No Free Time Lately

Well I think I was actually kind of retarded to think I would get to play as much as I wanted to over Christmas break. Friday I was home with the baby who had an ear infection which means I didn’t get to do anything but hear her scream and cry. I didn’t get to play till that night and not for very long = nothing really accomplished. Saturday I was forced to go shopping by my girlfriend, along with millions of other people crammed into tiny ass stores in the mall. There was a point in Bath and Body works while standing in line this old lady who I have never met before thought it would be a good idea to tell me about all the lotions and candles she is getting and for which family members. She kept pulling lotions and sh*t out of her basket to see what I thought of the scents, it was a nightmare from which I couldn’t awake. I hate that place to begin with, I’m not a fan of all the crazy smells, I seriously thought of slamming my face against the wall till I went unconscious. Very little wow played on this day, just old people who look like the crypt keeper shoving scented oils in my face, that lady has no idea how close she was to getting choked out. Sunday morning I got to play a little bit but then it was off for a Christmas party. Which I did have fun at so I can’t complain about that, but no wow that night either. Monday I was finally able to relax and get some game time in. I did some 2v2 arena matches which bumped me up to 1560 from 1470, so that was a lot of fun. It’s been a while since I have consistently won in any arena matches. I also got a lot of battle grounds done, but sadly alliance in my battle group almost always lose every match. When horde win it’s a landslide, when alliance actually does win it always feels like we just barely squeaked a win in. I logged off for Christmas Eve with the family but I did log back on again when I went home. I did some more arena’s with my 3v3 team which went 5-5. After arena’s we went and raided Tauren Mill for the hell of it, it turned into a pretty good sized PvP war, some of the most fun I have had in a long time. Christmas I didn’t touch the computer and just hung out with the family.

I was able to pick up my chest piece for arena’s which is a huge upgrade to some blue lvl 70 Marshall gear I was wearing.

I think it was last Friday night we went into ZA and had the bear boss to 30% when the timer ran out, I think if we had a mage in the group the added dps plus a very stable cc could have made a huge difference. I don’t know which of the dps in the group I would like to replace with a mage though because everyone did a really good job. Hopefully on the next attempt we can beat the timer, thats a goal of mine. The guild hasn’t raided Gruul for like two weeks, hopefully we can get in there this week, but it’s looking kind of iffy with the holidays and every ones schedules are so sporadic. Sorry I haven’t kept up with the blog but like many other people I have been extremely busy around the holidays, I’m betting I don’t get another blog post up until next Wednesday. I know you all miss me, and I know you get lonely and depressed when you have nothing new to read from me. To help deal with these emotions just picture me in all my epic glory being your friend. Then I want you to realize you’re just dreaming and I’m way to cool to be your friend =).

Happy Holidays

*X files music plays* Last night on wow I told someone I was going to flatten their tires because they wanted to go to sleep instead of heal in my Kara group. This morning I woke up and I had a flat tire. Coincidence? Karma? I’m not sure, but I do know that my neighbor has a back tire up on a block because I had to steal his. Wonder what he did to deserve such an unlucky hit to his Karma. In my previous post on Monday I had mentioned that the Kara groups were reorganized to help some of the other struggling groups. My group was assigned on the forums and two of the people on the list couldn’t make the Kara runs so we subbed in two other guys (both new to my group), this put our group with five new people and five regulars. I am happy to say that my new group ran the instance fine. Everyone paid attention, learned the fights, was on time, and basically didn’t do anything stupid. We cleared through Prince but still have Netherspite and Nightbane up because it was getting late, hopefully we’ll find time to go back in there. Our run did take a little longer than normal but that’s totally understandable because we had to explain the fights to some people. To all the new guys that came, good job and thanks for coming. When these new Kara groups were reformed some of the regular Kara runners (Ones from my group, I’m not sure about other groups) were accidently left out of the re-order. This has lead to a lot of hurt feelings and people just being pissed off. When these people tried to get back into groups whether mine or other peoples supposedly they were just told to bad you’re out of the rotation. If this truly happened that’s a shame because they worked hard to help get the Kara groups successful in the first place. Now that my Kara group is pretty much done for the week I’m already getting whispers from new people and old people alike about who gets to go next week. I have no idea now, were the reorders supposed to be a permanent thing or were they to just expose people to the fights so they can learn and go do it in their own groups? There are a few posts on our forums about the re-order and pissed off people with no real answer as to what we are supposed to do. I’m pretty sure some of the officers read my blog so someone tell me what to do, and save me from having to hurt people’s feelings. I have mentioned that I used to be a GM before, this is one of the reasons I gave it up, dealing with pissed off people, telling people they are out of a group, and managing a ton of different personalities is not something I miss. I feel both sorry for the officers who I think are catching crap from people but they were trying to do a good thing by helping out the other groups and also the people who were left out for not having done anything wrong. My suggestion is to tell everyone F*ck Kara let’s do 25 man runs 4 nights a week and go to Kara in your free time. At some point if we really want to progress and become a raiding guild we have to do this right? I realize we have more people than the 25 who will get a spot, but if you are left out of the 25 man it’s probably a gear issue. If that’s the case then make a Kara group and go while the other guys are in the 25 man. If I’m one of the guys left out the 25 man raid what happens? I’ll go farm badges in Kara till a spot opens up in the raid. If a spot doesn’t ever open up for me in the raid for weeks on end what then? I’ll go kill one of the tanks in Real Life, bingo! spot available, couldn’t be more simple. With the new year coming up maybe it’s a good idea to make the transition? Or is that even the direction the guild would want to go? I hope it is, I don’t want to farm Kara forever, let’s really dig into some 25 man content and experience more of what WoW has to offer. Anyways this will probably be my last post till next Wednesday , I won’t have time with the holidays to write anything. Mostly all I do is threaten people with beatings anyways, which if Santa hears me I won’t get anything for Christmas and u know I’m a loot whore so it’s probably just better that I don’t post so close to the holidays. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday!

Santa's Epic Loot

Stupid new shield

We’ll after another Nightbane kill and no shield I decided I’m just going to buy the heroic badge shield and continue to wait for an upgrade to drop for me from Gruul or Nightbane. It’s not fair for me to horde my badges while using a crappy blue shield that can easily be replaced. I do hate everythign about this shield though, the fact i had to "buy" it with badges, the graphic is g@y, and its not as good as the shields i have been wanting. After purchasing the shield I have one blue item left to replace, which is my cape. One more Kara clear and I will have enough badges to upgrade that as well. Tonight I think we might be trying Mag again, which would be pretty fun so I hope we do. He drops the T4 chest piece but it’s not really a huge upgrade for me so I would roll on it, but not spend dkp points. He also has a nice polearm that I wouldn’t mind setting myself up with, but again not a huge upgrade so I wouldn’t spend dkp on it, just roll for it.

If Mag doesn’t happen tonight then I think my group might try to run ZA. I’m really itching to beat the bear under the timer, and we still need to get an eagle kill. I would like to see my group start dedicating more time to ZA than we do in Kara, but I know a lot of people still want loot from Kara and who can argue with the free badges, but at some point ZA needs to be beaten. As far as Kara goes this week it looks like the guild has reorganized the groups because groups 3 and 4 have been struggling. I don’t mind subbing people in and out of different groups to help them learn the boss fights but from what I have heard some of the guys in those other groups cause a lot of wipes from either not paying attention or f*cking around. I’m down as the “Raid Leader” for the new group 3, if people start goofing off even after warnings then they get the /boot. It looks like I am lucky though, I didn’t get any of the guys who I have heard complaints about so my run should still go as smooth as normal and hopefully get a few guys some new gear. I picked up my gladiator legs after I got enough honor points this weekend. My pvp set still needs a ton of work but I am one step closer. On the arena home front, my 3v3 team (Oslo- hunter, Dirty- resto druid, and I -arms warrior) went 8-7. We gained 1 point after 15 games. Overall we’ve done 39 games and have a 1505 rating. That’s an average of about 1 point every 8 games. Let’s say the rating to hope for is 1850 which I think is the rating needed to buy season three weapons, at this pace we will only have to play another 2760 games =P. I am happy with my 3v3 right now though, we seem like were clicking better, so I’m just waiting for that point when we all “mesh” and we start doing really well. My 5v5 on the other hand got owned, we went 3-7. This week though it was more to just get people their weekly arena points. I’ll keep doing the 5v5 for practice but I think I’m going to hang my hopes of a high ranking arena team on my 3v3, I hope one day that pans out to a good score.

I missed my arena pvp chest by 65 points this week so I’ll have to wait an extra week to get that. I’m going to try to get my pvp bracers this week so I can at least put forth one new item to my pvp set since I can’t grab the chest piece. Here are the two items I picked up. I’m going to have the shield enchanted tonight before any raiding goes down.

PvP Tourney = Good times

“This weekend were having a sort of “guild pvp” event, I’m looking forward to it. Should be a lot of fun, monday ill probably post something about how everyone in my guild is a bunch of cheaters and hackers because i didnt win the tourney.” - Posted by me Friday, December 14, 2007 Turns out I was absolutely correct. I did horrible in the pvp tourney. Why so bad? The only answer is that in my guild I’m surrounded by cheaters and hackers. Couldn’t they just be better than me? Pfft, not possible. The only logical assumption is that somehow everyone in my guild found a way to hack the wow mainframe altering their characters stats allowing them to beat me. While I realize this would be a near impossible task for the common gamer, it was obviously carried out and successful to sedate their lust for glory and gold prizes....Okay, I will admit that there is a slight possibility that it’s because a lot of these guys are good and I still have a lot to learn when it comes to pvp as a warrior. I’m still leaning toward my theory of pro-hackers risking jail time over a 300 gold prize though. During the tourney me and dirty(resto druid) faced off vs a druid/rogue team. They beat us knocking us out of the race for 2v2 teams. What sucks for the druid/rogue team is that they are both in my Kara group. You bitches can kiss your loot goodbye for the next three weeks. “What’s that you say? Oh my goodness did I accidently give that loot you won to someone else? That’s a shame. My apologies” . The 2v2 tourney was won by an arms warrior and holy pally who defeated a team of two locks. During the 1v1 I did a little better but was beaten by Oslo a hunter who is also in my 3v3 arena team. It was actually a pretty good fight, if I had just gotten off that last execute it might have turned the fight in my favor. I guess the extra stamina buff you had from hacking into wow paid off, an anonymous letter has been sent to wow explaining what you did, grats on your jail time. The 1v1 was won by a demo lock vs a rogue but I don’t remember his spec. Locks are just badass, it was demonstrated yesterday over and over. The 3v3 consisted of Me, Dirty, and Nightwin (same rogue who beat us in the 2v2), we lost our first match, instantly putting us out of the 3v3 race. Not much I can say to this except, Dirty and Nightwin’s fault. The 3v3 was won by the same arms warrior and holy pally who won the 2v2, they had a rogue as their third. They beat a team of Druid, Druid, Frostmage for the win. Overall it was seriously a ton of fun and I hope we do it again sometime. Good job on organizing it all Oslo! Next time i'm going to get in some practice before hand.

You're A Vegetable - WTF DOES THAT MEAN

So im here at working listening to the radio.
Michael Jackson comes with the song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'".
Now I like some songs by Michael, but i dont know wtf some of the lyrics mean in this song. I'm tired and i guess crabby from my long night, crabby enough that these stupid ass lyrics are actually pissing me off.

I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' You Got To Be Startin' Somethin' I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' You Got To Be Startin' Somethin' It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah) Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah) You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah) And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah) It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah) Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah) You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah) And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah) You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable

You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable
Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable
You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable
They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable

WTF does the above mean. Him singing this in his high pitched voice just grated on me for some reason and irritated me enough to post about it.

Gruul --> Mag --> Kara = Another late night.

Yesterday I got home from work to test out my new ISP. It worked, I was on WoW and Vent at the same time, latency was around 250-350, that’s good enough for me to be happy. I gave my new router a little loving last night to let her know how much I appreciate her, she told me I’m the best she ever had. Hopefully this leads to a long lasting relationship of happiness for both parties. My quest now is to get a new computer, but that won’t happen for a few months with the holidays here and my money going out the window for gifts to family and friends. Last night the plan was to Kill Gruul, Kill Mag, form up a group and go finish up Kara. About 50% of these plans were executed successfully. Gruul died in one shot, he dropped the token for my pants. I bid 5dkp on them but didn’t win them since someone decided to go negative, since I just got the pants of curator I wasn’t going to try to match that. This was the same druid that beat me on a roll for the t4 glove token the first time they dropped, this is the same druid that beat me on a roll for the t4 helm the first time it dropped, this is the same druid that is going to have four flat tires this weekend. Actually I don’t know how old this guy is, if he isn’t old enough to drive then…this is the same druid who will have 2 flat bicycle tires. Maybe he doenst have a bicycle? I'll rip the soles off his shoes, thats right i thought of everything. After killing Gruul we headed over to Mag, we couldn’t quite get the right makeup that people were saying we needed but we went ahead anyways. Which is totally cool with me, I’d rather wipe on a boss and begin the learning process than disappoint people and decide to not attempt him. I used to be a guild leader/raid organizer and keeping people motivated and happy about progression isn’t an easy thing. If you don’t raid you upset the people who want to progress, if you go in with the wrong make up and wipe you hear BS from people about how we shouldn’t have even tried and then it’s harder to motivate those people to go next time. Raistilan a mage in our guild is shouldering the raid progression, just wanted to give a quick shout to him about what a good job he is doing. I don’t envy you, it’s a pain in the ass with little reward. Thanks for organizing it all. As far as the Mag fight goes my job is pretty simple. I run in and tank the 3’d warlock, as each warlock dies the others get stronger. It’s a dps race to kill the warlocks, so when the fight starts the guy on the first warlock has the hardest time controlling agro because everyone is balls out dps go go go. With me being 3’d I have plenty of time to get agro and even with warlock 1 and 2 dead the mob really still isn’t even hitting hard. I just have to interrupt his death coils and mending spells, last night I think I most likely did have the easiest job. When my mob died I ran around taunting infernals off healers until Mag was released and honors starts MT him (Honors our pally tank was chosen to MT him last night. He now has a Sh*t ton of hp, grats man and gj!). One of the classes we were short on last night was locks so there wasn’t enough fears/banishes to go around so that’s why I picked up the infernals, better smacking on me than a tree. When Mag pops it was my job to toss up a thunderclap, demo shout, and hit honors with a commanding shout. That was also easy, I think the hardest part of my “Mag fight” experience is to watch the “cube” I am assigned to. This part is where Mag starts casting this fire spell and the five cubes around him have to be simultaneously clicked, also not that hard and I got my “clicks” off just fine. Except the time I was dead, that made it a little bit difficult but I had said I was dead in vent and someone covered me. We didn’t get Mag down but at least we learned something. On our final attempt i was the last guy standing, just for fun i grabbed mag and tanked him against the wall to see what it was like. Suprisingly i actually lived a long ass time with no heals, long enough for people on vent to ask how i was still alive. I should have popped shield wall to see just how long i could last. After getting a taste of tanking Mag i hope one day i get a shot to MT him. After switching some of my gems around i noticed in my kara raid i have 17k hp, i wish i would have paid attention during the 25 man raid. The guild has decided to concentrate on Mag until he is dead then we move off to SSC, good call in my opinion. After Mag my Kara group formed up and we headed in. It was already late so the whole time I was hoping it would get called so I could go to bed. Like I said in a previous post, I can’t say no to a raid so I stuck around. We killed Illhoof, shade and the chess event and that’s when people decided it was late and we should call it. I think tonight we’ll probably go in and finish the rest of Kara off. I have decided that if Nightbane doesn’t drop my shield I’m going to use my badges and buy the heroic one for now. It’s not that great of an upgrade but I can’t keep putting it off hoping for a free drop. Yes I realize that as soon as I buy it a shield will drop off Gruul or Nightbane. This weekend were having a sort of “guild pvp” event, I’m looking forward to it. Should be a lot of fun, monday ill probably post something about how everyone in my guild is a bunch of cheaters and hackers because i didnt win the tourney.

I am sick

Wow the plate legs off Curator weren’t just a myth. They ended up dropping last night and being the only plate tank I picked them up. I also bought a new pair of bracers with my heroic badges last night, which I needed since Attumen refuses to drop his. I like the heroic bracers better anyways so f*ck you attumen i dont want your sh*t drops anyways. This leaves me with about 40’ish badges and I’ll probably pick up either the cape or shield next depending on what Nightbane and Gruul offer up. What sucks about the legs I got last night is that I’m not sure how much $$ to put into them because most likely in a few weeks I’ll have the t4 ones from Gruul. I’ll probably be a cheap ass and put the +9 stam gems in them and maybe not even attach the +30 stam leg armor for right now.

The last few days my ISP has really sucked hard core because we had a little bit of an ice storm which froze all the lines around my house. If you will remember from previous posts if I have any type of “wet” weather my connection goes to hell real fast instantly driving me crazy. I don’t know why it’s like that it just is, no matter how much I yell and scream at the phone company. We’ll now my ISP is totally down while we have this icy weather so I decided I’m going to drive up to Dirty’s house and use his ISP for Gruul last night. He is a RL friend and doesnt mind me bumming off his connection but also lives 30 mins away. Yes, you are correct, I am sick, i care about raiding that much. I packed up my computer, drove 30 minutes, raided till 1:30 am, packed up and then drove 30 mins home. I feel like I laid down in bed, and instantly the alarm went off for me to go to work. As always I’m writing this post while only being half awake, like I said…I have a sickness. My original plan was to just go bum his ISP for an hour to do Gruuls then pack up go home and get a good night sleep. We’ll my regular Kara group formed up after Gruuls and when it comes to going on a raid I can’t say no. When I got home a little after 2am my girl friend was NOT a happy camper, I wish she would be a little more appreciative that I stayed up all night to fight the forces of evil so that our child can grow up in a future not over run by the forces of undead. She didn’t see it that way though, apparently I’m just a dumbass. That’s fine if she is gonna be all mean to me, I’ll just have to cut her off from the old love muscle. Wonder how she is gonna like those apples.

Before Kara last night we formed up and went in to Gruuls layer. We had A LOT of new people so the run wasn’t as smooth as normal, but we also didn’t have all the regulars on so trying to teach new people a dungeon is better than not going in my opinion. My normal mob to tank on HKM is Olm the Summoner. He is my new nightmare since the last patch change making fear no longer an agro wipe. Before the patch he would be tanked to the left and against the wall of the main entry hall, he would fear you and then switch targets to either his enslaved fell hound or to the other tank. He never moved really from this spot, and was about as simple as it could be. Now with the non-wiping agro he follows the tank around that he feared, and is just a huge pain in the ass needing to be chased after and taunted back to his starting position. Last night two times in a row I got Olm into position and then was feared directly into the mage mobs aoe. I died leaving Olm in a bad spot and with only 1 other tank on him. We had to reset HKM about 3 times before we actually killed him. We attempted Gruul 2-3 times getting him down to 11% but then on our last wipe we got respawns so it was called. I’m not sure when we are going back in to kill him but I hope I’m on for it, I really would like the t4 legs and the shield he drops. I know Honors and Lan both have their eyes on the shield along with me so the plan is to hack the database storing DKP so that it looks like I’m the only one with enough to bid on the shield. Obviously im joking, of course I wouldn’t ever do anything like that……

Tonight I don’t think Gruul is on the schedule so it will probably just be a run to finish up Kara, I hope it goes smooth so I can get to bed at a decent hour.