Just one of those days

blue-screen-of-death1 Every now and then you have a day when your normal pattern goes out the window.  This is one of those days.  I’ve juggled meetings, fires, phone calls, and all the while trying to wrap up one of my projects for a meeting at 4 pm.  Normally I spend my lunch hour devising my daily post and then writing it up when I get back into the office. 

Some days I set out in the morning knowing roughly what I am going to write about, other days the spark of inspiration comes to me throughout the course of the morning or during my lunch excursion.  Today… the spark has failed to find me.  I considered licking my Jeep’s battery at lunch for a “jolt” of inspiration, but I didn’t figure the raid wanted to take the chance of me going into cardiac arrest when we have so much to clear.  So here I sit, trying to steal a few minutes of time to sit down and compose anything worth while for my readers.  I have already typed two whole paragraphs so I seem to be actually doing this.

Forgotten-ramas

naxxramas-1280x Last night was pretty frantic.  I had a slew of errands to run, involving the dreaded act of shopping.  I carefully juggling a list of items to buy at the grocery store, hurriedly put them away and made a plate to eat, all the while trying not to pass out from the heat.  When I finally sat down, frustrated and surly, I was looking forward to a quiet evening doing nothing much.  Alas this was not apparently the plan.

Last Sunday I had tried to help a friend get his other guilds 25 man Naxxramas run off the ground.  Unfortunately 11 am on a Sunday is a piss poor time to try and plan a raid on Argent Dawn.  After standing around for an hour trying to make people appear magically out of the ether, something I do quite often if you have read many of my posts.  They finally called the raid, and now here comes the tricky part, agreed that they would shoot for Wednesday, a part that I had apparently completely blocked out of my memory.

So imagine how utterly confused I was when I logged in last night to a barrage of tells from Lenwen, informing me of how many they were able to get so far for “the raid”.  So in my attempt to be a good friend, I resolved to spending my evening in a raid group.  The positive however is that I would be taking my relatively newly minted boomkin, Loamis.  After about 45 minutes of haranguing players to join the effort we entered the zone.

For Honor

Project_Stormwind___VoH002_WIP_by_Kjasi It was for honor’s sake that I kept my word and attended the raid last night, and it was apt that the guild leading the raid was in fact named “For Honor”.  I have had minimal exposure to them, but so far I have to say they are a pretty like minded guild.  Shalomz was the raid lead, and did a great job keeping us moving along quickly, and at the same time still doing a great job healing while trying to juggle loot master responsibilities. 

They currently really only raid 10 man instances, other than trying to pug together a 25 man Naxxramas.  While we had a few players that I would label as terribad last night, all of the “For Honor players seemed to really know their classes and be able to perform the roles assigned.  We had a few weak links in the healing and tanking teams, but overall the night went pretty smoothly given the very late start.  Really hoping that a few of the players take up my offer and apply to Duranub.  We could use the infusion of fresh players and fresh ideas…  especially some fresh caster dps.

R.I.P. WoW Insider

Rest In Peace.... Clean UI Design Late Tuesday, the beloved WoW news sight transitioned from WoWInsider.com to more flashy WoW.com.  With it went the clean and easy to read layout, that was replaced by a cluttered and confused one.  No longer is the site a pure news venture, but instead a bizarre WoW Social Networking/Twitter clone.  It would be hard for me to put into words how much I dislike the fact that they took this direction. 

However, now that they have, we the formerly loyal readers will have to adjust.  With the horrible layout comes a bunch of fairly slick features.  If you notice on the sidebar, there is a new wow.com profile link.  This links to my new Belghast profile page, which is much like your standard facebook-era social networking page.  The core functionality that will be the make or break feature of the design is the incorporation of an addon that promises to give you the ability to post twitter like “micro blog” entries from inside the wow interface. 

In additional to user written entries it also keeps a running log of various status changes in game, in the vein of keeping your friends updated on what you are doing.  Because of the raid last night, I did not really get time to set up the UI portion, but the blogger WoWGrrl has a good example of the type of feed you get with normal play. I hope to get my addon set up and feeding data by raid time.  The service offering reminds me of a much more verbose version of Raptr.com, which by all notions should have become a much bigger player in the “social gaming” community than it ever did.

The Fish Feast Effect

mmmmm tastes like chic... err fish In closing, I present to you the fish feast effect.  When I presented the quandary, that I was busy and uninspired… Bellwether at 4Haelz suggested that I write about the Fish Feast effect.  Basically the general Fish Feast Effect happens only to the players who are responsible enough to bring their own class based stat food to a raid.  As soon as one or more of these players choose to each their own food, in an obsessive act of preparation for the coming fight, a fish feast will be “donated” to the raid. 

It is a truism that no fish feast may be laid down until at least one playing, preferably one of the more anal retentive players, has begun to eat their own food.  Bonus points are given if you can time the Fish Feast so that they have begun to eat, but not yet received the well fed buff.  It is also necessary that no less than one druid in bear or moonkin form must eat so that it places their butt firmly on top of the recently grounded platter, thereby making it difficult for additional players to benefit from the “feast”. 

 

Keep an open eye, and always observe the fish feast effect

7 thoughts on “Just one of those days”

  1. Oh god… the Fish Feast Effect is brutal. Our guild bank provides feasts for 25s, but in 10s my mouse is always hovering over my buff food, trying to ride the fine line between not preempting a fish feast getting dropped and not holding up the raid while I get my buff. Well… by guild bank, I mean this one mage who has some freakish obsession with fishing. We’re told he has somewhere between 50 and 80 stacks of fish feasts in his bank at all times. o_O;

  2. Heh i just give all the salmon, nettlefish and whatever that 3rd fish is called to ry to make the feasts for us.

  3. Being a druid tank, I have firmly planted my big, hairy butt in the fish on more than one occasion. Now a days I try to pay attention which way I’m facing before I sit to eat.

    Last night we had three of our Ulduar(10) team leave. They were father and two sons, and where one goes, so go the others. We have others that can step up and fill the roles, but it hurts all the same, especially when we’re trying to get an Ulduar(25) raid off the ground.

  4. Clearly. Now vent is just a competition to see who has the most fish feasts to put down, and complaining that they haven’t gotten to put one down yet. Last night, there was one dropped before the last person released on one of the Ignis wipes. Hehhehe

  5. We also had a problem with Fish Feasts where multiple people would drop a feast at the same time. We solved our Fishy problems thusly:

    Anyone who wants to contribute feasts or mats sticks em in the guild bank. I bring a couple stacks of them to every raid and I am the designated feast dropper. They will be dropped after every full wipe, but if less than 5 people die, there will be no feast provided, and people know to use their own food. Much less chaos 🙂

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