Things have been rather sparse or, at best, fluffy around here lately. Why? Nib said it better than me. I just plain don’t have a thing to talk about because I haven’t done anything new in weeks. Breezing through the first six bosses or smashing against Putricide and, well, supposedly the Princes are on farm, but our luck hates them – we’ve gotten bitten two weeks in a row with the known bug where they summon important parts of the fight in the hallway instead of in their room; last week, it was Dark Nuclei, and I got by because I learned when to look for them, but now Valanar’s started summoning beach balls in the hallway. Add some attendance concerns on top of all that and it’s just become a weekly grind of breeze -> facesmash -> repair -> breeze -> facesmash -> repair. Tried to do Ulduar hardmodes on a raid night and 6 people signed up; did ToGC-10 for a little while, at least, and ran into the wall that is Faction Champs. I pretty much only log onto my DK for the facesmash repetitions; I need frost badges badly – 180+ of them – but I can’t even bring myself to do the dailies anymore.

In short, I’m halfway between frustrated and bored. Maybe I just need a week off or something.

A few days ago, Dechion mentioned the idea of "throwing everything up and keeping what sticks." (I bet now the pic of some sticky hand things makes sense.) Twice now, I’ve basically gone through an entire expansion with a single alt – granted, in TBC, it was an abbreviated amount of time, as I joined just before 2.3.2. After TBC, I immediately switched my main to a DK with no hesitation; my warlock languishes at 73, where – let’s be honest – she probably isn’t going to move up from anytime soon. I’m starting to think I might change again, because my DK is starting to lose his stickiness.

So who’s sticky?

• My warlock? When the class changes came out and I realized how much they were going to buff my favorite spec, I went demo on her again, only to find that, well, the urge to stick to her wasn’t there. I throw the pet at the mobs, I throw the magic, and the magic is gone. Leveling her would be hell for leather. Has completely lost her sticky, much like an old toy.
• My death knight? WotLK was a rollercoaster of a time to be a death knight. Overpowered, underpowered, middle of the road, one-and-only flavor-of-the-month specs, other specs utterly nerfed into oblivion for entire patch levels. It’s a little mentally exhausting. Plus I switched roles and I did it fairly thoroughly. Hell, I barely remember how to DPS anymore. Is my DK losing his sticky? Maybe.
• My rogue? You’ve never met a bigger failrogue than me. I really need to just use this guy to farm junkboxes for my DK’s insanity. Not sticky.
• My warrior? I don’t level this toon much, but when I do, it’s always a fun time. As a DK tank I’m a little envious of all the fun buttons warriors have to push (Vampiric Blood just isn’t all that appealing when I could be Thunder-Clapping or Shockwaving or Last-Standing or Shield-Walling or Devastating or, or, or…). The announcement of an alternative to Titan’s Grip is also nice – I admit I’m a fan of single-handed weapons, but they’d need a serious boost to keep up with the stat boosts alone from TG right now. However, with my warrior, it’s just finding the urge to level her. In short, she’s sticky, but not enough yet.
• My hunter? I want to get into my hunter, I really do. I have many hunter blogs in my RSS reader. I just can’t summon up the mojo to level her past 45. Unsticky.
• My shaman? I was leveling my shaman pretty consistently for a while; come hell or high water, I was determined to get him out of Outlands. And out I got him, and now he’s parked at 68 in Valiance Keep, where I keep telling myself I’m going to take that resto spec and go heal some instances. I really do keep telling myself that. Inconsistent stickiness.
• My priest? My priest has been my little side project for a while now. I really only mention her at any length to Tart, who is my pocket advice priest. ("Oh, God, where do I put these talent points?!") And as you can probably surmise from her Discipline spec, I’ve been leveling her almost solely through instances. It’s not entirely instances, of course – whenever she reaches a new level, I gather every newly-available dungeon quest available for the dungeons in my queue list, and usually can gain a level or two from those – but she’s only level 20 (on the verge of dinging 21). She’s got a long way to go to even be considered a main, even moreso than my warrior. But the important part is that she’s fun. It may be just because of the complete change in role – Brynhild is only for healing, at least for now – but I like that healing rush, the feeling of keeping a group alive against odds that they probably shouldn’t have lived through (like three underleveled DPS and me taking on VanCleef because we’d waited 20 minutes for no tank). But right now, Brynhild is very sticky. Those twirly red braids may as well be made of glue.
• An alt I don’t have yet? At this point, if I don’t have an alt of some class, I’m probably waiting on Cataclysm. I fully intend to level a worgen druid or mage, which is the main reason I don’t have either of those. As for paladins, well. I’d love to have a paladin, and if I could get one past level 15 without getting utterly sick and tired of him, I probably would by now. Maybe once 4.0 hits and new baby paladins have a button to push, I’ll look into it, but right now, paladins bore me senseless to try and level.

The dilemma is: if I focus entirely on one alt, I risk burnout on that alt (see also: DK, warlock, shaman), but if I don’t focus on that alt, I’m an incredibly slow leveler. At least in my opinion. I know plenty of people whose progress feels like they’re speed demons, and I figure I’m the slow one. Or is this all pointless wankery – do I just stick with my DK? I mean, he is my only 80, my primary source of cash and heirlooms, and my only actively raiding toon. And no one can deny that we need all the tanks we can get – but I’m looking to maximize my fun here, as well as provide something useful to my guild.

It’s a set of questions that I don’t have any easy answers to. If anyone else is going through the same thing, I’d appreciate any insights you have.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Keeping what sticks

Patch 3.3.3 for DK tanks

And yes, no matter what Gravity tries to tell you, it’s 3.3.3, not 3.33.

Blood tanks: our plan B is now plan-B-ier. It’s also even easier to understand: Damage that would take you below 34-35% health or taken while you are at 34-35% health is reduced by (4-5/9-10/14-15)%. Voila. Will of the Necropolis is now better, but still sort of a worst-case scenario. Frankly, I just want to know when it kicks in – does WotN put something in the combat logs? Does anyone know?

Frost tanks: If you’re specced into Improved Icy Talons, it (1) now double-dips to give you more melee haste and (2) should now be taken whether you have an enhancement shaman along or not for basically that reason… if you’re dual-wielding. DW got more boosts, in the form of more off-hand damage. (That also kind of makes me want to look into frost DPS again, but I’ve not been keeping up with the latest math wankery on whether frost DPS is competitive again. Plus I need new weapons.) Two-handed frost tanks… please stand by.

Unholy tanks: … sorry, I got nothin’.

Shamananananing

My shaman has been receiving a bulk of my attention lately. I like shamans! It took a while for the totem mechanic to grow on me, and I can still see a number of fights that my DK is doing now where totems would be more or less very awkward to use, but it doesn’t make me like it any less. I’ve been leveling elemental, and doing a few Outland dungeons as elemental so I can get used to it in groups. It’s a real culture shock, after being a death knight solely for so long – what do you mean, I have to not use up all my mana? Bloody hell, I’m an aggro machine! And so on.

I also got unexpectedly pressed into resto’ing (as elemental) in Underbog when our healer decided to plop his fat dwarven butt on the ground prior to the naga section and, y’know, not tell anyone, nearly causing a wipe. Once he got punted, I was asked to heal until we could find a healer, and so I swapped over to Earthliving, put my 3 heals on my bars, and along I went. I … liked that too! I sense 1000g is coming up in Kallech’s future to make him dual-spec ele/resto. Y’know, right after the combined 6000g for epic and cold-weather flying.

Money

Finally makin’ it. Thanks Jewelcrafting! And thanks primarily to Hydra and Rip for the advice.   I won’t be hitting the gold cap anytime soon, but my total grows little by little and I’m no longer scraping the bottom of my empty change purse to try and pay for repairs or raid consumables, and that’s an improvement in my book.

WoW is like Pokemon

No, seriously. At a very high level, there’s a lot of unusual similarities, especially in playstyles.

First, you’ve got the people who play for the leveling, or for the story, or both. These people might do things that seem strange to some of us, but they like what they’re doing, and sometimes they’re 9 years old, and who can fault them for that?

Then you’ve got the people who get really, really srs bzns about it. These people crunch math, look at stats, find advantages, and in the end they boil the ‘acceptable’ standards down to certain combinations of stats and maneuvers in tiers. For WoW, these might be hardcore raiders or arena folks; in the world of Pokemon, these are competitive battlers. Hell, both games even have simulators that allow you to engage in full-on math wankery in an idealized version of the game environment.

Oh, and altoholics? Come on, that one’s easy: gotta catch level ‘em all.

Pokemon even has its own version of Elitist Jerks: it’s called Smogon.

No wonder I’m such a fan of both games.

Caffeine is still recruiting

Especially healers. Seriously. Join us. Joinnnnnn ussssss. Now 7/12 in ICC-10, after a decisive Orb-Whisperer-included victory over Team Edward The Blood Princes.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Bits and pieces

• Baron Rivendare’s Deathcharger. As you can see from my armory statistics, I’ve killed Baron Rivendare 42 times. This means I’ve just passed the point where I had a 33% chance of seeing the reins drop at least once. Thus far, I’ve failed that chance. But hey! Only 24 more kills until I’ve had a 50% chance of seeing it at least once! My dedication to this was so great that my DK was the Argent Champion long before there was ever a hint of a tournament.
• Swift Zulian Tiger. This one has only recently joined the unicorn list thanks to my discovery that with careful tabbing and the occasional Mind Freeze (on what appears to be, on my screen, an invisible castbar…), I can in fact solo High Priest Thekal. Still, it’s on the list.
• Swift Razzashi Raptor. Luckily, I’m in Zul’gurub quite a lot anyway, trying to get the raptor boss to cough up the goods. He’s an easier fight than usual when you’re solo, if only because he tends to fear you out of his whirlwinds 90% of the time. Not that he’s that hard anyway. Silly Bloodlord. This one means even more to me now that I’m primarily playing Alliance.
• Bindings of the Windseeker. I’ve only recently discovered that with a minimum of trouble and trash-killing, I can work my way to Garr in 20 or 30 minutes. Unfortunately he has yet to drop the bindings. I have yet to be able to kill Baron Geddon solo, though, to try for the other half. When he’s hellfiring, I take too much damage to Death Strike my way out of; when he’s not hellfiring, he’s shooting me into the air. It’s very annoying.

  Oh, and if you believe Rawr, Thunderfury is #12 of the list of off-hand weapons available to me. Don’t think I won’t show up to an instance with it.

• Insane in the Membrane. This is the king of all unicorns. I initially thought about listing everything separately but let’s face it, that’d just be post-padding fodder. I honestly feel like I’m making some serious progress towards this goal nowadays. Last night I hit Honored with Shen’dralar (only 60 librams to go!), a week ago I hit Honored with Darkmoon Faire (only 1,200 mini-Darkmoon Decks to go!), Ratchet is nearly out of the Hated range and into merely Hostile (only a crapton of Knot Thimblejack rescues to go!), and my baby rogue only needs 42 or so more levels before she can start pick-pocketing the appropriate humanoids for me to get Junkboxes to get exalted with Ravenholdt (only 1,200-something junkboxes to go!). Progress! (Of course, I keep getting distracted by my pesky shaman, who insists on pew pew’ing his way across Outland and AV.)

So there’s my unicorns – what’re yours?

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Chasing unicorns

So why did I revive Kallech? It’s hard to say. I’ve been taking a greater interest in my alts lately, mostly out of a desire to try different things. After all, prior to my DK, I only really had one other main – my warlock – and so there’s a lot of things I haven’t done. I’ve never leveled a healer past the 40s, for instance! Kallech is proving to be fun, too. Just for fun, I bought a mix of greens and blues off the AH and talented him up as elemental. Why? Mercurial whims – I woke up yesterday and was, for no apparent reason, really jazzed to play an elemental shaman. Turns out the late 40s is as good a time as any to do this.

After wandering over to Ironforge to get my Totem of the Earthen Ring, and equipping my newer bigger bags and my new shiny horribly mismatched greens and blues (I’m practicing my Outland clown suit look, if anyone asks), I then took the annoying trip to the Exodar. I hopped on my slow elekk, wandered down to the tram, took the tram to Stormwind, took the boat to Darnassus, got on the boat to the Exodar, and almost made it all the way to the Exodar without anyone pointing out that I could get my fast mount at 40, what a nub.

Sigh.

So after getting equipped with fast mount, then helping some lowbies stop the horseman in Azure Watch (fun fact: it is nigh impossible to see the fire in some places in there), I went back to the Hinterlands and pew pew’d my way through wolves, trolls, slimes, and what have you. Yay!

In 3 more days I’ll be the Champion of Ironforge, which will in turn bring me all the way up to Crusader level. I believe my first purchase will be a vest and those goofy-ass elemental shoulders, and maybe even one of the weapons. (I have a lot of champion’s seals.)

Alternately? I may just buy the two heirlooms, and a pony, since Ghostcrawler finally gave us that pony he promised. 

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Because Bell did it