First up, one of my favorite sights in WoW: a dead Rotface. As of last night, Caffeine has officially put him on farm status.

Before leaving Kael’thas, I did finally (finally) get my last book for Higher Learning. I’ve since ran into at least four people doing some, uh, adult RPing in the Archmage’s room.

I also went and sat on the throne in Blackrock Depths. Think that’s enough to declare myself king?

This is how I get psyched to fight Deathbringer Saurfang.

Noticed while leveling my baby warrior: is it just me, or does that tower in the distance kinda look like…? Naaaah, couldn’t be.

Truthfully I don’t know why I took this one. I think it’s because it was raining in Stratholme? Either way. It might make a good blog header, if I cropped it a bit…

Or perhaps I should edit it to showcase King Ymiron’s taste in art.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

I have my orders

Though my current account says December ‘07, I actually started playing WoW in the fall of ‘05. Specifically, sometime around Patch 1.8.0 or its successors – I know it was just prior to the opening of the gates. I had graduated from college, and got in touch with a friend of mine who’d moved out west to pursue a graduate degree at the Colorado School of Mines. We were chatting about various things we’d done together in college (memorable D&D games, etc.) and she told me that she’d recently started playing World of Warcraft at the urging of her new boyfriend and really loved it, and that I should totally check it out. I don’t remember my excuse for putting it off, but I had one, and I managed to stick to it until one day in Best Buy, when I walked by and saw that World of Warcraft really wasn’t all that expensive. Huh, I thought. Maybe this’ll give me something to do. (I was in kind of a console game – and MMO – slump at the time, having burnt out on Final Fantasy XI.) So I picked it up, took it home, installed it on my creaky little Mac Mini G4, and dived headfirst into World of Warcraft.

I don’t remember my first character’s name or the ones immediately following him, and I kind of regret that, but from day 1, I played Horde. My very first character was an undead rogue on Feathermoon, and I didn’t let my friend know about him – just yet. After all, I wasn’t sure I was gonna stick to this game or not. I remember falling in love with the areas around Deathknell and Brill, and how cool it was that I could jump (veterans of FFXI and Guild Wars may understand my amazement as well). I gleefully remember stealthing up to that little camp of Scarlets and stabbity-stabbing them to death, and I probably got my rogue to level 5 or 6 before deciding to try a second class.

My friend, Cassie, was a tauren druid. So I figured, why not? I rolled a tauren druid. Mulgore totally has a different flavor, and by now the variety had gotten me hooked. Cassie hooked me up with some leather gear and other generic piles of mats so I could level my own leatherworking, as well as some low-level greens, and I plowed through early quests in Mulgore and found my way into the Barrens. I remember using my newfound jumping skills (shut up) to get around to the guys above Wailing Caverns, before I had ever realized what an instance was (or that Wailing Caverns was an instance). I also remember that I had the pattern for a Deviate Scale Belt (I believe Cassie or her now-husband had blendered that instance for me so I could do some quests), and that I really, really wanted to make myself a Deviate Scale Belt – all by my lonesome. Self-sufficiency was the name of the game.

Have you spotted the problem yet? This was a long time before Patch 2.4, which would turn all the elites outside instance into non-elites… and no one had ever explained to me what that little gold circle meant. (I just thought it meant they had better loot.) So here I am, a little bitty druid around 15 or so, with what I’m sure was an absolutely moronic selection of gear (I didn’t know yet how utterly useless Spirit was), trying to solo elites – sometimes 2 and 3 at a time. However, I never gave up, at least until I did. I concluded that I sucked at this game, and wasn’t any good at it, and that’s the story of how a Deviate Scale Belt made me quit WoW.

At least until December 2007. I’d built a new rig earlier in the year – a fairly powerful one, to replace my stolen MacBook and underwhelming desktop – and had Gamestop gift cards, and that 19.99 Classic + TBC battlechest called my name…

How did you get started playing WoW? What kind of boneheaded mistakes did you make as a newbie? We were all there once, after all.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

We were all boneheads once

So that’s been making the rounds, so there you go. I love it, especially Illidan’s little cameo, and – oh God – is Archimonde humping the World Tree? What has been seen cannot be unseen.

After finishing up my Fool for Love requirements, I finally took the jump yesterday and made my second spec a tank spec. My primary spec for raiding, at least for the last two weeks, has been a variant of Gravity’s single-target raid blood spec – somewhat adjusted for AOE, by moving 3 out of Spell Deflection and into Morbidity, like so. I may just end up copying Gravity entirely, though; I just informed my raid that my AOE would suck, and they adjusted accordingly. Second tank was a bear, and the two of us took it up to the plague wing, so I’d call it at least a moderate success. Also through Sister Svalna and, for a change, took a poke at Valithria Dreamwalker. I can also DPS in this spec if I absolutely have to, like last night when we 7-manned (or 8-manned, my memory’s fuzzy) XT for the weekly (just under the wire).

My other spec is now a pretty stock 2H Frost with IIT build. This one is explicitly for five mans; it ends up with about 1000 less health than the blood build, and in my opinion feels moderately squishier, but in heroics that hardly matters – it’s just being able to build snap AOE threat, and that’s one thing this build excels at (barring, of course, stupid DPS – like the fury warrior I ran DTK with yesterday who insisted on, if I paused for a second to get HB or DnD, pulling himself with Heroic Throw > Charge > Whirlwind. I should’ve let him tank, by which I mean tank the floor, more often than I already did).

I guess that’s that, then. No real progress to speak of, a few new shinies on my equipment list but I still can’t get rid of those damned blue boots. It’s starting to get a little ridiculous. At this point I’d put just about anything in that spot. Wish me boot mojo!

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

The World (of Warcraft) Is Just Awesome

What I don’t get are people asking me – and judging from the searches that somehow refer readers to this blog, a lot of you would like to ask me – where Stratholme is.

How can you not find Stratholme on a damned map? Here’s a quiz: look at a map of the Eastern Plaguelands. Where is Stratholme?

It’s right here.

It’s right here.

IT IS RIGHT THE HELL HERE.

LEARN TO READ A MAP.

P.S. Technically, it is also right here:

… but if you can’t even find the front door, you’ve got no business going in the back.

(See what I did there?)

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Where is Stratholme? Really?

A while ago, in a post on my new UI, I posted this screenshot, which includes a little peek into my wallet. See 353 gold shown in that bar in Fortress? That’s basically what I have on my toon at all times.

Let that sink in, because as far as I can tell, no one really understands that. "Oh, well you can just pick up blahblahblah for cheap." No I fucking can’t, pardon my French.

I’m in a near-permanent state where single epic gems are expensive, some enchants are unbuyable, the craftables from Crusader’s Orbs are out of reach even after getting emblems to get the orbs (and even one piece of Primal Saronite is way beyond my budget). Darkmoon Cards are unpurchasable. Essentially I manage to keep enough to repair after raids or astoundingly bad heroics, stock up on consumables again, and then that’s it.

I have neither the patience nor the intelligence to play the Auction House. I’ve tried it – I’ve followed the advice of Arthas-damned Auctioneer geniuses and I lose money, every single time. I don’t know what to farm because I have no idea what I should be farming. I can’t fund myself entirely through dailies like I used to in TBC (this is not a new problem, in case it wasn’t obvious – I had to borrow 500g to even get epic flying for my DK, and that was the most gold I’d ever had, at any one point, ever.)

Essentially, readers, despite how good I am at everything else, I am an abysmal failure at making money in WoW and I don’t know how to improve that.

I need your help. Badly. Leave comments below.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Let’s play money making game.

Well, I smell a post. Let’s get started with a quick tour of Kahorie’s fine, fine tool!

Caveat: I use Windows. I am not a Mac person anymore, though not by choice. Anyway – these instructions should work fine on a Mac if you use BootCamp or some sort of tool that lets you use Windows apps on OS X – Parallels and VMware Fusion both being popular choices. It’s not a terribly complex app, and if you can run .NET apps, you can run this sim.

First things first, you need to download the simulator. On the downloads tab, you’ll see a big list of downloads – but the only one you need to worry about is the very first one, Kahorie’s DK Simulator.zip, because it always points to the newest version. Unzip it, and place the folder inside somewhere convenient – your desktop, a downloads folder. There’s no installer to run – open up this folder, and look for this icon, then double-click it. Kahorie’s DK Simulator runs right out of the box. (Yours probably won’t have a little green checkmark on it – mine does, because I keep my simulator stored in my Dropbox, which is a whole ‘nother story altogether.)

Upon opening Kahorie’s DK Simulator (which I’m just going to call "the DK Simulator" from now on because I’m already tired of typing out the whole thing), you’ll be greeted with this slightly intimidating window full of dropdowns and options (as always, click to embiggen):

None of this is too difficult once you’ve done it a time or two, but I’ll walk you through the basic steps.

Character

This is the first dropdown; a few pre-built characters come with the DK Simulator, usually representing ‘ideal’ DKs at a given point in raiding progress. Usually I like to create one of these as a sandbox representing my current stats, then a second to test potential gear changes. Since my character is somewhere between T9 10-man and T10 10-man at the moment, I’ve chosen "2h ToC Blood.xml" from the dropdown list, and clicked Edit to get to the character editor. Here’s what that screen looks like:

This is pretty straightforward: essentially it’s your statistics, trinkets, procs (the DK Simulator models several trinkets, procs, and profession enchant procs), and set bonuses, as well as racial bonuses. Obviously I can see that some of these differ from the ’stock’ character to my own death knight. For instance, Rajaat would gain a small main hand expertise bonus for being human, and his stats are definitely different from the ones shown. Unfortunately, the DK simulator doesn’t have a way to directly import toons from the Armory yet, so you’ll have to do the copying by hand.

A couple things might be confusing for first-timers.

• Attack Power (the green part): If you mouse over your AP in the Armory (or, I believe, in-game), you’ll see your attack power written as something like: Melee Attack Power 4333 (3738 + 595). The only part you put in this blank is the portion in green (here, 595), not the total (here, 4333). This will lead to wildly inflated max possible DPS, if you do, and it’ll leave you wondering exactly why you’re underperforming.
• Haste Rating: On the armory, this can be found by mousing over your melee speed.
• Armor Penetration Rating: Similarly, this can be found by mousing over your melee hit rating.
• Expertise: This is really confusing on the Armory. For instance, on Rajaat, I see Expertise: 24. If I mouse over it, I see Expertise 124, but expertise rating 24. I’ll be 100% honest with you: I usually add this up by hand. 124 is what’s on my gear, so 124 is what I put here.
• Racial: If you’re an orc, turn on the "Blood Fury + Pet damage" checkbox, and put in 5 for your expertise on the appropriate hand if you’re using an axe in that hand. (For two-handed weapon wielders, just use the main hand expertise box.) Dwarves put a 5 into the expertise box if they’re wielding a mace; humans put a 3 if they’re using a sword or a mace. Trolls and blood elves check the appropriate box for Berserking or Arcane Torrent, respectively. Everyone else, sorry, your racial talents aren’t relevant to your DPS.
• Misc: 3% crit damage is from, I believe, meta gems – either old and busted or the new hotness. Tailor Enchant is referring to Swordguard Embroidery. The rest are fairly explanatory.

The rest should be fairly self-explanatory – choose your trinkets, choose your weapon proc if you’re wielding one of the Onyxia one-handers or the new weapons from Icecrown with a proc (right now that’s Bryntroll and the two one-handers from Onyxia; you can bet on Shadowmourne being added once it’s available), and pick any set bonuses you happen to have. One note, if you happen to not have any set bonuses – which could happen as you’re mixing and matching gear – there’s no blank option. Just delete the entry in those dropdowns with the Backspace or Delete key.

Once you’ve gotten all these finished, click Save As (or Save if you’re saving an already-modified character), type in a filename, and hit enter. Choose your new file from the dropdown next to character, then it’s on to the next step. This is important – saving the new file will not pick it from the dropdown for you. I’ve gotten incorrect tests many times because I was looking at the wrong character.

Template

This is just a fancy way of saying "talents and glyphs." The most common builds for the current patch are included, and I can probably go with the stock "Blood 51-00-20-01-GoD.xml," but let’s see what the edit screen looks like, in case you’ve got a non-standard build or glyph setup. If you need to edit a template, or want to make sure the stock ones are the same as what you’ve got, pick a template from the dropdown and click Edit.

That’s pretty much it. If you’ve ever used a talent calculator before – whether on the Armory, on Wowhead or MMO-Champion, or even in-game – you’ve seen this. It only gets a little weird when PTRs are out and the functioning of a glyph is changing – for instance, prior to 3.3, the DK Simulator included IcyTouch and IcyTouchII – the former representing how it used to work (extra runic power), as opposed to how it works now.

Oh, and the StartTalentDpsValue button will figure out how much DPS a given talent point is worth – so for instance, if you got down to having enough talent points to maximize Blood-Caked Blade or Necrosis, but not both, this button would help you figure out which one you wanted to max out to eke out that last itty bitty pesky point of DPS.

A caveat, this will let you put in illegal talent builds like 71/71/71, so, uh, double-check before you save, yeah? Save. Now back to the main screen. Pick your template from the dropdown, and it’s on to the next step.

Intro

This just lets you model an introductory round to your rotation. Some builds, such as the blood/Glyph of Disease spec, use this – the first round of a DPS rotation will be radically different from the others. You can also choose NoIntro.xml, which models no special introductory round. If you do choose to make and edit an intro, you’ll be using the rotation editor, which I’ll cover below. Skip down to rotation editing if you want to edit your priority.

Priority and Rotation

A lot of noise is made about the different between priority and rotation. Most builds can be defined as either, and honestly it’s up to your individual playstyle to decide how you define your priority or rotation. Some builds even switch – for example, in my build, my introduction is a flat rotation (PS > IT > DS > HS > Pest > RP dump), while after that it becomes a priority system (Keep diseases up > Heart Strike > Death Strike > Death Coil). You may find that a straight-up rotation works fine for you – a lot of Unholy players use one, for instance. It’s really a matter of preference – so, pick the one you prefer.

Now, one of the two boxes – priority or rotation – will be greyed out, and the one you chose can be selected from. Choose, then edit, because I guarantee most of the time it’s not going to match what you’re actually doing in play. (You want to, if at all possible, not save over these base rotations – they’re usually examples of cookie cutter rotations, and it’s possible they’re better than what you’re doing, but I digress).

Both priority and rotation editing (and intro editing) use the Rotation Editor tab. Here’s what that looks like.

Oh, hey, this looks familiar. What this says is that Frost Fever is a higher priority than Blood Plague (only because it won’t let you set them equal…), then Heart Strikes, then Death Strikes, then lastly Death Coil. Essentially the list on the right represents both abilities and combinations of abilities to work into your priority or rotation. Use the arrows on the items on the left column to move them up, down, or out of your rotation/priority; use the arrows on the items in the right column to move them into your rotation/priority. A few of them might be unfamiliar, because a lot of them apply to Frost:

• KMFrostStrike, KMHowlingBlast, KMRime: These Frost-specific abilities represent waiting until you have a Killing Machine proc, then using Frost Strike or Howling Blast. KMRime actually represents having both Killing Machine and Rime procs up simultaneously.
• FrostStrikeMaxRp, DeathCoilMaxRp: These represent dumping RP abilities because you are close to, or at, maximum RP, and generating any more would be a waste.
• SaveRpForRuneStrike: Self-explanatory, I figure.
• CinderDisease: For those of you still using Rune of Cinderglacier, Cinderglacier increases your disease damage but does not consume the proc.
• DRMObliterate, DRMDeathStrike: Being honest, I’m a little shaky on the meaning of these. I presume it means waiting until you have two Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery to fire off one of these abilities. None of the current rotations uses them, so I suspect they might represent things that have fallen out of favor in the current DK DPS landscape.
• FadeRime: This represents casting Howling Blast when your Rime buff is just about to fade, whether you got a Killing Machine proc or not. No sense wasting it!

Cooldowns are not represented here (like the gargoyle, dancing rune weapon, etc.) because they are not part of a standard rotation or priority system. Now, if you are editing a rotation instead of a priority (or if you’re editing an intro – intro segments are, by definition, rotations), you’ll notice an additional checkbox:

All the retry/wait checkbox does is ask you if you want to try something, or wait for it to be available again, if you missed it. As you can see, in this intro, I’ll retry anything out of PS > IT > DS > BS > Pest if it misses or I have to move, because that’s the only way I can get my priority system running – but I won’t wait on Death Coils, mostly because if you miss, you don’t get that runic power back, so I could be waiting a long time…

As usual, once finished, Save or Save As, return to the main screen, and choose your new saved intro/rotation/priority from the dropdown.

Presence, Sigil, Main Hand, and Off Hand

Fairly self-explanatory: the presence you’re running in for DPS (almost universally Blood these days), the Sigil you’re using, your main hand weapon’s runeforge, and your off-hand weapon’s runeforge (if any). Two-hand wielders, leave your off-hand runeforge blank.

Other Settings

Some of these settings you’ll need to touch; some you won’t. Here’s the most important ones to look at, in my opinion, and you can investigate the rest if you wish:

• Latency in ms: VERY IMPORTANT! Latency plays a huge part in your DPS (just ask any Australian playing on US servers), and setting this to your average latency will generate much more reliable results.
• Number of enemies: Choosing 1 enemy gets you something like a Patchwerk fight; choosing multiples can represent any kind of fight where your DK is fighting multiple enemies at once, and whether or not you want to keep diseases up on all of them at once.
• Use Bone Shield/UA: This just chooses when you want to re-apply Bone Shield or Unbreakable Armor when they fall off. Your choices are kind of limited: apply them after a Blood Strike/Blood Boil, or apply them instead of a Blood Strike/Blood Boil.
• Wait for FC proc for GG/DRW: This will stop Gargoyle/Dancing rune weapon from being used until your Fallen Crusader runeforge procs. I’m not entirely sure, but if you’re not using Fallen Crusader at all (I’m not sure why… but maybe you’re running some crazy Unholy build with Cinderglacier on a two-hander or something), you may want to uncheck this or it may never use the GG or DRW.
• Generate Combat Log: If your DPS seems very low in the report – or very high – you should check this on and see what is going on in the generated combat log. Sometimes priorities (especially priorities) can be very difficult to model correctly. I once accidentally somehow made a build that prioritized blood taps and keeping Bone Shield and Horn of Winter up higher than everything else.
• Show Procs/Non-Damaging Spells: Useful, but probably not necessary. Useful for seeing how often your procs were up during a given fight.
• Report Name: Good if you’re doing multiple reports in a row.

Buffs

There’s a buffs tab along the top that we haven’t, as of yet, touched. It’s very important to edit this. By default, every single buff is on, and let me tell you, this is how you get some vastly inflated numbers. You’ll probably want to pare down the selection to get the buffs that you’re more likely to have in your raid. To get your "test dummy" DPS, get rid of everything except Str/Agi.

Let’s Go!

Now, there’s two big buttons at the bottom: Start Simulator, and Start EP. Start Simulator is pretty straightforward: a progress bar pops up, and it will run a raid boss simulation with the parameters you’ve put in, generating an output that looks something like this (try not to laugh too hard):

A very precise breakdown of what you used, when you used it, what hit, what missed, what critted, so on and so forth. Those numbers are actually fairly consistent with what I’ve seen recently, too – and higher than what I’ve seen in 5-mans, which I suppose can be accounted for by raid buffs.

The other button, Start EP, is more useful to help you figure out what you want to look for on new loot to get an upgrade…at least, this is how it was explained to me. EP is, if I remember correctly, "equivalency points," or something along those lines – essentially, a guide to what stats are more valuable to you on new gear, and what ones are less valuable. There are options on the EP Options and Stat Scaling tabs that you can fiddle with; honestly, the defaults have always seemed reasonable to me (though I do add trinkets and stats I know I need more of, like armor penetration). This will take much longer to run (and will also put a crapton of progress bars on your screen that you can’t minimize and that are always on top of everything… annoying), but once it’s finished, you’ll get something that looks like this (I turned on a bunch of additional options):

The nice part is, you can plug these directly into Wowhead’s loot filters, or LootRank, or really anything of that kind – and get customized lists of loot for you. Neat, eh? (Looks like I could do with a little less Expertise and a little more Armor Pen and Strength… oh, and a Greatness card… and should stick with 4P T9 until I can get at least 2P T10, since those two are nearly equivalent.)

Any questions? Ask in the comments and I’ll answer them as best as I can.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Kahorie’s DK Simulator

So the holiday lull is over and the new year begins. My real life resolutions for 2010 aren’t anything impressive, and I’ve been cheating on WoW with consoles so I could really use some goal setting… so let’s take a look at what I intend to get done in WoW this year.

• Finish Insane in the Membrane before Cataclysm – or at least the goblin and Shen’drelar portions. Ideally I’d like to have all of this done by the expansion, so I can march into Deepholm and prove that I really am insane – see, it says so right above my head… Barring that, I’d like to at least finish the Steamwheedle Cartel and Shen’drelar reputations. Feralas is marked for some pretty heavy changes, and as it’s the easiest source for both of those (or at least the best for this title), I’d like to get done with that place while I can. Goblin I can do – Shen’drelar will be hell on the pocketbook… I suck at making money. This also has a sub-resolution:
• Get my rogue to 60+. This is the only way I’m going to be able to pickpocket all those Heavy Junkboxes unless a miracle occurs. The problem is, I really don’t like playing my rogue, so I need to use my remaining month of recruit-a-friend time and power-level her.
• Finish The Loremaster on my warlock. This is the title I originally wanted for him back when he was a little Forsaken warlock. Then he was a gnome warlock on Kael’thas and I’m sorry, I just can’t play gnomes. Now he’s an orc warlock back on Feathermoon and is only a few levels higher than he was at the end of Wrath. He’s halfway done with basically all of Loremaster, barring Northrend, so I guess I should also add:
• Finally (FINALLY) finish Higher Learning. Do you know how close I am to this? I need one book. One. It is never there. I have seen its joke replacements for the last four months. I WILL FINISH THIS ACHIEVEMENT THIS YEAR. Finished on January 18, 2010.
• Get my warlock to 80 before Cataclysm. That way I can ignore him until it’s almost time for the expansion after that. Ha ha, I kid.
• Get my Violet Proto-Drake. As it stands, I’ll get this during the Midsummer Fire Festival – assuming I don’t get boned by the RNG again during Valentine’s Day. The Midsummer Fire Festival is the only event I’m not at least 33-50% done with, because it was the only holiday that passed during the time that I quit playing WoW. I’ve been cleaning up so far, and I’ve got no reason to stop. Hot Pink Drake of Speed, here I come!
• Level a druid, paladin, or shaman to 80. Really, just level anything to 80. I’m pretty sure I’m the last remaining person in World of Warcraft with one level 80 character. And I’ve really had the urge to level a kitty druid lately… and I do have the leather heirlooms for it… I’ve just been trying to hold off on it until I finish leveling my rogue, and I was also kind of waiting until troll and worgen druids were available. However, I’m bad at not giving in to temptation.

So yeah, that’s it. There’s my list. It’s a short list of resolutions (spoiler: I typed "reoslutions" again), but it should be enough to keep me occupied.

Especially Insane in the Membrane, which some days feels so overwhelming that I start to think maybe Battlemaster would’ve been a better idea.

Oh wait! I forgot one!

• Post informative stuff about Death Knights again. The death knight blogosphere shrank about as fast as it grew, didn’t it? And my old guides could really use a good revamp. So yeah, I figure 2010 is a good time for me to get back into posting about the art of death knighting again.

So what are your goals for the year?

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Shaking off the dust; WoW resolutions

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!

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Behold! A guest post from the inimitable Leafshine

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!

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Letting it languish

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).

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Random dungeons and UI redesign