Here, fresh from drawing my name in the Blog Azeroth Kris Kringle post exchange, is Leafy himself, who brings us a bit of good family fun and British humour from across the pond (WoW-themed, of course). At least, that’s what he assures me it is, and as he’s got a fantastic accent, I’m inclined to believe him. And so, without further ado.

We join the Christmas pantomime* The Stoppable Farce in mid flow…

_Enter stage left Stop Stoppingtonforce, the affable Death Knight, and his Vanity Pet Cat. He’s carrying Haris Pilton’s Hole on the end of a large weapon slung over his shoulder. _

Stop: Oh, puss, oh, sweet charming puss, with three main animations and no visible purpose, shall we ever reach Dalaran and find the streets paved with gold?

Puss: does a cute idle animation and fails to respond

Stop: oh, Pussy, I do love you so, but you are completely useless… Wait, what’s that ahead?

_Enter stage right, two large, angry looking mobs (crowds, not quest cannon fodder…), gesticulating at each other on the road ahead. As the cacophony begins to wind down, we realise both groups are shouting insults at each other; more - it’s the same insult! _

All: “You’re ruining the game! You’re ruining the game!”

_Puss chases an invisible butterfly, while Stop looks on in horror. _

_Four individuals step forward, two from each side. They are all played by over-weight, middle-aged men in drag, with excessive make-up and bad wigs. Both pairs of outfits are identical, with slightly different colouring. Let’s call then, randomly (ahem) Casuals One and Two and Raiders One and Two. _

Casual One: Them! They’re ruining the game! All that elitism and epeen!

Raider One: Them! They’re ruining the game with their sense of entitlement and welfare epics!

_Raider One turns to look at the audience, cocks an eyebrow, and raises his skirt to reveal a large, comedy ePeen** below… _

_Casuals One and Two make comic expressions of shock. Suddenly, Casual Two turns as if hearing a distant voice. _

Casual One: FTW! A healer! Now to chain random heroics and get my last piece of Tier 9!

_Casual One fades away. _

Raiders One and Two: They’re welfare Tier gear!

Audience and Casual Two: Oh no they’re not!

Raiders One and Two: Oh yes, they are!

Audience and Casual Two: Oh no they’re not!

_(repeat until the audience show signs of suicidal boredom or playing Warhammer) _

_Then…
Raider Two fades away. _

Stop (desperately): See, you are running 5 mans, too! Really, we’re all one big happy family!

Raider One: She’s just quit to play Dragon Age, you fool.

Casual Two: Oh no, she hasn’t!

_Raider One punches Casual Two in the face, while Stop legs it away _

_After a few seconds, Stop crashes unexpectedly into the Narrator. _

Stop: Oh, narrator, there you are. When can we expect Act Two to begin?

Narrator: Signs indicate that the door to Act Two will finally fall in 365 days.

Stop: Oh, bother.

_To be continued… (possibly) _

*Pantomime is (apparently) a very British Christmas theatre tradition, in which children’s fairy tales, or historical legends are played out with arch-villains, brave heroes (often played by very attractive young women playing handsome men - in tights), audience participation, and middle-aged men in extravagant and over-the-top drag making heavy sexual innuendo. This is, clearly, suitable Christmas entertainment for children and good, clean family fun. I have no idea why foreigners think Brits are sexually odd.

**Please find a way of making this acceptable to children while still being funny and lewd for adults. kthnxbai!

Ah, December - that time of the year where I typically let my blog posts trickle to a minimum. Not out of neglect for you, O dear reader, all 3 of you. No no - I simply find a lot of other things to do that happen to coincide with the holiday season, plus I spend a good deal of time out of town and not playing WoW.

I’ve been running PUGs, like everyone else, but to be honest I don’t even have a good story about those. Oh, there’s the one where our tank ninja-quit during the fourth wave in the Tribunal of Ages in Halls of Stone, and me and the fury warrior ran around like chickens with our heads cut off, keeping the billion dwarves off of our druid (who kept us all up!) and our elemental shaman (who knocked them all down). And then we went and punched Sjonnir in his ugly face to round out the night.

And yes, I’ll be finishing up Winter Veil. I only have 4 achievements until the title that I couldn’t finish last year, so this year, Merrymaker is mine!

However, I’ve also been playing other games. Gasp, shock! Blame the Polygamerous podcast (episode 3 just came out! Check it out here, it’s a good listen), but I periodically play other games now. Finally beat Persona 4, for instance, and a little Modern Warfare 2 and Zeno Clash (which wins hands-down for weirdest friggin’ game of the year). However, the game I can already tell is going to eat a lot of time now that I have it again is Mass Effect.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - the only people who can match and, in my opinion, far exceed Blizzard’s ability to create a fictional universe down to the niggling details that don’t affect gameplay are the fine folks at Bioware. I’d love to know how many of them are frustrated ex-tabletop GMs. :) Mass Effect was one of my favorite Xbox 360 games, if not the favorite, back when I had a working Xbox 360. However, due to complications with the 360 itself, I never quite got to finish it… and so when I saw it was only $20 on Steam….

Well, Merry Christmas to me. :)

(Incidentally, if you’d like to be friends with me on Steam, here’s my profile.)

So that’s why you may not hear much here in December. Now you know!

Random dungeons: LFG works well now. It works scary well. It also has a sense of humor: my first instance after joining the queue for a random instance? Heroic Trial of Standing Around in One Room. Thanks, I wanted to go straight back here, how’d you know? (Still got two achievements out of the place.) Then there was Utgarde Pinnacle, which went well. Peaeye joined me and we ran a random heroic Azjol-Nerub in which a few more achievements I didn’t have got knocked out, then got my Looking for More.

Then Pea and I decided to do the new Icecrown instances; it’s not random, but we still wanted to see it. Picked up Nighthawque and, well, there’s our DPS. :) Tank and a healer joined in (the healer, amusingly, was the only one not from our server - and he was from Alexstrasza, where I once had a toon, once upon a time). We completed the Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron, and while I’m sure I’ll be sick of them eventually, I absolutely loved them. They were different, they were actually challenging since none of us knew any of the mechanics, and Bronjahm is a treat to fight. Sadly we didn’t make it past the Halls of Reflection; we wiped on Falric when he had virtually no health, and never managed to do that well again (it was about 2:30AM server time, so I’m going to blame it on that).

UI redesign: I spent a couple hours last night redoing parts of my UI from the ground up. Several of my addons were unnecessary or could be rolled into smaller, more efficient versions. Just for comparison, here’s what my UI looked like prior to yesterday (click to embiggen):

Several new addons later, I got something I like. I’m still fiddling with the precise layout, but at least I know I like all of the addons themselves - except maybe Magic Runes. I may switch back to SimpleRune or its successor. And I’m not a big fan of TidyPlates - I find that in groups of enemies they tend to completely overlap, making targeting an enormous pain in the ass. Here’s what it looked like, from the beginning of the evening until near the end (again, click to embiggen):

Since I know someone’s going to ask - the thin white circle you see around me in several of the combat pics is from Power Auras (specifically, that one’s letting me know that Unbreakable Armor is ready for use).

That, if I decide to do it, will come tomorrow. I’d have to find something different to say from what I’ve already said, though. The problem is that patch day and my weekly real-life gaming night fall on the same day, so by the time I got home last night, the instances were mostly smoothed out in my battlegroup… but I got to spend my time sitting in front of the gates to ICC, waiting on a tank and a healer to miraculously log on to go with the three DPS we got together in a hurry.

There’s just been a lot of stuff to deal with lately (though not stemming from the patch - frost death knights saw virtually no changes of note in this patch, which is just fine and dandy with yours truly), and it hasn’t been the best of times, but I’m hoping tonight fixes that. We’ll see. If I can’t get into ICC, maybe I can at least PUG a little bit with the new LFG mechanism (which Anea sums up nicely here with her in-game experiences, so I don’t have to). If anyone on Rampage runs into Rajaat, give me a wave. :)

Also: boy, that Core Hound Pup is cute! Lil’ K.T. has himself some competition for the spot of my favorite pet.

Tonight will also probably be when I redo my UI from the ground up. I mentioned on Twitter that a few things were non-negotiable. Those things are, in no particular order:

• A rune timer of some kind. I’m currently using SimpleRune because it lives up to its name.

• Unit frames. Currently I use Grid, but full-fledged raid frames are largely overkill for what I do. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Shadowed Unit Frames, and may give it a try. (Users of SUF are welcome to convince me. :))

• A configurable bar mod. Currently rocking Dominos. My primary reason for this is a bar layout that matches my n52te. I’m not totally committed to this, but I like to at least have 14 keys, with the ability to page to 14 different keys by holding alt, and as just about any bar mod will do that… (Also, you can tell how old the screenshot in that post is because it still shows Unholy Blight as a clickable, actually-useful spell. Ah, those were the days.)

  • I put the bar mod down as non-negotiable, but honestly, I dunno. If I could find a 14-button bar mod with paging on keypress and a few additional slots to the side for things I am lazy about, like mounts and Path of Frost, that might be sufficient. I might not need all the extra jazz that Dominos comes with.

• Quartz. More for my caster alts than my main.

• Jamba, but only until February, when my recruit-a-friend runs out again. I loooove Jamba.

• RatingBuster, because I hate crunching math on the fly.

That’s basically it. I do have some utility stuff (Auctioneer for bank alt, for instance), but a lot of my addons have been replaced by built-in features - for instance, from what I tried last night, I don’t think I’ll need to be toting around Cartographer or QuestHelper anymore; I could truthfully do away with Outfitter at this point; and LightHeaded’s built in features have been replaced by having a second monitor. I also have Buffalo3 but I don’t find it very useful. I also have some features I’ve lost that I’d like to get back - for example, a movable minimap like SexyMap or Carbonite’s map.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with a guildie whose Scion had $500 $2800 worth of damage done to its bumper by hitting a raccoon… only to be informed he needed to get his car def capped if it couldn’t even tank a raccoon.

The Sidhe Devils Night Crew is a bit wacky.

Borrowed from Bible of Dreams:

1. Get into LFG and finish the 5-mans, straight off the bat. I was blathering Ratshag’s ear off again this morning on IM about how there’s 1, maybe 2 drops in all of the first two instances for me… and then I can replace damn near most of my gear in heroic Halls of Reflection. (Plus I kinda wanna see Uther.) In fact, “PUG randomly and constantly” is on my list of things to do because I need - need - to get rid of this crappy mix of T7, T7.25, and T8 that I’m sporting. Ugh. Just… ugh.

2. Figure out where the hilt for Quel’Delar drops, and get started on it. Papa wants a brand new legendary (as in its place in the lore, not its gear level - don’t be overly literal) sword to dual-wield with his beer mug.

3. Log onto my rogue and enjoy the 70% walk speed stealth! And, maybe level her or something.

4. Wish that “bind on account” actually meant “binds to battle.net account” and not “binds to WoW account” because I would really like to send my paladin some heirlooms suited for following my rogue around healing her, but unfortunately that won’t happen. One step at a time, I guess. (Cross-faction BOA! Woooooo~)

5. Keep working on Insane in the Membrane, since I’ve been slacking lately, kinda. (As far as I’m concerned, leveling my rogue is working on Insane in the Membrane. Those junkboxes won’t pickpocket themselves.)

So what are you going to do first when the patch drops?

You know what’s not a good idea? Changing your laptop’s OS before leaving on vacation and thinking, “eh, WoW works fine under Wine, I don’t have to worry about silly things like testing. And this OS seems to be running fine - I can’t think why I’d need to bring my flash drive to install a replacement.” So yeah, after posting about how awesome the rep gain bonus for the holiday was, and how I was planning to take advantage of it, and after in my head planning out a series of nice relaxing Dire Maul runs while my turkey digested… well, let’s just say none of that happened.

Spoiler alert for anyone thinking about it: Acer Aspire One AOD-150 + Kubuntu + Wine + WoW = a non-working WoW setup.

Wednesday night, after fiddling with it and failing pretty much all day, I gave in and finally bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium at the reduced education cost - it had been previously running the Windows 7 RC, it needed a legitimate OS anyhow. By midday Thursday I was reinstalling Windows onto my netbook using my mom’s new $700 Pentax camera, plus the 16 GB SDHC card from my DSi, as a cobbled-together USB drive. Oh, and I booted the Win7 DVD using UNetbootin, because my setup wasn’t epic enough yet.

So after maybe an hour or so, I had a fully-functioning netbook with its own proper OS again, and it would’ve been entirely capable of running WoW had I remembered to evacuate my WoW setup from Kubuntu. Whoops.

Oh, hey, no biggie, I’ll watch Persona: Trinity Soul instead. … Wait, you mean I left that on the Kubuntu drive as well? Damn it! Oh well, I can just download them from home.

Wait, what do you mean it’s going to take a bajillion hours to download from home? Oh hell, now I have to find new things to do. Good thing I planned for this eventuality and brought Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 home with me. So I spent pretty much the rest of my vacation playing those two, as indicated on my Backloggery.

Which led to me and Cas discussing Persona 4 on Twitter and concluding that even though she has the best followup in the game, Chie Satonaka cannot Galactic Punt Ameno-sagiri.

No matter what the picture that goes with this post may tell you.

Hope everyone had a good, or at least tolerable, holiday, and it’s good to be back. :)

Stupid turkeys. Killing 40 turkeys with 30 seconds between each kill is going to be the death of me. I even had it at 39 of 40 yesterday and a friggin’ warlock decided to curse the turkey I was standing on top of. Thanks, you dick.

On the up side, cooking all of the holiday foods got me from 1-330 Cooking (well, 285 to 330 on my main) with little effort and only a few gold, then 330-342 with only slightly more (yay turkeys!). Then I bumped Raj up to Northrend level cooking by making the ingredients (and a little extra) for some Super Hot Stew. Progress! Doing one alt a day sounds good, I figure, then they’ll all be self-sufficient up to a certain point - at least as far as food goes.

Today: dailies, get a hat, kill Ikiss, somehow kill those blasted turkeys, then hunt down rogues for the rest of the week (by which I mean “make level 1 rogues on my second account and shoot them with turkey shooters”).

Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, Spirit of Sharing stacks with the passive human rep boost. This is the week for you to get your rep grind on. I can now get 420 rep for freeing Knot, 605 rep per libram turn-in, 90.75 rep per Gordok Ogre Suit… you get the picture. If I play my cards right, I might actually be able to step into goblin cities again by the end of the week. If you’re trying to grind rep for tabards, achievements, or anything else, now’s the time to do it.

You can also re-up your Spirit of Sharing in some weird places. I was at Honor Hold last night, and they only had 3 of the 5 chairs per table, so I guess that was out… but Telaar had a fully-stocked table right next to the flight point. If you’re an Ally in Outland, now you know where to go. I would wager that the tables at Thrallmar and Garadar are about the same, but I can’t confirm. Nagrand may be the place to go for those grinding Outland reps!

I mentioned this to The Mighty Gresh on twitter - I started dual-boxing again (so I could power-level my rogue to 60 using Recruit-a-Friend [so I could pickpocket junkboxes for Insane in the Membrane]). I’ll actually be leveling two or three alts this way - since Lasombre (the rogue) is already 18, I needed a quick way to boost Sigrat (the paladin) up to join her. And so, I started a relay race, only using a dwarf instead of a baton: this involved creating Bubblesqueak (the mage) to lead Sigrat around and have him kill stuff until they hit 18, then passing Sigrat off to Lasombre… but wait, you say, you put the mage in the lead? There’s a method to my madness:

1. I wanted to make sure I could get Sigrat’s keybindings set up ahead of time, and

2. It’s easier to pull with a mage, on account of having a ranged attaack with a range of greater than 10 feet, and

3. There have recently been changes that made dual-boxing a melee character … well, possible.

It’s still a touch awkward (namely if you try to attack with the melee character while the monster is still running towards you), but it’s a far sight better than having to run through the mob and flip it around. Here’s the guide. (Thanks to the folks at Dual-Boxing.com for figuring this out well before I ever needed it.)

• Besides the required keystroke passing app (I use Keyclone), you’ll want to have an addon that allows auto-following after combat. I’m currently using Jamba, last time I used TwoBoxToolkit. I can vouch for both; though Jamba’s got features above and beyond TBTK, and makes configuration a lot easier (plus has some graphical niceties like a small window on my “master” character showing how close everyone on my Jamba Team list is to leveling, whether they’re following, etc.), TBTK will get the job done.

• On the character or characters who will just be following you around, turn ON click-to-move (Main Menu > Interface > Mouse > check Click to Move).

• On the same character(s), go into the key bindings and bind something to Interact With Target. As the name implies, this is essentially a keybinding for right clicking. I set mine to the same key that, on all my other characters, makes pets attack. It’s fitting. :)

• And last but not least, you’ll want a macro you can hit to make this character assist your “master” character. I use a simple macro that says “/assist party1” because my dwarfadin will actually be following two different people. For ease of use I actually worked this into my other macros - I macroed together “/assist party1” and Judgement of Light, for instance.

• On the “master” character, combat goes like so:

  • Engage target. For ranged classes, pull, for other classes, wade into combat.

  • Once the target’s positioned, hit the keybinding that corresponds to the assist macro on the follower, then the keybinding that corresponds to the Interact With Target keybinding on the follower.

  • ???

  • Profit!

Because of the way that assist, click-to-move and the Interact with Target keybinding work, your follower will target your target, then “right-click” it - i.e., pull out their weapon and run into melee. This way you’re not strictly limited to having a ranged follower or healbot follower for ease of use. I was actually considering having him level up holy and using my rogue to do all the damage, but it’s just more fun this way.

So word on the street is that Shadowmourne finally has stats. Sexy, sexy stats. And, yeah, it breaks my heart a little bit to know that I’ll never have a Shadowmourne, or that my shaman will never have a Val’anyr, and I’ll probably never see Arthas unless I’m running away from him.

The closest analogy I can think of is that it’s like running into an ex. Yeah, me and 25-man raiding had some good times, there’s no denying that. But raiding just wanted more than I could give at that point in my life, so we took a break - and when I came back, raiding had moved on without me. So I went somewhere else, trying to forget about raiding. I mean, occasionally I still see 25-man raiding’s younger easier sister, 10-man, and we hang out, it’s all cool. But 25-man gave me something I didn’t really know I wanted until now.

I’m seeing someone new instead - casual, you might’ve heard of it. Real nice group of people hang out with casual, too. But sometimes, I wonder if maybe I never should’ve left raiding at all.