It's up!!!!

http://www.infamousnoob.com is now up and running, pointing to my WordPress blog. I'll be working on it over the next few weeks to get it all prettied up. This blog might end up doing something, but I'm not sure what. I'll figure it out as I go.


See you at WordPress!

General Update (complimentary hassles inside!)

Well. A lot has happened over the last few days.

I joined a larger guild with my druid to raid 25-mans. The following two days, we cleared Naxx-10 (Monday and Tuesday), and I got some much needed upgrades. I'm sitting about 1.5% under the hit cap, so I'm still debating on what to cut in favor of hit gems/enchants.

I started a priest. He's level 10. I'm not sure if this character will weather my intolerance of leveling or not.

My warrior has started doing timed runs of Strat for the mount. This is awesome. I was even able to sneak my druid in on one to get the achievement. I'm trying to decide what to get next with my badges. Possibly the mammoth mount.

Old-world and Outlands achievements have started becoming very popular among those who frequent the trade channel. I'm not sure if this trend will continue, but I'm sure I'll pick up what I need for the Classic and Outlands Raider ones at some point. And then move on to the Dungeon Master and Heroic Dungeon Master for each as well. I guess the only achievements I'm not too interested in are the PvP ones for now. And possibly the holiday ones. Those get to be annoying after a bit.

I'm really happy that we're about to start doing the 25-man raids. I've hit a wall with gear for both my warrior and druid until I can get the heroic raid drops, or in the case of my druid, some of the more obscure heroic drops.

All-in-all I'm very happy with this expansion so far, except for the players (as always). Every time I get on the forums, be it the realm forums, the class forums, or the role forums, everyone is complaining about how they got the shaft somehow. I'm hoping that this means that everyone in-game is happy and playing instead of on the forums complaining, but I sort of doubt it. Maybe that's just the skeptic in me.


And of course, the big news for this site is the domain name. I'm still fighting with GoDaddy's setup, and am playing around with WordPress a bit as well. Bottom line is that I want to have the archive of this blog transferred if I can when I get http://www.infamousnoob.com pointed to it. Right now I think it's just some spam that GoDaddy put up. I'm very unimpressed with them so far. Come Monday I might just have to call them and have them walk me through the setup if I can't figure it out on my own. I don't even know if they offer that kind of service, but for as convoluted as their process is to navigate, they absolutely should.

So there's my snapshot of what's happening now. I'm very hopeful that I can have a real site up and running before school starts, and maybe even get some playtime in, too. ;-)

The Wonderful World of Blogging (and all the complications that go with it)

So I had lots of free time today, being that it's Christmas, and I was talking to my friend and internet publishing mentor Dave about this little blog. He had some awesome suggestions about how to get my name out there, and what to do to get more than the 3 readers I have now. To really get that rolling, it would probably require a domain change and, quite honestly, more work that I want to put into a blog right at this moment. But I'm really interested in the possibility of making this thing grow, so I'm doing a bit of research over the next few days to see what I can turn up.

Eventually, I'd like to branch out of WoW and into other topics gaming-related. For now, I'll just stick with one step at a time and try to work up to a "real" blog that relates to WoW and updates on a regular basis. I'll see where it goes from there.

Here's to reinventing, and better blogs :)

My Class Imbalance

So. . .

I'm still plodding along with my druid and warrior. I finally got the [Essence of Gossamer] from heroic Azjol-Nerub last night and replaced my [Sonic Booster]. This puts me up to a solid 27111 health unbuffed, while keeping ~37% dodge+parry (before diminishing returns) and 20ish% block. All of the drops in Naxx-10 are either side-grades, or minor upgrades, except for tier pants and shoulders and a pair of boots.

My poor, poor druid on the other hand can't seem to get any gear to save his life. I still have a half dozen or so relatively significant upgrades from heroics that I can get, and of course everything in Naxx-10 is zomg good compared to what I'm wearing. I did manage to get my enchanting up to 440 though, so I can do all of the enchants from the shard vendor. But my pitiful 1550ish healing when specced resto, and 1660ish damage when specced balance are churning out numbers that I would yell at anyone else for having. But I can't get any upgrades from normal instances (except for a couple wonky trinkets that are too good for where they drop), so I feel sort of stuck.

I was amazed at Northrend when I leveled through it with both of my characters. It felt very natural to progress, and I never felt like I had "strayed" into a high-level zone that I shouldn't have been in. My warrior continued this progression all the way through Naxx. I've never felt like I wasn't geared enough to tank something on him. But my druid makes me feel like I missed a step somewhere. I keep looking at gems and enchants thinking that I missed a +150 spellpower upgrade. My glyphs are for resto, but I don't believe that swapping them to balance ones would increase my dps by the 500 or more that I need. All of the gear from normal instances are downgrades, but the heroic instances kill my tanks when I'm healing, or just leave me sputtering at 1500 dps. Maybe I just need more practice like my holy pally brother keeps telling me.

In any case, druid gear is what I'll be doing this week. I think another 2-3 solid upgrades, and I'll be set for Naxx.

Tanking and Healing

So, the 2-piece T7 warrior bonus is awesome.

I got my gloves Wednesday-ish, and my chest Saturday. I got my badge neck yesterday after two times attempting Naxx (and clearing the spider wing and up to the four horsemen in the death knight wing). I think this brings my count down to 1 pure upgrade from heroics, and 2-3 sidegrades. I'll probably be running Pinnacle for that sword until I get the next step up in Naxx.

I think this week will give me time to work on my druid. I feel like he's been neglected lately, but tanks are so hard to find, and I'm the only tank I know that's online most of the time. Ironically, all the death knights are dps (go figure).

It's odd to me that I feel more pressure to do well as a healer. As a tank, if I die in a heroic or raid, it's because the dps or healers didn't have enough throughput. As a healer, if anyone dies, it's because I didn't have enough throughput. It's pretty funny when you think about it.

At any rate, I've read a lot about druid healing in the last few days and found one particularly good post about direct heals that helped me decide when to use Nourish vs. Regrowth. Sadly, Nourish is pretty lackluster in most situations - especially compared to a glyphed Regrowth. Now, if there were a glyph for Nourish (and there might be, I haven't seen a complete list of druid glyphs anywhere, yet) that made it gain some portion of Improved Regrowth's crit, say even 25% instead of the whole 50%, it would be a pretty good spell. But I think the only glyph for Nourish right now is the one that gives it an extra 5% healing per HoT on the target. This makes it a nice spell, but it's hardly practical. Especially when the other glyph options don't have state requirements on them. Niche spells are nice, but not when the niche is so small.

My gear is still very much a work in progress. I'm up to 1430ish healing, but I think I'll need at least 200-300 more for Naxx. There are some really great pieces from heroics I can still get, so that's what I'll be working on this week. The T7 gloves and chest are requisite, too. <3 set bonuses. I think I can get 3-5 pieces this week if I need to for Naxx, but with the severe lack of tanks on the server in general, I think I'll probably just stick with my warrior. Remember when tanks and healers could get into PuGs? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Anyway, that's about it for me. I might take to leveling my shaman just to get his professions up, but honestly I'm not that impressed with him. Or my death knight. They both feel very clunky play-wise, but very solid mehanic-wise.

WTB MOAR PROFESHUNS PER CHARAKTER

. . .
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. . .

And with that bit of insanity, I'm off to pusue merry ventures in that thing called "real life." Whatever that is.

On Being 80, Heroics, and Death Knight Professions

I'm back!

Well, I never really left. I just didn't have anything worth saying for a while. WoW has been exciting and fun, but there's nothing new to say that wasn't said a million times during the beta. But in an effort to combat blog silence, I decided to make a post about my progress anyway.

I've been doing a lot of heroics (as many as I can) on my warrior. He's got a decent set of gear now, and I'm looking to try to get him in Naxx. As soon as I get the 140 Emblems I need (of which I'm at ~50), I'll get my T7 gloves and chestpiece. Somehow the defense trinket from normal HoL has eluded me so far, and I still go in there when I'm not getting Emblems, but I think it might just be one of those pieces I miss.

My druid has sort of been shelved for now. I'm not sure whether it's the fact that he's resto, so can't kill anything without a lot of work, or that I've got a good rhythm down with my brother and girlfriend for knocking out heroics on my warrior. I still try to get him out to do the cooking daily quest and mine up more saronite (BOO to the last 5 points of engineering), but there's not a whole lot that I really want to do with him right now. I think once we get more 80s in the guild he'll become more useful, but with only one heroic "group" (6 80s in guild, I think - 7 if you count me for both of mine) we only need one healer. And my brother's paladin is way better at that than my druid.

I still have a couple zones to do quest-wise on my characters. My druid is pretty much done with everything except the faction quests in Sholazar for either the Frenzyheart or Oracles and still needs to do some quests in Icecrown. My warrior needs about the same Icecrown quests, but hasn't done more in Sholazar than getting the flight point set up. To be honest, I'm not in that much of a hurry to get them done, either. I'm sure I'll have some time to burn once I finish getting my heroic gear worked out and I can putz around questing then.

Oh, I do have a death knight. Just like everyone else. Mine is only 58 though, and I haven't even decided on professions. I mostly just wanted to do the questline in the starting zone and be ready to pick him up at some point in the future. Although with the appearance of the Darkmoon Faire and the Northrend deck trinkets, I might just take him herbalism/alchemy to get the eternal life that's required for inscriptors (scribes?) to make the cards. Oh, and to transmute my meta gems so I can get my jewelcrafting leveled. But I really don't want to level through Outlands again right now. I spent way too much time there in the last year. So that might be a while coming.

So that's a snapshot of my WoW status. Hopefully it will change rapidly so that I have something interesting to post here soon. :)

TwentyFifthNovember and Professional Gaming

As of last night(ish) all of the current content is cleared for WotLK. Assuming that all of the members leveled in 36 hours, that's one raid tier cleared fully in less than 8 days of progression attempts. To me, this highlights the cutthroat capitalism that permeates people everywhere. No matter what the activity is, someone will turn it into a business.

Part of me is saddened by this, since it's a game and should be fun. But most of me is just jealous. If I could describe my perfect day, it would be just sitting around gaming. Not just WoW, but all kinds of RTS, RPG, FPS, TCG (and other TLAs), puzzle, and board games. While my education (for the most part) has been in mechanical engineering, my passion (somewhat obviously) is for playing games. Sometimes I even dabble in the underlying mechanincs of what makes great games great. Dabble. Dabble. I'll try not to splash too much.

But even with all this, I'm not being paid for it. The players of TwentyFifthNovember, from what I understand, are. They get equipment and salaries for being the best gamers out there - at least at WoW. I guess the next best thing to simply playing games all day is to design and build them. Maybe once I'm 80 and raiding I can pull back the throttle on the playtime and shift more towards thinktime.

So while I'm entirely too jealous of their ability to do this with their lives, I still have a great amount of respect for their gaming prowess. Grats on the world first clear of content, TwentyFifthNovember!