The new shaman T10 just revealed on wow.com is ugly. Uglier than the Alliance T9.
So now instead of a lizard man, I get to be a wannabe troll with a tail!?
Nov
03
I’ve been playing my priest a lot lately. I’m not really sure why, I have an 80 healer already, and I’ve already cleared H ToC 10 with him.
Maybe it’s just for the challenge of being a new healer with bad gear and a different playstyle.
I'm new to this priesting business.
I hit 80 with her on Halloween and been trying to run through everything that I could since then. Got into a Naxx 25 PUG the next day and now I’m decked out in T7.5 gear! I know, I know, badge gear is better, but I’ll take free gear if nobody wants it anymore.
I have to say, being a discipline priest is a hell of a lot of fun. I like penance. The reaction the PCs give when you shoot them with it is hilarious. Like you’re hitting them.
Gemming is almost like a shaman.
Gearing is almost like a shaman.
Core stats are almost like a shaman.
Healing is not like a shaman.
They’re both the same, but different.
Healing is hard again.* I like it. 
*this does not include Anub in H ToC 10. That is a nightmare on wheels.
Oct
21
This post is partially a response to this post and a similar experience that I just went through.
It’s been almost a month since I left my old guild and joined a raiding guild. When I sit and think about it, the reason that I left is one of respect. The guild leader and one of the officers in the old guild had set a tone of disrespect for people that enjoy raiding current endgame content. This is why I believe that progression raiders and causals do not belong in the same guild. Unless the guild leader is strong enough to put down negative comments from both sides, they will snipe at each other until the guild falls apart, which is what happened to the one I was in.
It all boils down to respect. Progression raiders need to respect the fact that their friends might never catch up to what they are doing. This doesn’t make them bad players. Casuals need to respect that progression raiders are often busy doing things to help them in their next raid and might not have the time to help them gear out an alt (or 10). They might not want to run old content again for the 500th time. This doesn’t make them bad players.
I think people need to take a step back and think about the person on the other side of the monitor.
Sep
15
I started playing a warrior.
It seems the classes that I end up deleting the most I end up liking the most. My main, Xeranos, is the third shaman I ever created. The other two I deleted out of disgust in the class because shamans are hard to play right. With warriors, I deleted a bunch because I thought I hated being a pure melee class. Previously I couldn’t make it past level 13 but I created one and stuck with it, and now I am level 49. I love being a warrior as much as love being a shaman. I want to learn to tank with him so I bought dual spec at 40, so I am leveling as arms/prot. I know it’s going to be expensive in the long run, but it is fun as hell.
I visited my guild mates IRL.
My husband and I took a vacation over Labor Day and I met up with several of my guild mates in Houston. I’ve never met them before and it was great to put faces to the people I’ve been playing with for a year.
I upgraded my computer to Snow Leopard.
Blizzard dropped the ball on this one. WoW isn’t compatible with OS X 10.6, the game causes the computer to freeze up so hard I can’t even SSH into the machine and remote shut it down. They said on the forums it is having a problem with context switching, and is fixed in 3.2.2, but that is a long ways away.
Aug
10
I am very pleased with the changes to shaman healing in 3.2. I respecced to pick up the new Healing Way talent just to try it out, and I have to say for tank healing, it is amazing. While I miss the extra haste on my LHW, it is a bit less frustrating now because I am not constantly clipping the global cooldown. I also noticed that while Tidal Waves is up the extra crit chance on LHW doesn’t seem to make it crit any more than it did before. So while it does burn more mana, it is often better for me to cast HW once instead of LHW twice. I finally have a use for the “useless” HW totem that I got out of Naxx 25. Normally my HW will hit for over 11k and crit anywhere from 15k to 17k. I’m impressed. Before it used it hit for… 8k? HW, it’s not just for Nature’s Swiftness anymore!
The range increase on CH is helpful, but not as useful as a druid’s or priest’s AOE heal. I am so used to CH being 8 yards that I never was a CH spammer outside of Naxx, it often only hit one person so I gave up using it. Now I have to remember to use it, it actually works on the Kologarn fight in 10 man. The 40% reduction in healing per jump is only a little better than the 50%, I am hesitant to pick up the CH glyph again because of the low amount of healing on the 4th target. I’ll have to see if Elitist Jerks has a writeup on it.
One of my favorite parts about being a shaman is the “I’ve got a totem for that” feeling. I love being able to have presets and drop them all now at once. It is so easy for me to drop them now that I sometimes will even drop them on trash fights. I never had the time to set them up before, so I only did it on select fights. I’m glad those days are gone. Shamans are all about our totems!
Lastly, on the MP5 and water shield changes, I couldn’t be happier. I think I got another 100 MP5 out of the increase on all the gear, and with my water totem and not having to refresh the shield constantly, I am not going OOM as fast as I did before.
Thank you Blizzard, for making me a happy shaman. Now, about my 10k crits on lava burst that doesn’t hit in PVP for that amount…
Aug
06
Quick, bang your face on the door. It’ll let you in faster, I swear.
Is there an achievement for this?
With all the badge farming I’ve been doing I haven’t gotten around to doing the orphan quest yet. >.<
Aug
05
How I love you.
So far in 3.2
The good:
Not having to refresh water shield every time I crit on a heal!
Chain heal is 12.5 yards! It’s amazing to watch Jesus beams going all over the place now.
Totem rack: amazing. It’s about damn time I can drop them all at once.
Slight nerf to tidal waves speed for LHW didn’t seem to do anything bad.
The bad:
XT (25 man) bugged a ton last night and spawned about 100 adds on the first heart phase. I thought it wasn’t hard mode until you killed the heart?
One of the bosses on the new heroic Trial of the Champion bugged out. Luckily I managed to run out of the instance. It reset, and we got the loot chest anyways.
All my add-ons are broken!
Where’s the QuestHelper like part of the game so I can ditch the add on? Not in the patch notes…?
I haven’t tried anything else yet, but even as buggy as patch day was, my PUG was able to take down Ignis, the PUG destroyer. Couldn’t get past XT because of the million adds. We’re supposed to try again today, but second day PUGs never seem to make it…
Jul
21
There is always speculation that a new MMO will be a ‘WoW killer’. There will be no WoW killer. World of Warcraft will always be popular because it took MMOs and made them accessible to millions of people. The question for new MMOs is whether or not they can be competitors.
I participated in the closed beta test for Aion over the weekend. I created a priest on the Asmodian side and I got to level 10 and made him a cleric before I ran out of time. My reaction to the game is mixed.
Visuals:
Aion is gorgeous, see for yourself:
Take that, WoW gryphon!
Oh so shiny and pretty...
Blood elves wish they were as pretty as me.
Character Customization:
The character customization screen will keep you busy for hours. There are a ton of sliders to edit your character to look the way you want them to. They even have height and body type. It is such a nice change from WoW. I don’t think I ran into anyone in the beta who looked exactly the same as me.
UI:
The UI for the game was passable. I dislike that keybinds are only per character with no way to save it to a file for import on another character. There are also no user customizable mods or LUA scripting. There are macros, but that was all I found. Until I have to start doing things that the UI limits me, I don’t know if this is a problem.
The quest log is slightly better than the default in WoW, it underlines important terms and people and allows you to click through to find out more information or the location of the NPC.
The one thing I did notice was there was a very noticeable input lag. It might have been the beta server, I picked the server at the top of the list because they all said Low Population. Aside from trying to get around the horrible input lag, there is also very little notification on the part of the game when your character has been interrupted during a spellcast. Unlike WoW, there is no pushback when hit by a mob. You simply stop casting completely. All the UI tells you is “Spell was stop casting” instead of saying “Interrupted”. I find that irritating since it is the same message as when you stop casting something yourself.
Questing, Leveling, Money:
Quests seem to give out trivial amounts of XP except for the class change quest that I did at level 9 to become a daeva. The amount of experience for each level is a lot higher than WoW, but the level cap is significantly lower. I have read that at higher levels, the quests do not give out increasing XP, but you must repeatedly kill mobs. Quest text and flavor is a lot better than WoW. Quest descriptions tend to be a lot longer and some of them are accompanied by mini cut-scenes.
Money doesn’t seem to be an issue in this game (yet) like it does in WoW. The money comes in one denomination, Kinah, and quests and vendor trash give ample amounts of it. There is no such thing as durability so the only thing to spend money on is bind points (similar to hearthstones, except you must spend money to set it) and buying back your lost XP when you die. There is a player driven economy where people can set up their own shops, but as far as I have found, there is nothing like the auction house from WoW where you can scan looking for the lowest price.
Death:
I have not died yet in this game, so all of this is taken from what I have read. There is a death penalty in this game where you lose XP when you die. In addition, you get a speed debuff. You can pay a spirit healer to remove the speed debuff and to regain your XP, and supposedly the cost increases based on level. I can’t find any information if you lose enough XP if you de-level, but if you did it would be consistent with the way Lineage 2 operates. I don’t mind having a death penalty in a game, death does need to mean something. What I don’t care for is losing levels, it is an archaic mechanic from the MUD days that needs to go. I also do not know how this affects PVP.
Overall:
It seems like there is more grinding than WoW (kills on average take longer, more XP to gain per level) and the whole death XP penalty makes me hesitate about this game. If raiding or instances are any where near similar to the way WoW operates, then it severely hampers gameplay. Imagine if you were in an Uludar raid and you wiped, only to find out that a couple tanks or healers had de-leveled due to dying in Vault of Archavon right before they came to your raid? Raid damage is rampant in WoW raiding right now, and unless the mechanics of Aion are completely different then I don’t think many people will be heading into them. The rewards would need to overcome those risks.
I also don’t feel that mindless grinding for XP and money makes a game. It works in some single player games (a la Diablo), but you pay for that game once. There has to be more to a MMO to warrant the monthly fee. Asian games are notorious for their grinding (I played Lineage 2 and a few of the free ones, I remember this well). I think this mechanic will hold back Aion from being a WoW competitor. It has less to offer a casual gamer.
I eagerly await the next beta weekend when I can test out the flying mechanic, the next quest hub, and the death penalty.
Jul
13
I had a rather strange weekend in WoW.
I finally saved up enough money to get epic flying, after grinding all day in Sholazar Basin to get the remaining cash. Got the achievement, I’m done.
About damn time
I said I was going to wait until patch 3.2, but I don’t think I can hang on another few months. Who’s bright idea was it to make regular flying slower than the epic land mount? Winner!
I also got to exalted with Sons of Hodir. No more quests with names that sound like innuendos. Thanks!
I set up a 25 man Naxx run for my guildmates and some friends. We cleared the place in about four hours, excellent for a semi-pug. I had set up the loot rules as 2 epic, 1 tier, and of course, loot drama ensued. Lots of it. Since I did not say “main spec over off-spec”, I was told that some people missed out on getting stuff.
Sigh. I can’t please everyone. If you are in Ulduar 25 gear why the hell would you want to only be able to roll on gear that you don’t need, because it is “main spec”? Not everyone gets invited to a raid on their off-spec, especially tanks and healers. It isn’t fair to them.
It isn’t fair to main spec people because they potentially can miss out on gear that is going to an off-spec.
I hate loot drama. Seriously, it will drop again (I missed out on Voice of Reason because I used my rolls on enhancement gear, c’est la vie).
On a positive note, our main tank finally got his Betrayer of Humanity for his Arms spec. His off-spec, which he shouldn’t have been allowed to roll on according to some of the loot-dramists (he was tanking the whole night)!
Loot-dramaists, DIAF. If you only play this game to gear yourself you are missing out on the bigger picture.
