Category: blogging

Post of Miscellaneous Stuff

Kurn / / blogging, general, guild, paladins, raiding, ramblings

1) I’m behind on comments. I am bad. I will respond soon. :) Er, that might be Soon ™. Actually, probably tomorrow.

2) I have the makings of a post in my head about healers and tanks and obligations to guilds. More of an observatory post, looking back on the changing roles of healers and tanks within a guild over the years. I hope to post this sometime this week.

3) Getting to be around time for another Holy How-To post. I still find myself reluctant to do anything about healing meters and parses and stuff. Anything anyone is particularly curious about? Wondering about? Need to know about? Would LIKE to know about?

4) My new guild has done a few pulls on heroic Sindragosa 25 (before I showed up) and plans on playing with her tonight, so I’ve tossed in probably a dime’s worth of information in on the discussion. Tips and tricks for helping me NOT sound like a know-it-all tool would be welcome. ;) I seem to have three settings:

a) No comment. I just literally don’t say anything. I have trouble with this.

b) “If you have any questions, let me know!” which I say a lot in general (see #3 above!) but then that means not saying anything. With which I have trouble, as noted.

c) “UR DOIN IT WRONG”. (See basically every post I’ve ever written.)

Tips and tricks for helping me steer clear of “C” would be lovely. Not that I think they’re doing anything wrong or whatever, but I AM prone to opening my big mouth and would like to pre-emptively shut it, just in case.

5) Oh, yeah, PATCH DAY TOMORROW, in all likelihood, as per MMO-Champion. Dammit, I better get used to Sindragosa without AVR, pronto.

6) The guild got another holy pally app today who doesn’t totally suck on paper but lacks a shoulder enchant and a bracer enchant. He uses the 245 holy libram, not the Libram of Renewal. He’s glyphed for Seal of Light (yet gemmed straight intellect with one exception) and picked up 4/5 Toughness instead of 3/3 Imp Righteous Fury (right, armor’s going to be useful at all, there, buddy) while building down to Divine Guardian. He’s not quite off the mark enough to be “UR DOIN IT WRONG” but enough off the mark to concern me, so I wrote a quick review for my GM who was then basically like “<3” and asked him questions about his choices in his app thread. I can’t WAIT to see how he justifies ANYTHING!

7) Blog maintenance. At some point this week, I’m going to upgrade to v3.0 of WordPress. No IDEA how this will affect some of my plugins, if at all, so maybe Thursday is when I’ll tackle that. Pray for an easy upgrade.

And with that, back to working on my RL friend the resto druid’s website. Yes, folks, my life is really that thrilling.

Musings and Ramblings

Kurn / / apotheosis, blogging, guild, raiding, ramblings

I just spent about an hour working on my guide to getting the Key to the City, but I just couldn’t get the narration right. Most of the time, I just have a basic idea of what I want to say and say it, but I kept screwing up my narration. Perhaps 3am is not the best time to try to record myself describing a key run.

It’s now four in the morning and I find myself thinking about the nature of guilds. This is likely unsurprising, given my recent transition to my new server and guild, but it’s not just stemming from that.

Rohan, over at Blessing of Kings, always has neat stuff to say, but the other day, he posted about Group Content and Group Creation. Go read his post, then come back. I’ll wait.

Rohan talks about how there are two types of group content: transient and extended.

As I was reading the post, it dawned on me; I pretty much loathe tranient group content. I participate in it just about daily and sometimes more than once and I think the Random Dungeon Finder is amazing for a lot of reasons. But I hate the non-permanence of it.

It used to be that, back in the day, you would search high and low for a group to run a dungeon with you. Or, you’d get together with guildies and find another person or two and go tackle a dungeon together.

These people were always on your server; there was no cross-realm queue. These people were people you could add to your friends list and ask them if they wanted to tank/heal/DPS for you some other time. These people were potential recruits for your guild, too.

I remember doing a Molten Core attunement run once, back in the day. I was level 60 on my hunter and I was taking a tank and two DPS with me through to the part of BRD where you get the quest item. I’d done the run half a dozen times before and knew my way through BRD. All we needed was a healer.

After spamming Trade and LFG for a few minutes, a druid whispered me, saying he’d go.

The run was a success. We had one ugly moment with Ambassador Flamelash, but the druid healer gave us all some fire resist potions he had (!) and the second time was the charm. So impressed was this druid with the overall efficiency (and yes, leadership) of the run that he asked me if we were recruiting druids.

He was already guilded so I insisted he take his time to determine if he wanted to app to us, since I didn’t want to ninja him from another guild. A couple of days later, he applied and was accepted.

That he turned out to be someone who would chase greener pastures, leaving our guild not once, but TWICE, is more or less irrelevent. He was some pug who we picked up and was a valuable addition to the guild when he was with us.

That kind of experience is all but dead and gone now, with the Random Dungeon Finder. And I hate it. I hate that I don’t recognize people in my pugs on any server. I hate that I’m doing my daily content (for frost badges) with people I don’t know and may never see again (which isn’t a horrible thing in many cases, but still!). I don’t like that I’m doing weekly raid content (VOA/weeklies) without my guild. Of course, I COULD just do it with my guild, at least on my pally, but my hunter doesn’t have a real guild. Neither does my shaman, my druid, my mage or my priest. For those toons, it’s great to be able to pug the content.

I remember the days where you used to have to get someone to vouch for you before you’d be invited to any raid pugs. I couldn’t stand the warrior officer back in our old, old, pre-BC guild, but he knew damn near every serious raider on the server and forged those relationships so that he could get into pugs — and he’d sometimes have spots for others, which everyone jumped at.

This whole expansion has really been the rise of the pug raid group. Everyone can pug anything. This bothers me. Maybe I’m being a snob, maybe I’m being unreasonable and stubborn, but I really feel like raiding, the high-end raids, should be the domain of, you know, raiding guilds. I think that there was something special about belonging to a guild in the original game. I remember when we, as a guild, first set foot in Molten Core, four years ago. We basically just went in and farmed trash a bit. We got Arcanist Bindings, our first piece of T1 gear ever, which went to our resident Arcane mage, Jaymie.

It was this epic experience, though. Getting the Molten Giants down, the Lava Surgers, Firelords, Lava Annihilators, the Ancient Core Hounds (LOOT YOUR HOUNDS!!!)… There was a very real, noticeable progression with our group. We went from 20-some people farming trash to a group of about 30-35 people killing bosses. Lucifron’s first death was freaking amazing. Magmadar relied on us hunters to use Tranq shot and not miss. And, by golly, I MADE SURE my hunters didn’t miss! Downing him was a freaking miracle made possible by me and my trusty sidekick, Toga.

We were eventually able to kill through Golemagg. Killing him spawned Majordomo and we succeeded in spawning Domo a couple of times, even if we never did attempt him.

But knowing that we COULD attempt him was an AMAZING feeling! After attunement, scheduling issues, recruitment problems, balance issues, it was just SO EPIC, such an amazing feeling, to step into Molten Core and know we could down eight of the bosses. We were the little guild that could!

Where’s that epic feeling? It’s gone. Or at least, it hasn’t happened for me in this expansion. It happened in BC — seeing my guild progress from Kara through to killing Vashj and Illidan, now THAT was amazing.

Tier 7 content, barring Sarth and drakes or something like 6m Maly, was too easy to elicit any kind of pride. The proof is that my little raid group went in and cleared the Spider Wing and Plague Wing and got Razuvious down on our first night. Never mind that we never did kill Thaddius and such before the guild broke up; that’s wasn’t because Thaddius was hard. That was because we had no DPS showing up anymore, which is something else entirely.

The end of Apotheosis is where my extended content group and I parted ways. I’ve been looking for a new home, a new extended content group, since then, so that these downings actually mean something to me. I can count on one hand the encounters that really meant something to me since the end of Apotheosis:

1) Sartharion + 3 drakes: This was my big chance with my Bronzebeard guild to really show that I knew my stuff and wasn’t a noob. They’d already done Sarth3D a few times, but it was definitely not on farm. The first time I downed Sarth3D was pretty amazing.

2) Yogg-Saron: In the raid with me was my buddy Euphie and in a chat channel with us was Osephala. Two of my Apotheosis folks were with me, and Euphie and I were healing together for Yogg. Plus I did the healing assignments for Yogg and even made the useless priest be useful by getting him to take the portals. So there! Having Kal and Fad and Saku around was also basically awesome. I seem to surround myself with amazing healers. <3

3) Algalon: Killed this guy with my last guild, with my RL friend the resto druid. The “Astral Walker” title is the only title she and I share that we have earned together at the same time, so it is totally precious to me.

4) The Lich King: My healing strat based on my RL friend’s initial strat. It was super important for me to get him down because I wanted my RL friend to know the guild wasn’t stunted without her, that we could totally use having her back, but that she could feel free to focus on her RL stuff and not worry about the guild.

Plus, you know, being resurrected by Terenas Menethil is AWESOME.

I spent six months on Bronzebeard. Ten months with my last guild. And neither of them felt like extended content groups. Not the way my old Fated Heroes did. Not the way Apotheosis did.

I’ve been searching for a new home for over a year and I’m on to what is technically my fourth guild in this expansion.

Will this be the guild that becomes my new extended content group? Or will this just be another stepping stone for me before we try to bring back Apotheosis? Will this guild be the one that actually prevents me from becoming a GM again with Apotheosis 2.0? Or will this be just another bunch of scattered memories?

I’m not sure, yet. But I do know that there’s one more boss kill that needs to be added to the above list.

5) Valithria Dreamwalker’s rescue — my second “first time”: I’d been in the guild not even 36 hours and we rescued heroic Dreamwalker for the first time for them. THAT meant something to me. It meant more to me than doing it the first time I’d done it. It meant more to me than any other heroic boss downing. (Sindragosa and Putricide come close, admittedly.)

So maybe I’ve found a new extended content group that will last me at least until Cataclysm comes out, and perhaps beyond, depending on what my Apotheosis people want to do.

But I do know that it’s taken me way too long to find a group like these people, a group that even gives me a glimmer of hope of being something beyond a transient-feeling extended group. It’s not to say that I haven’t found some amazing people along the way (basically, all my healers from Bronzebeard save, uh, the other paladins, one of the shammies and one of the priests) but it’s been way too long since I’ve been a part of a group that I actually felt meant something. I’m trying to keep from getting my hopes up too much; SOMETHING has to be wrong with this group, right? Oh, wait, I know! What’s “wrong” with them is that they actually read this thing. ;)

But seriously, the idea that I haven’t felt like I’ve been in an extended group is an interesting one. Is this why I’ve not liked this expansion? Too much transient content and not enough extended? It’s all been transient since the end of Apotheosis, it feels like, even when I was guilded.

I think it’s this transience that makes me long for the days of BC raids. I hated the dungeons, thought BC was pretty lame on the whole, but my God, did I love our raids.

Okay, two hours after starting this post, I think I’m done rambling and pondering for the night, or perhaps more accurately, the morning.

How do you feel about your guild? This expansion? What is your most epic feeling from this game, and did it come from an experience you had with your guild?

The Second Raid

Kurn / / addons, blogging, facepalm, guild, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

The second raid was infinitely better than the first. And the first wasn’t bad or anything.

We got Saurfang down after a few attempts. We stomped on heroic Rotface and heroic Festergut, killed regular Putricide (getting most people their Nausea, Heartburn… achievement), then stomped on the Blood Princes and BQL.

Then we looked at heroic Dreamwalker.

My new guild had never killed heroic Dreamwalker before.

We did it on our second try.

And that is a part of why I joined the guild. People were saying to me all night long in whispers how awesome it was that I was there, how much they enjoyed having me there, how I was just what they needed… And I think that’s got to be true. We downed Saurfang for the second time for them, Dreamwalker healed to full for the first… and I played significant roles in those fights.

I totally noobed it up on Festergut, though. Fellow healers, please take this as a warning and DO NOT DO WHAT I DID.

I use Clique and Grid. I have Clique binds for most of my spells. Flash of Light is left-click (shift-left click is to target), Holy Light is right-click, Sacred Shield is shift-right-click, Cleanse is middle-click, Beacon of Light is shift-middle-click, Holy Shock is thumb-click and Lay on Hands (a relatively new bind from about three weeks ago) is shift-thumb-click.

Tonight, before Saurfang, I was looking at my bindings and trying to figure out where I could put Hand of Protection for easier access during Saurfang instead of shift-left-click and then clicking on my Hand of Protection button.

So I figured Ctrl-Thumb-Click.

Who here sees where this is going?

I try out the binding a couple of times. I don’t like it. I DO like the thumb-click part of it, but the Ctrl is just a little far out of the way for me.

So I open up Clique. I decide to edit that bind.

And I promptly bind it to Shift-Thumb-Click.

Uh, Kurn? Didn’t you say that Shift-Thumb-Click was Lay on Hands?

Why yes. Yes I did.

Uh…?

Yeah.

So NORMALLY, when you try to bind something in Clique to an existing combination, it yells at you. But that’s apparently on the main screen only when you’re clicking the combination in your spellbook.

If you edit the bind directly, you can overwrite any prior combination. Without the yelling.

Oh, God, Kurn. What did you do?

Well, Saurfang went great with me BOPping someone on each attempt with ease.

Festergut, well, there we are, one tank with 9 stacks of the debuff, the other with 7 stacks, probably with Fester at under 20% health and I see the active tank (7 stacks) is about to die and so I do what any good paladin would have done; I went for my Lay on Hands bind, which has been, for the last few weeks, Shift-Thumb-Click. Which I UNKNOWINGLY bound to Hand of Protection.

Tank is BOPped, other tank gets aggro and blows up the raid because he hit 10 stacks.

I was completely oblivious as to why the tank got a 10th stack of his debuff. The GM said something in healer chat along the lines of “ha, ha, who bopped the tank?” and the ret pally was like “Not me!” and then I paused, remembering that I HAD messed with my Clique bindings and I HAD tried to cast LOH on the tank and hey, why wasn’t that on cooldown? Why WAS Hand of Protection on cooldown?

I checked my Clique binds and found the problem and switched Shift-Thumb-Click back to Lay on Hands and then let them know what had happened.

Apparently, I made the MT laugh, so, uh, way to go me?

I told him that it could have been worse, I could have DIed him the way I did one of our tanks on Bloodboil back in the day and he replied to say that a DI would have been the only thing that would have been funnier than a BOP.

>< Still annoyed! In my last guild, I was teased for standing in fire for months by my RL friend the resto druid and another RL friend of hers. And now, I’m going to be known as “the pally who bopped the tank”. /facepalm

By the way, I’m still in search of a good Clique-bind for BOP! :P

Anyways, getting Saurfang and Dreamwalker down was awesome. I also managed to snag heroic Unclean Surgical Gloves and heroic Crypt Keeper’s Bracers, which is kind of hilarious, given that it’s my second raid with them. EPGP is an odd beast and I’m going to have to read up on it again, but it’s got this nifty mod that makes things super easy.

In other guild-related things, my new GM and I are hitting it off beautifully. There’s a mutual admiration society going on and we just totally get along. I did not transfer with the intention to make good friends; I just wanted to escape the douchebags, but she’s definitely someone who has the potential to be one of those awesome people I still keep in touch with even if I’m not playing. The weird thing is that she already knows a stupid amount about me — she knows my real first name, she knows about this blog… It’s like, in the span of a couple of days, the woman already knows a ton about me.  I feel a little bit naked, if that makes sense. I mean, I go through a fair amount of effort to construct and maintain my various WoW personas, all of which have the “true” me at the center of them, mind you. But, for example, if I’m on my hunter, chances are, I’m going to be quieter. Just let me be there, in the back, shooting things. It’s what I like to do.

If I’m on my paladin, I’m not so quiet. I’ve spent a LOT of time as some kind of stupid leader in this game, including YEARS of that stuff on the paladin. Kurn-while-on-the-paladin is a lot more outspoken, a lot more critical (HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE HASTE OMG FAIL) and can get frustrated really easily.

My GM has somehow managed to dissemble these personas, more or less, because I’m basically my actual self in talking to her. That doesn’t happen too often, at least without my expecting it. This just kind of happened.

There’s an opportunity, which will remain more or less cryptic, for a mutual exchange of information, a mutual way to get to know each other better. Part of me wants to participate. Part of me does not. The part of me that wants to is all like “HELL YEAH!!!!” and the part of me that doesn’t isn’t remotely as enthusiastic in trying to talk me out of the idea. It’s more like “Dude, whatever, give it a couple of weeks. You’ve been in the guild for like, 36 hours.”

It would involve stripping off yet another layer of my carefully constructed personas. “Kurn” and “Madrana”, if you will, are very public personas of mine. It’s still me in there, but there are things about me that none of my readers, no matter how dear to me, will ever know. Things that my long-time raiding companions never knew and probably will never know. You know, real life stuff.

All of this feeds into my interest in identity theory, online personas, the use of the Internet for anonymity… And really, you know, that’s it. That’s what’s bugging me about this. If this exchange of information happens, I’ve lost any real sense of anonymity I still have. Okay. Now that I know why it’s something I’m hesitating about, it’s time to figure out if that even matters.

Actually, it’s well past time for sleep. I’ll figure that bit out in the morning or, perhaps more accurately, the afternoon. ;)

Apologies for the sidetrip into the land of sociological musings. I hope the Festergut story made the entry worth reading. ;)

Brief Update

Kurn / / blogging, facepalm, guild, icecrown citadel, lfg, ramblings

1) Paladin is on Skywall, guilded. All mods seem to be working (YAY DXE, YAY DBM, YAY GRID & CLIQUE & DOMINOES!) with very little effort (sigh, CLCBPT, you fail. SexyMap, you too.) and I’ve already made money with my bank alt. ;)

2) I was guilded for maybe 30 minutes when my new GM found the blog. Hi! ;)

She apparently is more like me than I thought since we both have the ability to stalk online. ;D

I felt just a wee bit embarassed about the mush I’ve previously posted, but it’s all good. And it was a harmless reminder that anyone can actually find and read this.

(I’d hope if any of my former guildies find this, they’ll see how much trouble I took to not name names. You won’t find me naming names in my new guild, either.)

3) Reckoning hates me. I queued up for the daily heroic (I think it reset, since I got 2 frosts on my last server and then 2 frosts on the new one) and it gave me… Heroic Halls of Reflection. Thanks, RNG. Love you too.  I arrived after what had been a wipe where both the tank and healer had left. The tank who arrived with me promptly left. Five minutes later, we have a tank. It was not super smooth (DPS need to stop pulling aggro and standing in front of cleaving mobs) but we got through relatively unscathed. I haven’t healed it as a pally in a long time — I miss my chain heals, dammit. ;)

Anyways. I need to grab some food before the raid, which is in, you know, 40m. Which is new. And early. Working on LDW HM apparently, and I’m hoping all my DXE settings really DID carry over so I don’t look like a moron eating ghosts.

Stupid Vengeful Shades. WHY must they be so vengeful?

Oh! And thanks to everyone who listened to me bitch about my last guild and how I was unhappy and for wishing me well on my new server. <3 It’s meant a lot. :)

24 Hour Downtime

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

In all seriousness, a 24-hour break from this game is something I need to do more frequently. That doesn’t mean that the fact it’s not on MY timetable doesn’t bother the crap out of me.

Anyways, Tuesday, June 8th, will be a busy day here on ye olde blogge. I’d start my posting frenzy now, but I am le tired. As such, I am not attending my raid AND I am going to bed early. So THERE!

That said, I thought I’d let you all know what is coming up tomorrow.

1) Healing: Paladins vs. Shammies vs. Druids vs. Priests. Just a look at the four classes and their healing roles from my perspective and (in some cases) limited experience.

2) Kurn’s Q&A 20, where we look at such search terms as:

“holy paladin wearing mail”

“can u reset the keepers in ulduar”

and, my favourite:

“how the fuck do you get into halls of reflection when you die”

Then, depending on Real Life stuff, I may also write up:

3) Holy How-to #7: How NOT to be a Holy Paladin. This will be a detailed examination of many of the mistakes Failadin ™ made while applying to my present guild. Specifically, mistakes made in the Lower Spire. I plan to include a link to a WoL parse where I’ll have changed all the names, to preserve anonymity.

And finally, if time permits:

4) Kurn’s Guide to Stratholme (Live side), assuming I can get the narration done properly and upload the darn thing.

No World of Warcraft for 24 hours means there’s no game to distract me from the blog, mwahahaha. ;)

Redesign Done

Kurn / / blogging

Okay, so the redesign is more or less done! I currently have no links to other blogs posted, but that’s more a function of the fact that my links section was woefully outdated, so I’ll take some time and fix that up and get them up soon.

The polls should work, but the poll archive link will not go away no matter what I try to do. Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there was actually an archive to link to.

As to the small google ad over there, I’m already blocking uncool sites, but over the next week or so, please do copy the URL (don’t click on the ad! Right-click, copy link address!) and use this form to help me block more evil advertisers. That is available up at the “Bad Ads” link in the top right and the link directly below the ad itself. You shouldn’t see too many questionable ads of other sorts, though, since I was able to filter them at a category level. Sadly, gold-selling ads, etc, fall under “video games”, and it doesn’t make sense to block that category on a site that is, you know, dedicated to a video game. ;)

Anyways, if you see anything else that’s broken or looks icky, please do let me know!

ETA: Some display issues in Chrome that I may or may not work on at some point. Also, the ads are now starting to show spiritual healing ads. Ahahahaha.

ETA Again: Fixed the Chrome issue. It was displaying the page’s title as text on the page, offsetting the entire header. I moved the wowhead script below the title tag in the code, et voila.

Potential Downtime and Redesign

Kurn / / blogging

Since I’m not sure exactly what percentage of my readers actually visit the site (averaging about 100 visits a day) and what percentage read from an RSS reader (no idea what this number would be like), I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that my blog site here has become extremely cluttered. It’s not unlike my real-life spaces, to be honest! I guess I carry my clutter everywhere with me. ;)

My front page has my twitter feed, random polls I put up from time to time, achievement feeds, category links, links to other blogs, armory links, all kinds of stuff. It’s feeling a little much and it certainly could be organized better. So, at some point in the next week or so, expect the layout to change significantly. Expect me to break something at some point. Expect the blog to be inaccessible sometime. I’m not sure anything will break, nor am I sure it’ll be inaccessible, but whenever I’m confident that I won’t break something, I do. :P

I’m also planning on putting in some code for some Google text ads, primarily to help defray hosting costs, but also because I’m interested in building up the site a bit more and if I’m going to put in more energy than I currently do, I’d kind of like to see if I can get any returns on it. I rather suspect that advertising on a personal kind of blog is kind of frowned upon in the blogging community, because I don’t see a lot of it. That said, I thought I’d throw in some very simple advertisements while doing the redesign and if my traffic drops substantially because of it, I’ll remove it. My overall goal is to share information about World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives (but obviously the Holy Paladin perspective tends to be the main one these days) and to share my raiding experiences. That does include random daily frustrations, annoyances and the like, but also the awesomeness of progression. When we get LK heroic down on 25-man, I’ll be posting about it, that’s for sure. I plan to write about Ruby Sanctum. I plan to write about Cataclysm.

I plan to write about a lot of things and for quite some time, so if advertisements will prevent a significant amount of people from coming here and reading all the stuff I’ve written or plan to write, I’ll drop them from the site.

In the month of April, I had 4532 pageviews from 2729 visits, for an average of 1.66 pages per visit. Average time on site was 2m22s. So we’ll see if any of that drops for June or so, eh?

Anyways, thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you’ll be reading for quite some time. :)

Beta Beta Bo-Beta…

Kurn / / achievements, apotheosis, beta, blogging, cataclysm, lfg, ramblings

As I wait in the interminable Bloodlust (Alliance) queue for a dungeon, waiting for someone to need a level 68 healer, I thought I’d drop in my two cents about the upcoming Cataclysm Beta.

I got into the Wrath beta, thanks to my RL friend the resto druid. She had a spare beta key that she gave me and I spent much of my time screenshotting things, getting my hunter to 73, laughing my ass off when Unholy Blight would crash world servers and generally exploring things. I remember when Infusion of Light would cause an instant HOLY LIGHT, not just a Flash of Light. I remember when there was only a 25% penalty to healing when using Divine Plea, not a 50% one.

I really enjoyed my time in Beta. I got to see half-finished mobs in Dragonblight, I got to experience quests before others. You know the quest for Nexus called Quickening? You kill the big ol’ tree things in the zone and get Arcane Splinters. In Beta? They weren’t group loot. There were like, 10 of them available total or something. I wrote feedback, recommending group loot or 25 total so that all five people could get their quest items if all five people were on the quest. Guess what? That’s what happens on live. :D

I also really enjoy just learning the new mechanics before things go live. One thing I hate about expansions is that it’s a near-total knowledge reset. By the end of Burning Crusade, I could have tanked on a warrior at 70, even though my own warrior is only level 16. I had done my research. I could have played just about any spec of any class adequately throughout any encounter from Kara to BT. I might not have topped damage meters or healing meters or been able to hold aggro from our resident fury warrior while I was tanking, but I knew enough about what abilities were available to everyone and when they should use them that I could have done an okay job.

Come Wrath, most of that knowledge was gone.

“Vigilance?” I remember asking, “What the hell is that?”

It typically takes me at least a full year to be relatively acclimated to the game changes an expansion brings. Beta knocks off a bit of that time and lets me learn about my own classes right off the bat so that I have the knowledge that’s most important to me already subsumed by the time live hits. When live hits, it’s about learning about other classes, newer quests and instances I never tried on beta and such.

I’m hoping I get into Cataclysm’s beta early on so that I can learn about some of the big changes — guilds, mastery, archeology and the like — as well as my own classes so that when Cataclysm comes out, I am ready to hit the ground running.

I really do want to restart my dear old Apotheosis (most of the time, anyways!) and the best way for me to do that is to go into 4.0 filled to the brim with knowledge about how things work in Cataclysm.

The thought of going forth into the beta and the next expansion really reminds me, too, that a lot of the content I post here, the informative stuff, is technically time-sensitive. My Holy How-Tos are going to be all but useless come the expansion. Definitely something to bear in mind, going forward. Every patch, every expansion, things will probably change, which is something I haven’t had to deal with since I only REALLY started blogging in earnest after 3.3 hit, despite the fact I started this blog up around 2.4!

Anyways, should I get into the beta, I WILL be posting stuff here. I’ll put it all behind the cut, though, and my blog subjects will be not-too-spoilery. :) This is your notice!

The queue still hasn’t popped. In other news, I got Portal Jockey and I’m on a Boat last night!

… yeah, that’s about it for now, I guess. This queue is awful. I think I’ll try my hand at some AV.

In lieu of two posts I want to make…

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

… I joined Twitter.

Which is kind of silly, ’cause I have a “RL” twitter account I don’t really use and another one that I used for quite some time and then a more professional one… and now a WoW one.

I can only imagine my “RL” twitter followers will be relieved to see a distinct lack of WoW tweets from now on, though. ;)

So I’m @kurnmogh over on twitter. Already have connected with someone who had actually apped to Apotheosis back in the day when we were searching desperately for an ele shammy. Kind of a crazy-small world we all live in!

The two posts I want to make will be coming up this week:

1) Spells, downranking and RankWatch.

2) Courtesy and etiquette regarding asking someone to pug a raid with you. (ie: How NOT to piss Kurn the hell off when randomly approaching her in Dalaran, which people apparently don’t know how to do so I’ve turned off my Kingslayer title, you cretins!)

Many thanks to Rilgon, a fellow hunter who feels strongly about his WoW.com representative in a similar way that I do, for talking a bit about Twitter in our recent mails and thereby (perhaps unknowingly) encouraging me to branch out into that brand of social media.

Cool!

Kurn / / blogging, dungeons, lfg, ramblings

Cassandri over at Hots & Dots wrote up a sweet guide to BRD – Prison if you, like many old-school players, know there has to be more to the prison than killing the interogator lady.

As an aside, I’m about 90% sure that the tank and healer combo she refers to in the post consists of my brother (prot pally) and me (disc priest), since we’re on the same battlegroup which makes it possible. Which is just uber coolness in and of itself. My brother was adorably pleased at even the possibility that someone thought he was a rockin’ tank in BRD. What tipped me off was the bit about how they patiently explained how not to aggro the entire damn bar.

Yeah, if that’s not me, I want to meet that person, who was likely the person in charge of attuning their ENTIRE GUILD to MC and Onyxia. The way I was. Curse you, Jailbreak!

(You know, it’s odd. I hated Reginald Windsor. With a passion. But I rescued his stupid ass over 25 times for various groups. Including twice for my friend Majik for reasons that have to do with him being a failure. ;) And now that I can’t rescue him, I find I miss him and the entire Onyxia storyline. Call me crazy, but I always looked forward to Dragonkin Menace, the Burning Steppes quest that started the whole quest chain.)