Monday, December 31, 2007

Random Thoughts

1- Iron Maiden is freakin' awesome. To think I *disliked* them up until a few weeks ago.

2- Got me some Sangria for tonight :D It's not some fancy expensive wine, but I like it, very warm going down.

3- WTB patch 2.4/WotLK info. FUUUCK I wish Blizzard wasn't so damn "ivory tower" all the time with their communications. That's it, I'm gonna invent some world changing thing, make a shitload of money and buy up Vivendi just so I can change policy at Blizzard and get, oh, about +2000% more dev posts on the forums.

4- Back to raiding this week. I enjoyed the time off the past week as a nice WoW break (though I'm a little burnt on TF2 now...) Will be nice to get back on the horse in TK...though I hope nobody is rusty what with it being two weeks since we last fought Kael.

5- It's nearly 9:00 AM and still not sleepy.

Atlas Shrugged

So yesterday I started reading "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand at request of my grandmother. I'm only ~40 pages in but it's great so far. It depicts a world that is degrading into uselessness through excessive "left-leaning" thoughts, not just from politicians, but businessmen and the common folk. Drive is frowned upon, new ideas discouraged and the successful scorned. It portrays a few brilliant minds of business who are constantly being put down for their successes and...well that's all that's really going on so far but who knows what might happen?

(Okay, so I peeked a little at Wikipedia)

The main conflict of the book occurs as the "individuals of the mind" go on strike, refusing to contribute their inventions, art, business leadership, scientific research, or new ideas of any kind to the rest of the world. Society, they believe, hampers them by interfering with their work and underpays them by confiscating the profits and dignity they have rightfully earned. The peaceful cohesiveness of the world requires those individuals whose productive work comes from mental effort. But feeling they have no alternative, they eventually start disappearing from the communities of "looters" and "moochers" who bleed them dry. The strikers believe that they are crucial to a society that exploits them, and the near-total collapse of civilization triggered by their strike shows them to be correct.

Apparently it's one of the top self-pride/motivation, free thought, free market, etc novels. A HUGE book, probably the largest I've read- I won't be putting this one down for some time.

(Oh, and FWIW one of the main characters in this book is a woman by the name of Dagny- When I first read her name I immediately thought "female dwarf". That name does sound awfully Dwarven, doesn't it?)

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Kael Down!

A slightly belated post, but Sunday we got our first Kael kill! To be completely honest I wasn't (nor do I think many others were) expecting to get him that night... apparantly phase 5 was more of a cakewalk than we expected. Anyway, it was quite a rush to see him drop. Give us a couple more weeks, get some people their Kael and Vashj vials and we'll be in Hyjal/BT mostly full time! It will be nice to get into some new content and finally for (Arv and I) get some genuine upgrades. Nethervoid Cloak especially- yum.

As an aside, I hope I can go a stretch without having to play Mr. Caster Tank. Leotheras, Vashj, Kael, I'm either kiting or tanking a good portion of them. Not that I mind doing it- I like knowing the job will get done (No sign of disrespect to my guildies. I just follow the motto- "If you want something done right, do it yourself") Here's to seeing some DPS-race gear check fights in the future?

PS- Rumoer has it boss #1 of Sunwell, the pitlord Brutalicus, is a Patchwerk style gear check encounter. Patchwerk was such a fun fight(even at level 70) it will be great to a fight like it at it's inteded level.

PPS- Jack and Dr. Pepper, not quite as good as Jack and Coke.

Monday, December 10, 2007

By Request...

As required by Fusoya.

* List your primary talent tree(s), i.e. Holy/Disc.


43/7/11 Afflict/Demo/Destro


* List the content you're primarily pursuing or most enjoy, i.e. Raiding, PvP, Solo, etc...

I pretty much do everything, but I'd say raiding is most important to me.


* Provide a brief description of the areas you feel are most in need of improvement (you may list a maximum of three issues and each issue should be described in one or two sentences).

*** DoT scaling/itemization: These spells gain little/no benefit from crit/haste which appear on the vast majority of endgame items, making Affliction comparatively weaker and weaker. It would be great to see both of these stats impact DoT damage in some way, or perhaps see one raid set per talent tree so this isn't a problem. (This is my biggest issue with the game. It is a huge problem as a raiding Affliction Warlock)

-PvP escape mechanisms: Honestly, we're sitting ducks to melee in PvP. Fear is unreliable and often not possible to cast, and while melee is supposed to be our weak point I believe we're currently *too* weak vs melee and we could use some better defense against them.

-Lack of *active* debuffing: It would be great to see some more debuffing power, especially active debuffing that isn't a 5 minute curse you cast once per fight. For example having the Affliction 51 point talent be a debuff that reduces damage a target does by X% for Y seconds with 1 minute cooldown.


* List up to five specific spells/abilities/talents you feel most need change, redesign or improvement in the order you feel each is most in need of attention. (MOST to LESS)

-Bane: I feel this talent is *too* necessary as a raiding Warlock. It would be nice to see it moved to tier 1 Destruction so we don't have to spend as many points to reach it.

-Death Coil: This ability, once considered quite overpowered could use a reduction in cooldown in the current game environment. 45 seconds - 1minute seems reasonable.

-Contagion: For where this talent sits in the tree it's too weak. I'd like to see it's +5% damage effect Siphon Life and UA as well.

-Siphon Life/Soul Link: I feel this talent spec in particular is entirely too powerful compared to anything else in the arena and due to it's power is keeping the class as a whole from receiving changes that it needs.

-Seed of Corruption: I feel this ability is too strong. Warlocks should be viable for AoE but this ability takes us beyond viable into the "as good as Mages" category which I feel we shouldn't quite be at.

As a side note, I'm very happy with the posts of all the other Warlocks made. Many of the same issues are brought up, which gives our feedback a sense of cohesion so maybe the devs will take it seriously! It seems like DoT scaling/pet scaling came up in every other post. Tough stuff to ignore when everyone has something to say about it!

Sunday, December 2, 2007