2fps

Wait. Strike that, reverse it.

Pike’s resignation is so recent its still on the blogosphere’s metaphorical desk and already its got me thinking about things. The first thing I think of is OMG WHY DO I NOT UPDATE 2FPS MORE OFTEN WHEN I HAVE SO MUCH FREE TIME NOW.

The second thing it makes me think of is the list of things I would still like to do before ending my WoW career. Here’s the list as I recall it off the top of my head at 4:48am.

Kill the Lich King

This one’s an obvious one. It brings my experience with Warcraft full circle as I saw the Arthas character begin life in Warcraft 3 and now am presented the opportunity to end his life in WoW. It also signifies the culmination of the idea for this guild I had well over a year ago. I see this goal as an inevitability.

Get my warrior to 80

I have one character of every class. Each of those characters is level 80 except my warrior who is in the mid-sixties. My compulsive side simply cannot rest if one of my characters isn’t max level.

Kill Kil’jaeden on my paladin

My paladin was my main character throughout the Burning Crusade. I’ve managed to get every pre-Wrath raid achievement on her except Kil’jaeden. The furthest I’ve been with her is the Eredar Twins before the fucking snow on the driveway ruined everything.

Make my blog not look like crap

I generally like the look of my blog but there are certain parts of it that make me weep. The header is one of those parts as is the comments section of each post. I have the ability to make it not crap but the motivation is lacking. I find that sad since Ashmaw/Balor provided me with such a brilliant header graphic months ago and I’ve been unable to figure out a way to work it into the Journalist theme after all this time.

Podcast

I’m going to use podcast as a verb here even though I have no idea if society will allow it.

I’ve had a pet idea percolating on the back burner for a while now. I kinda want to do a podcast. It would be like an audio version of 2fps as far as content goes but I could get guest stars to come on each episode. I would also want to make it a limited series, maybe do eight episodes total before ending it. This way it would be an addendum to 2fps, not a replacement. It also sets a reasonable limit to ensure burnout and time constraints don’t interfere.

Podcast with Chas and Tam

Carrying on the theme of the last bullet point I specifically want to air a podcast featuring myself with Chas and Tam of Righteous Orbs. Why? Clearly if you’re asking that you’re beyond hope because anyone would want to hang out in a ventrilo server with these two to do a podcast. Also, british accents boost ratings; any idiot in America knows this. If you want people to listen to your shit, get a Brit to talk to your audience.

Complete the Quel’delar quest

This is sort of a weird goal. I already did this quest on the PTR and I feel like that was a very satisfying experience. The only things that nag at me about it are that I don’t have a fancy purple token to show for it and I didn’t stop the quest chain at the part where you go to the restored Sunwell. Sadly, those two things contradict each other since you have to go past the Sunwell part of the quest to get the token. I’m undecided about this issue. If I don’t complete the quest I can go chill at the Sunwell anytime I want. Awesome. However, once I stop playing the game it would be nice to have something on the armory to serve as a reminder.

Actually that problem is stupid since it works itself out. I just don’t finish the quest until I’m done with WoW. Gah, I just solved at least a month’s worth of angst in one revelatory moment. That was dumb.

Finish and publish that damn post

Chas and Tam gave me a topic to blog about back in December. I’ve been working on it ever since. Its difficult since all the graphs and charts I want to include in the post are a little beyond my ability to create but that’s still no excuse. I simply need to suck it up and finish the damn post. Hell, its mostly complete as it is now, just post it ffs!

Poke Algalon

Also known as my last priority. I could take or leave this one and not lose a night’s sleep but it would be cool to at least attempt the Algalon fight because darnitall if it doesn’t look pretty as hell. Amg sparkles!

Picture taken from The Enigma Order via Google Images

 

In the end, when I stop playing WoW I won’t feel that I’ve left much undone. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky when it comes down to the opportunities I’ve had and the friends I’ve made. When I put in my resignation, it’ll be with a feeling of satisfaction.

DPS don’t get enough love.

I know, I know its because they’re depraved mindless drones that are fit only to drool, flood your chat window with endlessly scrolling Recount meters and respond to every strategy explanation the raid leader gives with a resounding "TL;DR lolz" but still!

Cheap shots aside, it just isn’t true that DPS don’t matter as much as healers and tanks. Give the meatshields and rejuv-bots their due, yes but don’t think for a second that elevating them beyond what they deserve while sneering down at the dps is at all right or fair.

I’m primarily a tank. Sometimes when there are multiple Bad Things to kill, my job will be to tank the one we’re killing last. This gives me a long enough time alone with the mob to really see how futile my damage output is when it comes to being able to kill that mob alone. If that mob happens to be a very dangerous one that hits like a freight train powered by the souls of the damned then I can tell you, the moment the DPS switch to my target and I see its health bar start to go down rapidly its like seeing Gandalf and the Rohirrim ride up over the horizon.

I’m prone to giving shoutouts to people I end up grouped with in random heroics on Twitter. One of the people I gave a shoutout to was Valesara from Nordrassil. Valesara is a warlock and a darn good one at that. In our Heroic Forge of Souls she topped damage meters, didn’t throw big nukes at the second boss while it was linked with the healer, helped burn down the drawn soul during the first boss fight, etc.

On top of doing great damage and playing well generally, she also buffed the party with Detect Invis so we could see the floating skulls before they aggroed to us and she did it without being prompted or asked. To top it off, when she spoke in party chat it was with full words, not abbreviated leetspeak drivel. I cannot express how appreciative I am towards this kind of DPS.

This is the kind of player that makes me balk at people saying that tanks and healers deserve more loot, praise, attention or whatever else than DPS.

Bottom line is, tanks and healers don’t burp rainbows and pixie dust and DPS don’t actually waterlog their keyboards with drool. Thank good DPS the same way you’d thank a good tank or healer and recognize that without good DPS your time playing WoW would suck.

One of the things I resolved to do more of in this expansion is take more screenshots. I feel like I’ve done a much better job of that than I used to do and in light of it being the new year, let me share with you some of the shots I’ve taken in the past twelve months.

 

This is how Shayzani looked this time last year. White hair at the time instead of the black that’s almost always been her color and sporting the classic T7 look.

 

 

 

 

 

You know you’re in trouble when this is how you’re greeted as you first sign online. Of course, it could also just be Zmei being crazy.

That’s exactly what it was that time.

Other times… not so much.

 

 

Fahn, one of the very first members of Nocturne, posing with me after he stole some rockin’ hunter lewtz away from Zulrohk. It was striking at the time how uniformly opposite our armor looked: his polished red and gold compared to my frost and sable.

We miss you Fahn!

 

 

 

 

You really don’t want to mess with these two. Meet Zindo and Aurorai. Zindo is the scary troll man on the left and Aurorai is the lovely Sailor Moon impersonator on the right.

 

 

 

 

In the first of a series entitled “Good lord you have too much clutter in your UI” I present this fine shot which I’ve labeled “Oh gosh why is the bug that big?!”

DPS may have been a touch slow that night and our offtank had been carefully holding the floor down with his corpse and Kel’thuzad’s adds had to be kept busy by somebody so why not the guy tanking at 2fps with poor reaction speeds to ominous black spots beneath his feet?

 

Flame Leviathan gave Nocturne a great opportunity to have the first half hour of our raid nights be one big de ja vu experience. We’d go in on 25man mode and clean him up, zone out, and then zone right back in again on 10man mode to kill him yet again.

MORE PYRITE PLZ.

 

 

BUT ITS TOO HARD TO TELL WHICH GUY HAS THE LIGHTNING ON HIS FISTS, SHAY!

Uh huh. Fine, I guess I’ll have to use raid marks. That skull is way more prominent than the GIANT ELECTRIC FIELDS around his hands anyway.

 

 

Sometimes I get hungry before raids. This is generally known to be a bad thing in Nocturne as I am noticeably more negative and cranky.

I think this particular night I had said something about not being able to get Ony down and Amaniita took great delight in taunting me after we beat the dragoness the next attempt.

 

 

The end of an era. My favorite piece of loot that I had for almost a full year is finally replaced on the footsteps of Icecrown Citadel.

This is me, about to equip the last cloak I’ll ever wear.

 

 

 

Sometimes you see strange things in town when you play on a roleplay server. Now, obviously the costume isn’t completely perfect. The makeup is all wrong and the shoes aren’t the same color and she’s clearly not remembered her belt, etc.

But come on, that’s awesome.

She stood next to the vendor without saying a word and without moving for about twenty minutes before disappearing. Outstanding job.

 

 

 

More strange things you see around town.

Are they protecting the bank from the Alliance? No.

Are they claiming a part of Dalaran on behalf of their guild? No.

Are they giving some erotic roleplayers some privacy? It is a roleplay server after all.

 

People get crazy when it comes to rare-drop mounts from seasonal bosses.

Remind me why the hell I keep doing this again?

Next year, you’re on your own guys.

 

We worked our asses off trying to get that stupid Brewfest ram to drop two years ago with no luck. It left us bitter and resentful. This time around it had been a few months since we had seen each other but Brewfest had just started and I said, hey why not try?

First kill gave us a ram. That was the last time we did anything together.

 

 

My mage runs into Zindo at the bank and mistakes him for a grisly rapist.

You would too.

 

 

 

Zindo’s actually a pussycat. Here he is on his warrior Skive, not paying attention to where he’s headed in Dragonblight. I, on my druid in hax-form, laugh at him from the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of my druid, she wasn’t always a female tauren. She started life as a night elf actually and only became Horde in the late 40’s.

Here she is in her first incarnation sprinting across the desert of Tanaris.

 

 

Don’t mind me, I’m not up to anything at all.

Amaniita and Ashmaw got me an awesome birthday present: almost all the elementium I needed to make my Thunderfury.

Thank you guys, I loved it.

 

 

 

Here’s where it all started.

Salanthe on the far left, Tywren in the middle and me on the far right on my paladin. We were getting nostalgic one night and decided to dress up in our finest BC regalia and go back to our old haunt in Shattrath.

This is what it looked like at the end of the Burning Crusade when the idea of Nocturne first came into being and we three would later become the founding members.

Awesome people of the day award goes to my Oculus group for not cowering in fear at the big scary instance with drake mounts!

Thanks to Sleeps from Quel’dorei, Sartik from Nazgrel and Kreepshow (sorry, not going to try to do the funky characters in your name) from Rivendare for sticking with the pug and thanks to Rurie of Nocturne for jumping right back into the tanking game on her first day back after an extended leave of absence!

Boo on our original tank and rogue who bailed out within seconds of zoning in! Scared of the big nasty Oculus that took us about fifteen minutes to clear? Probably best you ran off, you’d probably have slowed us down!

The clever reader will be able to deduce the content of this post going by the title alone.

First, I logged in tonight to have Amaniita present me with no less than seven Elementium bars bringing my total to… eight. I’m still amazed and grateful for this, its simply outstanding. Thanks Ama!

Next came raid time and on the menu tonight was a curbstomping of Ony and then we were planning on spending the rest of the night failing at Yogg. A few new people in the raid who had never done the fight before, all of us rusty for not having been at the fight recently at all, etc.

So on the third attempt I think, I was thinking how crazy surprising it was that we were doing so well when things started to fall apart. I let the adds build up a bit and then we had confusion over what to do with them. Ranged dps were solely on Yogg but I couldn’t see his health at all due to having my hands quite full and overflowing with faceless tentacle spawns and then not wanting to stare into Yogg’s PURPLEZOFDEATHRAYS.

Oh crap, someone died. Craaaaaap two more died. Things are unraveling fast. I’m at 20%, there are five adds up and one is loose. Another person dies. Noooooo! I snuff it hard and immediately I spin my camera around to get a look at Yogg’s healthbar. At that second we had our shadow priest (Zarat) and our hunter (Zulrohk) alive and only those two alive. I open my mouth to say that it was a good attempt and we almost had it when suddenly…

Yogg just falls down and dies.

What what? My mouth hangs open frozen before the words ever started to come out and vent erupts into cheering, cautious and surprised cheering. Oh yes, it was true. The Big Bad of a Thousand Maws of Tentacle Hentai was dead.

Killing Yogg completes the most important goal Nocturne had as a guild to complete before 3.3. Awesome job guys!

But wait, there’s more!

After raid, I checked the auction house and found two pieces of elemenium ore for sale. Le gasp! I snatched them up immediately and in that moment I had finally obtained all the items I needed to get Thunderfury.

To the bank!

Let’s take a brief walk through the contents of my paladin’s bank. Kurinnaxx’s Venom Sac, check. 100 Halaa battle tokens, Tabard of the Argent Dawn as well as the Blood Knight tabard. The second row has my valuables: the Blood of Zul’jin, Kael’s Vial Remnant, Vashj’s Vial Remnant, Essence of the Firelord, and of course the two Bindings of the Windseeker.

To Silithus!

While waiting for Amaniita to arrive I got into a conversation with Zindo about buying new earphones for my iPod. He was less than thrilled with my choice.

 

All in all, a great night!

Solitus, my first WoW mentor, left quite the insightful comment on my last New Rules post in response to my rantings about the junk stats on the new Onyxia gear. I thought the points he made were so great that I’m reposting it in its entirety. Thank you for commenting Soli!

Hey. Is this the interwebz? *taps monitor* Is this thing on?

Right. I’m here to complain about the casual dismissal of the good old times.

Sure, the itemisation sucked, but it sucked for reasons other than simple incompetence. Blizzard tried to design hybrids as true hybrids, with shortcomings and advantages. A feral dpsser was, in theory, supposed to be able to shift out and help heal in a pinch, using the gear he was wearing for the damage role.

It was a world where shamans were the third best Horde tanking class. ‘Support’ classes were meant to have a viable and relevant group role in bloated 40-man raids. Mp5 did not actually exist as a stat and many stat-synergy talents were unheard of. Diminishing returns were added gradually from 1.4 to 2.3.

The min-maxers was wut done ruined it. Being blessing-and-off-heal bots, propping up the bottom of the damage meters to compensate for a utility you could theoretically bring to the raid if things go south, or spamming frostbolt for eight hours in Molten Core was suddenly not good enough for some people.

Obsession with everyone being a star at every show eventually begat the extreme homogenisation of class abilities in WoTLK with all its massively-pooled ‘reasonable’ stats. It’s a good outcome. The overall standard of living is higher. It might be interesting, however, to imagine alternative courses of the game’s evolution where end-game content would be tailored to satisfy both the pure min-max effectiveness yearning and the fiddly jack-of-all-trades utility yearning present in all of us. The rumoured scaling back of stat complexity in Cataclysm is intriguing in this context.

So, yeah. Cherish the sweet, sweet memories associated with tiny bits of resistance on Ony helms, for they are mementos of a younger, more hopeful world, with more possible futures.

And get off my lawn. You can use your level 20, sixty-silver Interdimensional Warp Mount to do so.

I caught this outstanding excerpt from a post written by Mikata over at Resto-Melee and it rang so true with me I had to repost it here.

I love, actually no, I prefer to talk and have fun during a raid, but like you said earlier, when that joking and fun causes a distraction, it quickly turns from fun and games to “Angry Raid Leader STFU AND LET’S FINISH THIS SHIT SO I CAN LOG AND GO SMOKE A CIGARETTE”

Its funny because I’ve said nearly those exact words after a long night of raiding and I don’t even smoke!

Not content to simply sully up Mikata’s posts with pingbacks I’d like to mention that the writers of Resto-Melee, I Like Bubbles and Casual Hardcore all play in the same guild which makes reading them all the more enjoyable. Check them out if you don’t already subscribe to them.

And on a related note, here’s someone else you should check out.

She runs a podcast called Wowcast, she blogs, she opened my world to HDR photography with what a friend of mine called the sexiest bucket he’d ever seen, and she does a live stream of her guild’s raids complete with ventrilo chatter. Her name is Alachia and she plays a resto shammy. Last night I, among others*, caught the Freya and Vezax fights from her livestream. I particularly enjoyed seeing other people wipe after pulling Freya while trying to nab those damn flowers that path through the middle field. Glad I’m not the only one to do that!

 

 

*Link taken from Alachia’s twitter feed.

Yet another post that started as a comment and then swelled with my verbosity. In response to Iris’s post Why I Don’t Like Death Knights.

All throughout the Burning Crusade I played a paladin as my main. I leveled as Prot, went to my first raid ever as Prot and finished out the expansion as Prot. In between my first and last BC raid I explored the wanderlust I often get and I tried out Ret and Holy. One fine guild was awesome enough to let me raid as Ret full time (and I did it exceedingly well if I do say so myself) and I saw the late late raid content as Holy.

My point being that I played the hell out of the paladin class in BC.

Tanking was and is my first love. I loved and hated being a pally tank though. I had so many gripes about the plight of paladins. We needed more avoidance than warriors to get uncrushable, we had to use spell damage gear, our talents and gear choices shunted us into the role of offtank, etc.

My biggest complaint was mana. Every frickin time I’d start a pull I’d toss my shield, drop a consecration and then be scraping the wrong end of my mana bar for the duration of the fight. I felt like I was constantly parched and never able to get enough to drink. A tank should not be needing to chug mana pots during a fight nor should they flask for mp5 to get through a fast badge run.

Towards the end, I was ready for a change. I looked at Death Knights and what Blizzard had been saying about them and their expected role. They were going to be able to tank and they wouldn’t have a mana bar. They’d use normal tanking gear but use a 2handed weapon. I was halfway sold already.

I got my beta invite early and got to work. I was massively influenced by the videos (which, tragicly, I can only find one of now and its the Unholy demonstration) Jade posted on his blog (now defunct) and I immediately fell in love with the class.

I’ve leveled a lot of characters. I have almost seven or eight max-level characters now, I wasn’t really interested at all in doing that whole grind all over again. Starting out at 55 was acceptable for me and quite a relief.

I’m quite happy that I made the change. Its been very fun and I find myself more content with Death Knights than I ever was with paladins.

My love affair with my paladin was stormy, violent, passionate and full of angst. Compared to that, playing the Death Knight is like being married to your best friend for decades and still having that spark.

I debated putting this advice in context but have decided not to simply because I have no desire to send these people any traffic at all.

If you ever get to the point where you’re frothing at the mouth with rage, swearing at anyone with a different opinion and then soliciting feedback with condescension dripping from your words (like the rubbish that came across my twitter today), its time to quit playing WoW and get a new hobby.

I suggest doing something with people who share your malady, politics for instance.

Too often I get carried away with ranting and even though I’m fully aware that’s the point of the internet I feel like I should offer up a different perspective from time to time. Don’t get me wrong, I love ranting. Not just any kind of ranting but the kind of Calvin-and-Hobbes style ranting that leads a person to building a transmogrifier out of a cardboard box to morph them into a dinosaur to eat the people in the original rant. At the end of such a rant the world looks quite cheery.

But let’s just make this post all about said cheeriness. Brace yourself for there shall be a few things that are not necessarily WoW related.

I like my knock-off Horatio Caine sunglasses.

They’re the cheapest of cheap knockoffs and they came with the nosepiece slightly bent but they’re still awesome and they still make me smile randomly as I walk to and from the train. They make life feel much more dramatic and tempt me into saying absurd puns while taking them off or putting them on. 5 stars.

I like my guild.

At the launch of Wrath I knew exactly what I wanted in a guild and I knew for certain I would never find it anywhere unless I had a hand in making it. I’ve had a vision of what it has to be and I think its been an amazing success. Thank you to everyone who have made this guild their home.

I like Pike’s tweets.

They’re so consistently there every day that I might not know what to do with myself otherwise. They are delightful and I heart them.

I like sugar.

Almost certainly far more than I should in fact. I think happiness and Hostess are synonyms. I do care that my sugar habit is wildly unhealthy but none of that matters at all when I see a box of those glazed donuts. Don’t even get me started on oreos.

I like tanking with a two-hander.

For one reason, it cuts down on one more slot I need to fill with loot. It also looks awesome and feels different from the sword and board tradition. In BC I loved hearing the block sound when tanking a bajillion things on my paladin. Now, I get to see the mad crazy blood elf SPECIALATTACKSPIN all the time. And if I decide to shaft the hunters in the raid by taking a polearm to tank with I can relive my glory days with the Blood-Tempered Ranseur and watch myself do artful acrobatics while spinning a spear behind my back.

I like tanking period.

Its just refreshing and safe and warm feeling to be pummeled relentlessly.

I like Acherus.

The view from the Death Knight batcave is not so scenic but the seclusion is pretty damn great. I really really enjoy this particular perk to being a former scourge automaton. Oh no guys I need to put a different class-exclusive enchant on the two-handed weapon I tank with, I must retreat to the secret society of renegade death knights in our floating necropolis in the sky where no others shall ever tread!

Finally, I like the community here and elsewhere.

I like Tam’s posts and comments, I like getting blog update announcements in my twitter and I like reading about the exploits of all of your interesting and diverse characters. I also like the gorgeous articles on www.dustincurtis.com, the latest of which is particularly lovely.

Thanks for sharing everyone!