Storm Peaks = Awesome

I only got a brief chance to look around the zone several days back when they first opened it up. The next day when I logged back in the zone was closed again (due to some leveling exploit I believe) Now it's open again and I'm totally in love with this zone. It's like Winterspring and Dun Morogh on crack. The mountain peaks are high, the mobs are awesome, and the quests are great as well. It has a very Nordic theme. In fact (spoiler alert!) a good bit of it revolves around the relationship between two giants:Thorim (Thor) and Loken (Loki) who are brothers and are locked in a war with one another. You even go undercover at one point and do quests for otherwise hostile Brunnhildar clan- a bunch of frost skinned all female Vrykul and help them deal with their enemies, the Sons of Hodir (male vs female thing) and the Valyries (former allies who have sold out to the Lich King) I won't spoil any more for you but this zone is just GREAT.

Democratic National Convention

Not a politics blog but I thought I'd chime in on this since it's fresh in the news and all.

I just got done watching several clips from the Democratic National Convention and it struck me as so odd just how touchy feely the whole thing was. The audience was enthralled as if taking part in a hardcore baptist revival- hooting and hollering and screaming and even some tears here and there. And listening to the speakers just sickened me. They play fully on the emotions of the viewer- Not on arguments or hard facts, but rather acting as a stimulus to induce an emotional reaction among those who are too blind to see it for what it is. Even Obama himself, a guy that seems pretty sharp IMO, has in the past said things that just make me scratch my head in wonder. Paraphrasing here, but when asked a question about taxes and how a certain policy of his regarding the taxing of upper income brackets actually hurt those in lower brackets he replied with "Well, it's just not fair." He didn't dispute the studies, or qualify how the poor would actually be better off with said policy, or say anything that even resembled a logical response to a perfectly legitimate question. No, just vague reply resembling an emotional comment I would expect to hear from a small child, not a man running for president. I was surprised I didn't see someone handing out Kleenexes and antidepressants at the DNC...because that's who it seemed they were pandering to.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Republicans certainly are no saints. They have their own list of issues to deal with... That being said I'll take a heartless, out of touch old businessman who won't change a thing running my country before I'll take a crybaby, head in the clouds upstart who would rather play to your emotions and make you feel good regardless of the factual reality of the situation.


Disclaimer: Draele is affiliated neither with the Democratic nor the Republicans party and is in fact a Libertarian, which has stances on issues shared and opposed by both parties.

What's With WoW Insider?

I'm not sure how many of you read WoW Insider but lately I've been getting kinda irked by some of the articles I've read on there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not really trying to bash them or anything, hell, I have them linked on the sidebar, but the problem is so many of the articles are full of fallacies, generalities and overall give me a sense that they haven't done their homework on whatever they're writing about. IE maybe an article written by some guy in beta that makes you think "Is this guy *really* in beta?"

I seem to get a sort of vibe that many of them are journalists with a passing interest in WoW rather than WoW players who like to write about WoW. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that, but as a very detail oriented guy it tends to grate on my nerves a little from time to time. I like to think everything I post on here is totally accurate and any opinion I venture has sound reasoning, but I do have it a lot easier since my subject matter is so very narrowly focused on one class. They have to write about several subjects so perfect accuracy perhaps isn't a luxury they can afford.

Just my thoughts for the day.

A Couple Of Graphs For A Forum Post...

Ignore this. Just uploading these to make a point on the beta forums.

Affliction & Demonology Videos

Affliction The Haunt graphic kinda sucks right now...hopefully they'll do something else to it.

Demonology Demon form is fun. Health funnel is crazy OP right now @ 700+ ticks per second.

Unholy/Frost Deathknight Video

I tried to show off a few things about the class, or my spec at least. Your standard ability rotation, kiting, unloading a full runic power bar into them before they even touch you, and using Death Chill's 100% crit frost crit chance a couple times in there. Ultimately the focus of it is more on spell damage, especially in building runic power up through basic abilities, having Chill of the Grave and Dirge increase the amount of runic power you get, and Runic Power Mastery making all RP abilities cheaper. Overall it's really fun.

My Spec

A few things...

1) Server was a bit laggy so things are a bit off at points.

2) Quality of the video is pretty bad, make sure to use fullscreen so you can see the tooltips.

3) Sometimes the runic power might seem off, but there's currently a bug that doesn't show runic power decay out of combat.

Video

More To Come!

I realize I've been a little scarce here lately. Between finals, catching up on sleep after finals and beta I've been pretty busy the past week. Some time in the next couple of days I'll put up some video of my Deathknight as well as a Demonology video. I made an Affliction video but scrapped it since it's pretty much the same as TBC just with bigger numbers. I'll make another Affliction grinding video once I get Shadowflame next level- which should be a little more interesting.

Also, it might be a little later in the week but I'll throw up some info about Venture Bay/Blue Sky Logging Camp, a couple of really fun PvP areas in western Grizzly Hills. Expect to see some pretty maps!