Category: general

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 13

Kurn / / achievements, blogging, classic instances, classic loot, general, ramblings

I am, unfortunately, working this weekend, so this may be shortish. I’m not American, so working on July 4th didn’t bug me, but oof, I don’t like working weekends. Alas, it’s the nature of the career I’m in, so occasional weekend shifts are just something to expect and then deal with.

Topic 1:

I never have enough Azeroot, but that’s largely because I don’t farm anywhere near as much as I used to. So last night, I thought hey, let’s do a quick lap or two around Harandar on the druid. Maybe level him up to 88 since he’s so close, and get some more herbs.

Well, I ended up getting mostly Tranquility Bloom and Sanguithorn, but the fun thing I did was kill Annulus the Worldshaker. He had like 3.5 million health. But I saw him and I thought… well, I’m a tank, aren’t I? Let’s see how OP druids really are. (I mean, I’m sure I could have survived on a paladin, but probably not a warrior, so let’s see how the druid does.) So here’s a screenshot of my stats about halfway through the fight, which definitely took more than ten minutes.

So yeah, level 87, 143 ilvl, lots of cooldowns, and maybe halfway through the fight. Honestly, it wasn’t difficult, it was just long.

It went on so long that rarescanner or whatever it is alerted me about him again. I had been fighting him the whole time! 😂

Also, fun fact, he casts some sort of “sludge”, I think it is, at you, but it’s a movement speed debuff. It shouldn’t bother you too much if you don’t interrupt it. He does cast a couple of earthquake things, but you have plenty of time to get out of them if you are, you know, paying attention.

So that was fun. I like doing stupid things on my various toons.

Topic 2:

Still farming instances for transmog, still selling a few items every week. Certainly enough to make it worthwhile, even though I’m disenchanting so much. Actually, since Greater Eternal Essences are hovering anywhere between 18-24g each, it’s actually more worthwhile these days.

Topic 3:

The goal for this week is to use the WoW API to download my achievements and review them. The UI is crap for that, even the armory site is pretty gross in terms of the interface. So I’m gonna download them and present them in a way that doesn’t suck (locally on my own computer) and then see what I can do with them. What achievements are worthy of a Storytime with Kurn video? What achievements am I missing? What achievements do I want to … achieve?

What about you, folks? What are you up to in WoW this week?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 11

Kurn / / blogging, general, gold, ramblings

Shockingly, I am posting this on a Sunday! Will wonders never cease?

I can’t believe it’s Sunday already and I have to go back to work tomorrow. We built the world wrong, gang. SIGH.

Topic 1:

I need a challenge of sorts to do. Please give me one.

I probably won’t continue with my Whelplocked challenge because it’s basically boring, which is something I’m realizing now. Did Kurn get the whelp or not? And how long does someone have to watch to see if Kurn got the whelp? Boring. So give me a challenge! Or many challenges and I’ll pick one! Please? Pretty please? I’ve got 7 days left on my current token, so I’m looking for something to do. (And I’m intrigued by “heroic” world stuff, but not sure if that’ll be enough to keep me interested.)

Topic 2:

Speaking of challenges, I started watching this guy doing two challenges simultaneously. He is trying to get 1 million gold (in cash) on a toon solely from what he gets out of Scarlet Monestary (on Sokratez) and 1 million gold (in cash) on a toon solely from what he gets out of Zul’Farrak (on Bofades). He’s about 11% of the way there on Bofades (the Troll druid) and maybe 8% (?) of the way there on Sokratez (the Worgen druid), but Sokratez has looted some sweet drops, so that challenge could be over any day now, if one of those sweet drops sells. Anyway, it’s SUPER interesting, so go check it out. Episodes out almost every day, each is about 10 minutes long.

For funsies, I’ve started running old-school SM armory and cath and have gotten some decent drops too. Nothing amazing, but hopefully some of this stuff will sell. I’ve got alts on other servers to help with that, too.

Topic 3: 

Anything you want me to talk about for Storytime? Perhaps one of these would be interesting to tell:

– The history of me and Majik

– The Night Kurn Drank Red Haterade

– Why I rolled Madrana (holy paladin)

Let me know!

 

    Missing data…!

    Kurn / / blogging, facepalm, general, ramblings

    Well, well, well. What do we have here? It’s a case of missing data.

    I could die of not surprise.

    So, a couple of weeks ago, I went to Sunwell Plateau on my hunter. And I recorded it, but the sound was unrecoverable, so I recorded a new video, which is here. In both videos, I noted that something was really messed up with my rep, because Kurn couldn’t wear the “of the Shattered Sun” title, despite being exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive, and also the tabard (which required exalted to buy and wear!) didn’t show up in my tabard options for transmog.

    Doing other things at the time (like running Sunwell and narrating for you folks), I was like, whatever, I’ll figure it out later.

    Figured some of it out today, when I finally figured out how to open a real ticket and not some bug report that is just going to die quietly on a to-do list somewhere at Blizz HQ.

    First, I didn’t own a tabard of the Shattered Sun. Which is plainly horseshit. I ran around wearing that tabard for months! And apparently I don’t own the shields either? Also horseshit, because I used them for months (on Madrana) so like… wtf.

    So some of my items are legitimately missing outside of stuff that was yoinked from me during the Great Blizzard Bank Heist. It is possible that I tossed the tabard on Madrana, but I wouldn’t do that on Kurn. Kurn has an exceptional collection of tabards and shirts and I love them! And I wouldn’t just junk them!

    Anyway, ran up to the Shattered Sun staging grounds and got me a tabard. Madrana can now wear it and Kurn can transmog into it… but so can my dwarf shammy. Who is emphatically not exalted. So transmog doesn’t required rep? Interesting.

    Still, even with the tabard able to be selected, Kurn still can’t select the title, while Madrana can, and the shammy cannot (as intended).

    Folks, something happened to my data at some point!

    I have a missing tabard and a missing title on Kurn.

    Then, on Madrana, I have at least some missing items (like the Shattered Sun shields).

    Who knows what else I’m missing on those or my other characters?

    Am I pissed? No. I’m a little annoyed. BUT, I said to myself, this is what happens when you trust The System. Not only do they own everything, but they host everything, and that means you will lose data. Just like the Great Blizzard Bank Heist. Why? Because the people running the show can’t be bothered to back up data that’s lost. I honestly don’t care that I had to spend a whole 80 silver on a new tabard. I do still care that I had a couple of thousand of dragonscales I couldn’t farm back in less than a decade of running BWL weekly to skin Chromaggus. 52 weeks in a year, ten years, I could feasibly rebuild my ~2k of dragonscales of various colours. But why bother when they can all just vanish again when a patch goes out?

    When I returned to the game, I had three rules for myself:

    1) Don’t pay these people a dime of your money.

    2) Play and have fun. If you’re not having fun, stop playing.

    3) Never forget that your data is not your data. It’s their data.

    And on a related note, did you folks hear about the poor person who was (originally) permabanned after 20 years?

    Original YouTube video here

    Update here

    Basically, the individual wants to know what actions made Blizzard get out the big ol’ banhammer. He has no idea. He’s appealed several times and got his ban lowered to 6 months, but now is questioning why return to the game when the ban expires? Apparently “other players” reported him for various actions that can get you banned and he has absolutely no clue as to why that might have happened. All he wants to do is understand and then get the issue resolved. Of course, as usual, Blizzard isn’t giving any details.

    He’s decided to file consumer complaints. He’s based in Norway, but is originally from the US (I think) and has form letters linked for both countries’ consumer advocate organizations.

    In the US, this is typically the Better Business Bureau. However, Blizzard is not accredited with them, so any complaints probably don’t need to be handled. Still, Blizzard does respond to these:

    https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/irvine/profile/wholesale-video-games/blizzard-entertainment-inc-1126-13050668/complaints

    There are hundreds of pages just like this and that’s just the last three years. They have a 1 star rating pretty consistently throughout everything. It shows that Blizzard’s interests and ours (the players’) are not aligned.

    You play this game, it’s by their rules. They don’t have to do anything. They can gaslight you into next week with their vague and obscure references to logs and analyses. They can boot you off their servers never to be seen again with absolutely zero warning.

    Or, they can steal your bank.

    Or your shields.

    Or your tabard.

    Or your title.

    It’s all the same. Because we play on their servers, our data is theirs to manage (or mismanage) as they please. And that goes for bans that are upheld with no real proof as well as dealing with canned responses from shitty Customer “Support” people. (I’ve worked in support spaces for 12+ years and I would never treat a customer of mine as poorly as Blizzard has treated me, or thousands of others, in the past.)

    You want to play legitimately, you gotta play by their rules. No matter what they do to your characters, your inventory, your achievements, your reputation, your account.

    Just a reminder to us all.

    Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 8

    Kurn / / blogging, general, ramblings

    Brace yourselves — I actually opened WoW for more than auction stuff this week! hahaha!

    I’d been watching a video a few weeks ago about rare titles, and that video basically got me thinking about titles, and it also encouraged me to watch a video series about this one guy Barny on a Classic server and the title Scarab Lord.

    Scarab Lord is a wild title. The things necessary to get the title are absolutely bonkers.

    So I visited Silithus (old world version) on Kurn and recorded a little video which is the first of a series in which I tell a story or two. Or three. It’ll be called Storytime with Kurn. And so my first stories have to do with Scarab Lord and the Brood of Nozdormu and such.

    I may rerecord it because I think I rambled too much, so I need to rewatch it before I post it anywhere, and then potentially rerecord it, but expect it this week at my YouTube channel!

    ETA: Here’s the link, I didn’t rerecord it:

    Let me know what zones/dungeons/etc you want to hear my stories about. Anything from Vanilla to Cataclysm is valid.

    Haven’t done much else and don’t have a lot of thoughts today, but let me know what stories you want to hear, go subscribe to my YouTube channel, and I’ll do what I can to get stories up weekly-ish. :)

    Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 7

    Kurn / / apotheosis, general, raiding, ramblings

    Once again, didn’t do much to do with WoW this week. Part of it is the hockey playoffs. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, is still in the Stanley Cup playoffs as I write this. They may be eliminated Monday night, or they may move on to the third (of four) rounds. Who knows? It’s been a weird playoffs.

    The other part is a lack of motivation. I feel like there’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get anything in terms of gear, so I’m just… not doing a lot? Maybe?

    Still, as usual, I have things to say. :) (And I’ll note I started this entry on Sunday even though as I finish it, it’s now Monday. But I have Monday off for Victoria Day so I’m still going to pretend it’s Sunday.)

    Topic 1: The Old Days

    I had a former guildie, Aaza (hi Aaza!), comment on my last post. She’d wanted to know if I had a copy of our Illidan kill. That kill happened in, uh, like August or September of 2008. And I had it! I didn’t realize it was set to unlisted, so I set it to public and linked to it. (Thanks to Dayden for frapsing it and putting together the video!)

    That someone, from that old version of Apotheosis, wanted to see our Illidan kill, was kind of interesting to me. I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently. Not nostalgic enough to do all of that GMing/raiding/etc again, mind you! But nostalgic enough to feel as though some of the memories my guild and I had made together really meant something to people at the time. So to have Aaza pop in and be like “hi!!!” was really lovely, because it sort of validated that I hadn’t wasted my time back in Burning Crusade. (Or in Cata, for that matter.)

    Topic 2: I miss… something

    Growing up, I read. I read, I played video games, I called local bulletin board systems… and, of course, being a teenage girl, I talked on the phone a lot. But I never really had much interest in joining a sports team. I didn’t really feel the need. I got a lot of my social needs met just by hanging out with friends and stuff, and then dating, later on.

    But the school I’d gone to for eleven years of my life (grades 1-11!) had taught me a lot about teamwork and leadership. We were separated into different houses (yes, like Hogwart’s — and, btw, fuck JK Rowling for being a transphobic piece of shit!), and so we were forced to participate in teams to do with the houses for various things. Two of my closest friends from school weren’t in my grade. They were in the grade below me — and both were on my house. And we’re still close to this day. One of them is my RL Friend the Resto Druid I have mentioned dozens of times on this very blog!

    So when I joined Fated Heroes in, oh boy, like late 2005… I was kind of all-in. It was the first time I’d really been part of a team. And, naturally, I wanted to be helpful. Back then, I was in learning mode. I wanted to know everything about how the game worked. Absolutely everything. I think I reached my peak knowledge of the game in Wrath, when I learned about parry thrashes.

    We lost my brother to a rival guild, who was already actively raiding, while Fated Heroes was… fated to stand around a lot. ;) But I worked hard to bring information to the guild, put up a forum for us, dropped info for attunements, T0 gear drops, etc. And we slowly but surely got to the point where we raided. We never had 40 people in a raid (well, maybe once, but that wasn’t even all our guild) and we didn’t clear MC or kill Ony (do not get me started on the warrior who claimed to me he had like 3000 defense when, in fact, that was how much ARMOR he had), but we cleared all of ZG, including Jindo the Hexxar and such. And we did spawn Majordomo Executus in MC. And we did get Ony down to like, 20ish percent. It was just a rough time to get everyone used to raiding on these days at these times when most people had only joined for fun. Still, I pushed as much as I could. I got so many people attuned to everything way back then.

    Why?

    These people in Fated Heroes, they were my team. And if I knew one thing from my schooling, it was that the sum of the parts of a team are a greater force than the individual parts alone. I believed we could do anything we set our minds to doing.

    That was really my first taste of real teamwork in an environment where I cared about the result. If my house lost at floor hockey to another house during 7:45am inter-house games at school, I honestly didn’t care. But if my guild didn’t get Venoxis down? I cared. If my guild didn’t get Lucifron down? I cared. If people in my guild didn’t loot their goddamn Core Hounds? I very much cared. ;)

    So that’s the feeling I’m missing right now. I’m not super into any online communities right now. I’m not even really into any offline communities right now. I am missing a sense of belonging to a team. And I’m not sure where to get it.

    And it always makes me think about WoW, because WoW is the place in my life where I have put everything I had into running good teams. Whether it was the guild as a whole, just the healers, just the hunters, whatever. I gave it my all.

    I’m not saying I want to give my all to something, mind you. I don’t have the time or even the energy for that these days.

    But I do miss something team-like.

    Topic 3: Rabid end-stage capitalism will be the end of us all.

    Between billionaires and AI, I have come to the conclusion that we are not only fucked, we’re super fucked.

    Eat the rich. And if you can’t, tax them.

    For the first time in my entire life, I have wanted to be offline more than online lately. And you have to understand something about me — I have been terminally online forever. For decades. I started using the Internet in 1994. That’s over 30 years ago. And while I’ve certainly managed to create, you know, a life for myself, I work in tech, and I work remotely, and I have done so for the last decade. (another 2 years spent in an office at a startup here in Montreal, so 12 years in tech.)

    But the more I think about tech and the world and where it’s all going, the less I even want to sit down at my computer.

    Who would have thought that AI (and the billionaires, let’s not forget those motherfuckers) would be the thing to push me away from online? Who would have thought that something I’d always enjoyed thinking about (in a very “someday in the future” sense) would come to be and be one of the worst blights on humanity?

    Sometimes I do wish I could just live at my parents’ cottage for the rest of my days. Read. Canoe. Write. Even go swimming, occasionally, despite the fact that the lake is fed by mountain streams and is always bitterly cold.

    And yet, we have to at least play along with the capitalism that is eating us all alive, because we have to do things like pay for rent. And food. And everything else that comes with being a human in the early 21st century.

    It’s a major bummer.

    What are your thoughts, gang? What’s on your mind?

    The Great Blizzard Bank Heist

    Kurn / / facepalm, general, the war within

    Hi folks, long time no talk. I have a lot of updates for you which I hope to get to this coming weekend.

    In the meantime, please take a look at the latest video on my YouTube channel, which is entitled The Great Blizzard Bank Heist. If you’re not aware, a lot of people have had stuff vanish out of their guild banks since the pre-expansion patch hit. We’re talking decades’ worth of stuff at this point. I’ve lost two full tabs worth of stuff (ALL MY DRAGONSCALES, all kinds of rare and no longer obtainable patterns) and only realized it late last week. CHECK YOUR BANKS, see if anything is missing. If anything is, let’s make some noise about it and try to get Blizzard to do the right thing.

    Thank you.

    WoW Classic & Rose-Coloured Glasses

    Kurn / / classic, general, professions

    Hi, folks! How the heck are you? How’ve you been in the last, oh, two and a half years?

    Overall, I’ve been doing well. However, an update on my life is not while I’m writing today. No, today, I’m writing because I can’t sleep and because WoW Classic is coming out on August 27, 2019.

    Naturally, I am psyched. Anyone who has spent any appreciable amount of time reading this blog or listening to various podcasts of mine will be wholly unsurprised that I am psyched. (Also, my brother is psyched! TOGETHER, WE ARE SO EXCITED.)

    That said, since the launch date announcement was made, I’ve been wondering if the 13ish years or so since I first started playing WoW (October of 2005) have perhaps dulled my memory a little.

    I know that I have rarely had as much fun in this game as during the Tier 0.5 questline. The thrill of getting my Rhok’delar is still, to this day, a highlight of my WoW career, if you will. Downing Venoxis for the first time on April 1, 2006 (no, for real!) was amazing because it was my first real raid boss down. So I had a lot of fun back in the day. Just the fact that I have frequently said “back in the day” over the course of the last decade or more proves that I have some very, very fond memories of Vanilla WoW.

    However, having played Vanilla WoW for more than a year before Burning Crusade came out, I remember a lot of things that, well, sucked. I thought I’d write a bit about them here. Now, it’s important to note that I am not in the Classic Beta, so if you are, please feel free to let me know if I’m dreadfully wrong about something. What I’m talking about is based entirely on my Vanilla experiences and memories, and perhaps some Wowhead Classic info.

    Getting to 60

    Listen, I don’t care who you are, or how much you love levelling — getting to 60 was a grind in Vanilla. For quite some time, there weren’t enough quests in the world to get you to 60. A common happening was people getting a couple of stacks of mage food and water (yes, separate stacks, if they were mana users!) and hitting up the Eastern Plaguelands for a few hours. Regularly. Now, I know that they did fix this at some point and I would presume that’s prior to the patch we’ll be starting at, but it was still a pain to get to 60. It took me 30 days played — full, actual, real days of my life — to get to 60 on Kurn. It took me less time on Madrana, but I did get a lot of experience by healing my way through dungeons.

    Mounts

    No mount until you’re 40, no epic mount until you’re 60 and you should expect to spend a fair amount of money on that epic mount unless you’re exalted with your Alterac Valley faction. Or a paladin, in which case get ready for an epic quest chain that culminates in a really difficult fight in Scholomance. Or a warlock, in which case you should expect a truly insane quest chain that ends with craziness in Dire Maul. (Why yes, I HAVE healed both of these encounters on my paladin, thank you for asking.)

    Combat Ratings/Stats/Skills

    Defense rating. Hit rating. Parry thrashes. Alllllll of these were things you had to be aware of. Now, to be fair, I only ever made sure I was hit-capped when I was fighting Magmadar in Molten Core, because I had learned Tranquilizing Shot from the drop off Lucifron, so it didn’t really make too much of a difference to me until I realized its importance in Burning Crusade. But defense rating mattered if you were a tank. Knowing you could get parry-thrashed was literally something I only learned in Wrath of the Lich King, but has been around since Vanilla. Oh, and who can forget weapon skill?

    Hot tip: if you’re level 60, go to the Blasted Lands and beat on the Servants of Allistarj around the Dark Portal for a couple of hours to grind up your weapon skills. They’re basically unkillable unless you kill the thingy they’re bound to, so you can keep beating on them to level up your weapon. Or, better yet, work on your weapon skills as you go, swapping weapons whenever possible to make sure you get them up there. There is little that feels more like you’re wasting all of your time than upping your weapon skills.

    Ammo

    Dear hunters, Blizzard hates you and, as such, you have to use a dedicated bag slot as a quiver or ammunition pouch and you have to use arrows or bullets. Well, you don’t have to, I don’t think, but you should because most of those quivers/pouches have a ranged hasted bonus. Also, ammo could be expensive! There was rep-based ammo you could buy that did more damage than the typical stuff, but hooooo boy, was it expensive. Also, you could run out of ammo. ALWAYS CHECK YOUR AMMO. (Who me, speak from experience? Never!)

    Reagents

    Mages had to carry Arcane Powder for Arcane Brilliance. They also had to carry Runes of Teleportion and Runes of Portals. Paladins had to carry Symbols of Kings for all their greater blessings (which only lasted 15 minutes apiece, FYI – compared to the normal ones that lasted 5 minutes!), plus Symbols of Divinity for Divine Intervention. (Okay, real talk, I HAVE MISSED DIVINE INTERVENTION SO MUCH AND I WILL HAPPILY CARRY ANYTHING I HAVE TO IN ORDER TO CAST IT AGAIN.) And so on for druids and Gift of the Wild/rebirth (battle rez) and and priests and fortitude. Basically, if you had a buff, you had a reagent for the longer version of it.

    Spell Ranks

    Now, let’s be clear — I always trained up my spell ranks and I made great use of spell down-ranking, particularly as a holy paladin, so to me, this isn’t something that was unpleasant. However, other people not training their spell ranks was a thorn in my side throughout, well, my entire WoW career until they removed ranks entirely.

    Keys

    Again, I loved the hell out of my keys. I really, truly, absolutely did. What I did not love was the bag space they took. In my research, I see that the keyring was added in Patch 1.11.0, so this should be available in WoW Classic, once you get your first key. This is good because no one wants to wait for someone to fly all the way back to Ironforge to get the key they left in their bank so that they could enter the instance. Which instance? MANY INSTANCES required keys. The back door to Stratholme required a key. Dire Maul North and West required keys. Scholomance required a key. UBRS didn’t only require a key, it required you to FORGE the Unadorned Seal of Ascension with gems from bosses in LBRS and then it became a RING. At least the patch we’re starting out with has a bunch of Unadorned Seals dropping and many gem drops in LBRS.

    I should note that Engineers with a Powerful Seaforium Charge or rogues with levelled lockpicking could open most locked doors.

    Rep & Cooldowns & Professions

    Kurn was a skinner/leatherworker from day one. In the last 13 odd years, I’ve dropped skinning for mining on at least two separate occasions. I always come back to skinning. And it served me well in Vanilla! I was a dragonscale leatherworker (and thus made FREQUENT trips out to Peter Galen in freaking AZSHARA) and could craft the entire Black Dragonscale Mail set. Actually, Kurn can still craft every single dragonscale recipe in the game, thank you very much. And even the Red Dragonscale Breastplate, the recipe for which only dropped off of General Drakkisath in UBRS. But it was a pain to get to 300 skinning and especially hard to get to 300 leatherworking. What was more of a pain was doing the various rep grinds to get those sweet patterns.

    • Timbermaw Hold to Revered to get all kinds of feral Druid leather patterns
    • Thorium Brotherhood to Revered for all kinds of fire resist stuff including Black Dragonscale Boots
    • Cenarion Circle to Exalted to get nature resist stuff and some sweet agility mail

    I don’t think I did quite all of that at the time. I probably got to Honored with Timbermaw and definitely got to Honored with Thorium Brotherhood. To be fair, I did not have it bad. I did have a cooldown (Refined Deeprock Salt – every three days!) and not a ton of rep to grind.

    However. Did you know that it takes two Felcloth to make one Mooncloth? And that you can only make one Mooncloth every four days? And that the recipe for Mooncloth is only available once you reach Friendly with the Timbermaw?

    There are a lot of things that no longer have cooldowns that once did, and the grinds for the reps are a lot harder than they once were. Exalted with Timbermaw can take you a day now, but back then? Back then, it was a months-long undertaking.

    Oh, and one other thing — flasks were super rare because you could only make them at an alchemy lab. That meant either Scholomance or Blackwing Lair.

    Respecs

    This was pre-dual spec. And respeccing cost gold. And it got quite expensive to swap back and forth. It wasn’t uncommon for people to level as one spec and then eventually respec into their “raid spec” that they would use more frequently. For example, when my brother hit 60 on his druid, he went from being a life-long bear to being a resto druid. This is about when he started levelling a rogue…

    Meanwhile, I levelled my paladin as holy from day one. It took me forever to kill things, but damn, did I ever know how to heal things. Back in the day, a holy priest as known as the only kind of healer you really wanted in a dungeon with you. I did a Strat UD run at like, 56 or something on Madrana as holy, wearing a bunch of Blue Dragonscale mail (didn’t have the bonuses that came with wearing all plate back then), and the ret pally in our group, who had been a bit wary of me, was like “HOLY CRAP, I HAD NO IDEA PALLIES COULD HEAL SO WELL”. Honestly, the fact that any healer can heal any instance these days is something I’ll miss, because it was legitimately difficult to heal a bunch of things as a paladin back in the day.

    And?

    There are other pains from Vanilla, I’m certain of it. These are a few. And I don’t even mind a lot of them. But they’re things that came up as “oh mannnnnn” moments as I’ve been thinking about Classic.

    What are you looking forward to most about Classic? What are you least looking forward to about it? Are you even going to play Classic?

    Changes Coming

    Kurn / / general, guide, kurn.info, kurncast, ramblings

    For those of you who are unaware, I haven’t had a full-time, steady job in quite some time. I was in university for longer than I probably should have been, supplemented income with web clients and such, had a fortunate thing happen to me which allowed me to not worry about money for a while and, since graduating from university, I’ve been looking for work.

    While looking for work, I’ve explored different avenues for making money. Among them, my guides. I’ve also done some web work and have complained (at length) on Twitter about some nightmarish clients.

    Today, I was officially offered a position for full-time work in my field (!) (no details for you guys yet, sorry!) and, because I am not stupid, I accepted it.

    What this means for me:

    • Working Monday to Friday from 9am-6pm
    • Going to bed no later than midnight Sunday-Thursday
    • ZOMG A STEADY PAYCHEQUE
    • A distinct lack of this thing called “free time”

    What this means for you:

    Definite interruption in content production. Specifically:

    • Changes to the podcast schedule. I’ve been releasing most episodes on Sunday night/Monday morning. This may change to something like Sunday afternoon or Monday evening.
    • A delay in my guides. I wanted to release my Raid Leader’s Guide in August/early September. That is almost certainly not going to happen now. As of right now, before even starting work, I’m thinking we’re looking at late October/early November. On the plus side, it will almost certainly beat Warlords of Draenor to release. ;)
    • A delay in my Sneak Peeks. I generally write for my guides and then look over the content and select 2000-3000 words for sneak peeks and release those every week. Well, most weeks. With the interview process and such this week, I had no time to write, much less release a sneak peek. The best way to be kept up to date on my guides and sneak peeks is by signing up for my announcement list. With an upcoming bizarre schedule, I’ll do my best to aim for a new sneak peek every two weeks, but I can’t promise anything yet.
    • Possibly more blogging (?!) just so I have an outlet to talk about WoW stuff — assuming I have time to still play WoW.

    Crap. I just realized that I may not be able to pull an all-nighter when Warlords comes out. That’d be a first for me. (Well, not really. I wasn’t here for the launch of Mists, but that’s because I was in Italy.) Oh, well, a steady paycheque makes a lot of things worth it. ;)

    Anyhow, that’s what’s going on with me. I’m very careful about keeping my “real life” away from my “WoW life” and I didn’t give out any of my WoW-related stuff to my new employer, but I want to remain very vague about things anyhow (hence all the [REDACTED] tweets on Twitter!).

    So that’s what’s going on with me. I’m really excited about this and will spend some time planning stuff out. With any luck, there won’t be too large a disruption to stuff you’ve come to expect from me.

    That said, there should be a new Kurncast this Sunday night/Monday morning, by the way, and look for content (YouTube?) about the new Naxx “adventure” in Hearthstone after it comes out on Tuesday! (I’m seriously so excited about PVE coming to Hearthstone. I realize this makes me a little sad. I’m okay with that.)

    Hope you’re all doing well. :)

    Episode 10 of the Kurncast

    Kurn / / beta, general, kurncast, podcast

    Welcome to episode 10 of the Kurncast!

    This week:

    – Realm Maintenance (by Rho) hit 100 episodes!
    – I got my “legendary” cloak!
    – I went along with Dayani, Magdalena, Crazzarc and Tikari to the new UBRS in the Warlords of Draenor Beta.
    – Rob Pardo leaves Blizzard — related to the recent outcry and discussion about minority representation?
    – Huge grats to Apotheosis of Eldre’Thalas for downing Heroic Garrosh 25 on July 6!

    Finally, if you’re in need of webhosting, please do consider Bluehost! If you use this affiliate link, you’d also be helping to support me in various WoW-related efforts. I’d really appreciate it, thank you. :)

    [bha size=’160×40′ variation=’03’ align=’none’]