Woohoo! Child's Play auction: http://www.brigwyn.com/childrens-week-childs-play-charity-auction/
Lotsa good stuff, and I'm very happy to see bids on all. Yay!

Children's week continues in WoW, and last night I was down to the PvP achievement for the event. (cue ominous music here...)

I'm not big on PvP. My adrenaline hits when someone attacks me, and I just get a bit scattered at times. I don't have my HUD setup for anything but tanking, so it's a bit of a challenge to switch gears. But, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised at my sick survivability in the BGs last night.

First, I hit my least favorite - WSG. Usually when I go in there, it's a mess and the Allies win. Meh. But yesterday it was the daily, so I figured I'd see if the good players had moved into that one. And oh yeah, had they ever! I've never won two games in a row, much less two perfects in a row. Got my flag return and some nice honor. Now I'm kicking myself that I didn't stay and get enough WSG marks for another pvp mount...

AB next - my standby. AB is a good game: nice map, achievable results, lotsa action. Had a few close games, but I was getting more and more amused that I was only rarely dying. I'd noticed it in WSG, but it was doubly so in AB. Due to a combination of healers (thank you thank you healers in BGS, you unappreciated folks) and just toughness and HP, I only died a few times. Nice - I like the lesser repair bill. And I got my flag for Children's week with my orphan watching.

Then I went over to EOTS. Now, during BC, I liked EOTS. It was fun, the bases were actively defended, and folks got it. Yeah, not so much for me last night. No, everyone cannot carry the flag. No, we really do need to get bases. No, you can't just fight in the middle of the BG for no apparent reason. I got frustrated enough to quit in the middle of a game and give up. I'll try again tonight or tomorrow.

Didn't feel like hitting AV last night. Went and leveled my lowbie hunter instead. But all in all, I didn't think two of the 4 needed achievements wasn't bad for one night. Here's to hoping the daily tonight isn't one I have already. And yay for all the non-asshat pvpers on last night, there were a lot of folks. Almost made me consider getting yet another gear set together for pvp. Hehe, WTB closet for all my armor :-)

Children's Week

Wrapped up my gardening just in time to start the romp about for Children's week. Nothing like putting your raiding and gearing on hold to show a tyke around.

I really enjoyed this event last year, it was sweet. And yay for more pets. Now that the achievement system is in place, I'm compulsive about finishing the achievements for each as well. And the carrot at the end of the year for all (yay drake) ain't bad either...

We rolled through reg UP last night with an overgeared, overbeered romping good group. It was like butter, cutting through without breaking a sweat. Which was good, as the beer was also contributing. Got a marginal upgrade to my bracers, and spent more gold re-enchanting the new bits. Now my dodge is up over 21% - nice! And the Stam enchant kicked my hp over 27.5. Again, nice!

I think this week I want to try Occulus. Haven't yet, as the instance is apparently different than the average dungeon crawl tank and spank. I'll read up on it, should be fun.

Child's Play Auction

http://www.brigwyn.com/childrens-week-childs-play-charity-auction/

Woohoo! Go bid on goodies - there's some awesome stuff over at the Child's Play Children's week auction. Really awesome cause, really nice folks.

Hmm...

Ok, so I jumped into a 25 man VOA last night, knowing that it's been revamped and while I have read the Emalon fight, I don't know it. I was ok with my gear, especially with there being 3 tanks for some reason. But I was concerned when I noticed it was a hard core raider group.

Nothing against hard core raiders, but I'm not. Nor will I be unless I get laid off with a lot of savings. I have too much going on to commit to constant and regular 5-8 hour blocks of raiding time. I'm not the most amazing tank out there, but I do the best I can and try to learn what I can. That being said, this particular raid was not the best experience, and I've been trying to piece together why I had such an awful time in less than 5 minutes of actual time in raid.

First, I was tired, not even sure I wanted to go on the raid, and worried I wouldn't do well. Not a good combo. It was pretty clear most of these folks raided together all the time, so that didn't help. RL specifically said no vent, so there goes a great form of communication. But since I was one of two OTs, I knew my job was adds for the most part. Not sure why we needed 2 OTs, I could have just DPS'd, or I was more than happy being told "we have tanks". I hear it all the time lately.

Trash pulls went fine, we obviously had good DPS numbers. But Emalon didn't go well on the first attempt, and 1/3 of the raid wiped on the first chain lightening. Yay for spreading out, eh? I was in the wrong place, and I knew it, but I wasn't sure where to be. The other OT had the adds, the MT had the boss, I was waiting for an add to peel off? I dunno. All the strategies I know of use 2 tanks. I'm not going to taunt off the OT as long as he has it and is fine on health. Problem is that about the time the DPs get wiped by chain lightening, the RL starts yelling. And Yelling. I mean, just stupid yelling. Mostly at me. Sigh....

Frankly, at that point, I don't give a shit. Clearly the raid has the stats to do this, there's just some slacking all around, including me. It happens on raids when folks aren't focused. And they sooo weren't if I judged the text chat right. Likely it took a wipe to wake everyone up and stop facerolling. But I'm not fond of yelling, don't think it's necessary, and really am not interested in interacting with people who punctuate yelling with swear words. So I bailed. After calling him a dumbass. That part felt good, even though I'm sure it's a drop in the bucket for him.

I dunno, they finished and a guildie got some loot off of it, which is great. But at the end of the day, I was glad I jumped. I learned from it. My only concern was really perception for my guild for jumping out of a raid. New guild, new perception to build. I do want to raid, I work at getting better, I'm upgrading gear. But it's not my living breathing goal in life. Hopefully they get that.

Good things and more good things...

My buddy Everdawn and I plunked down 2, count them, 2 60 day WoW cards for the Child's Play Charity Auction starting this week. Everdawn is a graphic artist when not playing WoW, and makes some damn fine t-shirts and promo goodies out in Vegas.

Now it's your turn - the auction starts May 1st, and there's a bunch of good goodies to bid on. Go support a great cause and get some great stuff in the process! Details here:
http://www.brigwyn.com/2009/04/its-almost-here-childrens-week-childs-play-charity-auction/

Inside the game, I've been pondering my gear as I fish for Fish Feast ingredients in WG. I love that I can step off the flight path and cozy up to a nice quiet fishing hole in the middle of a BG. But I digress... I need to finish the gear process in getting up to Naxx-able, and I've been struggling with block and avoidance stats now that my def is nicely capped with a bit to spare. And even with regular upgrades, it's been a slow process. Upgrades were huge for +def, but less immediate satisfaction for the avoidance stats. So I did what anyone would do, and went to find my favorite uber pally to pick his brain for a bit...

Sadly, he's Alliance :-P But Turall is a RL friend, and very helpful and clear about explaining stuff to me about stats and gear and other things Pally. And he plays more than I do, so I get the benefit of his knowledge and experience. And he has excellent taste in cars. We batted back and forth about stats, talents, glyphs, and rotations to build the most effective tanking machine.

Some excellent points:

Improved Judgements:
If you look at the main protadin rotation, all your abilities have 6 or 9 second cooldowns (Ok, Holy Shield is 8 seconds, close enough it fits into a 9 second slot), except for Judgement, which is 10 seconds.
By putting only one point into Imp. Judgement you get a perfect 9, 6, 9, 6 rotation. SoR and HotR are 6 secondConsecrate, Holy Shield and Judgement are 9 second. You can tailor the actual rotation to your preference. But with this method you get always have an ability ready after a Global Cooldown (the 1.5 second cooldown after using a skill)

I must admit, my rotations aren't as machine-like as they could be. I'm tempted to set up a macro to see if it improves. Then again, that kind of takes the human monkey fun out of the picture, now doesn't it? Maybe I should just get better, improve my HUD, and practice.

His glyphs:

Majors-Glyph of Seal of Vengeance: bumps up expertise, nice for keeping Vengeance stacks up (it's the only seal I use for tanking)
Glyph of Salvation: %20 damage reduction when Hand of Salvation is active. You can use this as your own emergency button if your threat is really high, or it is good for saving someone's ass.
Glyph of Divine Plea: duh.

I personally am not a fan of the Salvation Hand. I get the mechanic, but my mindset while tanking involves using my taunts, not dropping their threat. Probably a good consideration, but I don't think I've ever, ever pressed this button. Ever. I suppose I could while healing, but I have yet to do so while tanking. Interesting thought.

Time to go mess with some basic setup and gear stuff. I did add the Aldor shoulder enchant last night, getting my dodge up a smidge more. And I'll go change my weapon enchant to STR, which should help my block a smidge. And I'll probably respec, he gave me some good points that I want to see in action.

Charity - go do good things!

http://www.brigwyn.com/2009/04/childrens-week-childs-play-charity-auction-update/

I highly recommend giving what you can, participating if you can, promoting if you can, etc. Gamers have hearts, too!

And its been a while...

Sooo it's been a while since I posted. That pesky real life has been annoyingly inconsistent lately, so I took a break from my usual writings to go deal with it. And again. And again...

But I've made it almost to patch 3.1, and I find this: http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/04/12/the-light-and-how-to-swing-it-patch-3-1-and-you-part-ii/

Yes, that high pitched squeal is every prot paladin in the Wow-niverse having a game-asm. Yay for viable pvp on a prot spec, not to mention the hardened goodness of the pve changes. I can't express it better, but I do have a new shopping list of glyhs to attmept. Now I'm just wondering if I'll be getting talent points back to respend amongst the new goodies.

Had some drama with the former guild. Best I could figure out is that the GL got annoyed at being the land of alts, not having good attendance at raids, and generaly not being #1 in our hard core raider's books. Which isn't hard to believe when most of them were on during prime time, and the GL works nights. Makes for difficult raid scheduling. The things I got annoyed by was signing on to mass insecurity as alt after alt was being kicked by the GL/other officer and no one was explaining to the rank and file why there were toons flying out the doors. Especially folks who'd been there from the beginning and were well known and liked. Sadness and chaos all around. I ruminated on it for a week or so, talked to everyone involved, and eventually decided that I needed to be elsewhere if I couldn't stomach the leadership style. Sad to not be in guild with some of the folks I left behind, especially since I switched servers to play with them. But I can still harrass them from my handy dandy friends list instead.

Still struggling with gears, although now that the bf has hit 80 (yay for him!), I'll be towing him through a few heroics perweek. I'm ahead of him on the gear scale by far, but the more we hit, the faster he'll catch up. He got 2 upgrades in the first instance we hit.

And here's 80....

So, I hit 80 over the weekend, despite my laptop video card crashing, the holidays, and general mayhem. 80 is good, nice to be on the upper part of the pile again.

Gettign to 80, sucked. I hate levelling, the grind, the questing, the ganking. PvP is fun. Ganking is not. Even with hitting 80, I was still harrassed in Sholazar Basin by random spellcasters who felt it necessary to annoy me while I was turning in quests over the weekend. I'll never be quite so glad about school breaks being over as I am now that I play WoW. I'd be standing in the middle of the Nessingway camp, minding my own business, and I'd get hit by random spells and dots. Nothing really taxing, I'd just heal up and keep turning crap in. But really? Does someone need a hobby or what?

Not that I mind PvP. But I do mind PvP based on stupidity. I'm not one to gank people based on opportunity. I don't like being attacked while I'm in PvE combat, and tend not to bother other folks who are just questing. Mind you, that's bitten me in the ass. I'll leave someone alone, just to have them attempt to jump me while I've moved on to the next critter. As a prot pally, luckily it still takes effort to grind me down to dead. I'm a big fan of making others work for it.

But really? Attacking me while I'm in camp, turning in quests, minding my own ball o beezwax? Can't be satisfying, other than the annoyance factor. I just healed up and moved on. Really the only inconvenience here was not being able to take the flyer back to Dalaran the first time I clicked on it. And I just did a tap dance around camp and took the next flyer out of Dodge. Didn't even bother to see wh owas snickering to themselves in the bushes, the annoying little gits.

It is interesting to see which areas are morphing into the new gankerton centrals of Northrend. Sholazar Basin, Howling Fjord, and parts of Dragonblight seems to be annoying. But as the primary rush of those levelling fast v. those who take a more liesurely route have changed the traffic patterns as time meanders on. And the holidays pushed all of our servers into the joyous queue of love, waiting to even be able to sign onto our beloved toons. We'll see how it pans out, and which area wins out as the Hellfire Penninsula and Stranglethorn Vale of Northrend.

Otherwise, I'm off to gear for tanking raids and heroics. I've got the def cap, now I just need more stamina.

Winter Veil and the joys of levelling

So, I've been busy levelling, getting a new job, and generally attempting to convince my video card to work for the last few weeks. Thanks to my buying a Dell with a possibly faulty nVidia graphics card integrated into the motherboard (M1330 with a 8440M GS), the new content runs like a lame jogger, running through molassas and being chased by their biggest nightmare. *le sigh* (something like: run run run, trip, stumble, run run run, jumpy jumpy stumble, run run run, faceplant tumble drag drag garble stumble run faceplant, reboot try again)

But despite technical difficulties, I managed to get my main up to 77. Mainly by questing in Outland, as the BC areas are deserted and much gentler on my video card's crappy processes. While I like the new content, being regularly ganked by DKs 5 lvls lower than I am is frying my grits and making the game less than fun.

And thats another thing. Someone explain the logic behind a "Hero Class" to me. Because as far as I can tell, it's Blizz's way to get us all to play, Death Knights instead of those other pesky classes we've had all along, spent hours and boats of gold levelling, only to have our asses handed to us by a hybrid class who only has to rol their face across the keyboard to kill us. And just when you think you have them, they rez at full health into a ghoul and finish the job. Great. Thanks for the wonderful chance at staying alive there.

So basically IMHO, Death Knights just need a more effective healing spec, and all of us can abandon our regular toons for our new sparkly DKs, and the game can go on from here. We can dump our toons that we spent years in the making, mainly because "Hero classes" are a more effective way to play the game. Thanks, Blizz. Screw you too...

But I do like Winter Veil. I generally enjoy seasonals, as its a break from the daily grind and stupidity of questing in the new areas. And they generally give more experience for whatever quests there are and achievements you can only get during that time period. And thank god this time the achievements aren't completely based on the loot rolls, like the Hallows End crap was. All of you who achieved the "Hallowed" title, screw you for rolling better. I saw the mount drop briefly, same with the helm, but never even saw many of the items needed for the stupid title on my main (squashling dropped for my lvl 9 mage of course. WTF?) I can make gingerbread cookies since last year, and I can rescue the silly reindeer too. And my lower alts have a chance at doing it as well.

Have fun kids, I'm off to farm small eggs like everyone else.

And what I've been doing since Xpac..

I know I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy playing every chance I get. I was involuntarily (...) laid off, so I suddenly had time to play the new content. It's pretty. Pretty pretty pretty. The new environments make me shiver with the snow and cold and make me crave hot cocoa :-) I love it, especially living in the desert.

I hate the traffic. There are so many folks in the new areas that completing quests gets comical. Shall I kill him next? Is it my turn yet? Ok ok, I'll wait for the group of 47 to be done.. Sheesh. I've gotten into a rhythm of questing in the late morning to early afternoons in the new area, then hitting Outlands and low level quests for rep all night. The lag is insane, and I've been averaging about 20fps. Sooooo frustrating. Still trying to figure out what's from addons (they work again, wheeee!) and what's from server lag.

But I'm up to 74, and I've replaced 2 pieces of epic gear already. Kinda hurts, but I'm about to the point where it makes sense. Plowed through Utegarde Keep like it was made for me to walk all over Vikings, err Vyrkul or whatever. The Nexus was a bit harder, but still got through without too much pain. Wiped a bit figuring the bosses, but yay for guildies!

And by the way, what happened to players? They all want it to be easy and effortless... I've seen more PUG members drop because we wipe once on a boss than I ever did in the lower levels. Lazy gits, suck it up and do your job. Funny how we usually do better with whoever joins the group next. It's a weirdness, and I think it's based in being overgeared for 5 mans for so long that you expect to walk through it like it is cake. Sad how complacency brews stupidity.

But overall, other than predictable things, I'm enjoying the expansion..