informational bloggers out there than me.)

Speaking of other bloggers, you may have noticed that I have a completely blank side (over there ->). This is on purpose because much of the information I had there previously has some problems like links not working or blogs not blogging. So just as I did with my own out-dated posts, I wiped the slate clean there as well. As time goes on and I get back into a reading pattern of sorts you can expect to see some blogs added over there, as well as some solid links to great sites that I personally use.

So what can you expect to see out of Holy Shock v 2.0? I honestly have no clue what to tell you. I am sure you will hear about some organized PVP as I am spending more time doing that than anything else at this point in time. I may venture into the build that I am using and the reason behind certain choices I have made, but I do not know yet as those types of posts sometimes wander away from the topic and into an insult war. You can definitely read some stuff that will be direct responses to things that are being talked about on the official WoW forums. Hell, for that matter you can probably find some pretty random thoughts I have about different aspects of the game. So basically you can expect the same type of content that I have always strove to publish.

In closing, I just want to say thank you for your continued reading as well as thank you to those who may have just read this blog for the first time. In both cases, I hope you continue to check out Holy Shock and its continual evolution in blogging!

A Grateful Heart Says Thank You

2011-05-02T08:25:00.001-04:00

So what has brought me back to make a post here on Holy Shock? The simple truth is that I was sad. I was sad that I have been so caught up in my own personal life that I have lost touch of what has been going on in the WoW blogging community lately. Do not worry, it is not any sort of drama I am talking about. No, I am sad because I recently discovered that many of my favorite bloggers have stopped writing. It sounds corny, but it feels like I have lost a family member. You see so many of you are people who I admire. I do not just simply admire the fact that you played WoW a certain way, but rather I admire the way you convey the human side of the game that we all enjoy.

So to you, I say thank you and I want you to know that you are missed. The blogging community will go on, but you are the people who made this community what it is today.

Cataclysm Impact

2010-12-07T00:00:00.002-05:00

Have you felt the Impact of Cataclysm yet?

It's Been A Hell Of A Ride!!

2010-12-06T14:20:00.002-05:00

The end is finally here! I hope you are all ready for it. I just wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you out there for making this a great expansion. From the bloggers, the machinimaters, the players, the readers, and even the trolls of forums and blogs! You guys made it great!

Apologies

2010-11-29T16:41:00.001-05:00

I offer my apologies for posting my piece a couple days back about the current state of healing as a Holy Paladin. Since the last patch, some things were tweaked and it has changed the way that a few of our spells will work and thus has made that post completely irrelevant in my opinion. While the changing and tweaking is nothing new, I do feel bad for putting out something that became outdated so quickly. I will try to make sure and watch out for these sorts of things in the future. I may revisit the subject of healing in the near future, but I want to let the expansion hit and then get some leveling in and see how everything seems to be pulling together before I post something else on that particular topic.

I do have some other stuff to discuss today though about being a Holy Paladin! I am sure by now that you have read about Holy Paladins who dream of becoming powerhouse caster DPS. (If you haven't go read the Paladin class forum on the official website and look under anything that has to do with Exorcism, Shockadin, or any play on those words.) To save some time for those who may not be aware of this new movement, Holy Paladins can basically switch some talents around within their tree and do some moderate DPS revolving around Holy Shock and Exorcism. This of course to many is an abomination that should quickly be squashed by Blizzard's development team and their massive nerf bats, or should it?

So how does one turn a healing tree into a DPS tree? A long, long, long, long time ago in a game that hardly even resembles WoW there was a limited use build that was referred to as the Shockadin. Many people throughout the course of WoW have attempted to make this build a viable build, but ultimately with the release of Cataclysm Blizzard seemingly squashed this build and banished it to the pages of history with many other aspects of the game. However, in their recent game build they added back in a few key talents that has allowed a small minority of the Paladin community to once again build a caster DPS spec!

The real issue is not can you build a talent spec that allows moderate DPS, but can you build a talent spec that allows moderate DPS that would be viable? In reviewing many of the posts from the official forums you would have to think not. There has been nothing but open ridicule and flaming of those who have tried to post possible builds and discuss ideas on how to better the DPS output. Regardless of what build they pick, it all revolves around the use of Holy Shock and Exorcism. This is what we are going to examine today!

I feel at this point I should definitely affirm that I in fact do have a Holy DPS build on Ruhtra. I created it quite some time ago and had been waiting to test the build within the random dungeon system where a group of peers could decide if the damage output justified being allowed to remain in a group or if it was too low to justify being permitted to stay within a group and ultimately would result in a vote to kick. The problem was that so many people do not understand the finer points of the game and even fewer are willing to take on permitting such in-game tests to be ran that I needed to bring along two friends to prevent an immediate vote to kick prior to actually running the instance. Last night I received my first chance at such a run when one of my good friends wanted to practice being a Discipline Priest. I had him queue as heals with the reassurance that if the shit hit the fan, I would be there to provide support. Along with him, my wife brought her Hunter in order to work on leveling up some of her newest pets.

********************* Start Fresh**************************

Happy Thanksgiving (U.S.A.)

2010-11-25T12:12:00.001-05:00

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving day here in the US! well, except maybe the Native Americans.....sorry for the whole taking your land thing......awkward......

Shattered Experience

2010-11-24T08:15:00.002-05:00

This is not a tale of QQ, but one of feeling lost in WoW. I have been playing this game for a very long time and yesterday I logged in excited to see what was changed like many others. As I flew around and looked over the changed things like sharper graphics for old zones and completely redesigned old zones I couldn't help but feel lost. All of my talents were reset as they had said. All of my quests were gone from the old world. Hell, I have a 1500 quest achievement but only have around 1200 quests completed now. As I flew around, I felt more disconnected from the game than I ever have before. During this time of excitement that everyone else seems to be having, am I the only person who just doesn't care one way or another?

I honestly feel like just putting down my level capped characters and starting all over again. I do not feel like revisiting old zones and hammering out new quests. I rode through the ZG zone and couldn't help but feel as though the game keeps losing more than it is giving back. Old raids like AQ, Naxx, Ony, and ZG being changed or removed makes sense, but at the same time it feels like they are ripping out my memories of what was and replacing them with an excuse to release less content. That may have come out wrong. I just feel like that in the Burning Crusade we got something new. There was no reusable content pushed upon us. In Wrath, we saw the beginning of reworking some aspects of content (Naxx and Ony). In Cataclysm, we get a whole lot of reusable content. Which is not bad. This is a good thing. It saves us from having to buy World of Warcraft II, but something just feels missing or wrong to me.

I honestly do not know how to really describe what I am feeling other than I played Minecraft most of the day yesterday. I logged into the game a couple hours after servers were up and managed to stay online for maybe an hour or so before logging off and going to bed. I am going to give it another try later today with a fresh character I made last night. What about the rest of you out there? Is anyone else feeling the same as me or am I just the odd man out on this one?

Balance

2010-11-22T13:41:00.001-05:00

The word balance has so many different meanings depending on who is using it and in what reference it is being used in. Today, I use the word as a way to describe what the changes to Wintergrasp was supposed to accomplish. I cannot argue that it has in fact managed to make a balance PVP environment, but I have to wonder if the goal was to have Wintergrasp matches that are 2v2, 4v4, and 5v5. At this point, I have not seen a lot of encouraging reports from Wintergrasp. What we are seeing is the raging of angered individuals that they no longer can get into Wintergrasp, the angered raging of those who felt that the environment was never a fair battleground in the first place, and many a troll who is using this as an opportunity to make themselves seem so much more knowledgeable and intelligent than what they truly are. In all of these "discussions" no one is really questioning the long term viability of such a fault ridden system.

It's About Time

2010-11-20T11:31:00.003-05:00

***** I want to say that this post is now outdated due to recent changes within the game. Feel free to review it and see if there were any ideas presented which you may find useful. Again, the spells have been changed slightly on some of the core abilities and has resulted in this information being outdated. *****

Here lately I have had a lot of questions via e-mail and in-game from people want to know how I am healing or what type of rotation/priority am I currently using. A lot of these individuals are people who have Holy as an off-spec build or maybe have not touched the class in a very long time. I think the main concern most people have is they went from two to three healing spells to having a whole bar full of healing options and they have no clue what to make of all these choices. Even worse than the choices is when they go into a run and attempt to heal it and struggle through because Flash of Light drains their mana or Holy Light doesn't heal the way it use to. It is very confusing and you are not alone. The good news is that we are not too far different from what we have always been in terms of healing. We just have a few extra options is all. Stick with me and let's try to make some sense out of all of this ok?

So let's talk about the healing spells and what is really different and what may not be so different! I was a Flash of Light kind of guy and so I will start with this one first. It is definitely not what it once was that is for sure. It takes a large chunk of our mana in order to cast, but it also provides a large heal back in return. In my opinion at current Wrath end game, this is probably our best large heal spell due to the time it takes to cast, but it is not something we are going to want to be spamming a ton because it will drain you way too quickly. Holy Light has lost a lot of its bite and I cannot argue that, but it is meant to be a filler heal now, much the same as Flash of Light use to be. It is inexpensive in terms of mana and provides a weaker heal when compared to its counterparts of Flash of Light and Divine Light. Divine Light is a spell that is meant to be our king of the mountain heal, but currently just takes too long and cost too much to make it a go to heal. Notice I said currently. At level 85, I fully expect this heal to be the king of the hill heal and so do not ignore it, just do not rely on it at this time. Now we come to our instant heals, Holy Shock and Word of Glory! I love instant heal spells! In the case of Holy Shock, it is now our prime heal. Everything we do is going to be based around it and its cool down. Word of Glory is still up for debate on when to use it and who to use it on. For me I personally relish using it on a non-tank who is about to bite it or a tank who takes one of those crazy hits six times in a row. In my opinion, regardless of who you heal, it is the "oh shit" heal option that I use to reserve Holy Shock for. Now that doesn't mean never cast it, but if you know your fights then you know which bosses will put you in those "oh shit" moments and therefore you can save it for those occasions. Finally, we have Light of Dawn in all of its blinding glory. All you need to know on this one is that it is situational at best, but play around with it and have some fun as well. It packs a decent heal but a long cool down so you just want to make sure and not blow it too soon.

Alright, so now we got through the quick hit version of what these spells are and now let's talk about how I choose to use them. This is important to note right here that I do not use a mathematical spread sheet or a formula that illustrates a perfect situation with a perfect raid group because I run in non-perfect situations with far from perfect raid compositions and occasionally have to bring a PuG in which usually never turns out to be a good player. Consider yourself warned! So to answer all those questions about my priority/rotation for healing here is how I usually go in PVE situations:

1. Holy Shock
2. Holy Light (Wrath end game)/ Divine Light (Cataclysm end game) - It is important to note that you should have Infusion of Light 2/2 for the speed bonus which makes casting both Holy Light and Divine Light directly after Holy Shock a must.
3. Flash of Light - Quick and powerful and due to the speed up of Holy Light a great filler in this slot right now during the remainder of Wrath.
4. Rinse and repeat!

A few things to point out:

1. This is a foundation to build on. Do not consider this to be the Bible of Paladin healing because things will be tweaked and new abilities will provide different options.

2. Light of Dawn is not listed, make sure and use it. It is a great ability for healing while moving. If two or more party/raid members are lined up then hit this ability.

3. Do not be afraid of Flash of Light. Yes it cost a lot of mana and therefore you have to think while casting. In PVP situations, Flash of Light is going to be your bread and butter so if you are an arena or battleground junkie, then you better not remove this spell from your hot bar/keys/mouse!

4. Beacon of Light is not what it once was. It does not allow us to heal multiple tanks at once. We are only capable to heal one and a half tanks now, which even with our avoidance of math here at Holy Shock tells me that one and a half is not two.

5. Word of Glory is my "oh shit" heal. I hold on to it like nothing else. I splash it around to save a high DPS when needed, but attempt to reserve its use to always have it ready to save someone's butt. I would not recommend using it every cool down simply because of its value to saving someone in a rare moment. If memory serves me correct, this spell is not on our global cool down table and therefore literally can save someone when no one else is available.

There is so much more I really want to talk about, but I think this covers the main question I have been getting. Remember that Cataclysm is just a couple weeks away and now is a good time to start developing good habits for healing. I encourage everyone to try out different ways of healing. In my own experience, this simple four heal rotation has proven to work in both dungeons and raids. It is steady, eats up spike damage and does not drain our mana down to nothing. What more could we ask for right?

Never Cluck, If You Can't Strut

2010-11-17T08:43:00.002-05:00

So last night I was feeling wide awake and wanted to do something different. Lately, I had spent so much time focused on raiding or running with guild members through randoms that I just needed a little fun. The problem is that for me fun involves things that are somewhat more difficult in the game to do whether it is grinding reputations or going for specific achievements in raids. Since I was not feeling in a raiding mood, I settled on the thought of working on one of those grinding achievements! The problem was which one did I want to focus on? This one sort of came out of left field, but the Twenty Five Tabard achievement is what came to mind. I had thought about this one in the past, but I had always gotten distracted by looking at other shinies as it were. So I decided to go and pull up a list of tabards over at WoW Head and see which ones were easily obtainable. In truth, most of the easy ones I already have and I refuse to sell one that I worked hard to get, just so I can go and buy an alternate version of it (think Midsummer Fire Tabards).

I was sitting at fourteen tabards and had long neglected picking up a couple easy ones. This literally shows how lazy I am when it comes to things in the game but I had yet to go and pick up my Warsong Tabard and also one of the ones you can get in Orgrimmar for honor (A lot of honor since patch). I had purchased the Scouts Tabard a long, long, long time ago so it is the other one which is escaping my mind at this moment. So two easy tabards and I am at 16. This then left me sitting thinking about the other nine that are needed. I know I never did a lot of quests in Outland due to my hatred of questing and so I can do the questline out in Shadowmoon for the Illidari Tabard (which I have on Emprius from helping a guild member back in the Burning Crusade days). So that moves me down to eight tabards. Things are looking good but where exactly do I focus in on?

Well, looking at my reputation I see the Cenarian Expedition and Lower City factions from the Burning Crusade are at Revered status. It just means spending some time running some old heroics to grind out that last bit of reputation. Two more factions at revered from the Burning Crusade is the Keepers of Time and Thrallmar! So that puts me down to four more that I need to try to focus in on. The easy answer would be to pick up some tabards from the Argent Tournament! I did do all that jousting and grinding for a reason right? Well, that is not my style! (Although I may do it for the sake of getting the achievement completed.)

See, I like to do things that I can take pride in and also I like to tie in achievements that are easier to complete with achievements that are somewhat more complicated or just simply takes a large amount of time to complete. For instance, when I started working on my Explore Achievement I chose to begin it during one of the Hollow's End events from previous years. This allowed me to do something that was boring (running all over Azeroth and Outland) and tie it into something that I really wanted which was the Hallowed title. So my goal is to do the same with the tabard achievement. I have not made it a secret that I really want to get the forty exalted reputations and this is a perfect little achievement to wrap into that one! You see, there are a lot of factions that have tabards that I am at honored and revered. So grinding for reputation serves two purposes, but I can make it fit into three by adding in a grind to max out my exalted reputation with the Defilers! Oh and if you have not seen the tabard you get upon completing the quest that you are given upon maxing out the exalted reputation, then go look at it right now. It was one of the best looking tabards from back in Vanilla WoW and in my humble opinion is still one of the best looking tabards and it is one of those things that you get in game that tells everyone that there was no easy way of getting that.

So by now, I am guessing that all this achievement talk has you wondering what in the hell the name of this post has to do with what I have been talking about. Well, glad you either stuck around to find out or skipped down to this part. You see to kick off working on the reputation for the Defilers I hopped in a few AB matches last night (got three victories and only one loss) and encountered this Alliance rogue named Fiola from Dunemaul. I was at the Blacksmith flag (which I typically try to go to) defending and this poor Rogue tried everything that (s)he could think of to kill me. It didn't work. I stood there healing like a Paladin possessed. What I found funny was that the entire time I am eating her assault, she is spamming /chicken at me. I was laughing so hard I was afraid I might wake my family up. It just amused me that this Rogue was probably use to one shotting players in lower brackets and had created this macro to annoy, piss off, or insult whomever they were attacking; however, when you cannot kill the target you are spamming, and even worse the target gets the killing blow on you........... it may be time to consider letting go of that macro. Just saying! It was amusing because in that match I had only one killing blow and it was on this poor Rogue with the bad macro. So two thumbs up Fiola for making me laugh and two jeers for having a horrible macro!

Is Respect Too Much?

2010-11-10T05:18:00.002-05:00

This has been a really, really good week for me personally. The highlight of my week was the return of a good friend who has not played WoW in over two years. Out of the blue last week I received this message from him telling me he was thinking of coming back and wanted to know if the old group is still playing. I was happy and immediately let him know that we are still playing and then did my best to keep the secret of his return. This guy is a fun person to be around and the older members of the guild were electrified to see him back and it created such a great atmosphere this past week. It also meant a lot of work to help him learn about the significant changes to the Hunter class. Back in the day when we were playing, he was my very first arena partner and also was with us for the initial push into raiding back in the Burning Crusade so I knew his gear would be good enough for a few levels.

He worked his butt off this week and hit 80 (with some help from the rest of us) and so we got him some beginner gear and hit the heroic scene up. First let me say, I have not ran heroics in any serious way in probably three to four months. I expected to have some rough groups simply because it is post patch and tanks have a God complex now days, but damn I was surprised at how bad it has actually become. Now maybe it is just my bad luck or a combination of my bad luck with his bad luck but we got the creme of the crop in bad attitude, bad skill, and well just bad players in general.

I watched as people insulted my friends gear, talent build, class, and anything else they could get a keep jab in right up until I had my fill of it. We were in a heroic Nexus run with all guild except this moronic Death Knight tank. This guy had some serious issues with holding agro and I was very nice and never complained about anything at all with him because I realize that with Death Knights some things are still off because Runic Strike is still set to trigger only with an avoidance rather than by mere runic power alone. However, this Dick Knight started in on my buddy as we headed into the chamber for the second boss. I was healing on Popebutch (as Discipline) and having got a mountain of achievements, gear, and a very solid spec I informed the dick that there was nothing wrong with my friend except for one retarded Dick Knight who couldn't hold agro. I also reminded the asshole that heroics for getting gear and working on your game (something he surely needed to do). I made a few other points and then stopped myself from crossing that line of lowering myself to that level.

The tank got insulted that someone would not stand there and take his crap and so he made an attempt to wipe us by pulling two platforms worth of mobs and then dropping group. I am proud to say that the members of MAS pulled together and our DPS Warrior picked up agro as best he could while I spammed shields and heals to all party members and assisted with some DPS as well. We burned the mobs, had no wipes, and got rid of a retarded tank that was replaced by a great tank with an even better attitude. All in all we had a good run and no wipes.

My issue as of late is with the attitude of so many players now day. I recently leveled my Death Knight (Methusaleh) to level 80 and started working on a few random dungeons and have encountered nothing but poor attitudes. It seems so much worse now than it did months back when I was finishing up working on Whoopy. With my Death Knight I have a Blood tanking build and an Unholy DPS build. I use my tanking build for guild runs in regular dungeons and my Unholy DPS build in heroic dungeons. In the regular dungeons I will admit I have not encountered a lot of the poor attitudes, but heroics are filled full of want-to-be players with horrible attitudes. I really am surprised that at this point in the expansion that people are acting this way. They bark orders out like everyone has a learning disability and treat you slightly better than dirt. I feel sorry for newer players or those returning like my friend. I have to wonder is it really too much to ask that people be respectful of others and remember that it is just a game?

Two Years

2010-11-08T06:05:00.003-05:00

So yesterday marked the end of my second full year of blogging. I have to admit that things have come a long, long way from the very first post here at Holy Shock and my life is the better for it. So, instead of talking about accomplishments and the like I am instead going to take some time and thank some of the people that have inspired me as a person and as a blogger.

The first person I have to thank is Fish over at Gnome Warrior Is An Oxymoron! If he had not talked to me about blogging I probably never would have taken that first step. Along with that, he is a great guy and good friend. When I went through some of the worst times of my life he was always there with an encouraging word or a shoulder to lean on. Thanks buddy!

The second person I would like to think is Larisa from The Pink Pigtail Inn. She was the very first person to post a comment on my blog and she is an inspiration to me in the way that she goes about writing. I admire her dedication to writing and only hope that I could one day reach that level.

The next person is a group of persons. They are the members of my guild. Some of them have blogs like my wife Eus with The Suicidal Healer, Edyion from Code Red, and Matt from Abbadonn's Wrath. I really do consider myself lucky to be able to play this game with such a great group of people in MAS!

One of my all time favorite blogs is WTFspaghetti. I am always happy to see something new posted over there. The thing that I like about the blog is that thedoctor writes things in a way that are entertaining yet informative and dare I say at times thought provoking? Let's not forget that kick ass choir!

I couldn't make a list of thanks without thanking each and every one of you bloggers who write about Paladins. You guys rock and are a great group of people. To the Holy Paladins out there, keep your chins up and don't sweat the changes. Change is a good thing and a necessary thing in life. Work with what you have been given and in time you will be right back where you were and probably doing some things that you may never thought you would be able to do. Keep representing our class with pride!

In closing I just want to share some advice with all of the bloggers and potential bloggers out there. Over these last couple years I have learned so much about the game, myself, and writing a blog. One of the biggest things I learned was to quit comparing myself against those who have been established for some time. You need to remember why you started blogging and then focus on writing the best post that you can write. The blogsphere doesn't need a hundred Ruhtras writing blogs (although that would be sweet!), it needs each and every one of you as individuals with your own thoughts and views. Too many times when I first started to write something I would stop and think about someone else who had written something similar and think to myself that their article was much better and what could I possibly add to the topic. When in reality, we are unique and approach the game from different areas of life. Some of us our older with children and established careers. Some of us our young and may have just gotten out of college. Hell, some of us may even still be in college or even high school. It really doesn't matter because my point is that we are all coming from different walks of life and if it is something that you feel is important, then you write your post and have your voice heard as well.

Once again thank you to everyone who writes a blog, reads a blog, and even trolls a blog. Without you all these last two years would not have been nearly as much fun. Take care!

Closing In On The End Of An Era

2010-10-30T13:34:00.004-04:00

So it has been a few days since since I posted and that is really because I have been severely ill. Missed several weeks worth of work and been through several rounds of antibiotics and even steroids. The good news is I am feeling much better and happy for that.

In WoW related news, my guild is making our final push on ICC. We downed Sindregosa in about a month's worth of attempts (Around 12-16 nights roughly) We were hindered originally by members switching in and out and a lack of attendance by many who are our core raiding group. Last night was a huge lack of attendance but one that we were not going to call a raid for. We recruited some quality PuGs and knocked out Dreamwalker rather quickly and then after several training attempts and a few adjustments to strategy we burned that ice queen to cinders. We are finally near the end of our stated goal for this expansion and I for one am completely happy about that.

We went up and snapped some photos with the Lich King and started the event so that the PuG members could see this and get a feel for the strategy and then called it for the evening to let the raiders go and relax. At the end of the evening we had one PuG member who requested to join MAS and another PuG who said he knew several of our members in real life and was seriously considering making a switch to MAS as well. I think it speaks volumes that our guild continues to grow without spamming for recruits or posting on forums and other locations. It is a special group of people.

As for other news, Ruhtra finished off his Glory of the Hero achievement on Thursday with some help from the guild and that put one more achievement down that I personally was looking for. One of the things that has been waying heavily on mind over the last few weeks has been deciding what to do in the long term. The guild is fairly deep in Paladins and at this point in time we are in dire need of some other roles to be filled in consistency. After thinking about this for a long time I have decided that Ruhtra is going to continue on in Rated PVP where his heart is and in lieu of that, Popebutch is going to now be the main character that I spend my time working on. With that decision having been made that led me to another interesting decision about the future of my blogging. I originally started this blog as a blog for Holy Paladins and then slowly evolved to talk about a lot of different topics, but attempted to keep the focus on being a Holy Paladin. It seems kind of weird to feature a Shadow Priest as the main focus of a blog called Holy Shock does it not? So with that answer being obvious, it is the end of an era here at Holy Shock. When the Lich King falls, so too will end Holy Shock.

Thank you all who have been reading the blog and commenting. It has been a hell of an expansion and I am sure the future holds a lot of great opportunities for us all. May the Light shine brightly on you in the dark days ahead.

A Change Of Pace

2010-10-22T13:37:00.002-04:00

So as Cataclysm is creeping ever closer and closer, I have been spending less time in WoW, but still spending much time online playing a different game and today I want to share that game with those of you who may still read my blog. First, I know this is a blog dedicated to WoW, but it is okay to deviate from WoW once in a while right? I am guessing that many of you have heard of it either directly or indirectly. I am speaking about Minecraft!

This game is so addictive and requires just a little bit of time or you can get lost in it for hours. I personally resisted getting the game until one of my friends in MAS (Scrawny) posted about it in our guild forums. I figured why not and purchased the game along

The New Is The Old Which Is The New When You Think About It

2010-10-17T12:00:00.005-04:00

Perhaps I have been watching a little too much of Pirates of the Caribbean to come up with a title like that, or it is the drugs talking. Either way, it is what it is much the same way that the Holy Paladin's style of healing is what it is and that is what we are going to talk about after all isn't it? Yes, it is! I first want to say that all the crying and wailing that has been done, oh and the lamenting for days gone by, is simply ridiculous! So if you are a blogger or Paladin that is moping around and upset over the "c" word (change) then just stop it right now and straighten up and look like the lean mean tank healing machine that you were intended to be.

First Impressions

It feels exactly the same as it always has. What I mean is that if you are so stuck in the rut as a spamming healer then you are in luck because you can still spam heal. If you were one of the Paladins who found healing to be boring then you are in luck because we have a whole bunch of new stuff that can really be leveraged to provide you with a great time while standing there healing the tank. Are you catching what I am throwing down here? To borrow a phrase (and hopefully not get sued), we are the best there was, the best there is, and the best there ever will be at healing the tanks and by the Light it is time we started acting like it.

I am not a number cruncher as I have stated numerous times. Hell, I don't even care what number crunchers are saying right now. I am a results driven man and in my world the variables of who I heal with changes too much to have a perfect world attitude that some jerks may have. [;)] (That is a wink, but hard to do you know.) So I decided that there was no better way to test out the numbers than to raid ICC fresh with those of my guild who were able to be on. Raid leader had a corrupted file which meant reinstall, off-tank was slowly downloading the patch, and several DPS were either lost in the real world or in trying to make heads and tails out of their specs. So myself and five guild members dared the pool of PuGs and trudged into ICC to start fresh and check out rotations, specs, and our intestinal fortitude.

We started with a two healer set, myself filling the role of sir spams-a-lot (the stuck in the rut healer) and my counterpart Druid. I specifically built and play tested a spec for staying true to a spamming style because I wanted to see what effects it had overall on my healing style. When spamming Holy Light, I was able to spam for what seemed an eternity with minimal loss of mana. It felt somewhat comfortable but a little bulky/slow when compared to my favorite spam spec from Flash of Light and even when compared against the Holy Light spam-fest spec. The effective healing done was somewhere between the Flash and Holy Light styles that I used up till this patch. The overall results were me having a ton of overhealing and finishing with almost the same amount of healing done as my Druid counterpart. I have to admit I was surprised that it was that close because it really felt off to me (which it should have). That was through the first wing of ICC.

For the second wing, we had a PuG Shaman switch to their off-spec for healing and proceeded to mow down that wing. The thing I noticed in a three healer set for a ten man raid was that one of the healers was always much lower than the other two healers. It basically seemed like if you were the third healer to react then there just wasn't enough damage to heal for you. In retrospect I would be interested to see how it would have went in the two healer set versus three. Had it been full guild, I would have felt much more comfortable causing a wipe due to my curiosity but we did have guests and so we owed them the courtesy of not wasting their time. We called it on night one with the first and second wings cleared completely.

On our second night we picked back up with more guild members and the blood wing. We again went with a three healer set. This time we had myself on Ruhtra, my wife on her Paladin (Eus), and our guild Druid once again. I switched my style this time to focus on healing around Holy Shock and Word of Glory. My wife right away noticed the same thing I did and remarked about how slow the healing seemed now compared to pre-patch. We knocked out the Blood wing fairly quickly with some issues coming from the off-tank having some agro issues and a gung-ho Warlock pulling the orbs off the tank who was handling the ranged member of the council. We do that fight a little unorthodox with a Warrior tanking the ranged orb member in case you were wondering. All in all, it was pretty much the same results as I felt from the previous night.

We went and healed up our green friend and that was the same old same old there. Holy Paladins in and Druid and guild Shaman outside healing. Once again we had issues with some agro and had to make a couple attempts instead of one shotting as usual. We decided that it would be best to call it prior to doing Sindi simply because our PuG members (not saying they were bad) seemed to be playing a little loose and some careless mistakes had been made that I just didn't want to deal with trying to heal through. We did do one attempt to allow the PuGs to see the fight and explain what they should be doing. In reality only one PuG survived the air phase (phase 2?) and justified my decision for having the raid called.

After Thoughts

So now that it is all settled and done with and I have one ICC 10 run under my belt how well do I like or dislike the new abilities? I have to say I like what I saw during this past week. It is nice having some additional spells for those moments where movement is going to be required. I definitely felt the difference on Rotface while running after the slime tank and also on Profesor Putricide as well.

I think where we will need to be careful is in not using Holy Shock enough. I really struggled on the second night in the Blood Wing and Frost Wing with making sure to cast it every time it was available. I have always used Holy Shock and considered myself well prepared for the change of focus for healing spells, but found myself wanting to find a comfy spot and just spam Holy Light. Another thing I feel I could have really improved on was using Divine Light in a more balanced way. Part of it was because I wanted to test the spamming of it, but the other part was that I still mentally fight thinking of it as the Flash of Light/Holy Light spell combo and that just cannot be the case any longer.

As it stands now I am going to focus on making Holy Shock the center of my healing universe. This is going to provide me with the mobility I craved for so long and coupled with the ability to feed Holy Power into Word of Glory it just makes sense and feels right. In the downtime between cooldowns of these two spells I will fill with a combination of Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Divine Light with Holy Light being the most used for mana conservation and Divine Light being second. Flash of Light is going to be relegated for those moments where you just cannot afford the longer cast time of Holy Light in a similar sense that Divine Light is for the moments where you will need a monstrous heal to bring back your tank. Remember to throw out a Light of Dawn when everything is aligned in a good spot and keep Beacon of Light up on the tank or special assigned raid member and things will go pretty smooth. That definitely is not the old style of healing but yet it retains the base idea of one spell is going to be cast much more often than others simply because it is available.

I realize there is a lot more depth to healing now and I plan to take a little closer look at it in detail, as well as specs, gemming choices, the age old argument of haste or crit, and a multitude of other things. As for now, what do you like or don't like about our new talents? What questions do you have burning inside that you just have not seen anyone talking about?

Be Very, Very Quiet....

2010-10-16T18:00:00.002-04:00

Hey all, been a while since my last post and I apologize but I got hit with what the doctor referred to as a sever sinus infection. I am still not feeling 100% from the nasty little bugger and I hope none of you out there get it. That being said, since the new patch has gone live I am sure that you all have been exploring the new talent trees and quite possibly even trying out a second spec with the price reduction down to 100 gold. I plan to talk a little bit about the changes for Paladins and my thoughts specifically about the holy changes, but that is for a little later. Today I want to talk about hunting rare pets.

If you are a Hunter, then you know what I am talking about. Sure, you could go and get the ordinary pets but what fun is there in that? This topic actually came to mind because my lovely wife has been trying to track down Skoll and I have been helping her out when I can. While I was reading up on the spawn points and other useful comments it got me thinking back to the very first rare mob I ever tamed and so I am going to share the story of my taming of Krethis Shadowspinner.

I feel it important to say that since the game has changed, this may not seem as impressive and some of you may not know that the rare mobs used to be considered elite mobs and were as hard, if not harder to kill than some of the bosses in the instances back a few years ago. This also means taming one could be a nightmare. I remember exactly what I was doing the day I came across Krethis. I was doing the quest in Silverpine to collect the items from the spiders and bears in the zone. I found the cavern that was loaded with the green spiders and figured it would be easy enough to kill them and so I ventured inside. At the time I had one of the spiders from Ghostlands as a pet. We were about half way down the shaft when we ran face first into Krethis. It did not end well for us; however, I desired that spider!

I was level 16 at the time and Krethis was only 15 and that should be easy right? I abandoned my current spider because we did not have the luxury that we are afforded now days and I proceeded to start the taming. Yeah it didn't go so well the first thirteen times. Finally, on my fourteenth attempt (and after fourteen deaths) I was smart enough to drop my trap far enough away to allow maximum time for my tame beast spell to pull him into the trap and the trap afforded me the remainder of the time needed. My friends made fun of me for having a caster pet, but it did not matter to me because this here little spider was a beast to get and I still have my precious Widowmaker with me today. Although it would be much cooler if she could spit flame shocks and cast her shield.

So as I sit here now having left my wife to go to Grizzly Hills and look for Arcturis, I am reminded of the fun, and pride, that can be had by taming these rare beasts. How about you all, what rare mob or pet are you most proud of?

Achievement Chasing

2010-10-03T15:07:00.003-04:00

I have a dark confession to make. I spent this week forcing Ruhtra to drink until he went and vomitted on a Dark Iron Dwarf that apparantly set off a giant brewl, er brawl. At this rate, poor Ru may end up being a hobo down by the bences at the tram station. The good news is that he did manage to sober up enough to complete the Brewfest holiday achievements and pick up the pint sized pink pacaderm! Now if we can just get him to put the brews down. Last time I looked he had conviced Whoopy to join him on his foray into Brewfest and they were both chasing pink elephants. So while they are off chasing elephants let's talk about achievements!

When achievements first came out I was somewhat negative towards them. I viewed them as a shiny object that distracted players from the lack of content. I am a big enough man to admit that I was wrong and that they have added a different level to the game that was not present in the past. I only discovered the complexity of some of these achievements recently. Even the ones that seem simple take quite a bit of effort to achieve. For instance, have you looked for the books of higher learning? It seems easy but it is a pain in the ass hunting for those damn books. Go out and try to love all the little animals or kill all the annoying vermin! I have found a lot of fun and depth in things that I viewed first as little more than a distraction to the lack of content.

35

2010-10-03T08:00:00.003-04:00

Rather is back again for another round this week and I want to talk about a thread I read on the US WoW forums. Basically we have this poster, who is crying about the required 35 points in a talent tree. This guy claims that he doesn't have any "hybrid" specs but feels that it is somehow infringing on his right to build his character how he sees fit. I can understand his desire to fight against the machine, but to be honest with the way it sounds that the trees are turning out there won't be a need to dip into other trees for those first few levels.

I tried to approach it from the other side, but very few of the hybrid builds (think PVP prot/heal Pali build) ever proves to be successful in the long run. The only thing that they tend to do is cause Blizzard's team to grab the nerf bats and start the whacking process. If anything, I am grateful that maybe, just maybe, we will be able to play the classes and their redesigned trees for more than a couple weeks before they start making changes. I understand an argument could be made for some of the hybrid builds that have proven useful (think the Fel Guard/destruction Lock build) for leveling and other things, but most of these builds have you go a little farther than 35 points and so they will not be effected by this.

I think what we see here is Blizzard making people learn to play a chosen class and that is not all bad. If they decided to restrict you to say spending 50 points in a tree before being able to dip into other trees then I may be more willing to fight, but I just see this as an overall win for everyone. Hopefully this means players who understand the class a little better, less nerfs done as a knee jerk reaction to a mechanic that was not intended to be used in a certain way, and more time spent by the staff on developing other aspects of the game.

Strange Ideas

2010-09-30T15:46:00.001-04:00

The other day I was talking with my wife (because communication is good right?) and I do not remember how or why but we ended up discussing the Brewfest holiday and different items that drop. Good thing we both play or that could have been an awkward conversation huh? It got me thinking about the overall status of the holiday events and their (un)respected bosses. Since Wrath came out, Blizz has put a lot (debateable) of effort into giving useful (trinks and weapons) or vanity (mounts and pets) items to these bosses. Alright, well maybe saying effort was too much, but they did add in some trinkets and update the previous loot tables to equal current entry level epic (used lossely) item levels for level 80 characters, which I know we are all aware of and I am sure where this is going right? Well stay with me because we are not yet done wandering around. Another thing that Blizzard added in the Wrath expansion was heirloom gear. The gear we love to hate to love (or hate to love to hate). I am equally sure that you are all aware of the benefits (are they realy?) of these items. I am equally sure that many of you probably have wasted the emblems (another sore subject for some) on these items.

Monopoly

2010-09-30T15:34:00.002-04:00

No, I am not going to talk about the economy of WoW or the board game Monopoly (exactly). I am going to pose a question today. Has WoW become the Monopoly of MMO games? In other words, Monopoly (the board game) has been out for what seems an eternity and in order to sell it, the company every so many years will release "new" versions of it. I personally own several different versions of it myself. Allow me to take it one step farther and say that Monopoly has evolved to a point where you can no longer add new content to the game and so in order to keep it relevant you must change the appearance of the game in order to attract either niche markets or popular markets. Is not this similar to what we are seeing Blizzard doing with WoW?

My opinion is somewhere between yes and no. At this point, there is plenty of new content to be developed and released into WoW

A Day To Be Remembered!!

2010-09-28T15:09:00.003-04:00

I do not know if you are aware of this fact or not, but today (September 28) in Taiwan is the day that they celebrate Confucius' birthday. As such I thought I would list a couple of my favorite quotes from him:

"It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop."

This is probably my favorite saying because it applies to every area of my life. We have to remember to stop looking at how far we have to go, but instead look at how far we have come and remember that even if we are crawling to the finish line, we are still going to finish.

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

It goes well with the first saying to be honest. Stop worrying about how many times you fall down, but get right back up and take another swing at whatever it is you are working on!

And now I leave all of you who complain about the changes (good or bad) coming in Cataclysm with these wise words:

"Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."

My Experience

2010-09-27T08:00:00.002-04:00

It is hard to believe that October is almost here. Where has the year gone? The good news is that this is not a self reflection post about my lost time but rather a post that looks back at the moments during this expansion that stand out in my mind! A celebration of Wrath of the Lich King if you will! So here are my top ten moments from this expansion:

10. Rocket Mount

Who does not want a love rocket? Nothing like taking the little lady out for a ride on space mountain! Wooooooooooo! (Rick Flair) In all seriousness, I love the rocket mount. I was disappointed that I was unable to get one during the holiday event and so I could not resist getting a third account with the sole purpose to get me that rocket! Oh and an added bonus, when people hop in your mount and you didn't invite them you just fly up really high and dismount. Bubbles FTW and the passenger eats ground below! (Want a ride Edy?)

9. Iron Forge Gate Crashers

This actually started from me reading so many blogs about how people only ganked out where it was safe and the numbers favored them. I personally love the thrill of PVP and do not care where it happens, but I can understand and somewhat respect the feeling that you get from being ganked where you feel it is an unfair advantage. So in order to fill my bloodlust urge, I got a group of around six to eight fellow PVPers and we ran straight into the areas of Iron Forge and Stormwind that were most crowded (aka the auctions houses and banks) and proceeded to engage in a little PVP. To be honest it was a lot of fun even when we were outnumbered with odds of six to one. Every now and then in guild someone says let's go to Iron Forge even now.

8. Blue Proto Drake

I had ran H UP over 100 times on my characters looking for this mount. I had seen it drop over 12 times and lost each roll pathetically. One night, in an all guild run I believe, it dropped again. I hit my /roll and lost it one more time, but this time it was to my wife. She knew how I had specifically been running H UP each day looking for this mount and she gave it to me and Pope is the proud owner of the drake now. (Thank you baby!) I still would like to get it for Ruhtra, but just having him on one of my characters is good enough for me.

7. Hearthstone

The single funniest moment I have ever been a part of occurred in Naxx. We were running one of our first guild raids and we stopped to group up before the final boss. One of our Hunters (who reportedly loves to smoke a special weed) went to feed his pet and ended up hearthing out of the raid. We were all sitting there just staring at him and wondering what he was doing. A few minutes later he realized he was no longer in Naxx and asked us how he got where he was. The vent erupted in laughter and even though it was an extremely long break it literally had to be the single funniest moment in our raid history (debatable). On his way back in after being summoned, he actually managed to get lost which naturally led to more laughter in vent and the guild taking "Because I Got High" as our unofficial theme song that we will still play when someone does something funny.

6. Undead Hobo

I do not know why, but one of my friends in the guild likes to take his undead Warrior and strip him of all his clothes save for a red Santa hat. Someone remarked about him looking like a hobo and from that day forward all I do is laugh when I see him standing there on the flight pad of Dalaran portraying the role of a hobo.

5. Oh My God!! You Killed Kenny! You Bastard!

We have a Rogue in our guild who has spent this expansion dieing in some of the most amazing ways. He has died so much that we have nicknamed him Kenny in honor of his horrific deaths. If there were a gold medal for deaths in WoW, then our Kenny would be the guy you are shooting to beat. We do not feel like it is a raid unless he dies within the first five seconds of the run. Often times as soon as he dies the mood will lighten and someone will remark that it is now an official MAS raid.

4. Drama

I bet you did not expect to see someone put drama in a top ten list for Wrath of the Lich King, but let's face the facts that this expansion was filled full of drama from my very own guild to the top ranked guild out there. Within my own guild, it really helped me to get a desire to focus on raiding and get behind our raid leader(s) and start pushing for success within the guild. Anyone remember the guild member who had received the GM item that would literally one shot Ulduar bosses? That created quite the stir when an unknown guild came out of the blue and was destroying Ulduar. How about the engineering bombs used on the Lich King? I think it is safe to say that we have definitely seen an expansion filled full of drama that is going to be memorable.

3. Phoenix and Tigers!

I am not one to pursue mounts exclusively but I am extremely happy that after what seems to be an eternity that Edyion was able to get her Zul'Gurub Tiger mount. I remember when she first started running to get it and she needed to take a healer with her and the tank. I remember many a day going in there and just spamming Flash of Light while her and the tank got in sync. I also am happy that she got her Phoenix vanity pet when I helped her with MGT. It has nothing to do with anything that I did, but instead the fact that I am generally excited and happy for any member of MAS when they have worked hard to acquire something that is as rare as the Tiger. So congratulations on all the mounts and pets and here is to many more members who get to acquire those things that they want.

2. Squeal(s)

I know kind of odd to list this, but I did because I love when I hear a loud eruption of squeals from the other side of our computer room. It typically means that something good has happened for my wife. For instance this week she got the Great Brewfest Kodo on one of her characters and she almost made me fall off my chair when she squealed in excitement from receiving it (I was completely focused on something in-game and was not running with her). It is like I said earlier, I genuinely get excited for my guild members when they get something special or earn a tough achievement so you know I am twice as excited when it is my wife.

1. _____________

This is reserved for killing the Lich King as a guild. We set out with one goal at the beginning of this expansion and I am fully expecting us to accomplish this goal. I will be even more excited because we are doing it without twenty five man content gear and on an extremely limited raiding schedule. At this time we are firmly able to go 10/12 and have had success to pushing Sindregosa below 20% health. The only thing that can stop us is ourselves.

So what about the rest of you out there? What is the highlights for you over the course of this expansion? Was there something you did that may seem insignificant to others but was a major milestone for you? Was there something you did not do that you are afraid you will not be able to do now?

Played Out

2010-09-26T16:50:00.003-04:00

Have you ever hit that point in your life where you just sit and wonder if this is all there really is? When I graduated from high school, the girl who was our class validictorian started her speach with, "We live, we die" and it proceeded to go down hill from there. That is somewhere close to where I was at in regards to my feelings for WoW. I was forcing myself to log in and run a couple raids per week and maybe make a cameo appearance in a random heroic. I just was not feeling the love for WoW like I had back when I first started to play. I know my poor wife would ask me to play with her and I would try but I just was feeling like I had done the same thing a hundred times before and there was no pleasure in actually playing the game. In truth I was beginning to consider just cancelling my subscription(s) for a while and then seeing if I wanted to come back to the game after an extended period of time away. Basically I was beyond burned out to the point of feeling that WoW was played out (for me at least).

I considered my options and decided I needed to find that love of the game that seemed so distant at this point in time. The question was what was it that made me love the game so? I started thinking back to the first few months of WoW and what made me want to play it. Was it the countless hours of grinding quests that use to make-up huge chunks of the game? Was it the fear of getting corpse camped from some lurking Alliance player? Was it the thrill of not knowing what lay beyond the next zone? Was it waiting to get a new ability? Perhaps it was the desire to get my first mount at level 40?

A New Course Is Set!!!

2010-09-26T01:54:00.007-04:00

It has been quite a while since I wrote anything around here and I do truly feel bad for this, but I do not regret it one bit. I needed to get away and just relax and enjoy the game for what it is, a game. That being said, even though I have not been blogging I have definitely been busy around Azeroth, as have my toons!

Pope decided he had enough of the evil Alliance (his words, not mine) and so he signed up in the war and charged straight into battle, head rattling and all! It was a hard fought campaign on both sides and there was no punches pulled. There probably would have been a lot more casualties if not for the brave Forsaken Priest!

Pope approached Ruhtra (so I am told) and asked if he would join him in his campaign, but Ruhtra would have none of it. He stated that he has waged enough wars for others in his lifetime and was going to go and reflect on the recent events. Ruhtra appears somewhat distraught having spent his entire lifetime fighting for what he believed to be just causes and seeing no results from all the sacrifices. So he headed off into the middle of nowhere and played some Simon Says!

We are really not sure what happened out there but he seems to have come back renewed with a purpose, but we are not really sure if his purpose is going to be for the better or worse of those involved. You see the first thing he did was go and speak to a large group of Ogres! Did I meantion that we are concerned about him?

Apparantly he wowed them with his shiny two seated rocket and won over their loyalty and is now being proclaimed as their "Shiny White Haired Pale Faced Little King". I think I should really stress that we are worried for Ruhtra's sanity!

I must admit he did seem to be much more relaxed with his new found allies when he introduced them to the joys of Brewfest!

After he completed guaranteeing the service of the Ogres he then set about seeking out some additional reinforcements of questionable character.

If you see this Paladin out and about we recommend extreme caution and please do not attempt to confront him. We would appreciate you to contact a representative here at Holy Shock or Mass Affluent Slayers for assistance as they have been trained in the proper ways to deal with Ruhtra and the Chaps of Power!

PS: I am doing great and thanks for everyone who has inquired about me and the blog. I just took a little bit of time to enjoy the game as a game and not a job.

Looking For Two More ______________ Raiding Achievement! Need Two Tanks!

2010-09-25T08:00:00.001-04:00

I was sitting in trade channel last night and was utterly amazed at the number of people who were spamming looking for either healers or tanks for specific raiding achievements. Do not get me wrong, I am all for you working on earning your raid achievements, but when it is for content like Ulduar do you really expect to put a PuG together that will complete this task?

I am not trying to belittle you or the raid itself, but the reality is that the achievements and hard modes in Ulduar can be some of the most difficult achievements to earn with a complete group of strangers. It is compounded when you are looking for two tanks or two healers who know the fights and are willing to spend the time trying to help you achieve this. I started thinking a little bit about this and I had to ask myself why the hell do you spam trade?

I understand that a lot of guilds are in stasis at this point of the expansion and so you may need a roster spot filled, but when you are doing trivial content and seeking experienced individuals I just do not see how you will get them. Then the thought hit me, why don't these spammers form a guild focused on doing these tasks? I mean they seem to think they have the know how to do the achievement. Most of them flaunt that they are gear checking and looking at achievements anyway. So why not just form a guild focused on this older content?

I think it is because these people are wanting to be carried. I do not mean to sound harsh, but no other reason makes sense to me. Why else would you ask people who have the achievement to come heal or tank for you? There is nothing for them to gain at that point unless they are seeking something specific such as fragments for a legendary item. So I ask you all out there, are any of you these trade channel spammers who are wanting someone who has nothing to gain to come out of the way and help you earn something why? Why do you want someone who has it and not take someone who is geared and qualified but lacking the achievement?

PS: I am not talking about ICC, but earlier content such as Ulduar.

Back To Basics

2010-09-21T15:17:00.004-04:00

It feels nice in life to return to your roots. It doesn't matter if it is going home to the house you were raised in or returning from a long trip to be greeted by your friends. In WoW, I have been slowly returning to my roots lately and I am finding it much more enjoyable than anything else I have recently been doing. When I first started playing I found three things that I truly loved to do in WoW. Two of the three things were directly linked and the third was a by-product of not doing the others. Everything else in the game was pretty much just filler for these three things:

1. Playing With Friends

To me WoW is a social game in that I started playing because of friends I worked with and in return I got my own family and friends playing as well. It was originally just about spending a few hours a week running around in a fantasy world with friends that I was not afforded the luxary of being able to run around with all the time in my every day life. In other words, I started playing my very first online game when we first learned that my wife was pregnant. I decided that it would be much cheaper to stay at home versus running around with my buddies. At the cost of going out to sports bars, movies, and the like it made much more economic sense to find something I could do at home and for fifteen dollars a month it seemed like a deal. By being able to play with my friends it was as if I were still able to run around with them getting into trouble.

2. Actively Seeking Out PVP

When I first started to play WoW, my friends from work already had maxed level characters for the then current content. One of my other buddies started playing and together we worked on leveling our characters between getting corpse camped. It was during this time that I learned to love PVP as did my friend. As a whole, most of my friends would prefer to camp an Alli instead of go run an instance or raid. This worked well and provided hours of amusement on a PVP server. Once I finally hit level cap I formed arena teams with countless friends and sometimes we won and other times we lost, but we always had fun with the game.

3. Auction House

If you ask of my friends in WoW they can attest to my love of the auction house. I made my gold by selling what no one else wanted to. I worked the auction house primarily between PVP matches or running the occasional instance. My friends use to have to drag me away from the auction house and often laughed at me for spending hours of time standing there. My auctioneer was known across the server and hated by almost every other auctioneer in the game. I would receive countless whispers and in-game mail regarding my practices for listing. I had such a rush back in those days just toying with people. At one point, people had told me they had started a petition to the GMs for my listing style. I never received anything from the GMs or Blizzard so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the statement, but it amused me that people knew who I was and what I did. I could often tease members of the guild who worked certain sections of the auction house about changing prices and they would laugh and ask me to leave them alone. To me, it was never about annoying other auctioneers or hitting gold cap. I just found it fun to see how much could I list each day and did I have a huge profit or loss when I was done?

I have been thinking a lot recently about why I play WoW. The fun had been slowly slipping away for me personally. I have taken pride in seeing the guild grow and become a respected PVE guild. I have taken personal pride in overcoming all the obstacles that we faced over this past year. I have enjoyed providing the guild with as much stability as I have been able to. I loved to log on and see people laughing and teasing in the guild chat because they deserved it, but something was missing for me. I know I have hinted at how the game slowly switched from being something I did for fun and slowly became like a second job. That was beginging to wear me down personally. Instead of logging in and looking forward to joking and teasing, I would try to avoid logging on when other members may be on. I no longer felt a desire to help the guild succeed. I found myself instead dreading the thought of logging in.

At first I assumed it was just the "burn out" that others have talked about. I reasoned in my mind that if I just do not log on as often and maybe even find another game to play that it would lesson the aggrevations I felt when I did log onto WoW. It worked to a lesser degree. I would log in less frequently and was not as annoyed, but it still was not proving to be that same feeling that I was looking for. I actually had debated on perhaps cancelling my subscription. I reasoned that maybe the game had lost the fun and it was just an obligation I felt that kept me playing. A tiny part of me disagreed. Instead, I decided to take some time away from a lot of things with the game (including blogging) and focus on just having fun when I logged on.

It started with me working on leveling alts and messing around doing silly little thing. (Dancing naked with a rocket helm on?) I spent some time working on professions that I had neglected. I started working on some achievements, like Loremaster, that would require a little bit more from me than I had previously been able to afford. I slowly started to enjoy at least logging in, but I still was not feeling that rush of excitement that I longed for. One night I logged into my Shaman, Walani, who I had not played in a few months. I decided I would run some battlegrounds with him just to mess around and level in a different way. Something sparked inside me while running those Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch battlegrounds. I felt that rush that I had been looking for so long for. I decided to switch from my Shaman to Ruhtra and take him into the battlegrounds and see if I still felt the same. I decided to focus on Warsong Gulch because I have a long, long, long way to go on their reputation.

As I was running Warsong Gulch after Warsong Gulch I found myself having a lot of fun. Yeah, I would get aggrevated by the losses or people not really playing the battleground in a smart manner, but overall it was more fun than I have had in a long time. If it was a bad group I could just find a nice spot and heal like a crazed man.

Alterac Failure

2010-09-17T12:00:00.001-04:00

I have been sitting here for a while trying to find a way to convey my thoughts on what has become of my favorite battleground and the only words that can best describe are that it fucking sucks! I suppose now I should come up with some sort of justification to make a statement of this nature huh? Well, all I have to say is go run one and then report back your findings. I will admit that it has been a while since I worked on running battlegrounds, but with a desire to level a new character Alterac Valley has provided a wonderful resource or at least I thought it had. So out of four Alterac Valley runs last night, I managed to win one and lose three. I do not mind losing honestly. What I mind are the little twits who do not understand the goal of the battleground or I should say do not understand the proper way to accomplish the goal of said battleground. I realize that Alterac Valley is not the only one to be suffering from this problem, but it is the one that I love the most and therefore that makes it blog worthy to me.

The number one issue I have with running Alterac Valley now is the fact that no one will listen to the strategies that are proven to win in the battleground. I am sure that you all have heard the guy who comes into the battlegroup and starts shouting orders out. I am the first to admit that I hate this guy, but I am also smart enough to know that these strategies will generally work if they are followed with a few modifications. You need at least two tanks for the first bunker so that one tank can deal with the boss there and the second can wrangle in the spawned elemental. In additiona to this, you need yourself a couple of healers who can keep the tanks up. Typically you hope that they are slightly higher leveled or well geared lower leveled. Throw in some DPS and she goes down easy enough. Of the three losses I suffered, only one of the groups were able to take down the middle boss. That is quite sad I agree, but then you have to understand that they had one tank and an elemental Shaman healing. That is not going to get very far because as soon as the elemental spawned that Shaman was toast. This led to the crucifiction of the group that was trying to down her and ultimately to many of that group going else where because of said scrutiny. When will people learn that the belittling and name calling accomplishes nothing except making you look like a pric?

The second irritating thing is the player (and there is always one) who knows everything and belittles every one for their lack of skills. You also know this guy pretty well I am sure. He is typically not the guy at the top of the damage done, honorable kills, killing blows, or healing done list. No this guy usually is in the middle down towads the lower side. They are the ones who disagree with every strategy except for zerging Van and likes to drop his huge vocabulary through words like "lawls", "lulz", "nub", "noobs", and other such words. They rarely ever have an original idea and while they may have an achievement I am willing to bet that it is one they earned when they accidentally ended up in a pre-made group.

The third group of players who irritate me are the ones who just follow orders without thinking out the results. It is a great idea to follow the guy who gives instructions at the beginning of the battleground, but if you are in a group that is all low level and your objective requires you to take a target without aid, then you may want to speak up and request some help from a high level character. Trust me, at 71 a character is not going to be able to take down one of the 79 or 80 NPCs found scattered throughout the battleground. It is better to make this issue known upfront, than to give someone cause to start the bitching over a group not accomplishing their goals.

The fourth and final group of people who piss me off in Alterac Valley are the leaches! Those people who come in and do actually assist with an initial target and then proceed to do nothing from that point on. Sometimes they are just the smart AFKers and sometimes they are the loud obnoxious guy who is just trying to annoy everyone. No matter which one they are, they annoy me greatly because they could at least be used as canoon fauder for a higher level character.

You know I feel much better having let that out versus holding it in till it becomes a curse filled rant. So what about the rest of you PVPers out there? What battleground shananigans get under your skin? Even better, if you are one of the four types I mentioned, what makes you tick?

Back In Black!!

2010-09-14T17:00:00.001-04:00

Wow things look a little dead around here! Well, don't you fine people worry too much about all that shit! Ol' Rather is back from his long, long, long trip and I am ready to start writing again! First I want to say that I really missed everyone. Yes, even those of you who hate my fucking guts! I also want to say that there is no way in hell I would touch some of the subjects that have been going around lately. I am sure you know of the ones I speak. It has been good reading though, so thank you for that as well!

I am sorry I do not have much to talk about right now, but I am trying to get my thoughts in order and catch up on everything that is actually worth my time. The Cataclysm news front seems a little boring so I will leave that up to the boring bloggers to talk about. I have been working on leveling an alt through some battlegrounds lately and boy have battlegrounds become nothing more than a sorry place. We may spend some time talking PVP since I have been doing a little more of it in lieu of anything else, especially with limitted time.

I think for now I am going to focus on just writing on Fridays again. Most people are busy during the summer, but my life picks up and goes nuts come the fall and winter months. Rather out!

Short-term Break

2010-09-05T18:44:00.004-04:00

I just wanted to come on here and wish everyone in the States a happy labor day! God knows that it is the common people like you and me who make this great country tick and you deserve your day! I also wanted to say that I appreciate the few folks who have inquired as to what is going on here with Holy Shock. The truth is that we are really good around here, just extremely busy. In the Ru household, we have learned that kindergarten is no laughing matter. They actually sent homework home to the parents! What the hell is up with that? Along with that, we are letting little Ru take after school activities and anyone who deals with children knows that it as much work for the parents as the kids. It is work that I am happy to do though. If you were wondering about Rather, he is doing well from his last communication to me. He has been busy with work and some other things and unfortunately just hasn't been devoting as much time to WoW as he use to. He reassurred me that he was still raging and pissed though and said not to worry. (Which of course makes me worry.)

I have not decided if/when I will be back to writing full time here at Holy Shock. I do not like to write things that are not well thought out and well written and right now I just do not have the time to commit to everything. Even my WoW time has been cut down as I have decided to not spend as much time in the game to combat the feeling of burn out. I refuse to write about the information regarding the beta unless it is confirmed by a blue post or I have tested it myself (which I have not). So if I am not playing and I am not goign to speculate, then the only thing for me to talk about is other facets of my life which I will not do from here. So in my leave, I am leaving the door open and the lights on. Feel free to look around and browse the older posts, there may be something there to make you chuckle and I will see you later.

Take care!

Life Is Funny

2010-08-22T13:26:00.003-04:00

It seems like every time I decide to start doing more with the blog that life jumps up and says "nuh-uh"! The last few weeks have been no different and while I make no apologies for my life being greater than a blog about gaming I do miss writing posts for the blog. That being said, as things start to settle down some I am hoping to start writing more and sharing what has been going on with my own adventures in Azeroth. Until then, allow me to give you a quick highlight of what I have been up to!

Raiding:

On the raiding front, we are making great progress. We one shot everything this week up until Dreamwalker and Blood Prince Council. Dreamwalker was a result of the tanks deciding they should only use one. I was against it, but allowed a few wipes and then made a recommendation to switch back to the normal way of two tanks and four healers and it worked as always. Blood Prince Council is just a nightmare for some of our raiders. The constant movement and activity seems to confuse some and then we also have to contend with raiders coming back who took the summer off. We called on the Blood Queen, as it was getting late and a few of the members needed to work the next morning. I am actually really pleased with the overall performance we have been getting and once the new and returning raiders get adjusted I am sure we will power on through and end this expansion with the final goal we had as a guild.

Characters:

I have managed to gear all of my eighties to be useful in ICC and in fact have cleared (I believe) the first wing with each of them. I often tease that I am the switch hitter of the guild. Missing raid heals? Let me get Popebutch! Missing tank heals? Here comes Ruhtra! What, we need some melee DPS? You can have Whoopy or Ruhtra! One of our ranged didn't make it? Who you need, Emprius, Lrem, or Popebutch? About the only role I cannot fill is tanking and that is simply because I have not made a whole lot of attempts at tanking until the last couple months! I had been working with my Death Knight and enjoying him, but there are just so many Death Knights out there! So I decided to give my Warrior a try! I picked up some tanking gear and a sent some heirlooms to him and hit the game running. I actually have been doing my quests in the protection spec just to learn more about my abilities and I have to say I love it! I have tanked a few dungeons like Mauradon and they have been smooth and ran at what I consider to be a good pace. I cannot guarantee I will stick with tanking forever, but it has been a nice change of pace from dealing damaging and healing.

Achievements:

Well, I am almost done with the Loremaster for the Eastern Kingdoms with Ruhtra. I do not know if I will get the full Loremaster title before Cataclysm hits, but my goal is to complete the original content first. I also picked up the multi passenger mount from the Sons of Hodir faction and I am loving it. I really debated on spending eight thousand gold on something like that, but I wanted it for a couple reasons and at this point in the game what else was I going to spend it on? I am also debating on whether I want to go for the Insane achivement. I am thinking of putting this one on hold as I doubt I can devote time to grinding the reputations as well as completing the Loremaster achievement.

I am sure there is a lot of other things that I am not remembering, but hopefully we will get back on track around here sooner rather than later.

Holeycow Talks Shop

2010-08-10T08:00:00.001-04:00

I do not know if anyone ever read my old blog dedicated to Holeycow and his ways of making gold and to be honest I am not too horribly worried about. I pretty much ended that blog and just remained focused here on Holy Shock. I did not quit making gold though and today I want to talk a little bit about one of the easiest ways to make gold and perhaps a few thoughts on ways you can prepare to make gold once Cataclysm starts.

If you ask anyone who knows me, they can vouch that I do not level my professions very quickly (if at all). As a matter of fact, poor Ruhtra has been just about every profession in this game and never managed to make it past the vanilla level of the professions. As a way to fight back my burnt out feeling, I have decided to level the professions that I feel will be most useful to Ruhtra as a healer (which is completely not backed by anything other than my own personal opinion). Once again I picked enchanting for a couple reasons, one of which was that Ruhtra is the character I play the most and so the ability to d/e items is great and allows me to get a large amount of mats for enchanting. The second profession I settled on is jewelcrafting. Those dragon eye cuts are just too much for me to resist! I have also begun working on finishing out cooking, first aid, and fishing! That is a lot of work, is it not? Especially for a guy who has not done anything at all with the professions on this character!

I have a clear advantage this time though for leveling in the fact that I have characters who are already maxed out in both of these professions and I have learned a lot along the way with those two. The second advantage is that now you can level using Armor and Weapon Vellums and I am just so fortunate to have a character and a wife who can supply me with all the vellums that my little paladin heart can desire. To my surprise, the low level enchants from Vanilla have sold quite well for me. I am not talking about the weapon enchants from the end game of Vanilla either. No, I am talking about the things like +3 stamina! It got me thinking and so I focused only on making these types of enchants and in just a week of leveling my enchanting I have made over 1,600 gold on cheap enchants. It cost me nothing in mats as I had a vast resource of mats saved and plenty of items to d/e. Looking forward, I am relatively sure that this is an area that if you do not price gouge, then you will able to make a good amount of quick gold with minimal effort as a lot of players are leveling new characters and come Cataclysm there will be plenty of Goblins and Worgens in need of these handy little enchants. Enchants that if adequately priced will earn you a nice little paycheck as the current players of WoW tend to have much more gold and are even much lazier about doing this stuff for theirselves. What are you focusing on right now to make a little extra gold or that you plan to leverage come Cataclysm?

Play That Funkeh Music!

2010-08-09T17:57:00.003-04:00

So last night after working a ten hour shift and having been away from home for twelve hours, I came home and ate some late night dinner and chatted with my wife. I decided I would log on and check some auctions that I had posted with Ruhtra and then grab a quick random by healing. My wife hopped on as she was working late today and we ran something, I do not even remember what it was. Whatever it was, it was over and done and made no big mark on my brain. So I was going to go grind some reputation with Sporegar and my wife commented that she wouldn't mind running for a few more emblems on her hunter, Lovkinja. So I thought why not? It was the effin middle of the night, what could wrong?

Enter Trial of the Champion! I hate the damn instance with a passion! I always get retarded groups and players with the skill of a rock. I was not let down. Along with my wife and I, there was a fury warrior, death knight, and paladin tank. It took foreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever to get the jousting done! I can deal with players who are trying to gear, but I have a hard time dealing with people who just don't give a damn about how they play. Had it not been for my wife, I would have bailed on the group. So we drew the rogue, shaman, mage combo as our opponents. A tough group with players who know what is going on and are at least adequately geared and a nightmare for players who have no clue what is going on. So we start out alright, paladin does his thing and draws them in and the DPS do their thing. Mage decides to target me and blast me with loving drops of fire, which is really not that big of a deal as I can heal through it. As I am healing for a good five minutes I keep watching as our poor warrior and death knight have to keep running away from the boss. Then the paladin tank decides to start berating the DPS to do more. I would have cursed him out if it wasn't for it was taking everything I had to keep them all alive. After what seemed ten minutes of endless healing, the paladin drops group! The death knight tried to pick up the slack but was not geared to deal with it and down goes the group one by one.

I can honestly handle wiping and groups struggling. I am not an elitest snob and I am always willing to help groups out. One look at my gear and you can really see there is nothing left for me to need emblems for unless I want to complete a prot gear set (which I would never use). What I cannot deal with are effin little dumb asses who do not know their head from their own ass. This paladin was nerd raging at the DPS to do more for a good five minutes; however, had the dumb ass bothered to understand that tanking is more than standing in one spot and holding agro, then he might of realized that he needed to move his sorry ass out of the green pull of poison that was taxing the overgeared healer. Apparantly, he has taken tanking to a whole new level of tard. This dumb ass apparantly felt that the two melee DPS should be able to stand in the pull of poison and burn the bosses down. I was completey enraged at the ignorance of this guy, but to up and leave a group in the middle of a boss fight is really just completely wrong! So if you play on the US server of Bronzebeard and are Horde, please let Funkeh know what a terrible tank he truly is and also feel free to berate and belittle this asshole as you see fit. If you are in our battlegroup, I feel sorry for you if you get him. As for me, he is on my ignore list and hopefully that should keep me from ever having to heal his sorry ass again.

As for the rest of the run? We got a solid Druid who knew how to tank and while it was a little rough with low DPS from the death knight and the warrior, we did complete the run with no more wipes and only one death. I was happy as they both got some upgrades and my wife managed to get some emblems, but damn do I hate that horrible, horrible instance!

Fighting It

2010-08-08T17:58:00.003-04:00

The last few weeks I have been fighting against the "burned out" feeling that often besets players in WoW. I am realizing that I am becoming more aggrevated and brooding than is usual for me. This past Friday I had to force myself to log into WoW to raid. That struck me as odd since I was looking forward to it so much right up until it was time to actually raid. I struggled through raiding this past week and found myself irritated over every little thing that came up. It didn't matter if it was people who decided to AFK or not knowing a fight, I was just completely in a foul mood. I worked hard in an attempt to mask my aggrevation and I feel I did an alright job of it. I was definitely not as talkitive as I am at other times, but all and all I think I managed to not insult anyone.

After the raid, I spent some time thinking about what was bothering me and I think it is just that I have played the game for so long that it is starting to feel like a job. For example, on raid nights I try my best to log on about fifteen minutes early and begin inquiring if anyone needs flasks and to check on the fish feast status. In addition to just making sure we have ample items to cover those who may not come prepare, the last few weeks our raid leader has not been able to be on and that always adds a little bit more to what myself and others then have to concern ourselves with. Usually this sort of thing doesn't bother me, but it has just been a culmination of things and having realized it I have decided to get back to just enjoying the game.

So yesterday I packed up my ret gear and headed off to Felwood in search of the evil Furbogs. I spent roughly two days fighting them and in the end they became my twenty-fifth reputation at exalted and I received my trinket of Furbog love! My plan to counter this feeling is to focus on the small and sometimes even silly achievements. For instance, the last PVP night when we were running all over Iron Forge, I led our band of adventurers to where I could fish. I got my Diplomatic Fisherman achievement and cracked up everyone around by stopping in the middle of a raging battle to fish. I have decided that sometimes in WoW, you need to take a break from the job and just enjoy the game side of it. How about the rest of you? How and what do you do to combat the dog days of summer?

Lucky Number Seven

2010-08-03T19:25:00.004-04:00

If you read my wife's blog, then you know that we just celebrated our seventh year of marriage. (GO US!!!) So you will have to excuse me if I do not have anything posted up today, but sometimes (as I always say) real life is far more important that WoW! I hope you had a happy anniversary baby!

The Raid Report

2010-08-03T08:00:00.001-04:00

Welcome to the all new ongoing series titled The Raid Report! There is so much on my mind when it comes to raiding, I worry that one post per week may not be enough but we shall try our hardest to make it work! So I wanted to talk a little bit today about what you can expect out of this weekly series and also what I am hoping to cover. The first part is really simple, you can expect once a week to receive a post about raiding. What we are hoping to cover in these posts are a brief highlight of what MAS has been up to during the course of the week. When we discuss our own raids, we will be as open and honest as possible and attempt to share what has worked and what did not work during the course of the week. Also, because we like a little bit of humor in our post, we will also present the worst PuG of the raid award for each week! We will try to not make this out to be too negative, as we hope that our PuGs will actually be good and make for an uninteresting discussion. The sad truth is that we still end up seeing players who just quite do not understand what is going on and so they will be open for "discussion".

Another aspect of this series that I want to highlight will be the way that we handle certain situations around our raid composition. As a smaller strict ten man guild, certain situations prove somewhat more challenging for us than others because we lack some classes and their buffs. On the opposite side of the coin, because we are a smaller guild, we tend to know how we will react in certain situations. In other words, when the shit hits the fan, we know what to do and how to react. We are far from perfect and we definitely find interesting ways to struggle and that is part of the intrique of this sort of a series. None of us our professional gamers. Most of us are well past our teens and sadly approaching thirty or passed it. The one thing we all have in common is that we feel that raiding should be a fun experience. We also feel that raiding should be taken serious and that there is a certain level of dedication that is required in order to succeed. We have been ranked in the top ten for our server in strict ten man guilds and at this point would probably be in the top five had six of us not ran and defeated Lord Marrowgar in a twenty five man PuG. We are extemely proud of where we are and are relatively confident that it is just a short amount of time before we finally finish off ICC.

The last and final thing that I want to convey is that raiding can be a lot of fun. It doesn't have to seem like a second job. Yes, it does require some forethought and a slight amount of preparation, but this does not mean that it has to be serious. I have been in too many runs with other guilds where they really do treat each other like a piece of shit and you can sense it in their raids when it begins to start. There are some guilds that I love their people but one bad apple makes me avoid them like a plague. We truly strive to make the raids as enjoyable as possible, while still keeping a focus on the prize. I hope this comes through loud and clear because at the end of the day it is about having fun with a game. Yes, there are moments where you have to get the job done and there may be some uncomfortable talk about what areas you can improve in, but it should never ever be used to make someone feel like lesser of a person because they may not be the best and with that I am going to close this out.

A Personal Message

2010-07-31T05:38:00.005-04:00

I want to preface this and say that this post is straight from my heart and I apologize upfront as it will probably be inappropriate for the younger readers and not so interesting to the readers who do not know myself, Eus, and the rest of MAS on a more personal basis. Having said all of that if you are still here, then read on at your own expense.

Almost two years ago Wrath of the Lich King dropped and MAS was excited to pursue this new expansion with a new goal. I have always made it known that our roots were in PVP. We have members who were here from Vanilla's beta testing. We, more than a lot of other guilds, are steeped in the tradition of what WoW was originally. We have a post up where I got a couple of our older members to talk about what WoW use to be like. I did this to show the newer players how difficult this game use to be and also to show that when some of the members speak, they may just have a little bit more knowledge than what you would think. We grew up on a server that had world PVP in mass through the Burning Crusade expansion and we were active in this. This has been a blessing and a cursing in that we often times would get sidetracked by killing Alliance instead of pursuing the raiding game. The positive side of this is that PVP'ers who turn to raiding often times have much better reaction times and can change strats on the fly in the middle of the encounter without instructions from the raid leader. Now when you get an entire guild like this, you have a fantastic group of talented players who can overcome any situation given enough time.

Our biggest problem was that some of our members wanted to raid at all cost. They cared more about their individual achievements than that of MAS. They left and they damn near tore down MAS in the process. Early on we lost half of our core raiders and were left gutted and unsure of what to do. I remember the anger and betrayel that I felt as I viewed most of these people as friends. I was enraged and I made no attempt to hide my feelings on the subject from anyone. I was actually told by one member that we should consider just remaining focused on PVP. That was the straw that broke the camel's back so to say. I spoke with several remaining members and officers and asked them all point blank what their intentions were. The resounding answer was that MAS was their home and they were going to stay so long as there was a MAS. Their dedication to the guild filled me with a sense of purpose. I decided that I would get them to their goals. I started working on making sure that we had guild runs scheduled, even if no one showed up. I put in time building up our bank resources. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into MAS.

We slowly over time started to see slow progress. After a few changes in the officers and getting a new raid leader, we decided the time was right to push into ICC. As I sit here now at 6:20 AM EST on Saturday morning I am proud to say that we knocked the shit out of every boss in ICC that we have encountered. We now sit on the brink of taking out Sindragoso and the Lich King. We went in last night with a group, that on paper was not our strongest group possible and exceeded all expectations. This was also the first week that we had set two nights for ICC 10. I cannot say how proud I am at what these people have managed to accomplish. We decided a long time ago that we would remain a strict 10 man guild and have not tried to clear parts of ICC 25 to upgrade our gear in order to overpower this content. Instead we rely on each other and our own ability to adapt and overcome every situation. I have always been very hesitant to make this next statement, but by God we have earned it. We are the best strict 10 man guild on our server, bar none!

Now for the personal part. I want to take a moment and talk to all the people who left MAS to be able to raid "current" content. To all of you who are sitting in trade channel begging for an ICC run, to all of the people who told us to stick with PVP, to all of you who marked us as being a failure, to you I say fuck you. Had you been able to put down your own egos and worked with the rest of the guild, then you too could be enjoying the success of the guild and where we are. Instead, you continue to sit out there and spam the trade channels looking for a group that will try to carry your lazy ass. I want to take it one step farther though and thank each and every one of you for making us stronger. You see the old saying that talks about only being as strong as your weakest link is so true and it was apparant who the weak links were in MAS and we owe you much for removing yourselves and saving us the trouble of struggling to carry you. The sad part is that you each will assume I talking about someone other than you. In closing, thank you for putting the fire in me to see this thing through. This is a chapter in MAS that I am closing and will never look to speak about ever again, but I want you to know that when you thought we would not make it, we took that as a reason to make it in spite of you.

Now to the members of MAS, I want to personally thank each and every one of you. Over the years, you all have meant a lot to me. During the last two and a half years, you have been with me through changing jobs, the death of my Father, moving, going from a family of 2 to a family of 5, and countless other things that you may never know. In all honesty, I took a test regarding despression and the results said that you would be clinically depressed if you scored 16 or higher. I managed to score 32 because of all of these major life events occurring in a matter of a few months. Through all of it, you guys were there and you may never know how much you helped me by just being there to talk to. It has been a pleasure going on this journy with you and I couldn't be more proud of each and every one of you. I know we do not take the time often to say these sorts of things, but I want you all to know that I could not have found a better group of people to spend my free time with. It is for you that I continue to work to improve this guild and make it what you guys want. We will finish together what we started so many months ago and you know that if you ever need anything and I am able to help, all you need to do is ask.

Who Is Your Main?

2010-07-26T21:44:00.002-04:00

A week or so back, one of our officers posted a question in our guild forums asking what is the class that we are planning to level in Cataclysm. That is an excellent question. I took the question to not necessarily mean who is my main character, but which of my characters do I intend to level for raiding purposes. That is an even better question for some of us. We have several members of our guild who have multiple level eighties. I personally have five, my wife has four, and a few others have three or more as well. I naturally responded and stated that Ruhtra would be my first to level to cap and along with him I would also look to level Popebutch (my Priest).

My initial thought is that Ruhtra is who I am most comfortable with and Pope is probably who would be most beneficial to the guild for raiding considerations. My thoughts are also somewhat jaded as I struggled to get Ru into PuGs and guild runs because there is such a flood of Paladins out there. I have litterally been every spec in this expansion and have three very nice gear sets because of it. I leveled Pope in order to see if Priest healing was as enjoyable as Paladin healing. I learned a couple things along the way while testing the priestly waters. The first thing is that I miss my plate armor! Yeah, with Ru I often take hits from mobs and some bosses without fear. Not so much with Pope. On a side note, I definitely see why people complain about their sissy robes. The second thing I learned is that Priest healing is a lot of fun. There are so many different dynamics to it and so much utlity that it could be overwhelming. In fact, it is overwhelming to some people and those are typically the folks who queue as healers and then try to switch to shadow. That being said, a Priest definitely brings a lot to the table in terms of buffs, heals, and utility.

The downside is that there is so much going on and so much utility that I am afraid it may take an entire expansion before I felt truly comfortable with playing the class. You see with Ru, I have been healing almost since day one. I do not even need to think about what is going on. With Pope, I not only have to think what is going on, but I have to try to remember where my hot keys are and not look for Holy Shock in my "oh shit" moments. A couple other things I learned about myself along the way. I truly love the Paladin way of healing and not the "spam _____ spell" method that is often associated with us. I have realized that when played well, a Paladin can bring quite a bit more than just one really huge healing spell. I think it took me playing another healing class in depth to really appreciate what Ru brings to the table.

At the end of this little question, my answer is that Ruhtra is going to be my main healer. So what about the rest of you out there who have multiple level capped characters? Is there one that is your main no matter what or are you planning a change come the expansion?

2010-07-25T14:06:00.003-04:00

Impending changes heading this way! That could describe a lot of things, but it is meant to describe what you can expect from us here at Holy Shock. I have been accused of being quite picky at times during my life and in truth I am. I believe if you plan to do something, then plan to do it well. At the beginning of this year, I switched the way in which I posted here to the blog. I had begun to think that constant posts would equal quality post and upon reviewing those posts decided that constant posts were simply consistant and that did not necessarily make them a quality post. I decided that if I did not have anything to talk about then I would not post anything. I think the quality of the posts have greatly improved, but I was not happy with the gaps between posts. That led me to bringing Rather on board, who was shortly followed by my wife Eus. The two of them have definitely brought some different perspectives to the site here and I love reading what they have to talk about. I think that together, we have definitely been meeting the goal of putting out some quality posts and in an effort to continue this I am planning to bring back a couple of the weekly series that I was writing prior to this year.

The one that is on my mind is the Raid Project. In its most original form, it followed my guild as we attempted to break into raiding. The original idea came to me when members of the guild left and suggested that we look at just sticking with PVP. It was my therapy to show them, and everyone else, that we could raid. A lot of time has passed and I think that we have proven that we are one of the top strict ten man guilds on our server. I would make the claim that we could be considered the best, but I realize I am biased in that opinion. What this new Raid Project will focus on is what makes us who we are. It will focus on what we did that proved to be successful and what we did that became our demise. The ultimate goal is to showcase the talent that the guild has and to show how we used our resources to accomplish our goals. Another asepct of this ongoing series will be that you get to know the members of our raid team. I have said in the past that I feel like one of my weakest areas is in the fact that I do not give enough praise to my guild. I am going to take major steps to correct this and some of that may just blead over into other posts.

Needless to say there are a lot of minor changes heading this way and I hope that over the coming months that you all stay with us here at Holy Shock and continue to enjoy the ramblings of thoughts that we put together. Also, if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, we are never opposed to hearing from you and we love the chance to interact with you all.

Cookie Cutter Life

2010-07-22T19:08:00.005-04:00

I was going to spend this post ranting about how aggrevated I am with all the talk about new specs and what is the must have talents, but I felt that the above pic would suffice. If everyone could tone down the must have talent talk until we at least have a confirmed ship date for Cataclysm, please? Thanks! Rather out!

I Have Seen The Light!

2010-07-20T15:15:00.007-04:00

There has been a whole lot of talk lately about Paladins and their incoming changes yet for some reason it has been completely calm here at Holy Shock regarding the subject? Every now and then you may see a reference or find a comment from one of us about the subject but as a whole we have tried to avoid the topic as there is still much time between now and when the changes will go live. That being said, we are starting to get a more complete overall picture of what direction the design team at Blizzard is wanting to lead us in and that is what I am wanting to look at talking a little bit about today.

So, in recent comments I have made it very clear that I am worried about my class. I am worried that the changes will either overpower us or underpower us. I will not lie, I like where the holy tree is at right now in the game. It provides the large powerful heals that you want for tanks and a lot of resource abilities in hands, blessings, and other abilities. I like it so much that I at one point during the expansion was sporting to PVE holy builds at the same time. I like it so much that I have two sets of gear, one for healing with flash and one for the blinding light. You can visit the Paladin forums and see how much debate there is over what build to use and which one is better. You can find multiple posts on forums and on blogs about what stats are best overall. In short, for the talented holy Paladins out there, the class is in a good position in my opinion and we are a clear cut tank healer.

That being said, Blizzard wants to change all healers to be able to step in and fill a role. There can be no debate on this with all healers being changed to have a small, medium, and large heal. All healers will have some sort of an area effect heal as well. The differentiating factor will be in the class specific abilities, which for Paladins will be Beacon of Light (changing), Sacred Shield, and other such spells. I think it is painfully clear that while Blizzard is making it possible for every healing class to perform a sepcific healing function adequately, there will still be classes that lend theirselves to doing specific roles such as tank healing versus raid healing. The designers have even suggested this in different posts, but the message is clear that they want the concept of bring the player not the clas to be more than a fancy slogan.

So what role do I see Paladins performing in Cataclysm then? I think the majority of the Paladin player base, as well as the overall player base, will see the class as still being a tank healing class. I think that how we decide to heal will signifigantly change in the area of how and where we wish to position ourselves. As I begin looking over the newer spells and seeing words like "AoE" and "Frontal Cone" used to describe our newer healing spells, I get the distinct feeling that positioning myself within melee range is idealy where the designers are wanting us to be. This could also lend credit to the thought of using our abilities to heal more than just a tank. Perhaps we are progressing to a style of play that will describe your healers more as melee ranged healers versus caster ranged healers. I say this because I do not believe that Blizzard will give us a lot of range on our AoE heal and the front cone style of healing would be best used to assist with the healing of those in melee range. One thing is certain, and that is nothing is certain until the changes are patched in right before Cataclysm. Until then, I plan to view everything cautiously and I shall attempt to not get all bent out of shape over concepts and ideas which may or may not make it into the final cut.

Trolls Are Trolls

2010-07-19T19:37:00.003-04:00

So the other night I ran some randoms picking up a few triumph emblems in hopes of finishing off my Holy gear set for Pope. My wife was running with me and that always makes me feel good to know that I will at least have gotten one player who has a solid understanding of how runs are supposed to go and also what their rotation and spec should resemble. So we pop into queue and in five seconds we get H Occ! I personally love this instance and my wife loathes the place. So she gets her few gripes out of the way while I buff (I keep wanting to say bless) the party. We set out on our merry way and one particular player catches my eye, a retribution Paladin sporting heirloom gear. I love fresh level capped characters, especially when I know that they have already leveled at least one character and ran enough random heroics to have the BoA Heirloom gear. I honestly do not remember the rest of the party, but nothing overly special since I cannot even think of the composition.

So we start out and the Paladin goes charging ahead of the tank and the group and pulls the first group. The tank (who I just remembered is a DK) pulled agro back and proceeded to maintain the agro. I chuckled to myself as I watched the Paladin through this run. He wasn't doing anything horribly wrong that I could not Renew him through, but I am sure the tank was getting tired of him by the end of the run. The poor guy would just charge ahead and expect the tank to pull agro off of him or for the healer (aka me) to keep him alive. I laughed and told my wife I really wanted to let him die, but in truth it takes way too long to wait for someone to run back into Occ, especially if you are towards the half way mark. We made it through the run and I did give the Paladin marks for killing the adds of the final boss who decided they wanted a piece of my green drake's hide. We said our thanks, good groups, and see you laters and I departed group back to Dalaran chuckling to myself about this Paladin.

So why did he crack me up so? To be honest, he knew his DPS rotation very well but was lacking on his overall knowledge of the utility abilities such as his hand spell that reduces threat or his ability to provide blessings to the party. I use to become really angered by these types of players because I felt it showed an attitude of who cares, but now they either amuse me or I just feel sorry for them. You know the kind! Anyone ran with the Rogue who goes nuts burning all the cool downs on multiple mobs only to pull agro and die? Had they realized they had ToT (Tricks of the Trade) they could of tricked the tank and then went all gung ho on the baddies and had improved the over all experience for the entire group. Instead they have found theirselves to be content with being just average and you know what? I am completely fine with that. I have come to accept that not everyone wishes to play the game the same way.

I know in the past I have been pretty hard on those players who choose to show up in a random with unchanted gear, sockets missing gem, and in some cases the completely wrong type of gear; however, it really just does not bother me anymore. If I get a group that looks like it will struggle, then I simply apologize and excuse myself from the run. I honestly do not care about a half hour "penalty" if the group will spend an hour trying to down the very first boss. I still believe whole heartedly in helping people and doing what I can to guarantee a smooth run, but it has been tempered by those same individuals who show up and either have no clue what they are doing or simply do not care if they are lessening the fun had by others. I will usually drop a suggestion and if I see it being utilized then I am willing to stick with the group. If it is met with a rude comment from the person it was intended to help or another party member, then I will simply bow out of the run rather than subject myself to the incompetance that will follow.

I know it is a different post for me to write but I have seen some of the worst behavior out of people in random heroics the last few weeks that at the first sign of this behavior I would rather just leave than stick around for them to get whatever attention they feel that they need. To me the people who play the game without taking the time to learn what they are doing are the very same as the trade chat trolls, you simply get tricked into feeding them in a different manner. My advice to everyone is do not feed the trolls. Do not acknowledge their bad behavior. Do not get into a war of words. Especially, do not give them what they truly crave.....attention.

Rose Colored Classes

2010-07-18T05:53:00.002-04:00

I want to let you all know that you do not need to worry about Ol' Rather, I am doing well but I have just been really, really, really, really busy lately! Yeah, that damn busy. I have been keeping my hand on the pulse of recent events and happenings though so don't you worry none bout me! Now, let's jump into what I want to talk about today which is in direct relation to a post made over at Honor's Code. You see Honor's is getting a little upset that the designers over at Blizzard seem to not be able to get a grip on what they want for Paladins after six years and you know what? I agree with him. I mean I fucking hate the fact that Paladins are a faceroll class and any caveman can sit down and play one.

Sorry guys, but it is true! That being said, I don't agree with a lot of the decisions they are making with changes to certain play styles and mechanics. Alright, so let me formulate a valid argument rather than a curse filled rant. Let's examine the changes they announced a while back for healers. They want all healers to have a small, fast heal that is high in mana cost. They also want a solid medium heal that will be the go to heal, and then the big bomb heal that is used for those moments when we know large amounts of damage are incoming. In addition they are trying to make sure that every class has a nice little AoE type of heal. Oh and they want some sort of gimic type spell that is a signature spell of the class. It sounds good in theory, but in practice I hate being a raid healer. When I heal I typically take a class and spec that specializes in tank healing. Why? Because I like healing tanks. I do not want all these other spells cluttering up my tool box. Instead, why not build on holy Paladins and discipline Priests as being the specialist for tank healing? Let the restoration Druids, Shaman, and holy Priests focus on raid healing and buff their abilities for this. I know that they want to push the whole concept of bring the player and not the class, but for fucks sake we picked the classes that we want to play and if they would just quit fucking with the damn specs we would be much happier than getting a damn new shiny spell.

Another thing that bugs me is their constant attempts at "balancing" between PVP and PVE. I understand all the different things that must go into play, but they have a couple stats that are not used effectively or efficiently. Those stats are Resilience, Armor Penetration, and Spell Penetration. If I were to suggest one thing, utilize these stats to build the PVP talents around. In other words, use them for what they were originally intended for. Resilience is pretty simple, increase how much damage Resilience will absorb. Yes, it may increase a match by a minute or so, but it is the simple solution to counter overpowered raiders coming in stomping a hole in those who choose to only run in PVP. Armor Pentration and Spell Penetration would be the counters to Resilience. Then all you need to do is build specific talents which will increase these specific stats which would make them completely useless in PVE and highly valuable in PVP. Yes, I know it is not as easy as I present. I know there must be computations and calculations. I realize that there would need to be statistical data and a ton of play testing to make sure that there would be no loop holes, but would it not be better to recalibrate specific talents for a purely PVP situation than to rebuild entire classes in an attempt to balance out the game?

I do not want to give the impression that I hate everything that they are doing. In fact there are two pure win moves that they are planning to implement in the change to Hunters and Death Knights. I think the Hunter change is long overdue since the use of mana really never made much sense. As for the Death Knights, I think by putting the bulk of the tanking talents into one tree will only help the class over all. Right now most Death Knights have no clue what to spec for or how to even begin to compile a rotation. Yes there is plenty of information out there at sites like Tankspot and Elitest Jerks, but I dare say that the average "anal" joke telling Death Knight is going to have the mental capacity to understand what they are reading. Don't hate me guys, I am just trying to be honest and keep it real. It is a pure win for your class and now lets every Death Knight know that if they want to be considered a serious tank, then you best have the right spec.

I know I cannot be alone in thinking these things, am I? Rather out!

Creativity

2010-07-17T04:26:00.005-04:00

So last night I stayed up way too late and made the picture above. I really had no reason to other than I found it fun and challenging to create. I started thinking back, while I was looking at this picture, about the reason I play MMORPGs. It really goes back to the fact that I was raised in a home that valued creativity. When I was little, we would go to church on Sundays and my Mother and Grandmother would take little pads of paper and give to me and my brother to sketch on during the church service. I do not know if this is the right thing to do or not, but it kept us occupied while the preacher would talk about what was on his mind. I can remember during the service I would draw these scenes of houses and people conducting every day activity and as soon as the service was over I would run around the church and hand them out to the people that were friends of the family. The years have certainly passed and many of those people have also passed, but one thing that they would always talk about was how they loved those pictures and looked forward to them. These individuals also fostered that sense of creativity by encouraging us and thanking us for the work that we put into drawing these little pictures.

As I grew older I definitely gave up the drawing, even though my Mother would always try to get me to keep drawing. You see my Mother is a very good crafter in her own right. She can crochet like no one I have ever known. I am not saying this because she is my Mother, but because people from all over call her to make baby blankets, baby sets, and all those other little crafty things that people like to give expecting couples. I remember when I was a little kid, she and my Grandmother would go down to the church they were attending and they had this crafting social club where the crafters of the church would get together and talk about events and exchange ideas. I would go and find something to do with some spare wood or take my own toys (GI Joe anyone?) and spend the afternoon just imagining these huge battles and far away places. All the while developing my creative side unaware. My Mother got her creativity from her parents. My Grandmother (who is 95 and still crafting) and my Grandfather (who I did not get the pleasure of knowing) were both very creative individuals. They fostered that in my Mother who passed that on to me and my brother.

My Father on the hand was extremely bright and talented, but did not have the supportive environment that my Mother was fortunate to have. I am not going to say anything either way since he has passed and he and his parents came to terms and seemed to move on with their lives together. My Father though struggled all his life with feeling like he was special and talented. He grew up being told he was a failure and that he couldn't do anything. When I hear his parents talk about raising their kids, they tend to make it sound like they were hard on them to make them better off and maybe that was the case. It however gave him a complex and so he never saw how special he was or creative he could be. My Father was big into gaming. He ran with a crowd that changed the gaming industry forever and while he never got involved he definitely helped define the gaming genre for generations to come. That is not what truly set him apart as being creative. To me it was all of his lead figures that he would use for gaming. He had the hands of a surgeon to be able to paint expressions on the faces of those little figures. I remember being little and he would take us into his room where he worked on and stored these figures and there were probably thousands of them that he had spent hours and hours working on making look perfect. I consider myself fortunate that he taught us how to paint and I am envious that I was never anywhere near as good as he was at painting. My point is that he invested a lot of time in us to make sure that we never felt like he did and to make sure and teach us to appreciate the creativity of others.

I remember the very first table top/role playing game that I truly fell in love with was called Battletech. We use to plan these huge campaigns with my brother's friends, my Father, and occasionally some of my friends. We didn't play with just the maps you could buy from a store, no sir! We created entire towns and country side out of railroad models to play. We would use rulers and play by the rules for conversion of movement points and what not. Sometimes it would just be a grand melee and other times one of us would create a campaign to be played over several settings. I poured myself into this game. I created entire units and wrote background stories for key members of the unit. I painted my Battlemechs to colors that were specific to the unit. We would race to the local gaming shop and buy the newest source books and figures as soon as they were available because we loved to immerse ourselves in the world that we had helped to create. Some of the best memories I have of my Father were had during these times. I can remember how he would raise his bushy eye brow over his dark tinted glasses while he thought about a particular move as if the very victory or defeat would hinge on this move (quite often this would be the opening move). Those were probably some of the best times I ever had. I wish we would have had more time to make those memories.

While in my college years, my brother had moved on to playing more role playing based games and occasionally I would go and play with him and his friends when they invited me. I often times found these games to be fun and would throw some crazy decisions at the folks who would be running the games. I didn't play with them regular enough to really remember the games, but I remember one game where I led half of this elite combat team to a 70s style disco in an attempt to locate this demonic legion that we were suppose to be after. In truth, when the guy who was running the game described the town he had briefly mentioned this place and I thought it would be funny. It did turn out to be a lot of fun, but I was told I had way too much of an overactive imagination. Looking back, they were right but every time I saw those guys after that they always would laugh about the fight against hell in the disco! Hell, if any of them were to read this post, they would know it were me in a heart beat because of how funny I made that evening. A lot of good times I have had in these alternative realities.

So why the walk through the past? I honestly do not know the whole reason, only part of the reason. You see while I was creating this picture, I was trying to capture the arrogance of Emprius. My wife and I often joke about the personalities of my characters and in truth most of them have a background story and full biography all in my head. A lot of times my wife will sit around and try to pick it all out of my head. I don't know if she thinks the backgrounds are funny or if she thinks I am funny, but never the less she enjoys it. So while attempting to capture the essence of Emprius in this picture, it made me realize why I love World of Warcraft. To me it is an avenue to carry on the creative side of myself. I don't just roll a character and play it for eighty levels. I created something that was as unique as my unit in Battletech, as fun as role playing a battle against demons in a disco, and for a moment makes me feel like that little kid sitting in my Father's room staring at the little lead figures. My wife has often teased me that I should write the backgrounds of all of my characters and some day I may very well do that. As for today, I am going to just sit back and enjoy the little lead figures and hopefully pass on the creative jean that flows through my heritage to my son. How about the rest of you, why have you stuck around for so long?

Healer Pimpslap

2010-07-16T02:00:00.002-04:00

So, here is another interesting tale, brought to you by one of my other 9,584 alts. Sacerdotessa is my priest that I've been leveling and have made it to level 60. Her main spec is Shadow, which I love. Several days ago I decided to dual spec her to Discipline. I actually enjoy the healing disc aspect. It reminds me of my dear ol' Eusymae.

Anyways, Wednesday night I decided to hop on and play so I logged onto Sac. I que'd up for a random and got Ramps. I had a great group of people with the exception of the tank. Many /facepalms went all around at this poor soul. Once again, bear with me folks because as I've stated before, I give credit where it is due but I also have to flame where it is needed. I'm not all Negative Nancy ya know..

We had a DK tank, a ret pally in Skrills-Darkspear, a hunter in Riskar-Bloodscalp, another fellow D-spiner Shaman in Shamayonaise, and myself healing on Sac. As many other healers complain as I do, my complaint is letting the healer get mana. Even after I openly told him in party, followed by whisper to the tank, we kept banging our heads against the wall with this fellow. He just kept pulling, with no response to my pleas. It was to the point that I had four tanks. Every one of them has aggro and it became a real feat of strength for poor Sac to keep everyone up. We all tried to tell him to switch from his blood presence to frost presence. The tank still never responded.

Finally when we get to the first boss I just finally had enough. We all died, me being the last to stand. Sham resurrected himself then me. We get everyone else up except for the tank. Between myself, Sham and Skrills, we refused to rez the tank. And we were very open about it. In fact, we never resurrected him. Then the tank decided to stay in ghost form and not come back to the instance. At this point Sac let loose on Mr. TardTank and I let him know that he was now griefing and that it was a reportable offense and it did not matter to me how he wanted to play this out. And that futhermore I would not be healing him if he continued to act in sucha manner. On top of that, I offered to leave with Sac and bring in Eus to tank, knowing that he wanted to be a complete ass about it and that Sham and I were on the same server, so easy invite could commence.

Skrills at this point earned her shiny gold star because she stepped in to tank, and did a superb job. Ris and Sham also stepped up and did a great job on their dps. We four manned the entire instance and finished it without any trouble. Mr. TardTank finally realized I was not messing around when he finally ran in twice during our runs and myself, nor anybody else healed him. At the second boss he made a parting comment, something about us being asses and left the party. With much rejoicing and laughter, we completed Ramps with no problems. At the end of the run Skrills made her wish known that she would like to dual spec prot someday, and I hope she does. She stepped up to the plate and offered to tank, in ret spec with no righteous fury turned on. She rocked it and I want everyone to know that these three players should be commended for playing a game and not acting like an ass.

As for the tank, I hope you learned your lesson. First, learn a little bit about your class before coming in at level 60 and thinking you are a pimp. Because you are not. Sorry. No way. Nuh uh. Nada. Nope. Fugedaaboudit. Until Cata comes out, use Frost Presence. It saves many headaches, bitchings, and facepalms later on down the road. And again, no member of the party was mean to this fellow. We were trying to help him and give suggestions and advice. If it falls on deaf ears, so be it. You made your decision, and I made mine. And apparently, so did everyone else.

So, for future and also up and coming tanks, please read or ask for advice on how to tank DK, Bear, Pally, Warrior, or "insert here any kind of" style before jumping in. There are forums, blogs and I'm sure other friends/guild members to ask or find out information. Also, I'm sure rational people can tell the difference when people are being mean to you and when people are trying to help you. If you can tell the difference, then you should either A)leave the party, B)shut up and deal with it, it'll be over before you know it, or C) don't act like a complete ass and do your job!

Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. I still have hope though, silly me. And Healers, remember, REMEMBER to keep the Healer Pimpslap strong!

Time Flies

2010-07-15T11:11:00.004-04:00

It seems like this year is just flying by doesn't it? Maybe it is just me, but I still feel like it should be cold out and I should have nice warm covers to hide under instead of the ninety (F) and higher temperatures we are having around here. I am not complaining, but it would be nice if things slowed down some for me. That being said, I added another little side project to my list of things to do and I am happy to say that it is finally ready to be unvieled and discussed! So, for anyone in my guild, my apologies that I did not inform you that the old guild website was no longer available but allow me to introduce to you (and anyone else who is reading this) the new Mass Affluent Slayers website that is being hosted right here on Blogger!

Feel free to poke around the site. There are a couple reasons that we decided to make the switch from the old host and bring it over here to Blogger. The number one reason for me is simply accessibility. I know I can access Blogger from anywhere. Blogger is a trusted site at every job I have ever had the privilage of working and you want a guild site to be accessible right? The second thing that stood out to me is the availability to add help to managing the site. Over at our forums, I am able to provide different levels of administration access which is why things stay up to date and tidy. The third, and maybe most important reason, is that of getting more attention. I am a huge numbers person. I crunch them all day at work. I crunch them when I am looking over what to do with my characters. Hell, I would crunch them for raids if it wouldn't cause the raiders to want to kill me. The bottom line is that Blogger does a better job of putting your site out there and getting hits on it. You cannot argue with statistical data unfortunately. It would be different I suppose if it were a business and we were paying for advertisement, then we could use whatever service we wanted to. In the end I think we would still end up right since Blogger has just made it too easy to not be here.

I hope you all go check out the site. There is a lot that I have planned for the site in the future and it will constantly be being updated, but for now I just simply plan to enjoy the site and I hope all of you do as well!

Edit: If you click on Mass Affluent Slayers in the post it will take you to the site. Also if you click on forums in the post it will take you to the forums.

Random Healing

2010-07-05T14:51:00.001-04:00

So the other day I logged on and wanted to get my daily random over and done with so I chose healing and party leader and queued on up for whatever was to come. It took all of five seconds for me to get a group. I zone in and I have Gun'Drak with a group of players who were relatively freshly turned 80s. While attempting to bless the group, the tank charges in and pulls the first mob and before I could even get a Flash off he was dead and the group wiped. A part of me thought about leaving the party immediately and just running on some of my other toons while waiting for the timer to come off. I decided against this and zoned back in. The group was inquiring about how the wipe occurred. I politely stated that the tank pulled while the group was not quite ready. The tank apologized and waited patiently while the group made their way back and buffed up and replenished their mana.

While we were waiting for a few who did not know how to make it back to the correct side of the instance to arrive, I did a quick inspect on the tank. He was a Death Knight tank and was wearing mostly DPS gear. This explained the reason I could not pull him back from death's door. I whispered him and inquired if he was defense capped. He waited a long while and then replied back that he was not. I thanked him for his honesty and changed my game plan for healing him. To be honest he only had three pieces of gear with defense on and this was going to actually make for a challenging run to keep him alive and the DPS as well. We chatted for a few moments and he explained he switched to tanking to help groups get in quicker but was in need of tanking gear. He had some trinkets which provided him adequate health for tanking heroics and I always love a good challenge. I said nothing to the other party members and never criticized any of them who may have pulled off of him on accident. I instead deployed my beacon to him and just rained down Flash of Light on the party.

At the end of the run he had collected three pieces of tank gear, had successfully held most of the agro, and no one had wiped past that initial one. He whispered me and thanked me for being nice to him. I responded and said that it was no problem and recommended in future runs that he notify the other healers if still below the defense cap. He thanked me again and I left the group. I share this today, in hopes that the other healers who are geared out there will have some patience with these new tanks. It would have been one thing if he had tried to play beyond his skill, but this guy held agro better than a lot of tanks I have seen in full ICC gear. He was careful to monitor my mana as he realized I was using a lot more abiltiies to compensate for his gear. He was quick to react to pulling agro back off of the DPS. He allowed the casters time to regenerate their mana even. It made for a much more enjoyable run. The group was one of the most talkitive groups tht I have ran with for a while, even though they were not the most geared group.

So why would I choose to share this story with everyone today? The honest truth is that I want to bring awareness on the fact that not all PuGs are bad. Not all tanks are overgeared assholes. Not all DPS deliberately stand in fire. Not all healers will refuse to heal through stupid. I try to share as many of these experiences as possible to encourage the readers here at Holy Shock to stick with your groups. If you get a group that is rough around the edges, do not insult the players but look for ways to offer some advice in a more constructive way. Sure I could of openly ridiculed the tank in this run due to his lack of defense gear. I am sure based on his reaction at the end, that not all healers have been as nice as I was and that is ashame since he was completely capable of running the content with a little bit of assistance. So next time you get that "bad" player, look for a way to help them. They may be greatful for it or they may not, but you will never know until you give them a chance.

Time To Celebrate!

2010-07-04T03:41:00.007-04:00

Oh yeah, one more goal in a list that is getting slightly smaller every day it seems. This guy right here has been the one thing that has taunted me beyond any thing else. Which Proto Drake is it you ask? Why it is the Blue Proto Drake from H UP but of course! This guy right here has dropped for me ten times! Ten times I have seen him and ten times I have lost him! That was until a few of us ran a random heroic and yet one more time my dear sweet little taunting Blue Proto Drake decided to show up. This time, I had a fearless Hunter with me who took careful aim and nabbed that mean old Proto Drake! They then graciously traded him to me for nothing other than the fact they know how much I wanted this little fellow! So to my wife and to her Hunter, Lovkinja, a great big thanks from me to you! See guys, one more reason that playing with your signifigant other is a good thing!

I also want to wish everyone a very happy fourth of July here in the states! I sat around the house on Saturday and watched some old John Wayne movies that he had made about World War II and that got me to thinking about a Great Uncle of mine who recently passed away. He was a young sailor during World War II and his aircraft carrier went down in the Pacific. He watched as other young men were burned alive, drowned under huge chunks of ship, and even attacked by sharks. He was fortunate, he made it home and spent the rest of his life working hard, supporting his family, and giving freely of his time to go to schools to share the events that took place during his time in the Navy. I guess to some, this time of year is all about the fireworks and celebrations but let's not forget the veterans who helped keep this freedom for us. Like my wife said on her blog, freedom isn't free. I also will probably go and sit down and watch the Patriot because it seems fitting for this time of year and also because it is a pretty damn good movie. Enjoy the celebrations and stay safe out there!

Are We Allowed?

2010-07-01T19:34:00.006-04:00

A few days ago I asked a question about whether or not the readers of a blog have the right to be disappointed in the writers of the blog. The responses were exactly what I had expected to see and some of them were very close to my own thoughts on the question. You see, I write a blog as a way for me to share my viewpoints on things that concern the World of Warcraft and occassionaly some other subjects as well. It is something that is done of my own free time with no merit or reward being offered. I will honestly say that at times, it can almost seem like a second job when you decide to write something that is more in depth and requires research. I do though because I enjoy doing it, as I am sure many of you out there do as well.

I try to write from a neutral perspective as much as one possibly can. I would like to think that I do a fairly good job at it. I avoid the big topics like politics and religion. I have learned that these topics are emotional topics and best left for their own proper realms. I try to keep the blog as focused as I can on things that affect the game that we all love to play and read about. I know I have never laid down any type of "rules" around here, as I view everyone as being adult and understanding that nothing can come from screaming matches (even screaming matches over a blog). Along with not providing "rules" which govern the blog, I also have not provided any sort of promise about content or posting schedules save the fact that I will try to have something up on here at least once a week. I think we are doing a pretty good job of this.

Then out of nowhere I received an email that could irritate me if I were to allow it. The person claims to be "disappointed" in Holy Shock and the change in content being offered. This person went on to say that they found it sad how we traded our style of writing from one that was viewable by everyone, to one that should have a "content advisory" notice on it. This person went on to belittle the blog and the recent articles that have been posted. They also felt the need to question why I would allow Rather to be writing here when they felt the majority of the problems started with his addition. They went on to do some more berating and belittling before one more time stressing how disappointed they were with the blog now.

I really debated how best to handle this particular email. I have not shared the information with anyone, not my wife nor Rather. I instead thought it would be a good topic to discuss here on the blog. After all, it is a blog for opinions (especially mine) so what better way to clear the air regarding this email? The very first thing I would like to say is that I refuse to edit or censor anyone who writes a post here at Holy Shock. It is not my job to guarantee that something will not offend you. I realize that there are young kids who may read this blog and I try to balance out the posts, but it is not my job to make sure that any of your children are not seeing content which may be inapropriate for them. In reality, it is the adult's responsibility to ensure that their children are reading/looking at material which is appropriate for them. I do not rely on the radio station or television station to make sure that my son is not hearing or seeing things that I would deem inapropriate for him.

The second thing I would like to point to is the fact that when Rather decided to accept the invitation to write here at Holy Shock, he made a point to note that he does write in a way that may be offensive and advised those who do not wish to view his "rants" to not read the posts that he writes on Fridays. I would take it one step farther and say that if you do not wish to chance upon a post that he writes, then perhaps this blog is not the right blog for you to be reading. It would be a different thing if I believed that anyone who wrote here at Holy Shock was writing with an intention to offend someone, but the fact is that we do not. We all have our different styles of writing and different ways to express ourselves and that is what makes the blog good in my opinion. I have no intent to change anything about the way that anyone writes here and the only way that anyone is going to quit having an opportunity to post their writings here is if they choose to quit blogging or that they decide that Holy Shock is not the proper place for their writing.

In closing, I would like to thank the person who emailed me with their concerns. I appreciate the fact that you have held the blog in high regard, but if you look over the past of this blog there have been plenty of rants by myself that could have rivaled that of Rather. I appreciate that you took the time to make me aware of your feelings, but at the end of the day this is a blog that is meant for people to express theirselves. Thank you and now I return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

- Ruhtra

Tumbleweeds

2010-06-28T15:11:00.008-04:00

I was reading some blogs this morning when I read a post over at Priest With A Cause that got me comparing the Burning Crusade heroic dungeons to the old western town that is abandoned with tumbleweeds blowing through them. What I took away from the post was a question of why do players not want to switch up the content some instead of running nothing but Utgarde Keep and the Nexxus? I think the simple answer here is that most people associate the dungeons with gear and naturaly even the most simplest of players understand that new and shiny is better than old and worn. The more experienced players understand that their experience per mob is twice that of the Burning Crusade heroic dungeons. Those two factors alone will single handedly kill the older content. Yes, you can probably attribute newer players not understanding the attunement issues, but most players eventually figure these things out by wandering into the knowledge. The real question here is how the hell does Blizzard correct this issue?

The issue is nothing new though and based on the track record, it is not one that Blizzard seems to care the least to fix. I would not even waste my time on this topic except there is a slight glimer of hope found in the fact that Blizzard has stated that they desire to put the feeling of being epic back into the epic gear. If this is in fact the case, then there is a slight chance that the gear we have now will not be as trivial as the gear we had in the previous expansion. If we look back at the history of the expansions, we can clearly see that the epics of Vanilla WoW were completely made obsolete by the greens of the Burning Crusade. It did not matter what you had or where it came from. After a few quests in Outland, your old epic gear was rubbish and nothing more than something to store to wear for fun or to sell for gold. When Wrath came out, some of the top tiered gear from the end game of the Burning Crusade was still viable into the low to mid seventies. With all of my characters who were geared to the teeth at the end of BC, I was able to make far into Wrath before I truly needed to upgrade. I doubt this pattern will change too much though in this expansion as there are only five levels until cap. So why all this talk of gear and how far it will go?

The gear is probably the number one driving force for any of us running content. We need gear to progress to the next level of whatever we are doing in the game. Blizzard has recognized this to a certain degree and is going to make rare items more powerful and hopefully put the epic back into epic items. So how can this help the older content dungeons? At first it may not be able to do much, but what if Blizzard plans to reevaluate their item levels and loot charts for older content. Imagine if when Cataclysm launched that the older dungeons were made viable again by Blizzard putting the same equivelant items in Stratholme as was in Ramparts? There would be a reason for people to run these instances now. Imagine if the heroic dungeons of Burning Crusade dropped items that were equivelant to the middle range of dungeons in Wrath such as Violet Hold and Draktheron Keep? It would certainly encourage people who are leveling their new Goblins or Worgen to run these dungeons. Now imagine if they removed the attunements for the older herocis and removed the labels of Vanilla, BC, and Wrath and whatever dungeon was appropriate for you, you then would stand a chance to get.

The trick here is that the developers will not do such a huge overhaul of their game if the people do not cry out about it. I am sure they are aware that no one is running Heroic Blood Furnace, but why would they fix that which no one wants? So it is up to us players who like this content to start threads demanding that this shit be fixed. That loot tables be changed. That item levels be equalled between the soon to be four different parts of WoW. That content be made relevant again. It may seem like quite a bit of work, but considering they are removing stats, merging stats, and changing itemization on gear that makes sense; then I dare say that it is not too difficult to begin the integration of the items to one smooth flow for all of the game. Yes this may mean that you lose epics from BC and Wrath, but wouldn't you freely want to trade some of that shit for the chance to actually run this content again and be able to experience it as you level your next character? I know I damn sure would.

Disappointment

2010-06-27T17:00:00.004-04:00

Is it fair to be disappointed in a blogger? That is the question I present today. A fairly simple question, but one that I think is fair to ask. Do we, as readers of blogs, have a right to be disappointed in a blogger? I will expand on this in a later post, but I just want to get the feeling of the community on this subject.

In non-disappointing news, go check out Fish over at his Gnome Warrior is an Oxymoron as it seems he is back to blogging and perhaps back to playing WoW.

Pardon The Interruption

2010-06-27T03:37:00.003-04:00

I just wanted to drop a note and apologize for the way things look. You see I learned a very valuable lesson the other day, do not mess with what works! I am always looking to change things, to make things better, to reorganize that which is already organized, and litteraly it seems at times I am just never satisfied with things. Well, while sitting at work really bored and with not much else to do, because who actually works at work now days? I decide to mess with the look of the blog. I saw the little "new" template design feature and thought that I could mess around some and see if I might be able to tweak some things I didn't like about the look of things around the blog, but instead I somehow managed to lose my old template and ended up with a pretty crazy looking one. I worked for probably a good three hours to get the current one set up, and while I like the layout I am not thrilled with it at the same time.

As for all the links and blogs listed, well they were part of the casualty of the accident. So if you had a blog that I had linked here, or by chance you have one that you want to shamelessly self promote, then make sure and drop a note in the comments section! I know my better half was not thrilled with the look of the blog and let me know about it before I could explain that I made a "boo-boo", but such is life when you live with me. Expect an actual real blog sometime in the near future. I have so many things to talk about and have probably about four decent posts near finished, a ton of ideas written down on steno-pads, and an infinite number of other things on my mind as well.

Well, it is late and work comes early, so I hope everyone has been enjoying their summer and having a fun, yet safe one!

Happy Father's Day!

2010-06-20T13:04:00.003-04:00

Hello folks, Eus here! We here at Holy Shock wanted to wish all the daddies out there a Happy Father's Day! Kick back and enjoy your day because you earned it.

To Ruhtra: Lil Ruh is lucky to have a daddy like you. Seeing the two of you interact everyday is a real treat. Entertaining but very much rewarding. Thank you for just being you!

Fibbing, Fibbers, And Other Bad Players

2010-06-18T03:10:00.004-04:00

So today I have a tale of a Paladin that I encountered while leveling my Death Knight with my wife's Mage. I actually felt somewhat sorry for the guy as he was trying to heal but was having some issues with just about everything that one could possibly think of that could be a problem for a healer. Bad gear, bad build, bad spell selection, not using utility spells to stretch the limited spell selection out. Yeah he was pretty rough. About half way through the run as we were waiting for him to finish drinking his 500th (exageration) mana drink, I asked him how long he had been a Holy Paladin. He stated that he has always been, but took about three months off from the game. I just acknowledged what he said and proceeded on worrying about my own characters role and not his so much. It wasn't until my third corpse run back into Utgarde Keep that I inquired about some of his gear. I off-handedly joked about the selection of Carrot on a Stick for one of his trinkets. His other trinket was an old vanilla tanking trinket.

I must admit I was getting slightly tired of the running back to my corpse because he was not able to keep the group up so I took a peek at his healing choices and he was bombing Holy Light on every cast. I give him credit that he was judging as well, but he had zero mana regeneration while casting and combined with the fact that he had a non-existant mana pool equaled me getting somewhat aggrevated. I suggested to him that he may wish to consider switching to casting Flash of Light since he was stacking spell power with little mana available. I explained that the larger costing Holy Light was draining him and that was the reason for us running back so often. He tried to explain to me his position with theory crafting and casting Holy Light as being a much better "through-put" for heals per second or some other grand plan; however, he missed the part where you have to consider being level 80 with top end gear to make that work for you. Hell, if he were even level 70 with blue BC or green Wrath gear it would have had a chance of working out, but in all green BC and Vanilla gear there was no way he was going to make this work.

We somehow managed after an hour, I kid you not, to make it to Ingvar where he proceeds to let the tank die within seconds of beginning the fight. My wife's Mage followed shortly behind the tank before I was able to pick up the agro. Our Shaman in the group healed me as best he could and we downed Ingvar for phase one, but proceeded to wipe on phase two. I know hard to believe with no true tank and no true healer huh? So as we are running back in, yet once more, the Paladin proceeds to tell me that he was using my Flash of Light method to heal. I quickly looked up the stats (which is the top set of stats in the above picture) and proceeded to call him a liar. He then switched stories and said he used Holy Light when the tank went down. I said nothing as sometimes you just have to know when to cut your losses. We get back in and proceed to down Ingvar this time. The healer miraculously had mana left over with the entire group left alive. My wife and I leave the group and I pull up the stats for the second (successful) attempt and what did I see? Why the young Holy Paladin followed my instructions and the group was successful with him having mana left over.

I am quite simply amazed sometimes at what I see out of players in this game. I don't care if when I am in a PuG that someone does not want to do their very best. I understand this. I rarely use the epic engineering arrows when running instances with my Hunter because there is no need for the extra damage. I am irritated though by those people who choose to make life hard on the other four players in the run. Yes, I have my moments of poor performance. We all do, but I never go out of my way to deliberately be a pain in the ass or blatantly expect to be carried through a run. It is something I am seeing far too often in runs. When I was leveling Popebutch through random dungeons, I had at times help from my wife on Eus, Itsirhc, Lovekinja, and Matronamorta, as well as a friend within the guild who offered to help me on their very well geared Death knight. Every time we would enter a dungeon, the group would immediately lose all sense of composure and simply not make any effort at all. They were content to sit there on their bums and be carried through content. I worked every run I was in regardless if I could actually do anything, in an attempt to learn my abilities with my Priest. I feel it made me a better Priest because I have a solid rotation that when I run with a group of players who are geared at the same level as myself, I perform well.

I realize this could be seen as another "bad PuG" tale, but it is not meant to be that way. If anything, I hope you see that by taking a few minutes of my time (even though it may have seemed like a douche thing to do at the time), I was able to give some pointers to a player who was in a whole new world with their class and needed the help (whether they knew it or not). Sure, he did not acknowledge the fact that my suggestion made the difference and I did not receive the showers of praise and a parade, but hopefully some other low level run will be a little easier next time around. I would in fact encourage you the next time you are in the run with Lulzwarrior, Lulzpaladin, Huntard, or any other player who may not realize that they need help, take a few minutes and offer some times (in as nice a way as possible) and see if it doesn't make a difference.

2010-06-13T14:06:00.005-04:00

So, I have two things on my mind and I couldn't wait until my next official day to rant, so you get a special Sunday post by Ol' Rather (hope you don't mind Ruhtra)! Well, I wouldn't say rant so much as just say that I couldn't disagree more with the perspectives of the two things. So here we go!

The Lost Effect In WoW? (Click here to read the post)

Feel free to go and read the article. A couple things that I completely disagree with is that Arthas was the one and only bad guy! The writer referenced to the fact that they had been playing since Warcraft III! One question I had was that if the writer had bothered to play Warcraft or Warcraft II. If they had, then they would know that there are other bad guys out there. I also have to question if the writer has read any of the books that have been written. The lore in the game is much deeper and richer than just Arthas Menethil. For instance, if you are contributing to Arthas being the only bad guy and that killing Deathwing is just going and killing another Dragon, then I would dare say you need to go and read the series of "War of the Ancients" as you see Deathwing has a much deeper and more lore driven story of any other character in this series. Who is the one who made it possible for the corrupted Horde to use Red Drakes to fly? Who took over an entire kingdom in the guise of an advisor in Alterac. I would dare say that anyone who would claim that the game is over and there is no more tales to be told or true villains to be known has not truly immersed theirself in all of the lore and should go out and spend some quality time reading these fine novels which enhances the lore of Warcraft and not just read the quests in the games.

The thing I do agree with is that I hope that Blizzard continues to be creative with the story of the heroes we have come to know and love. I think Blizzard did a good job in this expansion for writing the lore into the actual quests. You just didn't get the "go and kill 50 of this" type of quests. Instead you had quests that were all part of a larger story. I must admit that I hate that we had the Nexxus War, an old god, and the Lich King all crammed into one expansion, but if you spend the time to read the quests then you will see that Blizzard did a great job of making sure to interweave the lore into the game. They gave you a reason as to why you were going out and killing Malygos (who by the way was driven to madness and almost had his flight wiped out by Deathwing). That type of storytelling was not present in the Burning Crusade expansion, but Blizzard came back strong in Wrath of the Lich King to give a fitting end to Arthas and prepare the world for the next major shift in power.

Taking Credit For Doing What Was Intended (Click here to read the post)

So typically I read Gevlon's blog and laugh to myself and move on. Sometimes I may make an off-handed remark referring to the little green fellow, but I feel I need to speak up and say that he is completely full of horseshit when he makes comments like:

"At first, despite what naysayers said, we managed to cause impact. A single guild turned the balance of a server upside down for a week, forcing several guilds to do a coordinated response.

Secondly, it created the first competitive large-group PvP in WoW. PvP was always a sideline in WoW, despite for a skilled player PvP is the only way to be sure he is not eating something nerfed. You can't nerf other players. With arenas, competitive PvP became available in WoW, but only in very small scale. The largest group available is 5-man strong, there is no way to conduct epic-scale strategic battles. While battlegrounds had the potential, the ability to "farm" honor via chain-losing changed them into a stupid zergfest. Theoretically you can play in battlegrounds with an organized team, but that's not competitive. A premade easily smash any PuG. Also, Blizzard has disabled queuing up as raid to the random and weekend BGs, allowing honor and arena point rewards to only those who queue up into a zergfest and lucky enough to get less brain-dead than the other team."

See the trick with Gevlon is that he weaves the truth in with his own narrow-minded view point and then labels anyone who opposes his view as a "social" or "M&S" and then proceeds to insult them and find ways to discredit them. We have seen such behavior in history from similar type personalities and I will leave your mind to figure out who I may/may not be referencing. I want to go back to my thought though before I lose it. Gevlon actually described his own WG in his second paragraph. You see he went in there with his team and had a game plan. Seeings as his side is much smaller, it is much easier to coordinate and organize an offensive or counteroffensive. As the Alliance have been losing so long, they are quick to respond when they see something working. I suppose one could say that he went in with a premade team, just like in battlegrounds. The Horde on the other side is not organized and even though he may see a few people speaking in trade chat, I doubt very seriously that those individuals would represent a very large percentage of the population of the Horde server. I suppose that here we could describe the Horde as a bunch of random people or PuGs. So based upon that information, he is competing in exactly what he used to discredit battlegrounds for being the first true form of large scale PVP. So while I applaud Gevlon for an attempt to change the tides on a lop-sided server, I do not agree with his assumption that he has created the first true large scale PVP. He is just looking at it through rose colored glasses and maybe some day he will see that he is just competing in another WG that is no different than any other WG on any other server on any other given day.

Not your typical rant

2010-06-12T23:55:00.004-04:00

And I mean that. Some of us here at Holy Shock have been running our level 80 randoms and our lowbie randoms. With much discovery about our fellow man...really. As with much bitching as prior posts, mine is going to be a tad bit different.

There are two people that I would like to warn my fellow Cyclone battlegroupers about. These two are without a doubt special in their own very way. So much so that they practically hate my mage. Not really sure what Hyades ever did to them but oh my stars, do they hate her.

The first person I want to warn all of Cyclone about is Misj of Draenor. This bigbabyboomy could not stand the fact that I won a cloth item on a fair roll, despite the fact there were no other clothies in the run that could've rolled against me for it. He whined and cried because I won the roll fair and square and was crying because I did not want to /roll for it.

Which leads me to special #2.

Razledazle of Stormscale. If you are ever so lucky to make it into a random with this "EyeBeeDaUberLeetzofHealz", do yourself a favor, leave. Pronto. He is without a doubt the worst player I have ever had the distinct torture, I mean, pleaure of running with. Not only does this person insult everyone in the run, during the entire run mind you, but yesterday he has the audacity towards the end of the run to scream about my mage and say how much he hates me and wishes I was not in the run. When the entire group asks why, this is his actual response "because if the cloak drops." To which myself and the rest of the group told him too bad, so sad. That's the breaks.

Which I want to remind every single WoW player out there. Grow a set. If you act like this, just grow a set. Get out of your Baby Looney Tunes Pullups and grab those Superman/Wonder Woman underoos because the whole whiney/bitchey/crying thing, really, does not look well.

And because I promised that this post would be different:

I want to applaud some people from that same run with uberleethealz.

To Fineus of Boulderfist, keep your chin up and I think your tanking skills will grow sharper. You did a fine job!

To Jinnae of Darkspear and Fortuna of Boulderfist: You make Eus and Lovkinja proud. You fight to the bitter end and you know what you are doing as far as gear/gemming/playstyle go. Kudos to both of you!

I am one who likes to give credit where it is most definitely due and these three make that possible. Again, I want people to know I am not all about bashing but those two took the cake. But I also want people to know that there are people who enjoy playing and do not want to ruin it for others by being a jerk or not knowing what they are doing. How about stop being jerks and if you cannot be helpful, then STFU!

Also, if we all cried/bitched/whined about every roll we ever lost, Pullups and Kleenex would be making a killing. Get over it, seriously.

And lastly, is there a thing out there where we are hating on mages? Just checking..

The Week That Was

2010-06-06T02:41:00.004-04:00

A lot of good things happened this past week, but the icing on the cake was seeing a former member of MAS in trade channel say the following:

"2.8k GS Mage looking for a raiding guild. I dont care if you are just starting out. I want to raid ICC."

That caused me to litterally fall apart laughing when I read it. You see this member joined our guild and was carried through a lot of content. When Trial of the Crusader dropped, he left us claiming that he wanted to raid. He did get to raid, but was never in a top guild. I would even go as far as to say that he joined a guild which was behind ours in progression and then continued to hop from guild to guild looking for that one special guild that would carry him through Trial of the Crusader. As of last night, his achievements did not have him cleared through Trial of the Crusader and he was guildless; whereas, the little guild that he left is currently progressing through ICC in strict ten man style and living the good life as a fun raiding guild. Karma can be a bitch sometimes!

The Faceless Society

2010-06-04T15:46:00.004-04:00

So it is Friday and I suppose that means everyone is expecting another helping of Ol' Rather's special style of ranting, but today I am going to write more objectively.........gasp! Today I want to talk about the faceless society that we find ourselves living in. You see everyday I read hundreds of blogs of people that I do not know from Adam. Some of you, I have grown to respect even if I do not agree with you. I feel that I know you because you put yourself out there for everyone to see. I do not think that there is one person who doesn't feel like they really know the bloggers like Larísa and Honors. Hell, even as annoying as Gevlon can be, I feel like we have a true picture of who he is. That goes for all the rest of you out there too, even the ones who do not provide their characters names and servers for you still provide us insights into your way of thinking and your experiences in the game. No, today I want to talk to those people who feel much braver in life through being faceless.

I will freely admit that I am still quite pissed off at the asshole who stated that I have a responsibility to provide content every week without fail. Actually, let me rephrase this, I am not pissed at the asshole, but at what the asshole represents in his anonymous posting. You see I tend to view those who post anonymously, as individuals who are afraid to be confronted so the dwell in the shadows. They throw their two cents into a conversation like a little kid interupts adults at a dinner table and then scurry back off to wherever. I see the anonymous tag on so many blogs and I would give a conservative estimate that 75% of these individuals are dropping negative comments. I have to ask them one question though, why?

Why are you so afraid to post under an ID? The internet, forums, blogs, and all the social networking sites still provide you with a degree of remaining anonymous, but at least offer you a way to identify yourself with a username. I can guarantee that no one on here really knows who I am or where I live (unless you are a hacker :P), much less would know what I look like unless I chose to post a picture of myself. I understand wanting to be able to maintain privacy, but to drop insulting, demeaning, and disrespectful comments without taking credit for them is just plain downright moronic. What it represents to me is that little child I mentioned earlier. You are someone who is not mature enough to form a well thought out debate, so you throw an insult or your own "two cents" in and then run back to the shadows to wait for the next blogger who you disagree with. My simple request to all the anonymous people out there, put a face to your comments. You do not need to start writing a blog or even say where you come from or who you are, but for fucks sake take credit for being an asshole. God knows I take credit for being an asshole.

My Unicorn

2010-06-02T14:37:00.003-04:00

Donny: Eleanor’s Memphis's unicorn.
Freb: What's a unicorn?
Donny: Fable creature you know the horse with the horn impossible to capture it's the one car no matter how many times you try to boost something always happens.
Freb: What’s he doing?
Donny: He's talking to her man trying to get reacquainted they had a ruff history she almost got him killed a couple a times.
Donny: Flipped one on the Harbor Freeway.
Kip: He went off the long beach pier once.

This is probably one of my favorite movie scenes because I love how it is worded. We all have our unicorn's in life; whether it is swiping cars illegally (I hope not), chasing that dream job, or any other thing that you so desperately desire. Just like in real life, there are unicorns in WoW as well. For me, my Unicorn was Malygos. I have attempted Malygos in every way possible and failed miserably at it. I have gone in with groups that were undergeared to get a chance to see him. I have gone in with groups that were so overgeared that Malygos should have ran in fear at the site of them, but each time ended with the same result, my unicorn slipping through my fingers.

Last night that all changed. We posted a guild Malygos attempt because a newer member in the guild mentioned he would like to try this. It just so happened that this attempt fell during my vacation and I was available. I chose to take Ruhtra in as he was the best geared and I dare not trust healing to anyone else when chasing my unicorn. We had a decent group composition and made several good attempts that ended the same as every other previous attempt. From the very beginning we made it all the way to phase three where the inexperience of drake flying shown through. The group wiped several times, the majority of which was caused by the other healer not understanding how to heal on the drake. This is something I understand and so I did not get mad, but desperately wanted to find some help. We had a mouthy Hunter who kept rubbing his e-peen all over the raid that finally left and so we replaced him with a guild member's friend. We also had another member leave without saying a word and were able to bring in an additional guild member. With the added experience, we gave it one more shot and this time, my unicorn was captured.

Malygos was the one single raid in this expansion which drove me up the wall. The first two phases have never been very challenging if you have players who understand the basics of their class (rotations) and the mechanics of the fight (phase one - tank and spank, phase two - hide in the bubble, phase three - drake flying). The problem is that not a lot of people understand the third phase. There are numerous resources available to read strategies and watch videos, but they do not give you the knowledge of how to put it all together. You have to learn that part by failing, alot. The trick in failing though is to learn from it. So you tried "A" and it didn't work, then move on to "B". The problem is that in today's version of WoW, if you do not one shot something, quite often players will bail and leave you searching for your unicorn.