March 2012
0 posts
Anonymous asked: As players, we often develop our own personal likes/dislikes/preferences in Azeroth - for specs, for classes, for races, for faction. In game, we've numerous examples of cross-faction allegiances (Argent Dawn/Crusade probably being the best representation of this), friendships (Asric and Jadaar) and fanon romances (Thassarian/Koltira) - how would you approach a cross-faction relationship,...
February 2012
17 posts
Someone Like You
It’s easy to get down on the game, and I suspect a lot of people will over the next seven or eight months or however long it takes for Blizzard to release the next expansion. Deathwing is dead, and killing him will just get easier and easier as time goes by. Heroic modes may not interest a lot of people, but those too will become easier. Challenges will be overcome until there is a point...
You Can Tell A Lot About A Person
One of the things I do a lot of is browse for MRPs. I will go to crowded places like Cathedral Square, the Auction House, in front of either Stormwind Bank, the Blue Recluse, or Goldshire, and read MRPs.
For those who don’t know: MRP stands for “MyRoleplay”, which is an addon that allows you to share a description of your character with others who have compatible add ons. I...
Mists of Pandaria Wishlist
So I saw this Mists of Pandara Wish List from Among the Elements and that got me to thinking about my own wish list.
Wish Lists are like the Santa Lists one might have made as a kid. Ordering the wish list was very important, because people would naturally start reading the list and never get toward the bottom. So you wanted to put the things you really wanted to get near the top of the list. At...
Dragon Soul Hijinks
Jana’s raid crew went into Dragon Soul last night for the weekly raid. Because some people weren’t feeling 100%, the raid lead decided to forego a shot at Heroic Morchok and instead we did everything on normal mode. We actually started the run about forty minutes early, as nine of us were on and ready that early. We cleared all the trash before Morchok (and by that, I mean all the...
Firing Cannons
I was in an LFR the other night. No sooner did I say “Hello” in raid chat than someone replied with an insult of Moon Guard involving a British word for cigarettes. This happens every so often, and I usually just console myself with the thought that I will completely destroy the damage meters and carry their ass to victory. This LFR was no different; 3 of the 4 top damage dealers were...
Heroic Modes
Saxsy’s raid team went into Dragon Soul last night with the intent of starting on hard modes. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, we decided to start with heroic Ultraxion rather than heroic Morchok. Clearing the way to Ultraxion took a little over an hour, leaving us with a little under two hours to work on Ultraxion.
I am of a couple of different minds about heroic modes....
Tagged
Kamalia tagged me with a meme that’s been going around. I’m not a big one for memes but I’m trying to get to 500 posts before the end of March and there’s no better way of doing it than being willing to do something silly.
Here’s the meme:
* Go into your image folder
* Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
* Publish the image! (and a few words...
Fantastic Raid
Tuesday night, Jana had a raid spot with a guild named Dedicated Ending. This was the group that several weeks ago, on a wonderful day, invited Jana to go kill Deathwing for the first time. I did well enough in that run to be invited back for raids, and from what I can tell, I now have a standing invitation. I was looking forward to yesterday’s run because last week I was unable to run with...
Dissection of an MRP
Now that I’ve finally completed Jana’s background post, I thought it might be fun to put up her MRP description here to both give a sense of what she looks like now and what people would see when encountering her for the first time. If you haven’t already read it, you should go back and read my post on making an MRP profile. Jana had an MRP description from long ago, but I...
Valentine's Day Rhymes
I was having far too much fun today rhyming on Twitter. I thought I’d share my Dragon Soul themed tweets:
Shaman are blue, Death Knights are red, while I was rhyming, Morchok got dead.
Mages are smart, warriors are strong. Zon’ozz is easy, it’s just ping-pong.
I like Yor’sahj, his oozes are dopey. When one is black, Combustion is OP.
When fighting Hagara, it helps to be...
Tatjana Natalia Aliston
Tatjana Natalia Aliston (“Jana”) was born 32 years ago, the first child of John Aliston and Alexandra Aliston. Her father was (and is) an administrator within the Stormwind city government. Her mother was a mage in training but abandoned her practice to raise her family. Two years later, Jana’s sister Anna was born. Alexandra died shortly after giving birth to Anna. Her father...
Freaks, Part 2
So I was in Cathedral Square the other day, talking with friends and looking for interesting MRPs. As I’ve noted before, a hobby of mine is to look at character descriptions and see if I find anything entertaining. A few days ago, I saw one that made me do a double-take.
Warning: the following text content may not be appropriate for kids or the squeamish.
In the “race” field,...
Fairer LFR Loot
One of the common gripes I hear in LFR is that loot is not distributed fairly. Sometimes I am one of the people making such a gripe (although I suspect not so much anymore, now that Saxsy has her 4-piece set). That got me thinking as to how I would change the LFR loot system if I could, with the idea of making it an ideal system. This is more of a thought experiment than anything; I don’t...
Dragon Soul Tactics
Dragon Soul is becoming old hat. I’ve been in a total of five complete clears on normal mode. Including LFR, the armory tells me Saxsy has killed Deathwing 12 times, while Jana has done it 10 times. By now I’ve gotten beyond the basics and have gotten into some specialized ideas for each particular boss, which I’ll share below. I don’t actually know if these tactics are...
Gear List: Saxsy
My guild leader asked our raid team to make gear lists. These are lists of our current gear and locations of upgrades. In my experience it’s a good way to figure out what to hope to drop for and to whom to assign things when gear drops and more than one person can use it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about something like this. I didn’t raid much in Cata before...
Tale of the Tape: Saxsy vs. Jana
Jana raided Dragon Soul last night with Dedicated Ending, a guild that my one of my newer good friends K is in. This was the same guild she went with to kill Madness of Deathwing She got very lucky with loot, leading me to believe that maybe I should have been raiding with Jana all along (not really). Mosswrought Shoulderguards dropped from Morchok, and Jana won them, uncontested. Then on Hagara...
January 2012
13 posts
Contextual Fire Mage DPS
The typical boss fight in WoW is a simple matter of burning things down as quickly as possible. Think of Ultraxion for a moment; with the exception of hitting the Heroic Will button every once in a while, the fight is about pushing as much DPS as possible. On those fights you have a set priority list that you follow: combustion if it’s up and you’ve got three dots on the target, flame...
Madness
I’ve downed Madness of Deathwing three times this week in ten man mode, the first three times I’ve ever done it. I did it for the first time on Saxsy on Monday night with most of RRT’s regular A team raiders. I did it for the second time on Jana on Thursday night thanks to a surprise invitation from a friend to join her guild’s run, as they were one dps short. I did it for...
Why I Play
I complain a lot here.
I complain about not getting loot. I complain about people who are bad in dungeons. I complain about being depressed. I complain about people RPing things incorrectly, rudely, perplexingly, or whatever.
In some way it’s because this blog can be an outlet for that frustration. In some way I think complaining about idiots can be funny.
But I also think it’s...
Coming Home
“I think it’s time for you to come home,” she said.
On Friday it was hard to imagine that this would happen. I had done everything I could to distance myself from Red Royal Trading, to cut off ties, and just generally make it so I could not go back.
On Sunday night I rejoined Red Royal Trading. I rejoined as a Roleplayer, not as an Officer. I’m not sure if they would have...
…
Leaves are falling all around, It’s time I was on my way. Thanks to you, I’m much obliged for such a pleasant stay. But now it’s time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way. For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s headed my way.
So I’ve got to ramble on.
This is one of those entries where I have no idea what I’m going to say when I start...
The Morning After
A long time ago there was a film called “The Day After”. It was a television film, endlessly hyped, set to show the aftermath of a full scale nuclear war.
Kind of feels like that now.
Jana and Saxsy have been guildless for about ten hours now. The fallout continues to rain from that, and will continue for some time, undoubtedly.
Does a part of me think I made a huge mistake...
Things Blow Up
Well, that was quick.
Or maybe it was slow. The writing was on the wall a few weeks ago, I think.
There’s no good way to leave a guild. It is, at its heart, a rejection of what the guild is, and what it stands for. It is a rejection of the people who have worked hard to make the guild what it is. And that can sting even if an average person who’s been in the guild a couple weeks...
Saxsy's Haste
That might be a good title for a short story, but alas, it’s not. Rather, I wanted to delve into what seems to me to be a very interesting if technical aspect of Saxsy’s current gear.
I use SimulationCraft to model the dps of my characters. Sometimes I use it to determine whether one character should do more dps than another character. One of the things I like about it is that it will...
Status
I have had a couple posts floating around my head in various unfinished stages. One of them isn’t really floating; it’s a post on Jana’s background that perhaps is a third of the way done and incredibly long already. Another post is on a very interesting feature of Saxsy’s gear, in that reforging according to static SimCraft stat weights would be a mistake. I apologize for...
QQ
This is a whining post. If that bugs you, feel free to move on to read something else. I hear there’s lots of stuff on the web to read. Maybe you’ll find something you like better.
Our raid team went up against Warmaster Blackhorn Friday and Saturday night. We cleared the bosses before him in about two hours, so we were able to spend one hour on him on Friday and all of Saturday on...
Looking For Community →
The link above is to Vidyala’s most recent post on Manalicious, wherein she argues what to me is a standard criticism of the LFR and LFD tools. I encourage you to read the whole thing (otherwise I would not link to it so prominently). Ultimately, though, I think the entire premise of her argument is flawed. My argument below may seem a bit personal to her, but it is not intended to be....
What I Like About You
One of the things I have said a few times now on this blog is that a good role-player is someone I enjoy roleplaying with. This may certainly be a true thing but it is a distinctly unhelpful definition because it just moves the goal posts. Who are the sorts of people I enjoy roleplaying with?
I’ve thought about it for a bit, and I came up with the following and rather simple observation.
I...
December 2011
24 posts
Combustion Timing
This is going to be a bit of a wonky post. Worst of all, it’s the worst sort of wonky post: the kind that I’m not absolutely sure is accurate. I will try my best and explain my reasoning but if anyone sees anything wrong with it please let me know in the comments.
The question is a simple one: when should I look to cast my first combustion at the beginning of a boss fight?
Until...
Sunshine
I’m not sure when exactly it happened.
Maybe it was as early as when that death knight approached Saxsy with obvious lust in his cold heart. He said she was gorgeous. He said she looked great. And then he pulled out a bottle of nail polish and offered to paint her toes. It was humorously ridiculous. I tweeted about it.
Maybe it was that within fifteen seconds someone replied to that tweet....
Dark Fog
So I’ve been thinking.
That’s what I do, you see, when everyone else in the world thinks I’m sleeping. I lie there, with my eyes closed, alone with my thoughts, and I think about things. Relevantly to this blog I think about the situation in game and the last few posts I’ve made. And I’ve realized something.
It’s not the other people in the game who hate me.
...
Something's Going To Give
So here we are again.
Every so often within the game circumstances conspire in such a way that makes me think I have to make a change. I remember long ago, back when I made my very first level 60, back when people told me I couldn’t spec fire for Molten Core, I realized the game wasn’t fun and I left. I came back eventually, but it was on a completely new server with completely new...
I've Been Down This Road Before
So yeah, about that RP…
Guild RP was an absolute disaster for me last night. Regardless of what was actually intended, what it felt like to me was a bunch of people conspiring to harm Saxsy through use of NPCs without my consent or input. It felt like something like this:
A says: Hey B, you’re a jerk, and I’m going to do something about it.
B says: Go away, A.
A says,...
Toe Stepping
So it appears that I have stepped on some toes.
Before that, I’d like to get into a little diatribe about what makes a good RPer.
I realize that some people treat this as taboo; there are no good RPers or bad RPers to them, it’s all fun, and anyone who thinks someone is a bad RPer is really just an elitist prick. They are entitled to that opinion, but it is not mine. Every aspect of...
RPing Blind
As you may know, my guild is called Red Royal Trading. The IC nature of the guild is based around a trading company of the same name (“RRT”). Characters within the guild can join in on the guild RP by choosing specific roles within the company. For my part, Jana plays the role of a minor stockholder; she owns 0.1% of the company. Saxsy has no specific role within the company but she is...
Always Be Casting
A while back I noted that Ani was not happy with her dps. In that post I described the reasons for that and how I was hoping to help her.
A few days ago we stood in front of the target dummies and Saxsy and Ani went at it for four minutes (or until one of us ran out of mana), five times. SimulationCraft suggested that in such tests Ani’s dps should end up being about 87% of Saxsy’s....
LFR Madness
I ran three LFRs yesterday. The first was the Fall of Deathwing part on Jana. Then, later that night, I ran both parts on Saxsy.
LFR is an interesting beast. The second half of LFR is always an adventure because you’re never really sure what sort of people you might get. Ultraxion was an interesting example for Jana. At this point, I would think the general mechanic of Ultraxion is down to...
Dorei
So a few days ago the conversation in guild chat turned to the various forms of elves in the game. One person surprised me by not knowing the difference between Highborne, High Elves and Quel’dorei; I found this surprising because she’s always seemed to have a good grasp on Night Elf lore. I figured if she was having problems with it, other people would definitely be confused. I...
Angel of Death
(continued from the previous entry)
They say life passes before your eyes when you are dying. In Saxsy’s case, that was only partially correct. Her entire life did not pass before her eyes; only the things that she regretted. She remembered once making love to a young man in Auberdine just to shut him up. She remembered her decision to not confront her parents about choosing to go off to be...
The Haunting Past (A Side Thread)
(This is Saxsy’s off-shoot of a story posted at Ani’s blog and in the RRT forums.)
“It’ll wear off in an hour or so,” Anivile said with the sort of confidence inspired from reading the large print on a medicine bottle without reading the fine print. She dumped Saxsy’s paralyzed form into a portal, taking her directly to the large bed in their diplomatic suite...
Aiding A Friend
Ani is not happy with her dps.
I generally feel a bit of responsibility to other fire mages within my guild. As the resident fire mage expert, I try to point out how to play the class. I point them to my fire mage guide (which, thankfully, is still reasonably accurate). I answer questions about the spec. I also evangelize it as much as possible, tweaking arcane mages for their rather boring play...
Gear Will Come
Saxsy raided Dragon Soul last night for the second time in her ten man group.
There was a little bit of a snag at the start when we found out that our warrior off-tank was not going to be able to make it. To see why this is a problem, let me run down our normal raid composition:
Prot Paladin main tank (and guild leader)
Prot Warrior off tank
Rogue (don’t know the spec)
Feral druid
...
Returning To A Lost Love
I’ve been playing Jana more lately. There are many reasons for this, I suppose. Saxsy already needs no gear from the new instances and can more or less blow through them with competent allies. Jana, however, has a bit more difficulty, as she’s not nearly as geared as a lot of the people who run them. I hope I’ve gotten to the point where she isn’t exactly carried. Sometimes...
This Above All: To Thine Own Self Be True
So there’s been a little bit of guild drama lately.
Here’s the story as it’s played out. There’s a person, who I’ll call S but who anyone who is involved on Moon Guard will likely come to recognize immediately. S has been a friend of mine for a while, sometimes more distant than others, but she is someone who I have at least been on the level of “Saying hello...
Transmog-agog!
When 4.3 hit, the amount of excitement in my guild over transmogrification had created a bit of a backlash for me. I wasn’t all too excited about it and didn’t really plan on doing anything with it. When I saw, however, a ton of people making different outfits, I started to appreciate it more. There were always a few people that had walked around with completely coordinated RP outfits,...
Ultraxion
Last night my guild went in to Dragon Soul for our second night of raiding. The goal, as I understood it, was to down Ultraxion and if we got that move on as best we could to the next boss. Anything else would be a bonus.
Ultraxion is an annoying boss. The most annoying thing about Ultraxion is his name. Whenever someone says “Ultraxion” in any sort of chat, or when Ultraxion himself...
Raid Night
Tonight marks the A team’s first real foray into Dragon Soul. We ran a little bit last week to try to get drops off of trash. Most people have now run the random raid finder twice so the fights are going to be reasonably familiar. This, however, will be the first time we are trying it on 10 man.
I guess you could say that I’ve spent the last month and a half or so getting ready for...
Fun With Numbers
For the first time in a long while, I’ve been working on getting Saxsy some valor points to get new gear. In part I think this is because I feel a responsibility now that I’m raiding to do what I can to make my gear better. A bigger part, I think, is that running the new five mans is actually fun so it doesn’t seem like a drag to get all of those valor points.
The question for...