When all else fails…

Things are not going my way right now. Whatever, universe. You just go on and be your bad self. I’ll sit here and be all selfish and first-world-of-warcraft problems. And make pretty characters.

Selkaa, who lives with Navi

Pretty Purple Paladin

um…

Zeptepi the Graceful

Happy Earth Day, Azeroth Style!

About that time I was an asshat…

Gimme.

There is a human female mage I’m leveling, as Arcane. I say this in a way to distance myself from her, kind of a cognitive dissonance. You know when you’re first going through Shadowfang Keep, and that Eerie Stable Lantern, (in my opinion the best off-hand in the game), drops? And if you are a mage or warlock how you envy the healers who want that shiny off-hand for yourself? So what if it has spirit on it – you need that thing for your spooky look, dog! Here is one sh*tty justification: the fact that I can level a character from 1-20 in about an hour or two means that by the time I will be over powered to go farm for that transmog piece, I’ll have forgotten about it or won’t care. And then again, those heirlooms.

Yes, I just did that. I asked the player if he/she had an off-hand heirloom, because they were decked out in heirloom gear. No real response.

So is there a new order to gear etiquette?

In this day of easy-to-obtain account-wide heirlooms, so many alts, so much structure and order to gear, are there new rules or etiquette for low level dungeons? Sure, heirlooms don’t cover everything, and then there’s that tasty, sexy mog piece that drops that some jerk disenchants it. I propose that maybe we look at this more closely. Remember, for the most part, we really don’t like playing with one another. Well, we really don’t like strangers, so any act of gear fairness is off the table when it comes to stranger danger. Now when I run with the Old Ladies, sure, there are some cross-tier drops we have to make allowances for: tier sets are more important to Helke than they are to me, but not always, so I weigh out how much I can do on my own versus the social/emotional fun. We had a great time trying to do Dragonsoul yesterday but that spine — that damn spine. We would get an amalgam to nine stacks and then bam, it’d die. We tried, we really did. And I learned that Kallixta is one of the kindest persons I’ve met.

Monuments and Magnificence

I really appreciated Godmother’s post about the architecture of our garrisons. It’s frustrating how it just stops. I don’t want monuments to gear: I want monuments to my stats in game, perhaps, like “Death by Drowing: 1” or some such nonsense.

So my questions are not whether or not I was an asshole when I kept the Eerie Stable Lantern. I was, and don’t care. My questions are should there be some new gear rules for lower level instances, and what other monuments do you wish you could erect, for one and all?

It’s in the cards…

I want you to listen to the story from NPR about “Magic, The Gathering” and “How Success Almost Killed A Game, and How Its Creators Saved It” by Robert Smith.

Essentially, what the creators did was ensure the game stayed in the players’ hands, literally and figuratively, so as not to make it a game solely accessible to the collectors

Elias and his friends persuaded their colleagues at the company to deflate the bubble in card prices, and make the game fun to play again. It would be less profitable in the short run. But if the game could remain popular for years, rather than being just another fad, it would be good for business in the long term.

The first thing the company had to do was to bring the price of the cards back down, so the average person could buy them again. They did this by dramatically increasing the supply.

Increasing the supply? Sound familiar?

Look, I know there are folks who want Valor Back, who feel dirty and cheap by getting gear and not going inside a single LFR, but you know what? Get over it, please. No one is stopping anyone from playing the game because perhaps Blizzard is taking a cue from the Wizards…the Coast ones that is, and just simply trying to stay in business and keep folks engaged.

Right now, it’s a crystal clear spring night. I have the last of the whisky by my left hand, a job well done behind me, and the sound of crickets chirping on the plains of Nagrand as Haanta sets off to do some hunting. I may never get the black lotus card, but that’s not going to stop me.

‘night

OLRG: Tough toe nails and pedicures.

This is hard for me to write, because once I do it smells of intention and explicit decision making, something for a squirmy Pisces like me does not deal with well. I woke up the other morning and the first thought in my head was “You need to stop raiding.” Now, I have an awesome group I run with now. Relaxed, mostly good-ol’ boys and my friend Breige, and Plaid Elf, aka Ty, and we have so much fun. I’m accepted and heck, I even got lovingly tea-bagged the other night! Hey! I’m one of the guys! But the reality is, for April-May, things are going to be absolute shit at work. I have two big events, one the end of April and one the end of May, and a whole lot of–evil–in between. Turns out I thought I was dealing with an garden snake, but it’s a cobra with a bad haircut. What worries me is I hope this group is still running later – I can maybe do one night a week, but even that feels like I am going to slow folks down, etc.

NOW: that doesn’t mean to say that I have completely abandoned OLRG. Though most old content is do-able, there is still SHIT WE NEED TO DO! For example, Dragon Soul. And stuff. Dragon stuff. With Laser Kitties, duh!

So ladies: I need to laugh. I need to be around those who get me. Won’t you join me around 3PM this Saturday for some Old Lady Quality Fun?

Trifectalt

My last post about all the things I had gotten wrong with Zeptepi is still on my mind. If only Blizzard would grant us all three specializations for any one character, that would be wonderful. Well, maybe not. We have gotten many things we wished for, and not sure we don’t regret letting that genie (looking at you, garrison!) out of the bottle. I know as far as professions go, many have abandoned herb gathering or mining because it’s just silly to hang on to a pixelized identity. Here is my one question: if you could have one character who enjoyed all three class specializations (or in the case of Druids, four) which would it be? Warlocks and Mages have a bit of redundancy, but there is a case for them as well. Whatever you think, I woke up too early, so I’m going back to sleep. Maybe when I wake up this would all have been a dream, and Zep can be shadow, holy, and discipline.

You lack discipline…

Well, damn. Glad I checked. Zep started off Holy, changed to Discipline, back to Holy, and then now Discipline again. I don’t know why. What I really wish is that she could be Shadow, Holy, and Discipline, but until I get to go all Slap-Happy Gnome on Blizzard, I’ll be left with only two.

She has really been struggling, and having some time to do some research this morning, I can see why. “She” was doing it ALL WRONG. But here’s the thing: I hate talents that do nothing, that have no situational goodness, and are a waste of a Tome of the Clear Mind.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents offer you a choice between 3 abilities that heal multiple targets.

•  Cascade is a sort of chain heal. It heals an initial target (with the healing being greater the farther away that target is), and then bouncing to additional allies up to 4 times. Each time that the heal bounces, it splits into 2 heals. It can never heal the same target more than twice.
•  Divine Star resembles a yo-yo, in the sense that the ball of energy travels in a path away from you (in front of you), and after reaching a certain point (24 yards away), it returns. Both on the first, as well as on the second trip, it heals allies in its path.
•  Halo causes an effect around you, which expands up to a 30-yard radius. Allies who are inside it are healed, and the highest amount of healing is done to players who are at the 25-yard mark.

Of the three talents,  Cascade is an easy fire-and-forget choice for most situations. It does best in large spread-out groups. For smaller groups, you may prefer the controlled pattern of  Halo.

 Divine Star is weak, and it always eclipsed by  Prayer of Healing, so you should not choose it.

8. Tier 7 Talents↑top

Tier 7 talents offer you a choice of 3 ways of improving your healing.

•  Clarity of Will is a large damage absorption shield, with a cast time and no cooldown. It lasts 20 seconds, and it does not apply the  Weakened Soul debuff.
•  Words of Mending is a passive ability that causes your healing and shielding spells to grant you a stack of Word of Mending. When you reach 10 stacks, your next targeted healing or shielding spell also casts a  Prayer of Mending on your target.
•  Saving Grace is a powerful, fast, and quite expensive single target heal. It is more efficient than  Flash Heal, so to compensate for this, each time it heals it debuffs you, reducing the effectiveness of your heals and absorbs by 15% for 8 seconds, stacking up to 6 times.

For single target healing, you should choose  Clarity of Will. For AoE healing with  Holy Nova, the best option is  Words of Mending.  Saving Grace is not a good choice in any situation.

9. Major Glyphs↑top

There are several Major Glyphs that are important to your gameplay.

•  Glyph of Penance increases the Mana cost of  Penance by 20%, but allows it to be cast while moving. If the encounter on which you are progressing requires you to heal on the move, this glyph is practically mandatory.
•  Glyph of Weakened Soul reduces the duration of  Weakened Soul by 2 seconds. This glyph is also mandatory.
•  Glyph of Holy Fire increases the range of  Holy Fire,  Smite, and  Power Word: Solace by 10 yards. It is useful for keeping up the required stacks of  Evangelism.
•  Glyph of Prayer of Mending increases the healing of  Prayer of Mending by 60% on the first target, but causes it to have 1 fewer charge. This is an overall loss in total healing, so use it at your own risk.

So now back to the talent tree, where the intent of not having cookie-cutter talents has become EXACTLY THAT.

Yawn.

You know nothing, Mataoka

What if you invited your characters to a dinner party? Would it go this well?

Mataoka would probably accidentally kill the family cat by dropping her axes at an inopportune moment.

Zeptepi would hide her Brussel sprouts in the shadows under the plate.

Momokawa would be conflicted about asking if the chicken was free range and hormone free.

Ceniza would start smoking during dessert. Literally smoking.

Haanta would keep trying to tame the neighbor’s pit bull.

And Kellda would steal the guest towels.

*sigh*

A little night music…

Zeptepi in Black & Bones look:

Fantasy…what not to wear…

Inside of me, there is a Black Mage…but I ate her. She was delicious, and came in Drumsticks flavors and Smithwick Beer.

Great collection of cosplay pics from many venues:

More Proof that this might be the greatest weekend for cosplay…

And once again I think I figured this out too late in life. I’m too old, too Rubenesque, and too fractured to create something that not only would be phenomenal, but suit me and, quite frankly, something I could pull off.

Now, I don’t think I could do this:

But these are getting closer:

But Princess Fiona may have nailed it:

We players come in all shapes and sizes. My burning question to you, if you could cosplay, (or if you do) what would be your fantasy cosplay costume? Imagine you have Colleen Atwood at your disposal, and anything you wanted, given your current age, weight, gender (bendable), and passions, what would you “go as?”