I'm just not in the mood...

I'm not in the mood to blog, I'm not in the mood to read other blogs. I'm spending more time than ever on my guild's website and working with the Officers to the detriment of this blog and my regular reading.

I'm enjoying leveling my Shaman (just hit level 52!)and I still enjoy raids, but most of the stuff I do with my Hunter outside of that is pure farming for the raids or daily quests to fund my addiction to elixirs. Just not as much fun as questing.

I think I am woefully under geared and yet I still am usually in the top three on the DPS meters. (Except when I have another tasks -- like kiting or trapping or the like.)

Has the nature of the game changed for me? I still enjoy it but my need to read everything about BM hunters and the game in general is fading and my need to share on this here blog is fading as well. (Hence the severe drop in posting.)

I'm not sure what will snap me out of this funk. More gear? I just got Ranger-General's Chestguard and we're downing a new boss almost every week in SSC. Maybe I just need the expansion to light a fire under my tush.

That's Sir n00bie to you!

So my guild does the unthinkable -- they promoted me last night!

Yup -- I'm now one of the few, the proud, THE MAN -- I am now a junior officer in our guild (they call us Councilors --as we are expected to offer Council to Members and officers alike)

This on the heels of me getting my T4 leggings from Gruul last night -- Demon Stalker Greaves.

They changed raiding from Friday and Saturday (and I could never do Fridays) to Wednesday and Thursday with a Free for all sign up on Sunday afternoons (and then I have ZA Sunday night). So I'm getting involved in a lot more and we are dropping bosses. Three new bosses last week Mags, Fel Rever and Hydros. When we dropped Mags on Sunday I bid on and received his head, so I got Ring of the Recalcitrant out of the deal too. However, since we use the Suicide Kings Loot system, I will not be seeing any new loot for awhile from Raids (with the exception of ZA or KZ).

So you ask... does this lift your ennui? does that mean you'll be back to posting 5 to 7 times a week? Making wonderful and funny insights on this game we are all so addicting to?

Lift my ennui? Maybe a little. Being able to post more? I'll try.

I think that I try and make these grandiose posts that say something or are meaningful or fun... and lately, I just don't have the patients or the inclination to continue in that vein, but I will try and post more but make smaller posts -- meaty, but not always poignant, Interesting but not fully researched and linked. Is that okay?

In the meantime, I need some advice. Now that I got the greaves, I'm thinking of skipping out on the Shifting Camouflage Pants since its only a minor upgrade and I am still 12 Badges short. I could use 10 or 20 badges and get a primal nether and make Boots of the Crimson Hawk for which I just go the pattern. With three nights of raiding, I'm just not sure I could get into a heroic and then roll for the nethers... is it worth the 20 badges? Should I get one nether from a Heroic run and then use the 10 badges to buy the other?

I know, I know... I suck

Yeah -- I've been sucking at this blogging thing lately. I apologize. This is just a quickie to say I will be back soon. And thanks for visiting.

At last my arm is complete!

... is what I would have yelled had we A) Gotten the Prince down and/or B) he dropped the bow.

Neither event happened. In all three attempts on the Prince, who usually goes down fairly easily, we had terrible luck with inferno placement and just kept wiping... and since we didn't have a warlock, we had skipped Shade... so we eventually had respawns and not enough interest to re-clear all the way to the Prince.

So my ennui continues - as you can tell since I write this post 5 days after the fact!

In the meantime, I have been spending some time with my Shaman in Dustwallow Marsh and as much as I like the quests, I just can not stand the quick respawn rate on all the MoBs... I mean you kill your way to the objective and while you are sitting down and getting your mana back the mobs respawn behind you and jump you... and you've already killed them once! So frickin' annoying.

Well I've hit level 38 with him and there doesn't seem to be much left in that area so I will be moving on... maybe to Stranglethorn.

In the meantime, have a happy holiday... maybe a nice new year and I hope to have many, many more posts in the coming year.

(Don't get the reference in the title? Go see "Sweeney Todd")

Without internet, do we exist?

Arggghhh! for the last week I have had severely limited service to the internet as my throughput of cable seems to have been throttled back to nothing!

Generally in the afternoon, we have some TV on the cable boxes and some connection to the internet, but not really enough to play WoW. By 8PM, the cable boxes are useless messes of pixelation and the cable modem is a doorstop.

Comcast comes today to hopefully fix the problem, but I don't have high hopes... I think they are going to tell me that the cable has to be re-run from the hub... which means under three driveways and the last time that happened it took three months to complete.

Verizon did lay fiber optic in front of my house, so if it really becomes a problem, I can go that route.

But what about poor Mervyn (and Kelvyn my level 34 Shaman who is exploring Dustwallow Marsh) do they still exist if I have no connection to them?

I suppose as long as no one logs in as me and types "DELETE" they are probably somewhere in the nether.

It's just I miss them -- hopefully I'll be back soon

Sticking it to Your Allies

Let’s all admit this right here and now... there are more people in our guild, in our party, in our raid on the trade channel, etc that we just want to gank, than there will ever be on the opposite side of the server.

As a hunter we have a wonderful tool called Misdirection, in which we can put aggro onto anyone in our party or raid. I usually like the people I play with, so I only jokingly announce that I am casting misdirection on the healers, but there have been rare instances where I just want to send a whole bunch of MoBs against an annoying mage, warlock, rogue or priest just because I can. So far, I have controlled those urges, but maybe one day I will follow through on that threat.

However, I feel it will be ultimately unsatisfying… why? Because while misdirection is nice, you’re not shoving that knife blade into the toon yourself, and it seems only fair that you should be able to do that.

The other day, in the chat channel, I saw someone write, “Hunters are useless I always kick them out of any party I am in.” I started to write in response, “Misdirection on …” but then I remembered I was on my level 30 shaman and that wouldn’t make sense, plus other hunters said a few things, nothing as threatening as I was going to write, but they defended the class nicely.

On a related note, I was farming Netherdragon Scales up in Netherstorm and it is just strange to be attacking M0Bs that are green. They walk by you; they say “Hey how’s it going? Thanks for defending us down there in Shadowmoon.”
“My pleasure, you gave me a great mount for doing so,” And then you send your pet on them, kill them and skin them for their dragon scales… it seems rather heartless.

ZA, 2.3 QQ, etc.

Man, it's been a hell of a week.

The meeting at work went great... thinks for asking.

Since I had to work late on Tuesday, in my downtime, I grabbed the laptop that is pre-loaded with WoW, updated it with the patch, got on-line made my [Quiver of a Thousand Feathers] put 100 feathers up on the AH (at 40 gold a stack), did the cooking quest and stationed myself at the Light's Hope Chapel and logged.

Got home Tuesday at 8:30PM, plopped myself in front of the computer and set the patch to install, turned and asked my wife and children how their day was. Turned back to the computer when the patch was done, got a few new add-ons, put my headset on, logged in and was ready for Zul A'man.

We had a really good time there too. We downed Nalorakk in two shots (he dropped the [Robes of Heavenly Purpose]) and then we moved on to Akil'zon, and we tried about four times to down him, got him to 24% on one of the attempts. We were happy with our performance. The other guild group didn't make it passed the waves of Amani'shi Warbringer so we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Before bed I farmed the [Pattern: Bag of Many Hides] and checked my auctions (jerks had undercut my feathers). Eventually I lowered the price to 25 gold per stack and they sold no problem, I also sold a ton of Heavy Knothide Leather (they would sell as soon as I listed them) and one of those nice leatherworking bags for 445 gold (that won't happen again, the price has already dropped to 250!) So I made about 1,000 gold in two days, through some nice planning on my part.

Of course, I got some serious and deserved Spouse Aggro in the morning for coming home and ignoring the family.

New Topic: Okay... so the hunter forums are all in an uproar because we lost the following abilities: Double Trapping and Feign Death Drinking. I never double trapped, although things do sometimes walk into my traps unintentionally so I think this change is not a real well thought out one, since our CC is not very target specific, plus it seriously nerfs the Survival tree. The FD Drink thing, I also never used. I would put a Superior Mana Oil on my weapon and use Elixir of Draenic Wisdom, Aspect of the Viper, plus some fel mana pots to make sure I had enough Mana for the long fights. I never liked how the FD drinking took you and your pet out of the fight, so no loss there, but the crying that is going on on the forums, after all our great buffs in 2.3, is personally embarrassing to me.

Finally, I will be away for the next week doing the Family Thanksgiving thing, so I will miss our next two ZA runs... Alas. I will try and post in that time, but if I don't get a chance to, I'll be back in a week.

Patch Day, working alot, Working late, oh my...

Okay, so I have 80 minutes before a big meeting for which I have been preparing for quite awhile, hence the slow down in posts.

I will be working until 8PM tonight get home at 8:30 and go to ZA, assuming everything loads in correctly, at 9PM.

I have two posts already written in my head (one about allies one about guild stuff) but no time to put them down on "paper".

Maybe tomorrow.

Being a n00b is better than being a jerk!

So our Kara team is taking a little break -- we were going to take two weeks off, but it looks like it will be only a week as we will start up Zul'Aman when 2.3 drops on Tuesday.

In the meantime, four of us decided we would spend Tuesday running heroics. That left one spot for pugging and since we had two hunters, a priest, and a feral druid, we really needed a mage. We picked Slave Pens and started looking for a fifth. We found one and summoned him using the summoning stone did a /inspect and see that he was wear all blues and greens. We agreed that he was not quite ready for heroics and asked him to leave. He understood, we apologized, he opened a portal and off he went -- no hurt feelings -- at least not too badly. I'm sorry to say I don't remember his name, because he was cool about it.

I do however remember the name of the mage we picked to replace him and if you're on Hyjal and send me a tell I'll spill the name so you know not to group with this person.

This fire mage shows up and certainly doesn't bring the DPS like I do, on par with our MM hunter though and the sheep are nice. The first sign of trouble comes when our Priest fears a sporebat into another group.

Look, the pet was on the bat, but intimidation was on CD and I couldn't get the pet off of the squishy who was about to die so he cast fear. It's a shame that it happened we tried to stay up, but we wiped. It happens. This mage types, "That was really bad, guys."

Without further incident we got to Mennu the Betrayer and got him down with no significant problems. Our mage's typed response, "That took too long".

About 5 minutes later I pulled aggro on a pat because I backed up a little too much. We wiped again. On our way back to the instance, I noticed our mage disconnected. She never came back.

She just decided she didn't want to be a part of our group anymore and instead of saying to us, "Guys, I don't like the wiping, I'm leaving." She pulled this passive aggressive BS on us and we wound up waiting for 10 minutes to see if she would reconnect and then another 10 while we found a replacement (another Feral Druid, who off-tanked what the mage would have sheeped).

And of course, we rocked the instance and got through it without another wipe.

I just got really irate at this person and their jerky attitude. I would much rather people say about me, "He's a n00b, he backs up into pats (but he does bring the DPS)." Then saying, "He's a jerk, he says disparaging things to his party mates and drops out of instances without comment."

Am I Uberz?

So last week, while I was in Kara, there was a discussion amongst guild officers and class leaders about how to read the WoW Web stats that we were putting up on our guild's forum. I could not attend, as I was in Kara... doing this:

Now, what I want you to note in the above that pets are not combined. I am at the numero uno position at 17.4% and my Ravager Kodos is at number 7 at 7.2%. Combined it looks something like this:

DAMN -- this is a boatload of damage. Blkwidow at the five spot would probably be higher but she, like a good class leader, was in the meeting, as they dissected the WoW Stats, so could not give Kara her full attention.

However, when she returned from her Vent meeting, she told me that they asked "How does Mervyn do so much damage?"

"I really don't know" she told them, "He's doing it right now in Kara and his gear is not as good as ours... must be some beast master thing."

As you can see from below on one of our failed Gruul attempts, I am number 1 baby! As a matter of fact 1,2 & 3 are all hunters! (7 & 11 too, but someone shattered them early in the fight.)

So, I think it's pretty cool that people are wondering how a n00b like me gets to be such a DPS machine /flex!

And I tell them, I play my character and my spec well. I know what I am doing and I study up on things I need to know.

So now that I have presented my bona fides, I think I will spend some more time this week on "How I roll..." posts, so look for them.

In the meantime, since on one else will invite me, if you know of an arena team that wants an uber hunter....

And now for something completely different

Okay:
So this will be a post without a single reference to WoW. Then I will get back on my game and start talking about things. I even have the germination of something I want to write about in my head but for today... something different.
*********
So I was listening to the news the other day and heard that Dennis Kucinich was asked in a presidential debate if it was true that he had seen a UFO. He replied:

"It was more than 25 years ago, I don't want to go into details right now because that is not why I am running for president, but I can affirm that I did see something and it was a UFO. But so have a lot of other Americans."

And at first I guffawed, whether you agree with the man's politics or not, he is not serious contender for the Democratic nomination, and this just added to the weird stories about the man.

And then I thought, 'oh crap, had I been asked the same question, I would also have to say that I saw some things in the sky that I have no way of knowing what or who it could possibly be.'

Here is the story: In the summer of 1992 my mother invited me to join her on a trip to a spa in the Berkshire mountains. My father could not go and she wanted company... so I thought a free trip to the Berkshires, exercise and massages, I suppose I could go.

One night we went out to Tanglewood, which is an outdoor concert bowl and the summertime home of the Boston Pops. We got lawn seats to sit and listen to John Williams play some of his most famous pieces. Since we were on the lawn we could not see the symphony, so the only thing to do was look up at the brilliant cloudless, moonless sky and see the sea of stars. It was absolutely incredible, I could have watched those stars for hours!

I was lying facing North-North-West when I saw four green blobs moving across the sky heading in a Southerly direction. The blobs were about 5 times large than the largest star and glowing green they were moving in almost a "V" formation, but they would sometimes move a little bit to the side and move back. I have created an illustration:

They were a little more glow-y and larger than the ones in the example above and they didn't move straight across the sky like birds or planes. They wobbled in a semi-straight path and at one point one of them jutted out to the side quite a bit, as if it went to take a closer look at something, as illustrated below:

I knew of no flying machine or even bird that could quite move like that. I also knew I wasn't seeing things, because there were lots of people pointing up at the sky at the blobs showing them to their friends. I tapped my mother and showed it to her, she agreed it was mighty weird, but we dropped the conversation and went back to the music as they disappeared over the horizon.

That night I called my girlfriend (now Mrs. EN) and told her about the weird thing I saw, she thought it too was weird and we said our goodnights and I feel asleep.

About two months later I was at Mrs. EN's parents' house and she says to me, "Tell my Dad about what you saw at Tanglewood."
"Huh?" I asked, "What did I see?"
I had no recollection of the blobs. As she explained it all to me, I started to vaguely remember seeing them and then all of the sudden, the full memory of it came back to me, but the memory was so blanked out prior to that re-telling I feel that had I never told Mrs. EN, I never would have thought of it again.

In general when it comes to Aliens, UFOs, ghosts, etc. I consider myself a skeptic, and I still do, but I just can't tell you what those things in the sky were and why I didn't remember them the next day.
Does that make me a weirdo?

The 50th Post!

This was meant to be a sweeping post, congratulating me for finally having some substance to this blog. Except if you look at my last post and even my last few posts -- I'm not sure I have anything of substance to talk about.

Last night, in Kara, we started talking about our various blogs and I mentioned that I was blocked. "Some of my most popular posts were about the sex buffs, maybe I should continue in that vein," I asked. We have a rather fun and loose group and that was met with relative cheer. "Having done Straight and Gay buffs," I asked, "where do I go from there, bestiality?"

To which my raid leader responded, "Oh -- cross race -- I'd love to hear about Tauren-Gnome couplings."

Okay, let that image sit in your head for awhile and then start laughing.

Funny... but not substantive.

I'll work through this block, however it does kinda mess up my celebration of the 50th post.

In the meantime, here is a edited/modified version of the entry I had in mind:

50 posts! Wow, that is just great, I just... well I don't know what to say. There are a few people I have to thank, the ones that helped me get here and all. Well, first off, we must thank Elune, ya know, just because. I, also, owe a big debt to Big Red Kitty, without reading his blog I'm not sure I would have even considered starting one of my own (and I have a feeling that many of my fellow colleagues feel the same way.) I want to thank all my friends who came to this site and gave me very positive feedback and I want to thank all the readers, lurkers and commentators alike.

When I began this blog i said in the very first post:

If you, like me, feel as if there are aspects of this game that you don't get, come here and share -- I'm certain that I will always have n00bish moments but hopefully, I can start learning from them -- maybe one day I will learn not to use Multi-Shot in a Crowd Control situation!

So hopefully I have entertained and informed in these past 49 posts and I will continue to do so... in the meantime, here is a list of some general "Don'ts" that I have learned from my time in WoW.

Don't:

• vendor stuff that may be useful to another player. (Quick hint: "of the whale" vendor or DE it, "of the bandit" AH that badboy)
• be an arrogant ass in PUGS
• be an arrogant ass in Guild
• be an arrogant ass anywhere -- there are people on the server that can kill you. (It may take ten of them, but they'll get you down.)
• come to raids without Pots, water and food (the ones that give you buffs)
• keep epic (or really nice blues) un-enchanted, you are doing yourself and your group a major disservice
• put up with BS from your friends and guildies. At the very worst, you can always move to another server and make new friends (assuming you are not an arrogant ass)
• go into an instance ignorant. Before entering anywhere new go to wowwiki or bosskillers and learn a little bit.
• make the game not fun anymore -- if that happens take a break.

and finally:

• Don't (on the stairs leading to Moroes in Karazhan) send your pet wildly after party guests, only to return having aggroed the entire ballroom. (Yes I did AGAIN last night -- that would be the fifth time... in my defense though I assisted the tank and he changed targets)

So, fifty posts later I thank you for your interest!

Arggghhhh -- I'm blocked!

I have writers block.

Well at least I am blocked when it comes to talking about what I want to talk about here on this blog and that is: examples from my career as a n00b to use as fables to help me and my readers learn something from my mistakes.

And its not as if there is nothing to write about, flitting in and around the edge of my consciousness are all of these half remembered stupid moves I've made. I know I've thought of them in the past and thought 'that would be a good thing to write about', but invariably I am in my car at the time and I can't write the idea down and then it disappears back to the fringes of my memory.

Things in Kara have not gone exceptionally well, but not worth writing or whining about.

I could talk about the way I went without enchantment for months as a level 60 because I didn't understand how they worked. I could mention the first time I ever saw a need/greed roll and kept getting confused and rolling need. But those are minor issues, certainly not worthy of any kind of entry.

I mean it's Halloween -- I should have some story to scare the bejebus out of you, right?

Well, I'll work through this and figure something out!

What's a Boy to do?

Sometime ago I mentioned that I was selected to join the high end raiding team for my guild. I was honored, humbled and would have been elated except raiding nights were set for Friday and Saturday. The nights I set aside to spend time with my wife and family (as I am already raiding Kara on Tuesdays & Sundays).

So I have not been going on Fridays and going on Saturday when I can. I'm just not sure that is working out. First off, Friday is the day they get Gruul down and get all the loot. Saturday is when we try new stuff. Last night we spent 3 hours on Void Rever and the only thing I had to show for it was a 24 gold repair bill.

My raid leader asked if I was going to be able to make Fridays at all and I told him that was very unlikely and I understand that the team needs consistency (which to date it has not gotten). He certainly understood my situation, but we both knew that if the team can get a more consistent attendance going I will need to take a step back.

And I first thought that it would be terrible to not be a part of this team, but since Zul'Aman will be starting in a few weeks (I hope) and I may start getting the next level of loot from there I'm not sure I will miss getting to those instances (at least not at this stage of my game play.) I will miss playing with all of them... but there are always other times to do fun stuff with my friends!

On a completely unrelated topic:

I hear tell that you will only need to be honored in order to do heroics after 2.3. Now I have all my keys except Honor Hold, and I still think this is a really good idea. I don't think the keys should start at honored, but now that people have played and gotten them there is not so much of a push to do the non-heroic versions of the instances and that leaves players who are not revered out of luck, especially when you can only reach revered by doing non-heroic instances.

This will help n00bs and Alts alike as well as casual players so while it makes it easier to get into a heroic dungeon it does not make it any easier to complete a heroic dungeon... that is still an accomplishment to be proud of.

I'm too tired to post

Really, its just been an exhausting week. Between work and not being caught up on my sleep this week my head is full of cobwebs. But I felt I should post something before the weekend and I have only had two posts this week.

So here is a post... and some quick comments:

Only got to do the Headless Horseman once yesterday but I got [Ring of Ghoulish Delight], not quite an upgrade, almost a lateral move, but I saved it from the DE pile and its the only thing he has (barely) for Hunters. (The brooms are pretty cool.)

We were entertaining guests Tuesday night (entertaining guest late into the night, part of the reason I am so tired) so I was unable to attend Karazhan, but on Sunday I jumped down to get some more tomes and was going to use my cloak to float off but I screwed that up and wound up with a 30 minute cool down way up in the air. Finally, giving up all hope and not wanting to delay the raid any further, I plunged to my death... but didn't die (came close to it thou) so there is a lucky death I avoided having to confess to on this blog!

Finally, I had a dream last night where I was giving a PowerPoint lecture to 500 students about WoW and how it differs from Second Life. I knew it would be a really cool presentation with embedded movies and lots of cool images. I was really looking forward to it, unfortunately, my alarm went off just as I was walking up to the podium to start the lecture.

Have a great weekend and may all your drops be Epics!

We got a Letter!?!??!!!!

Yay! -- I got a letter -- and even though Justin posted his comment as well as sent me an email, it still counts. (And I know others of you have sent me email and I appreciate it, but this one actually asked me a question that I can try to answer.)

So, this email was about my favorite Post to date: What Kind of Buff would you get from Sex?

So Justin writes:

:) Hilarious... and might be implemented lol.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how gay / lesbian sex would work considering they know how to please the same sex easier as they have experience with their own body.

Regards!

So BRK gets letter asking him about mechanics of the game, what shots to use, what trap where, I get asked about sex... I win.

Course, now I have to opine on the Same-Sex Sex Buff (SSSB), which as a heterosexual male, I'm not sure I'm fully qualified to do so, but I am going to try and if any GLBTI MMO friends/readers would like to tell me I am crazy or have a correction, please feel free -- you know I like comments!

Here goes:
First off I am going to take Ratmaggot's suggestion in the comments and say that males need attunement to have sex (females may need a much easier attunement). However, should the attunement be easier if you want to have same-sex sex or more difficult? I'm gonna say from my experience that a man trying to understand women is a little harder than understanding someone of the same sex, so I'm going with an easier attunement to be able to have homosexual sex and, as Justin notes, since they are more comfortable with similar parts, a very high Proc rate for the buff, say around 90% -- as to what that buff would be, we have to look at more factors.

Well first off, we have to make it so that there would be a chance that any partner in any same sex liason could get either the Male Sex Buff (MSB) or the Female Sex Buff (FSB) but there should also be a very small proc rate for the SSSB. And would the buff from gay sex be different from the lesbian sex buff, I suppose there is no one that can testify to that, so for simplicity sake, the SSSB needs to be for any non-hetero sex.

Other issues include a cool down timer -- There would also have to be a cool down time before you could have sex again, whether the buff procs or not. I'm thinking 12 hours for men and 4 hours for women.

We also have to decide if you can be bi-sexual in the game or do you have to stick with the lifestyle you have chosen for your character? If you go with the same sex attunement, can you do the hetero attunement and then go both ways or should you be limited to your first choice? Personally, if I were playing I would want my character to be bisexual and get whatever buff I could get (and good lord, can you imagine the orgies before raids)! However as a programmer, I'm making you pick one or the other -- you're either straight or gay, once you've been attuned to your sexual orientation you'll need to pay lots of gold to re-attune to a different sexual assignment. No one is on the down low here!

Now here is the rub in all of this... the Daedalus Project (PDF) has done a great demographic study of who is playing Warcraft. In their study men outnumber women by 5.25 to 1 and those men are 7 to 8 times more likely to play a character of the opposite sex:

"In other words:
about 1 out of every 2 female characters is played by a man
about 1 out of every 100 male characters is played by a woman"

And I would guess that 80% the straight males who play a female character in Age of Conan are gonna want to play a lesbian character... which means that there will be about 1 woman for every 5 men and that is even if as many women play Age of Conan as those that play WoW (which I doubt). So unless a lot of straight men are willing to have their characters be of a different sexual orientation than themselves they are going to have to go without those great buffs or else start "self procing".

Okay, so with all that in mind, what would the SSSB be and how would it work within the mechanics of the game?

Here's what I would do: If the sex buff procs from gay sex here is what may happen: you have a 63% chance to get the MSB a 33% chance to get the FSB and a 4% chance to get the SSSB and just reverse it for lesbian sex.
Now because of the small proc rate and to encourage competitive straight men to play gay characters I think the SSSB should be pretty special, say something like this:

"Teh Gay" Buff: A 4 hour buff that improves all stats by 20% and haste rating by 10%. Additionally, when this buff is active the character may have sex with 4 more players (1 an hour) of any sex with a sex buff guaranteed.

Whadaya think?





Wow Item Creator!

Woo Hoo!

Hunter deadzone will soon be DoA

Awwwww....

You guys are the Greatest!

See you ask for a little love -- you get a little love.

Thanks I appreciate the comments and I appreciate all you lurkers that don't comment too. Sometimes its just nice to have feedback, ya know!


Okay on to some odds and ends for the morning.

2.3 & the PTR
Obviously, from the breaking news post below... I've been looking into the changes that are coming up in 2.3 and I am looking forward to them.

I think I may be going to the PTR this time around. I've never done it before but I think my Kara team will try and get an early look at the new 10-man instance Zul'Aman and I want to get a look at the new leather working recipes so I can stock pile ingredients for those quivers and ammo pouches.

Make sure you take a look at the ingredients for all the new recipes and start stock piling a few, you may be able to make a tidy profit when the patch goes live!

I didn't see it in the Patch notes, but I heard that we will get Badges of Justice from Kara & Zul'Aman bosses, which would be nice -- now if we could just get Primal Nethers from those bosses too that would be great!

As for the Hunter changes, I have yet to do arena and I don't do a whole lot of PVP, so while some of those changes seem nice, I'm not overly excited by them. The disarm is nice and the buffs to traps are good too, but my favorite trap, the snake trap, got no buff and will probably be used a lot less.

I may get on with an Arena team after the patch and see how useful I can be, but the changes do not seem to address dead zone and line-of-sight issues, so we shall see.

Brewfest

So Brewfest is ending on Tuesday and I have only around 300 tickets. I heard on WoWInsider that we can keep our tickets until next year, so I may bank them and do that. I did get the goggles, but for the one time joke, they are not worth the tickets. Maybe I will enjoy them more when we take Mags down and I take a raid screenshot with all of us (except me) as male gnomes!

PVP

So I only logged on for about 20 minutes yesterday. Thursday is a big TV night and Mrs. EN and I watch our shows together (Survivor, Ugly Betty, CSI, 30 Rock).

Anyway... I logged in, was in Ogri'la, and I started flying to Shattrath to take the portal to Ironforge to get some more brewfest tickets, when my Kara RL informed me that he was being corpse-camped by a hordie in Shadowmoon.

Hmmmm... go to Brewfest for tickets for a ram that I have no chance of getting or help out a friend?

So, I turned the NetherDragon mount towards Shadowmoon and announced my intention to kill this hordie. On the flight, I checked him out in the armory, decked out in his PVP gear he looked formidable, but I knew a Rogue, Druid & Hunter could take down one Shaman easily. When I showed up he took off on his flying mount and treid to avoid me. Because of that he missed the arrival of our Rogue.

Eventually, he lands and attacks. I hit the pet attack key and the Beast Within and intimidation and all he can see is a bid red alien and the poor shaman is dead before he knows what hit him, and I'm pretty sure he still hadn't seen our rogue.
I say this because while I didn't corpse camp, I did stay in the area and helped farm and after a while I told my friends that I was hearthing and the sneaky SOB attacked me while I was casting. So our rogue stunned him , the ravager attacked and went big and red, and even though I was down to about 30%, the poor shaman didn't get another hit off on me and he went down in seconds!
Then I had to hearth, because it was time to watch some TV, and even though I don't do PVP a lot, that sure was fun!

That Sinking Feeling Part II

When I started this endeavor, I kept having these great ideas of things to write about. Not just the "here's what happened to me today" posts, but the "Really helpful, really useful, boy was I dumb but you can learn from my mistakes" posts.

I had a whole bunch of things to talk about, and now... I can't remember them.

I really, really want this blog to be more than entertaining. A place to help us learn something... or at least make everyone go "Yeah, I feel that way too dude!"

But I am finding it harder and harder to write posts of substance and so I write less and less and so people visit less and less and then it just dwindles away to nothing.

I'm not sure if anyone noticed but I removed a blog from my blog roll this week. Huntard with Cheese went away from my blog roll because he hasn't posted since August and I figured if he wasn't updating, there was no point in having a link, but I really, really liked his site. I thought he had a weird and snarky quality to his blog that I would love to have in mine if I had the talent for it. I'm not sure why he stopped blogging, maybe he wasn't getting enough hits or maybe it was taking up too much time, but I find it sad.

My blog colleague Exanimo from Full Time Wow Addict has a recent post questioning the usefulness of his blog.

And I can certainly understand where he is coming from. And even though I have in-game friends who have told me how much they like the blog, so I know some people are reading and enjoying it, I can't help but have that sinking feeling again that I have nothing important or even entertaining to impart and I should just stop doing this.

But I probably won't, I guess I'm just channeling my mother, trying to guilt my readers into saying something nice about me, even though you're already here and reading this.

So, you come here, you read what I have to say, would it kill you to show me your affection through a comment or two, is that too much to ask?

Odds & Ends

I know, its been a while since I posted anything of substance that may help us shake off some of that n00bness that still clings to us and makes our clothes reek at the end of the day. So, while I do have a couple of posts planned that should help cover up, if not totally alleviate that odor, they are not quite ready for publication. So, I will drop in little tidbits about whats been happenning to me and how things are progressing in general. There is a small chance you may find something helpful in these ramblings... at the very least, I hope you will be entertained.

ACL: I came back from my vacation to read a post on my guild forum that I had been made Assistant Class Leader for the hunters. I knew it was in the works, but it was nice to see it was official.
Before it was official, I sent my class leader a message with some thoughts I had about the upcoming raiding group that was being put together and how it related to hunters. Now, the CL is my friend, so I mentioned that I hoped I wasn't being presumptuous, since it the promotion wasn't official, but I just thought that we should start talking about things. Funnily enough, no one had asked her if she wanted me to be her ACL, she said very nicely that she would have chosen me anyway but you would think they would ask the CL who their ACL should be. (Of course, the Guild has some responsibility to make sure the CL and the ACL are complimentary, and they should also not be adversarial.)

LBK: So, I saw BRK's post from last week, I think, talking about Little Black Kitty's blog typesetting error. I had never been to LBK website, but saw that she was on my server and I added her to my friends list and when I saw her on the server, I said "Hi". She thought that was cool enough to post on her blog and I am now reciprocating. I wonder if when she turns 70, if she'll still be little black kitty?

HERT: So we had our first run this weekend as a "High End Raiding Team". Still not sure how a n00b like me made it to the team, but I must have friends in high places or maybe because I can do a goodly amount of damage or maybe some combination of both. In any case, I couldn't make it Friday night, right now Friday is reserved for, after the kids are in bed, spending time exclusively with the wife (i.e. not getting on the WoW, watching or doing whatever she wants to do, etc.) So I missed our first take down of Gruul. Made it Saturday for Magtheridon's Lair -- which while we didn't get him down, was still a fun fight.
One of the aspects of the lair is that the Channeler's will not aggro you until you attack them, so you can move around the room, discuss tactics and get into position. As this info was presented to us, I said, "So I guess we should take our pets off aggressive." And while most people laughed, someone, I'm not sure who, actually said, "Your pets should NEVER be on aggressive during a raid!" Course, that didn't stop a warlock from summoning his pet, only to realize that it was still on aggressive... oops, I think that was wipe number 3. (Wipe 1 was also an oops, someone pulled aggro, but no one copped to that one.) I will state emphatically for the record, that I was not the one who pulled aggro on that or any attempt at Mag!

FP: (Future posts) So, I want to do series of posts entitled "Tales from the n00bside". Stupid things we may have done in WoW that we are embarrassed by. They can be stories that will amuse or have a moral, whatever... I have a few but I would like to fill it out with other people's experience, so if you have one, please feel free to email me (at the link above) and I will include it in the post.

TTFN: Ta ta for now