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Reconciling Deathknight

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The Anger Phase

This morning I am feeling completely out of it.  I struggled to get to sleep last night, and ultimately wound up taking some melatonin against my better judgment.  For most of yesterday I’ve felt like I was coming down with something, and this morning my lungs feel lousy.  It might be the strange weather we have been having, or might be an extension of the emotional weekend I have had, but in any case I am just drained…  which is a pretty horrible way to start a day.  As such this morning is a morning where I am doubling up and having both coffee and an energy drink, hoping that ultimately one of the two will do the trick.  Right now I am playing this fun little game that is composing with my eyes closed at the keyboard.  As such I have no idea what sorts of typos will creep into this post.

I want to thank all of the people who took a moment out of their day yesterday to send me condolences.  It means a lot, and while I have not yet responded to each and every one…  they all were very helpful as the day went on.  For whatever reason I mostly felt angry yesterday, and lots of little things kept me in a perpetual state of grumpy.  In a strange turn of events, it feels like the cats have been a lot more chill with each other, or maybe it is just that they sense that something is wrong.  They have pretty much swarmed me, where I would either have no cats or all three cats at once.  I honestly feel like cats can sense distress in their owners and will try to comfort them in their own way.  I am still very much in distress but I guess it is getting better.  My wife and I remarked that this is the first time in literally years that we have not had a sick animal that we had to treat for something.  It is a really strange feeling, but is also guilty as I feel a bit of a relief.

Serious Piddling

WoWScrnShot_120814_062315 One of my side projects, the last few times I have returned to World of Warcraft has been to slowly chip away at getting my paladin a set of Judgment gear.  I am one of those oh so cliché people that firmly believe that Judgment is quite possibly the best gear set that blizzard has created to date.  My paladin is old enough to have the Blue Judgment look alike set that came from the opening of Naxxramas 2.0 at the tail end of Burning Crusade, and I went through the trouble of farming up the Purple Judgment set from the BC era heroics on both my Paladin and my Deathknight.  The problem is that each time I went into BWL my paladin could not quite solo Razorgore, which in itself is a strange fight to solo anyway.  The equation has two components, firstly that you are geared enough to be able to survive the constant assault of the npcs attacking you as you control the orb, and secondly that your stats are good enough to pump up Razorgore to a point of surviving the assault that ultimately turns on him after you break the first channel.

WoWScrnShot_120814_062252 Last expansion my tanking set was good enough on the Deathknight that I could accomplish this rather easily, but as far as the Paladin goes… my focus was on Retribution so I didn’t quite have the appropriate gear to pull it off.  At 92 however with my focus being leveling tanky…  it worked like a charm and I was able to get through all of the eggs while Razorgore was still at like 75% health.  This was the only real hurdle to soloing the raid, and with that now easy it became simple enough to push my way through.  Positive is that I got the last of my judgment drops from BWL… the negative is that I still need the pants from Molten Core.  When pushing my way through the core like I have so many times before… wouldn’t you know that a binding dropped.  The entire time my raid ran Molten Core we never saw a binding… and in all the hundreds of times I have solo’d the raid myself… I have never seen one either.  Now however I will be adding this to my weekly raid soloing rotation as I chase the OTHER binding from Garr.

Reconciling Deathknight

WoWScrnShot_120814_063810 A huge part of my feelings about Warlords of Draenor as an expansion is how badly I did not like the feel of Blood Deathknights when I played them in alpha.  I could not quite put my finger on it, but they simply felt “wrong”.  To have the class I had been completely devoted to feel crappy going into an expansion, made me not really interested in the expansion at all.  While I have had this grand renaissance of playing a Warrior, I still miss my Deathknight, and with the need of his inscription abilities… I have started working my way through my issues with the class.  I guess at this point it is starting to finally feel “normal” again, and at this point I am staring down the barrel of 93.  There is still quite a bit of stuff that I need to wrap up in Shadowmoon Valley, and as such I am in no real rush to leave it.  I would really like to be able to hit 98 before sitting foot in the Spires of Arak allowing me to completely skip that zone, so I will be milking as much from the zones leading up to that as possible.

Granted at this point I have not tried to tank anything as a Deathknight, but instead just using it as a grossly overpowered leveling spec.  I started off trying to do two handed frost, but quickly decided I needed the survive that blood grants me.  Frost was awesome for bursting things down, but when it came to soloing elites… it struggled.  Blood on the other hand has allowed me to power through pretty much anything I come up against just like blood always has.  I am still getting used to the strangeness of blood boil being part of my normal rotation instead of an ability that I used whenever to spread my diseases.  Also still getting used to the loss of Rune Strike, and using Deathcoil as my runic power dump.  It still gives the Deathknight more of a casterly feel than I really care for, but like I said it is starting to feel “normal” again.  I guess I just needed to spend some time powering through the frustration.

AggroChat Episode 34

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Bad Name Great Cat

lilshitgametime This is going to be a really rough post to get through, so I am sitting here avoiding writing.  That said I need to actually get through this, otherwise I will sit here staring at the empty page all day.  Yesterday started off fairly normally, I got up, got showered and went out for breakfast like I have for years.  The problem is what happened during the middle of the day pretty much broke my heart.  Fifteen years ago this past Thanksgiving weekend, the above cat entered our lives as we rescued her from the cold of my parents barn.  There is some confusion about her name, because I originally named her Sasha having always liked the name.  My wife however had a living terror of a student named Sasha in her class that year…  so the name actually stuck.  The only people who ever called her that were the veterinarian and my mother.  When we got her, she was tiny and into everything like kittens always are… there was a common refrain of “you little shit” as we cleaned up one mess she made after another.  Well the name stuck and she was forever called “Little Shit” from that point on.

conkedwithcats She never would have guessed her name was a bad thing however because we said it with the utmost love.  She was my baby girl, but she spent as much time being my wife’s baby as she did mine.  There were so many nights I fell asleep with her purring loudly on our pillows.  She had the most amazing purr that you could literally hear like three rooms away.  For most of her life she always wanted to be somewhere near us, as evidenced by the two pictures above.  In fact I always tried to make sure she had room to lay down either at my feet or on the sofa near me.  You don’t realize how much you have changed your life to fit someone else.  She had all sorts of quirks, like while we were getting ready in the morning she would hop in the shower first and get a drink of water while the shower was running.  Actually that was only one of two ways she was willing to get a drink, the other being from a bright red cup we left on the bathroom floor.  There were many times in the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of that cup banging around, letting me know that I needed to get up and fill it up for her.

Some Rough Times

lilshit We have had two boy cats that had thyroid issues, so we were well aware of the tell tale signs.  A bit over two years ago we started seeing them in her, so we got her into the vet and had been treating her with a topical cream that I had to smear into her ear morning and night.  She was an absolute trooper and stayed still as I “greased” her ears as I referred to it.  About one in three cats experience some digestive problems associated with thyroid disease, so when she started having issues with inappropriate elimination… we thought it was all tied to the issues as a whole.  It became a nightly task for me to come up and pick up the messes left by her during the day.  Frustrating as it might have been, she was worth every bit of the effort.  Over the last two weeks however it had gotten noticeably worse.  She was spending pretty much all of her time sleeping on the couch, and then barely making it off the couch before having to go potty.  Yesterday afternoon we took her into the vet to see if maybe we needed to tweak the dose of thyroid medicine again.

Little shit had always been a waddly cat with a huge belly, and we always attributed it to her just being built “stocky” she reminded us of one of those strong country women, that while they might not win a beautify competition had the sheer presence to get job on the farm done.  As she lost weight her belly became more distended, which again we attributed to her odd body shape.  However upon seeing it the vet was immediately concerned.  Upon taking some X-Rays the news was pretty grim.  There was a massive growth in her stomach region pushing in on her bowels and likely causing pain to eat and got to the bathroom as well.  With her age there was nothing really surgery wise that they would recommend as the likelihood of recovery was pretty slim.  We were left with the extremely hard choice of either taking her home and waiting for her to get worse and die, or letting her go.  She had always been a very clean girl, with extremely preferences in her potty habits.  She hated a dirty litter box, and there were certain kinds of litter that she absolutely refused to use.  I could tell the last year was rough on her, because when she was force to used to bathroom in a bad place there was a look of panic on her face.  With the extreme increase over the last two weeks it felt like we were not terribly far from her messing herself in her sleep, and that is something she would not have wanted to happen.

kitties_sunning So we made the decision that seemed like it was going to be the best for her.  She had struggled with many things over the last few years.  She was struggling to move around the house, and we had to install pet stairs on the sofa for her to get up and down easily.  She had not slept with us for about a month, spending nearly 24 hours a day sleeping in my chair on the sofa, snuggled into blankets that I am sure smelled like me.  When we tried carrying her to bed, she would last for a bit but ultimately hop down and return to the sofa.  Cats do an amazing job of hiding what ails them… and I think she was trying to keep away from us from showing how much she hurt.  I wish I could have fixed her, made it all better…  but I couldn’t this time.  Truth is she has probably always had this mass in her belly, and we always thought it was just her unique shape.  This might have been the first time she ever had an x-ray… and unfortunately it happened far too late.  I wish I could go back in time and have caught this earlier, but I am not really sure how we could have known.  All I know is that I lost one of my best friends, and one of the sweetest animals we will likely ever have.  Yesterday it felt like my world was falling apart, and I am still not sure if the gravity has really hit me.  Laying down last night, as I called for the cats to come to bed… I had to stop myself from yelling for Little Shit.  We will miss you baby girl.

AggroChat Episode #34

I am so thankful to the awesome people that I record with.  During the day yesterday I was not sure if I could go on that night and record a podcast.  Then something happened over twitter.  Someone mentioned me stating that they had found the podcast that day and was really enjoying it.  Turns out they listened from show 33 to 24… so some 14 hours of our podcast in a row.  I have to say hearing that greatly improved my day and gave me that push to keep going last night.  I just was not sure if I could be my normally jolly self, and carry the show…  so Kodra stepped up and did an excellent job as master of ceremonies.  Actually he did a phenomenal job matching pretty much everything that I normally do and then adding his own flourish.

There was much discussion of Final Fantasy XIV as usual with Raven talking about completing her second Novus weapon and beginning a second Nexus grind, and several of us talking about our victory over Ultros and solid attempts on Tier 5 in Binding Coil of Bahamut.  I talk World of Warcraft raiding, and looking forward to beginning the Highmaul Raid after missing Thursday and my raids first two boss kills.  We talk Heroes of the Storm, since this week they finally saw fit to give Rae an invite.  That game is exceptionally fun and better suited for a more casual gamer than League of Legends is.  Over the course of the week we have played quite a bit of it and talk about our personal hero preferences and playstyles.  Kodra runs a much tighter ship than I seem to, because we actually clocked in at just barely over an hour once editing was finished.  Extra special thanks to Kodra for steering the ship while I couldn’t quite muster the oomph to do so.

WoW Xmas Wishlist

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Warlords of Faff

WoWScrnShot_120614_102145 The one thing I have to give this expansion credit for is that they really have embraced the gospel of faff.  There are more widgets and thing-a-ma-bobs for me to fiddle with in this expansion than any in any mmo to date.  It seems like I can lose entire mornings with all of the little goals that I seem to have.  Garrisons are a big portion of this, requiring just enough effort to make it worth doing… but requiring just enough time to eat up large blocks of your time.  They are this glorious black hole for people who are like me and are huge fans of short term goals.  On the other side of the equation there are folks who absolutely hate them, because they represent an end to the way certain portions of this game worked.  For the folks that loved farming resources and then using those resources to play the auction house…  unfortunately that time is over.  To a lesser extent you can do this with savage blood because on my server that is going for 2000g each.  However it takes 50 primal spirits to get a single blood, so the amount of farming to the reward is pretty minimal.

I like the way you gradually level your tradeskills and gathering skills through the use of the Garrison.  I was never one who enjoyed grinding either of these things, and being able to know that through doing daily snippets of mining and crafting I can eventually max out makes me a happy person.  I realize there will be a point where I run out of things that I want to do… but it is going to be a long time down the road.  For example I am already plotting removing either my inn or my lumber mill once I have gained all that I can get from them and I figure there will be other buildings that I do the same with.  In other faffy news you notice I am riding an Onyxia mount in the above picture.  As part of this mornings faff while waiting on a cat to decide she was done laying on my arms…  I took my mage over to onyxia.   For some time I have been killing her on every single level 90 character that I thought could reasonably do it each week.  Finally the mount dropped this morning and I can stop that extremely time consuming process.  However I am sure there will be a new target of my mount farming obsession.

WoW Xmas Wishlist

BattleNetLauncher One of the best parts of playing any Blizzard game is the integration with Battle.net so that you can communicate with your friends regardless of what game they happen to be playing.  This was awesome in that even when I was not playing World of Warcraft, I still had access to my friends playing the game through the ease of the battle.net launcher chat.  The system is extremely awesome for what it does, and the wow implementation is great as it works fairly well cross server allowing you to group up with your friends even if you don’t happen to be on the same server.  The problem is however it is still very limiting in that you have a fixed maximum number of friends.  You are allowed to have a maximum number of battle.net based friends be it through the Real ID system or the newer Battle Tag system.

Folks look at me like I am crazy but after being a guild leader for well over a decade you end up with a lot of people that you want to keep up with.  Once you factor in places like twitter and other social media…  the 100 slots are just too limiting.  I hate the process I have to go through regularly of trying to find someone I don’t really talk to that often to delete… in favor of adding someone new to the list.  So the first item on my Xmas wishlist is for Blizzard to greatly increase the number of available battle.net slots.  I hate to admit it, but I would even be willing to pay some sort of premium subscription to have this number uncapped, or at the very least tripled.  Especially once you factor in that I have different groups of friends that play different blizzard games… bumping this number up is going to become crucial.

Cross Server / Cross Game Social Channels

One of the ways we have managed to get around the limited size of friends lists in the past was through the use of social channels.  During the heyday of non-guild based raiding, we had several channels that served the purpose of giving us a much larger extended guild chat for both the Late Night Raiders and Duranub Raiding Company.  These were great, and I would love to see this concept come back into vogue.  The problem is at this point single server channels are just too limiting.  Our raid currently pulls in folks from other servers on a somewhat regular basis, and if we had a raid chat channel, we would really need it to work across realms.  I realize you can have some limited chat functionality with battle.net but what we need are persistent channels similar to the way Diablo 2 used to have them.  That way regardless of server you can keep in touch with your social friends.

To take this to the next step we really need these channels to also exist across all of the current battle.net enabled games.  As it stands currently we have House Stalwart folks that are playing all of the available Blizzard games.  Last night we had groups in Diablo 3, World of Warcraft and a whole bunch of us in Heroes of the Storm.  It would be so much easier to keep a common guild continuity if we could all hang out in the same “guild chat” in the form of a shared cross game battle.net chat channel.  Essentially Blizzard has the beginnings of something amazing here, and they keep building these really infectious games in different genres.  Coupling them all together in a shared communications infrastructure will only serve to reinforce the “stickyness” of each of the individual games.  That way players can feel like they can have the freedom to play ANY game in their line-up without losing any aspect of that rich social structure they have built already.

Final Wish

The final wish I have for blizzard is to let me have European friends, or friends from other regions in general.  I find it maddening that I live my life in a connected world that allows me to have friends from all around the world… but I am playing a game that tries to separate off these players into regional buckets.  I realize this is likely a tall wish but I know so many people thats lives would be made better by it.  Sure I would love to have cross region grouping…  but I would settle with just being able to have some basic “hey how are you doing” style communication between the server regions.  I realize that you guys kinda screwed yourself early on by recycling server names between the regions.  However it seems like your current battle.net connection system takes this into account by referring to the servers by the fully qualified names of “Argent Dawn US” or “Argent Dawn EU”.

Blizzard already does some pretty amazing things, given the age of the game and what has to be an insane server infrastructure.  At the end of the day however we just want to be able to play freely with our friends, without having to ask them to completely uproot their established social structure and server transfer…  or in the case of other regions start completely from scratch.  Warlords of Draenor is an expansion where you have very much learned the lessons of just how important nostalgia is.  Players don’t want to abandon their servers and their existing pools of friends, but at the same time keep meeting new people from around the world that they also would like to play with.  If you can somehow leverage this social connectedness it is only going to serve to strengthen the player bonds to your game.  Here is hoping that you are at least working on some of the things I have talked about, because you have some really good systems at work here, but you are one or two steps away from absolute greatness.

An Evening With Alternative Chat

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Bel Folks Stuff Episode 3

This morning sees the release of the third episode of my experimental side podcast, Bel Folks Stuff.  For those who have not followed this development, as the title graphic says I have conversations with interesting people about the stuff they are into.  So far I’ve had such conversations with Gypsy Syl and Rowan Blaze and his wife Scooters.  Both of those were really awesome conversations and I suggest you go back and listen to them at your convenience.  This morning however I am releasing an episode that I have been looking forward to with another good friend the Godmother of Faff behind Alternative Chat.  As a strict devotee of the Faff lifestyle, or at the very least an aspirant to the lifestyle… I always appreciate her bringing the term to public consciousness.  The funny thing is… we really didn’t even talk about this during the podcast.  I believe in letting the conversation go where the conversation goes and we filled up an hour of time chatting away about various bits, and probably could have filled up another hour doing the same.

Of note for this episode I also wanted to make sure that the podcast was available on both iTunes and Stitcher radio to help those folks out who prefer to listen to podcasts through those avenues.  I admit I was nervous with this episode because Alt herself has such an amazing production quality for her own podcasts. I felt like there was no way I could live up to that standard.  That said I feel like this episode is really solid, and that maybe just maybe I am starting to get a hang of what exactly this thing is going to be all about.  I don’t really sit down with a fixed number of questions or anything of the sort, but instead just try and keep the conversation flowing as best I can.  With Alt the conversation flowed naturally even though later in the cast she admitted to having notes of her own.  I still feel like we maybe got more than a few moments of genuine spontaneity there nonetheless.  Speaking of spontaneity, I am always trying to evolve as a person and as such would love to hear your comments on how this side project is working.

Rifftrax and Raiding

With the shit storm that happened Tuesday with the Argent Dawn server, we didn’t actually get to start raiding as a group until last night.  Unfortunately I had other plans, and had to miss the raid.  Some of my co-workers and I have started this tradition of sorts of going to the RiffTrax live shows whenever they happen.  Granted they are not truly “live” for us as in performed in theater.  Nonetheless each time I go I think to myself “I have never laughed this hard ever” and then the next one trumps it.  This go around they were riffing on a show they did during the 5th season of MST3K, a strange version of Santa Claus that involves Santa, Merlin, and some Christmas Devils…  you know the standard fare.  It turns out that apparently the film originally hailed from Mexico where maybe it made more sense?  The final product is this insane dubbed over feature with so many absolutely absurd moments that they had pretty much endless ammunition to make fun of it.  If you are really curious you can check out the MST3K version that someone has dumped on youtube, but apparently it was edited down heavily… and they had all new jokes to make at the movies expense.

As far as the raid goes they apparently had a pretty great night of their own right.  It seems as thought they managed to two shot Kargath, and then down The Butcher a well.  The sounds like they made some good progress on Tectus as well, so they are hoping to easily down that next Tuesday and progress to the next boss.  We apparently ran the raid on personal loot and the RNG gods were good to a lot of players.  I know Rylacus walked away with three pieces of gear, which means he can officially no longer complain about “never getting drops” for the remainder of this expansion.  Admittedly he has always had pretty shitty luck with getting drops he actually needs, but the moment a rare assed mount drops… his dice immediately improve.  I can’t really complain because I too have a collection of rare mount drops, but most of those were diligently farmed… and the only one I actually won when it was relevant was the Fiery Warhorse Reins.

Less Communicative

Last night after my post yesterday, I had a friend check in on me to make sure I was doing okay.  It made me realize that I am doing a pretty bad job of reaching out to say “hey” to people lately.  This friend has been logged into WoW at the same time as me for many nights, but I have been stuck in my own little world quite a bit.  Right now I have a batch of things that needs to be wrapped up at work before going on my holiday vacation after the 19th.  Then there is the daily blogging, and the two podcasts that I am keeping going… one of which records weekly.  After that it seems like I always have some OTHER side project to work on, like my upcoming post for Syl’s Bloggy Xmas.  Someone started a conversation the other day with “I know you are busy but” and I thought…  am I busy?  It seems like I very much am, and as a result when I get busy I tend to encapsulate myself in a little bubble or just shift into “speak if spoken to” mode.

Mostly this morning I wanted to take a moment to say that essentially “its me not you”.  I feel like I am failing miserably at keeping in contact with people during this holiday season.  I promise I still care, and I promise I am still interested in what’s going on in your worlds… but at this point I feel painfully behind in everything.  I’ve always taken the Stanley Spadowski “Drink from the Firehose” approach to information intake.  The problem is I seem to be falling further and further behind as my blog reader consistently has hundreds upon hundreds of posts to read.  Between that and trying to juggle playing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and entertain semi-focused raiding in both of them… my attention circuits are maxed out.  I promise I am still out here and still caring… I am just not taking it upon myself to engage directly nearly as much as I previously did.  All of that said… if you need help with something I will do my best to assist in any way I can.  Hopefully after the holiday break things will calm down a bit and I can reach a point of equilibrium.