2fps

New Rule – Beta invite > asbestos

As I’ve mentioned before, my condo is currently undergoing repairs for water damage and asbestos. This has put me in a state of temporary homelessness with corresponding lack of access to my computer. Thus, I’ve let my WoW subscription lapse. I’ve only just recently connected the dots between my lack of an active subscription and my lack of a beta invite. So to my good friends at Blizzard I say, I’m totally ok with renewing my subscription and increasing my risk of cancer if you want to toss me a beta invite!

New Rule – The guild bank is mine dammit

It’s time someone stood up to the draconian, socialist policies relating to Blizz’s treatment of guild banks. We bought all the bank tabs at no small price, we replenish the coffers at our own expense of time and effort and we deserve to use the guild bank’s funds as we as a guild see fit.

You see, Zenhakar of Nocturne has recently proposed to his lovely, brilliant girlfriend and I am what you might call “perpetually broke as a joke”, a “drain on society”, or even “omg why don’t you get a damn job”. Thus, the chances of my being able to afford a trip out to crash Zen’s wedding are not a sure thing. This is entirely unacceptable. I’m only asking that Blizz convert the currency in the guild bank into usable U.S. dollars so I can “oversee guild business” properly. It’s time to close this loophole with guild funds.

New Rule – Give me a real damn keyboard omg I am seriously not going to put up with this

Ok I won’t lie; I’m going to put up with this but dammit I won’t like it. This post was written on my iPod at 1am while lying down on a nearly-flat air mattress in the cramped computer room of my friend’s apartment. While I’m grateful to have a device to use to make blog updates, I’m annoyed as all hell at the horrific inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies inherent in virtual keyboards. Is it really that horrible to have a physical keyboard in my mobile device so I don’t have to argue with the auto-correct feature over every bleedin’ word I type?

This is roughly the one year anniversary of my first New Rules post. Crazy.

New Rule – Death to immunities

Remember how immunities were all the rage in vanilla and BC? Rag, Hydross, Curator, etc. all had immunities to certain schools of magic. This was fitting lore-wise but frustrating to play against. If you wanted to spec for Fire or Arcane or whatever you basically got a kick in the teeth on these types of fights. Heaven help you if you were a shaman farming the Elemental Plateau. There was even talk of having Sapphiron be immune to frost magic in the remake of Naxxramas for WotLK.

Then Blizzard decided to basically shelve the whole terrible concept and never use it again.

If only…

Ahune’s back and he’s as annoying as ever. All the adds are immune to frost making it very irritating to round them all up. Its not difficult, its just irritating to have Icy Touch essentially yanked out of my spellbook.

New Rule – Moar soulsssssss

Nocturne recently teamed up with another 10man raiding team to have a go at some 25man ICC. The raid went very well and the Nocturne folk cleaned up loot-wise. Zen finally got a new shield, Zarat got the Nibelung he’s been lusting for and I didn’t do so bad myself.

I got the drops from Festergut and Rotface that I needed for Shadow’s Edge. In anticipation for this, I had been hoarding primordial saronite for a while so that the moment we were done raiding I’d be able to get my new weapon.

Now its time to feed a thousand souls to the axe.

New Rule – No more capitalism please

As I mentioned above, I’ve been hoarding primordial saronite. Even with 7 80’s all running daily heroics for purchasing saronite I still felt like I wasn’t making progress quick enough so I did something that I do my best to avoid: I started using the auction house.

I have every profession maxed out between all my alts. I basically have a license to print money if I want. The thing is, playing the auction game bores me senseless and I absolutely loathe waiting around for auctions to sell. The interface for creating auctions is also pretty clunky although its better now than ever before.

But I needed saronite so I sucked it up and posted auctions for about twelve cut epic gems. I didn’t really want to do the research on which cuts were selling best so I just threw up a variety of a few I knew would be popular. I didn’t count on the Solid Majestic Zircon being my chief moneymaker but it didn’t take long for me to get the message. Every Solid cut I posted would get snatched up in minutes. By the end of the first day of auctioneering I had made somewhere near 10k gold from gems alone.

I could easily keep doing this. I could branch out into other markets as well. I could hit the gold cap, finance epic flying for all of my alts and do all the other things crazy rich people do. Thing is, its possibly the least fun thing I can think of to do in WoW. Therefore, a pauper I shall remain.

New Rule – We’re here to see the wizard, let us in!

This new contest for guilds to win Cata beta invites has been weighing on my mind since the second I found out about it (thanks J). I sent off the official email on behalf of myself and Nocturne within an hour of reading the rules and now its just a waiting game I suppose.

I haven’t been in oodles of game beta versions before but the WotLK beta was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced in this or any other video game. I liked the rapidly evolving environment, the sense of pioneering the unknown and helping guide the direction of the game.

I’m one of those people that likes to thoroughly research something before I jump in and do it. I pugged Naxx on a number of different toons in the Beta so I could have a leg up on knowing what to do when the expansion went live. I like, and actually need, to be able to have some kind of experience with a raid fight before I can start to formulate a workable strategy.

Ask Zindo what it was like for me trying to come up with a simple strategy for the Blood Princes before I’d done anything except read the list of abilities the bosses would use. Deer in the headlights man, deer in the headlights.

So I’ve put on my ruby slippers and I’m taking my guildies and we’re metaphorically off to see if we can get in to see the wizard for Cataclysm.

Yes, the trip is metaphorical, my ruby slippers are not. Be jealous.

New Rule – We’re here too

Remember when the blue posts were flying on MMOChampion about how exciting the loot was going to be from the Ruby Sanctum with particular emphasis on trinkets?

Turns out that was a bunch of crap that only applied to fake 25man raiders. The 10man loot table is just beyond atrocious so far. As far as we know at the moment, only one tank item drops in 10man mode and it covers the boot slot of all places. There are no trinkets listed as dropping in 10man mode.

There had damn well better be some stuff we don’t know about yet because despite what anyone else thinks, strict 10man raiders are here too.

New Rule – Go Holy or GTFO

Way back in BC when my guild was faltering on Gurtogg Bloodboil I talked to the healing lead about possibly speccing into a deep Disc build for Pain Suppressioning our clothies on the Fel Rage. I campaigned hard for the viability, if only situational, of a full Disc healer. Of course, nothing came of it because Holy was such a powerhouse by comparison.

Wrath launched and it seemed like Blizzard was listening to my stump speeches because Disc suddenly blossomed into a real true healing spec competitive not just with its Holy counterpart, but with any other healing spec from any other class as well.

The unfortunate fallout of this otherwise awesome turn of events is that so many priests have completely forsaken Holy altogether. To paraphrase one of my Nocturne guildies, it seems as if the Holy spec molested every priest in BC so people have sworn to never have anything to do with it again.

Here’s the thing: despite your objections and your hot displeasure, Holy actually is a great healing spec with a ton of awesome tools to bring to the table and you’re only gimping yourself and possibly your raid by sticking with vehement denials.

I campaigned for Disc back when nobody would touch it with a ten foot pole, I’ll do it again for Holy now!

New Rule – We’re smelting all other armor pieces to make new shields

When WotLK launched, warrior and paladin tanks were given a healthy variety of shields to choose from. There were no less than three item level 200 shields outside of raids with more shields coming from Naxx and Malygos. Awesome. One might even say it was a bit overkill.

As far as healer shields went things weren’t quite as rosy but were still pretty ok. There was one available with badges and at the time, we hadn’t figured out that mp5 was complete shit so we didn’t quite so much mind that the shield had that stat. There was also one off of Maexxna which was a reasonably killable boss.

Ulduar introduced two more tank shield and two more caster shields, one of each from hard mode Hodir. ToC gave us one more tank shield from a hard mode and one more caster shield. Now Icecrown offers one more tank shield and one more caster shield. The caster shield drops off of Sindragosa, not exactly one of the most accessible bosses in the zone.

Note that almost all the caster shields listed have mp5, by and large a completely wasted stat. The itemization seems to tell elemental shaman in particular to bugger off.

Yet two more shields were added in the Icecrown 5mans but these are both on the item level 219 scale and again the caster shield has mp5.

This sounds like a lot of variety on paper but really your options are pretty limited. You get the shield out of the 5mans on your own or you try and form a group for ToC. Its still too early for most people to start counting on getting a shield off Sindy if you’re a caster.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take the glut of item level 200 shields and all dps mail because I’m sick of seeing it and we’re smelting it all down to make new, better, more accessible shields. Pare down the unnecessary options for entry level tanks and throw us a bone at the higher end of the spectrum. I’m sure this is something that the elemental shammies will back me up on at least.

Hooray for guest writers! Today’s new rules come from Shintar of Priest With A Cause. I’ve said before that if you ever wanted to know what I thought about anything ever you could just read what Shintar has to say. I don’t think there’s any blogger out there that I agree with as often as I do with her.

New Rule – No more six-month content gaps

I know, I know, making quality content takes time, but let’s face it: one of WoW’s big appeals is that it’s always changing. If nothing new gets added or drastically changed for six months, things get stale regardless of whether you’ve beaten Arthas on heroic yet or not. Then people get bored and stop playing and it plays hell with any kind of attempt to keep doing large-scale group content on a regular schedule.

More and smaller updates, please! I want to keep raiding, but I can’t do it with half my guild cancelling their subscriptions because if they have to wipe on Putricide one more time they’ll want to kill themselves.

New Rule – We need more character slots per server

I can’t believe Blizzard encourages us to sink hours of time into levelling and gearing up alts, the upcoming Cataclysm changes are supposed to make people want to play with their friends more than ever, and yet they clearly don’t want us to do both at the same time. Ten character slots per server is simply not enough when you’ve been playing this game for four years or more! I really want to try out Goblins and Worgen when Cataclysm comes out, but the way things are now that will either mean starting on a brand-new server with no money and no friends, or deleting some of my beloved characters on my home server. Show us altoholics some love!

New Rule – The word "go" will automatically be removed from all chat by a spam filter

Can’t talk about your favourite Chinese board game anymore? Tough. As for the act of moving, that can be described just as well with verbs like move, walk, fly etc., which are all clearly too long to serve as substitutes for the annoying gogogo-ers in instances. Typing out more than two different letters? No time! Waiting for the healer to catch up? No time! Waiting for the tank to pull? No time!

It’s even spilling over into other parts of WoW right now; the other day I saw an advert in trade chat that said "Lf1M boomkin for VoA gogo". Because that will make people respond faster…? Just, no.

New Rule – Update on a weekend every once in a while

Come on guys, come oooooooonnnnnnnnn. My feed reader gets so empty so fast on weekends. I know the weekend generates very little traffic compared to regular weekdays but I still find myself checking my reader constantly on Saturday and Sunday. Being stuck inside sick on the weekend with nothing to read is just entirely unacceptable.

New Rule – Never again

See this? It should all be deleted.

The whole frost wing of Icecrown can just die forever as far as I’m concerned. It is aaaaaaawful. From the maddeningly boring/frustrating/impossible to troubleshoot Valithria encounter to the WHY THE HELL ARE THERE THREE FROST TOMBS UP AT ONCE OMG I CANT EVEN BELIEVE bitchslappery of Sindragosa, and the longest-most-boring-but-omg-seriously-how-many-adds-could-there-still-be trash in between the two, the entire wing was one nightmare-inducing prison rape scene.

NEVER AGAIN.

New Rule – This still doesn’t let you off the hook

This is me dueling with Arthas on the edge of the top of Icecrown’s spire. A waterfall of ice and frost cascades down to the frozen pit of Northrend below and only the tumult of thunder and lightning hangs over our heads. Truly, an awesome place for a final showdown.

Regardless, we’re still waiting for an apology for the Trial of the Crusader.

There’s a guest author for new rules today! Today’s rules come from Tart, aka Tartdarling, aka Tartshapdbox. Tart has the distinction of having dual citizenship in both Brotherhood of Oblivion on Azgalor and Nocturne on Moon Guard and if you don’t know about either of these guilds you are missing out. You can find more from Tart over at her blog Power Word: Bubble. Enjoy!

New Rule – If you are not a tank or healer DO NOT QUEUE AS ONE. 

No, I don’t care how short the queue times are. This especially applies to any instance that has "Heroic" in front of it. Your queue time means nothing to me if my overgeared for heroics bubble priest can not keep your non-defense capped arse alive in HEROIC VIOLET HOLD. Srsly. I can’t heal through a one shot and you with 500 defense trying to tank any boss in there are going to get nuked quicker than a microwave pizza. And my dps shaman is getting tired of seeing "well I’m boomkin/ele/prot(!) spec, but i can heal this" No, really, you can’t. Pinch heals if the regular healer bites it? Sure. But I hope to the WoW gods that you get one of those "I’m Fury/Ret/DPS-DK spec but I can tank!" tards with 500 defense to partner up with. 

New Rule – If whatever item you were in the instance for doesn’t drop – DON’T FUCKING BAIL.

You would think this would be stupidly obvious, but apparently not. This also applies to "Ding! oh…. sorry guyz i gota go" FAIL, people, EPIC FAIL. If you do this you can go hellfire yourself to death and may you be camped for hours by members of the opposite faction. Even if you are on a PvE server. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this while leveling. Some one just wordlessly and randomly drops group right after a boss leaving everyone going "what…. what?" and quickly checking atlas loot to go "that FUCKER. The Mace/Sword/Helm/Dagger of Help Me Suck Less must not have dropped" and then the fun of waiting for a replacement begins. This is especially irritating when it happens more than once in the same run.

New Rule: Sindragosa can suck it. 

She can take her crappy voice acting and bend over and give Nocturne loots like a proper raid boss should. And she needs to do it this week. (preferably tonight as I will be unable to raid on Thursday due to WOOO VACATION!) Arthas can also be Nocturne’s loot piñata and cough up the Kingslayer title for us. This also needs to happen so I can we can resume ICC loothoovering Frost Badge farming. 

Bonus New Rule – Tart gets whatever loot she wants in this week’s raid.

Yes, I will consider this an early birthday present from the guild. 

Ok fine, I will accept just SOME kind of "YAY YOU’RE OLDER NAO! /confetti" greetings via twitter/blog comments/green text on Wednesday or before. <3

New Rule – If you’re trying to screen bad players, don’t be bad yourself

Nothing makes me lose interest in joining a pug raid then one particular question.

You see the call go out in Trade chat: “LFM Nan Dungortheb, need 2 dps, 1 healer.” The announcement doesn’t smack of any particular idiocy and you’ve been meaning to pick up some loot from Ungoliant’s spawn so why not? You send the raid leader a whisper volunteering your pewpew services.

“Wats ur dps?”

…

Aaaaaaaaaaaand I’m out. Done. Do not care at all whatsoever anymore. That question tells me that you don’t really have any idea what you’re looking for and unless the number I give you in return is beyond ridiculous you aren’t going to be impressed anyway.

I could answer that my dps is over 10,000. That’s 100% true. I could also say that my dps is 3000, also true. Damage done is dependent on context for meaning, elsewise its only use is to flaunt your wowcock.

New Rule – Know where the hell you’re going

When I dinged 70 back in Burning Crusade on my first character I made a point of going back and soloing as many of the old world vanilla dungeons and raids that I could. I had to get help for Upper Blackrock, not only because of the numbers requirements to get past the door but also because Drakk’s conflag was still pretty wicked at the time without a healer. I got attuned to Onyxia, I got the Seal of Ascension, I got the hammer to summon Gahz’ranka even.

As I was doing all this old world stuff I was also working on my Arcatraz key, figuring out which floating barge was the Botanica and which was the Mechanar, learning where the Caverns of Time were and which portal was which, etc.

Why?

Because I never wanted to be the clueless one in the group. If I got a whisper inviting me to do Heroic Mech, I don’t want to be freaking out about trying to find the damn place on a map. Its discourteous to the rest of the group in my opinion.

The dungeon finder tool has bestowed upon us all a slew of people who have never been to the summoning stone of the instance they’re queued for, people who may have never even been in the same zone as the instance they’re in. This has led to a metric ton of people who, after wiping in say… Halls of Reflection, flounder around in Icecrown for twenty minutes before leaving the group in embarrassment because they’re completely incapable of finding the entrance.

Know that kind of thing before you queue please and thank you!

New Rule – So help me if you still have your hearth set to Dalaran Zulrohk I will murder your face off

I THINK THE PEOPLE THAT NEED TO HEAR THIS KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

New Rule – If you have a Chilly Slobberknocker equipped, let someone else do it

I know you mean well and good on you for trying but when you come into a battleground with zero resilience and leveling blues and think you stand a chance at getting that flag back to your side you’re actually acting like a double agent for the other team. They’ll be more than happy to pull people off of defense if it means they can get their flag back just by mowing you down on the way back home. You see that prot warrior with loads of pvp gear? Let her grab the flag!

New Rule – If you’re level 80 and you’re not doing pvp, take Drain Life off your action bar

Its crap damage and advertises that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. Particularly in a 5man, there should never be a time when Drain Life will help you. Yes there are the exceptions that prove the rule but they don’t apply to you. Or you. Or you in the back. Certainly not you with that Chilly Slobberknocker!

Are we sensing a theme?

New Rule – I’m totally ok with you being mad

Recently I decided I was enjoying WoW too much so I decided to gear my mage for pvp. I started the honor grind with a grand total of 20 resilience from my level 70 trinket and have been cutting myself ever since. I’m up to almost 500 resilience now and even though that’s hardly anything, pair it up with Ice Barrier and I can actually stay alive for a while.

Anyway. I joined up with a VoA25 group recently and was accosted by one of the other mages in the group.

“HEY DO YOU PVP. YOU BETTER NOT PVP BECAUSE I WANT THE WRATHFUL GEAR AND IF YOU WIN IT I’LL BE MAD. SO MAD.”

This pleasant fellow went on in this manner saying that if you weren’t rocking a 2000 rating with a rogue/mage/priest team you had no business taking pvp gear for any reason. The same tired rants spewed out of his mouth about how battlegrounds aren’t real pvp and anyone who doesn’t do it his way is wrong, etc. Of course he only talks like every WoW stereotype ever, even down to the gratuitous use of the pejorative “scrub”.

His trump card is his Warlord title which only makes me think he probably smells bad.

Of course, ultimately he proves every suspicion I have about him correct when we all zone in and he finds out… gasp! He’s already saved to VoA25 this week! His last words before leaving the raid are “Good luck mages on pvp gear. Except Adrina. I hope you don’t win anything scrub!” Powerful words coming from someone who can’t tell their ass from a raid lockout.

Guess what dude. If I win the roll on the Wrathful gear I’m seriously thinking of making a fraps of me deleting it forever in front of you. Just for fun. Or maybe I’ll gem it with spirit and run around in circles in Warsong Gulch because honestly, I’m very very all right with you being mad.

New Rule – You’re not a pirate

I don’t know how this got started but it makes me roll my eyes every time I see it.

Ignore what the healer said about the ghoul by the way, that’s just silly talk.

No, instead focus on the top part. Really guys? You can’t type out even just one full word? “r” is all you can muster? Gosh it must be tough getting out of bed every day if you can’t strain your muscles any more than to type just one letter responses.

New Rule – Wrap up the blues

As I’ve said before and as Chastity says here, the whole blue dragonflight plotline is a pretty awkward piece of work. I suppose its just another case of Blizzard royally mucking up when it comes to storytelling but this is the first bit of that you find in this expansion. Later you’ll come to appreciate the odd sidetrack to kill Yogg-Saron and then at the end you’ll find that every quest and npc lied to you about the nature of the Lich King and everything that was set up as truth ended up being scrapped and tossed aside in favor of one of the most egregiously terrible pieces of plot that WoW has to offer.

What happened to the blue dragonflight? What happened to the Scarlet Onslaught? What happened to Malganis? What happened with Azjol-Nerub? Why was the Lich King plot so radically changed?

The Malygos plot line is a story that could have really gone places but was brushed over entirely for more “important” things like jousting and… more jousting. Could we stop doing that please? Thanks.

New Rule – Moar buffs faster nao!

Say what you want about the ICC zone buff but I love it and want more stacks of it forthwith! After you spend week after week flawlessly downing early bosses in any raid you start to get a little crazy. Its repetitive, there’s no danger, there’s no excitement, its just the same hoops to jump through on your way to new things. Bring on the buff so we can get to the parts everyone wants to do darnit!

New Rule – MOAR GEMS

If I’m a transmute master alchemist and I transmute an epic gem, I want a chance to proc multiple gems dammit! I didn’t complete some trivial task way back in the Burning Crusade just so I could be disappointed day after day after day by gems that weren’t even conceived of back then failing to spawn in breathtakingly high numbers now.

New Rule – Spend your offseason with Single Abstract Noun

After the smoke has cleared and you’ve participated in Blizzard’s nonsensical plotline of slapping a bucket of doom on Bolvar’s head, give serious thought to joining in on the antics of Single Abstract Noun. You already know what this is because every WoW player with a blog has been talking about it of late. So once your super srs bsns has concluded and you’re free from the rigors of a raiding schedule, well you’ll simply have no excuse not to come hang out with the cool kids.

And speaking of offseasons…

New Rule – Keep it together

The end is in sight. A trifling handful of bosses are all that’s left. This raiding season we have, along with the rest of the world, trounced Naxxramas thoroughly. We have, like most of the world, routed the troops of Yogg-Saron. We have, like everyone else in the world, facerolled ToC with our eyes closed.

This is the end of the season. Only a trifling handful of games left before besting Arthas and then resting on our laurels. After that, the glorious offseason begins. An offseason filled with whatever the hell we want. Excursions into Ulduar for Algalon’s sparkly blood, whimsical romps through AQxx to punch Yogg’s family members in their tentacled faces, spontaneous pickup groups for ransacking Icecrown for gear for our alts and anything else that strikes our fancy.

However, it isn’t the offseason yet. There are still games (however few) to play. We need to take care that our focus remains clear. We set out to play a full season and to have it all unravel now would be a terrible disgrace.

Keep practicing, keep pushing yourself. Do better. Heal more, endure more, hurt things more. Don’t stand in that, don’t stand near that, do stand next to me, don’t stand next to her, shout more at hunters, keep withholding heals from the rogues, BE BETTER.

Remember though, you are part of a team. Frustrations and misunderstandings are common but right now, you’re a team. Now is not the time for infighting; its far too late for that.

It won’t be long now, just keep it together.