Valentine's Day Fun

Today those of us with loved ones celebrate the day with chocolate, roses, gold, money, and many other odd and unusual things. For those of you with out a significant other, today is referred to as "single awareness day" and you may or may not hate today. For those of you who don't care to celebrate the day...today is the 14th.

I decided to give my lovely lady something unusual and a little more creative then just jewelry. I enlisted the aid of the very talented artist, the awesome Vidyala from Manalicious, to help me with this task. She created a postcard sized watercolor of my fiance's warlock and I gotta tell you...it turned out even more awesome then I thought. I gave it to my fiance early because I wanted to surprise her with it and I didn't want to wait for the 14th to come around. Here is what it looks like:

Happy Valentine's Day to those of you who are in the mood for it and for everyone else...Happy Monday!

The Sky Is Falling

Today, Ranting Jed is Ranting. It seems to me that whenever a patch is pushed into the game we see a resurgence of people whining about how suddenly their previously Over Powered will now no longer be able to one man a raid boss or take on a whole bg by themselves or some other dumb thing that they think should merit their class not being balanced with other classes. I think that I dread these whiners showing up more than I do watching my class be nerfed. These whiners will make grandiose statements such as "If this nerf goes through I will never play my class again!" or "This nerf will ensure that no one will roll this class and spec because it is no longer fun to play" or my favorite "This change has caused me to cancel my account because blizzard is being so unreasonable."

My response to statements like those above? Good bye, good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Honestly if these whiners can't understand that the game needs to be balanced so that no one class is more powerful than any other class, they should go play something else. What makes WoW so fun is that it is constantly being fixed and tweaked so that the world is always changing and moving forward. The WoW developers are always watching to make sure that balance is kept. If they didn't do that...warriors would still be running around wielding arcanite reapers oneshotting mobs or ret paladins would gather reckoning stacks and unleash reckoning bombs on raid bosses, effectively soloing them. Ah the good old days. /nostalgia

Anyway back on topic, nerfs happen, tweaks happen, deal with it. Change like Spice, is life. If you feel your class is being nerfed into the ground today than look forward to tomorrow when it will be buffed to the heavens. Paladins are a great example of a class that is constantly being changed and tweaked. Back in vanilla, most raiding paladins were healers, ret pallies were rare and protadins were even more rare. BC made paladin healing more fun, prot more viable, and ret...well it was not as uncommon to see raiding retadins. Wrath made all three classes fun and viable to play in pvp and pve, but tankadins were made OP. Cataclysm so far has to make all three fun, although ret was nerfed a little because its mastery was a bum deal but that will be addressed in 4.0.6 which drops today and will make it more fun to play. Ask any vanilla paladin about their class and they can tell you all about nerfs and buffs and nerfs. It's an ever changing world we play in.

If you want to complain to anyone...don't bother talking to me as I have been a frost mage for almost 6 years now and my class has gone from everyone being frost in vanilla, to everyone being fire in BC, to everyone being arcane in wrath. The only people who were frost were people like me who rocked it, people leveling, and pvpers. When I joined a pug raid on my mage I had to constantly prove that I could rock the dps meters, which I of course did. It was only in very late wrath that frost was buffed and even than most people didn't consider it a viable spec unless you were skilled. Cataclysm has finally made it accepted in raids and for that I am happy and even though I am getting a few slight nerfs with this patch, I won't be complaining that the sky is falling. I know its necessary to balance the game.

If you can't one shot level 85 elites anymore after the patch...well maybe you should rethink about whether your class should be the only one who could do that and if that was fair to everyone else. Or better yet...remember that it's just a game after all.

Blogaversary!

My blog is a year old now. Wow. I honestly didn't think that when I started writing this blog that I would stick with it for a year or that I would even have any non guild readers. My very first post was on January 25, 2010 and I meant to write a huge year in review post but work kept interrupting me every time I wrote more then two sentences. So for the moment I will just post this while I try to finish the other post. Woots for a year of ramblings!

Oh and here are a few screen shots from the Gnomish Death Race that I held on sunday to celebrate my blogaversary. We had nine racers participate and everyone had a great time.
 A shot of the racers lining up at the start of the race:

 The race has begun:

 The pack enters the tunnel to Searing Gorge:

 The first racers into Burning Steppes:

 The winners crossing the finish line:

 Here are the three winners and my mage:

Thanks to everyone who participated in helping me celebrate. /cheers

A Celebration

So on the 25th of this month I will celebrate my first blogaversary! Woots! I have decided to celebrate the best way I know how...an ingame gnomish death race and you are all invited!! Now you may be asking yourselves what exactly is a gnomish death race? Well first and foremost its a race to the death! It is a race of level 1 gnomes from the gates of Ironforge to the gates of Stormwind. The race takes the gnomes through Khaz Modan, Searing Gorge, Burning Steppes, Redridge, and Elwynn.

Since the occasion is my blogaversary I am inviting all my faithful blog readers to join in on the fun! The race will take place on Sunday January 23 at 2 PST at the gates of Ironforge. All you have to do is be there on a level 1 gnome ready to race! Why race you may ask? Well other than the fact that the race is fun, the winner will receive 500g, second place receives 300g, and third place gets 200g. If you are interested in participating and you're on a different server...well...I will have a banner announcing that you have placed in the top 3 of the race which you can display on your blog or make a forum signature out of it. Or you can just have bragging rights!

If you are interested in participating please leave a comment letting me know or contact me through email: jedimas729 (at) gmail (dot) com or ingame by whispering Jedem on the Alliance side of the US-Ursin server! It will be a great time and I hope to see a lot of people there!

How to succeed at Cataclysm Heroics

So I was thinking about my previous post about how much bad luck I was having running heroics at the time and like usual my mind started wandering all over the place. I eventually thought up a few things that puggers can do to ensure that their group succeeds or at least so that their run doesn't end in total failure. Keep reading after the break to find out how you too can succeed in heroics!

Archaelogy is the DEVIL

As anyone who has leveled Archeology past 100 can tell you...its the Devil! Just like football, Ben Franklin, girls, and the robot Devil. It is a good source of supplemental experience while leveling but once you are 85 and have to fly all over the world repeatedly...it loses a little bit of it' fun. Stupid profession sending me from STV to EPL then BACK to STV! The bright side is that I have gotten the raptor mount and pet and both are very, very, very smexy. Now if only Tol'vir digsites would stop being such a tease and give me more locations I would be happy. Damn Kitty people keeping their canopic jars to themselves instead of filling them with dragon recipes for me to dig up!

Moving on from frustration to something a little better. Heroics! Guild has had a lot of people hit 85 so we've been running a lot of guild groups which are the best thing since sliced bread. Oh and to add to the list of the most obvious things ever: the sky is blue, wow is addicting, and pie is delicious. My mage is thankfully sporting a nice 340ish item level which would be higher except that I have been also running heroics on my shaman who is also sporting a 340ish item level. I think my warrior will hit 85 this weekend and then I'll have to get him up in item level so that I can get him some sexy gears.

Speaking of the Guild, we are currently at level 9 which is pretty awesome! We have gotten our first feast recipe from guild achievements (feast) and now that it is no longer bugged and giving out the wrong buff to people I'll be farming up more mats to make with the dropping them for groups. The lowering of the guild flask achievement was a very smooth move by blizzard. Before most guilds had no chance of getting 10k flasks made before they started raiding and actually needed them but now that it has been lowered to 1k and 3k it is a lot more doable. Woots for a development team that listens to us every now and then.

Well I've almost exhausted my extensive list of topics that I wanted to rant a little about so I think I will end this post now. Well before I do that I just wanted to say that I noticed that I started my blog in January of 2010. At the end of a month I will have spent a year rambling and ranting about random things that pop into my mind. I'll see about posting something special for the 25th which is the actual anniversary date. Anyone have any suggestions as to what I should write about?

My request of Heroic Puggers

So I dinged 85 on my mage on Wednesday of last week and since then I've grinded the gear that I needed to run heroics. Now as soon as I was able to run heroics I queued up and waited to get into a run. I have yet to down more then 2 bosses in a heroic and that was pure luck that I even got past one boss. In each heroic I have noticed the same things happening: tanks don't mark targets for CC and just rush in, people don't understand the fights clearly, CC'ed mobs are broken by non-tanks and the tank doesn't pick them up in time so someone dies, healer ignores the group and only focuses on healing the tank so dps dies, dps stands in bad stuff and die, healer doesn't heal himself then stands in bad stuff and then dies.

People don't understand that in heroics even though the boss looks the same, their abilities are stronger and not quite the same. My request is a simple request and it is that people realize that they are playing Cataclysm and not Wrath so you can't just steamroll through content like you previously could. Please mark for CC, please don't break said CC, please don't stand in bad stuff and expect healers to keep you alive, please don't go emo and leave a group after one wipe especially if you were the cause of said wipe. Also just remember that just because you didn't CC when you did the instance in regular and lived does not mean that you can do the same in heroic mode.

All I want for Christmas is to run a heroic at least once and down the final boss. I don't even care that I get loot from any bosses along the way. Yes that is how frustrated I am about this situation. WTB Guildees getting their item score up faster so that I can run in guild groups and not worry about fail pugs. So how is everyone else enjoying heroics?