Monday, October 25, 2010

Hooff

Onaara,

I have some sad news for you. Elder Hooff had a terrible accident. A few days ago Rhonin ( of the Kirin Tor I'm told ), requested a meeting with Hooff. A new gnomish device was invented, one that could transport beings through time. Traveling through time is not unheard of ( the Bronze Dragonflight do it all the time), but to have a device that enables mortals to travel through time is amazing. While clearly it was dangerous, the worst anyone was expecting was that the old dranei would fall out of the sky somewhere ( which to paladin is trivial).

Something went horribly wrong. As Hotplate put it, this is what happened: Rhonin, Hotplate, Waash, even QB, a representative from the Horde as well as the Alliance, along with the Gnome Toshley ( from Toshley Station ) were there to supervise. The first test was simple, send Hooff 5 minutes into the past, in the other side of Dalaran. After the device was activated instead of disappearing ( and later reappearing ), Hooff started to phase in and out. A blood curdling screen rang out, and then a flash of blue then red appeared and Hooff was gone. Toshley contacted the receiving team, but Hooff wasn't there. They then tried to figure out where he was. Rhonin called for mages to scrye, try to locate where Hooff ended up. After the mages reported that his presence was felt nowhere on Azeroth the search was widened to Outland. Finally when all else seemed to fail, the Bronze Dragonflight was involved, to try to locate where in time Hooff may have possibly ended up. Chromie reported that it was very unlikely that Hooff was lost in time as there was no disruption in the flow of time. Even the infinite dragon flight could not mask a disruption.

Rhonin declared that Hooff was simply lost, a victim of technology ahead of its time.

I'm sorry to have had to break the news to you.

- Huntry

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Hot,

Heard from Huntry today, she's taking the news of Hooff's passing as well as can be expected. He was like a father to those twins. I expect to hear from Onaara soon as well, she may even come home for a while. Zoee and I have restocked the manor, in case people show up.

I corroborated the story you told them. I hate keeping secrets from them but I guess its for the best. They can't do anything to help anyway, they might as well get some closure from it.

- Waash

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Bob,

I told the young ones the story you told me to. Waash corroborated the story and it seems like everyone is satisfied with the explanation. Care to explain what I really saw in Dalaran?

- Hot

Friday, October 22, 2010

Housing Update

Fiance and I have been in the house for about 2 weeks now. We've settled in pretty well. The unpacking has slowed down to a crawl. I think this is because we've unpacked enough to live day-to-day. Its amazing how little of the stuff we brought we actually use every day. There's some stuff that would make things more convenient ( doors on the bathrooms, clothes in dressers instead of a pile on the couch, Fiance's shoes, etc), but we're making do. I think tonight will be more of a hardcore unpacking night. We may possibly have people staying over at the end of the month and I don't know if they'll appreciate our certain level of unpackedness(that a word?).

We seems to have reached a compromise in the battle of the server closet. Some background, one of the bedrooms was converted into a den by the previous owners. The closet doors were removed, so there is a space there. Fiance wants to put a cabinet for "office supplies" while I want to put the servers, and server related equipment there. We found a nice modular cabinet/dresser system at Ikea. Our basic idea is to have a tall cabinet in that space for all the assorted equipent (except the servers). The servers themselves will be on top of a smaller, matching dresser thing, out and to the right of the opening. Haven't worked out the measurements but it should work out.

We also got an idea for the dining room. There's a big empty wall that used to contain a large bookcase ( by the previous owners). We don't have THAT many books, so we thought some more modular would be good. We're thinking basically stacking 3 of those modular cabinets on that wall, in different configurations. Then maybe a painting on top.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

4.0.1 the Money Maker and Class Breaker ( kinda )

4.0.1 Hit last week and there has been blog after blog written about it. Many much better written than this one. With that in mind, here's how 4.0.1 affected moi.

Fiance and I moved the Monday before patch day. This means that we didn't have internet again until Wednesday night. Because of this I completely missed out on 24-hours of post-patch mayhem. This was both good and bad, good in that we were able to get enough stuff unpacked to be able to live BEFORE I totally got sucked into WoW. Bad because I missed out on a huge amount of glyph business.

Class Changes


In short, almost all my toons, especially the 80s, underwent huge changes. As of yesterday some still don't even have their specs rebuilt. This is mostly my fault, I've spent far more time making glyphs than actually rebuilding the toons.

Bob, Warlock


Destruction
The destruction rotation is very complicated. Much more complicated that the previous rotation. The old rotation went something like this:

Opener: Life Tap, CoE, Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Conflagrate, Incinerate.
Maintenance: Keep Chaos Bolt and Conflag on cooldown, refresh Immolate as needed, lifetap every 30-40sec to keep the buff up and get mana.

Now:

Opener: Bane of Doom, CoE, Soul Fire, Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Conflagrate, Shadow Flame, Corruption, Incinerate.
Maintenance: Keep Chaos Bolt, Conflag, and Shadow Flame on cooldown, refresh Bane of Doom, Immolate, and Corruption as needed. If Empowered Imp procs then cast Soul Fire. On top of all that use Soul Burn->Soul Fire three times somewhere in the fight. Spam Incinerate otherwise.

The opener has 9 spells, you're keeping 3 on cooldown, refreshing 3 dots, watching for a proc and weaving in 3 big cooldowns. I'm slowly developing the feel of it on a target dummy. Its complicated, and I find myself watching the dot timers and my action bars. On a target dummy the rotation is involved, in a real raid where you have to move around, it would be very difficult, at least at first.

The good part about all this, is the DPS. I'm pulling in 6K when I do the rotation well. Thats pretty crazy considering I was only getting 3-4k pre-patch.

Demonology
With dual-spec being lowered to 100g, I went ahead and got bob a second spec. I've always wanted to try Demonology, its the most utility oriented class, plus who doesn't want to turn into a big purple demon?

The rotation is much easier, but the DPS I was getting was only around 3.5k. Its entirely possible that my gear isn't suited for this spec or that I just don't know the "proper" rotation. Either way, I'll have to work on it and see how things progress.

Hooff, Paladin


Paladins ( and Hunters ) have had the biggest change in terms of class mechanics of the patch. Pallies now have "Holy Power" think mini rogue combo points. For Retribution, the rotation isn't that much more complicated, but it changes the tempo of the class quite a bit.

Rotation: Crusader Strike(CS), Filler, CS, Filler, CS, Templar's Verdict. Filler being Exorcism when Art of War procs, judgements, holy wrath ( which now affects all enemies but stuns undead/demons). Its made the class feel slower, more rigid. Whereas before it was priority and you hit whatever was off cooldown, now you have to wait and try to build up holy points (with crusader strike) as fast as possible to hit with a heavy TV. I have to keep myself from trying to hit the abilities as they come off CD.

Unfortunately melee DPS seems to be down accross the board. I don't know if they've fixed it yet, but that was the scuttlebut on wowinsider and mmochampion.

Holy
I haven't got the courage up to try healing on Hooff yet. The heals have been shifted around and new ones added. Flash of Light is now a big, fast, expensive heal. Holy Light is the slower, small heal. Divine Light is the big, slow nuke heal. Except for the names changing, its not a huge change. Then there's the Holy Power mechanic. Holy Shock is still instant, with a CD, and it heals for a decent amount. It also produces 1 holy power. Word of Glory is instant, has no mana cost, but consumes all your Holy Power. The more holy power the more it heals. So this leads to the scenario where you want to use Holy Shock all the time to build up HP to get mana-free healing using WoG. There's also Light of Dawn, which is a Cone type AOE heal.

I haven't actually tried healing with this new toolbox so I don't know how anything feels. My old playstyle heavily favored Holy Shock + Flash of Light combos so that should be easy enough to convert to Holy Shock + Holy Light. Remembering to use WoG will come with time. From what I've heard, the mana pools are so large ( from the SP->Int conversion) that using Flash of Light won't drain your mana much at all.

Hotplate, Death Knight


Blood Tanking
I haven't even respec'd her yet. I forsee that it shouldn't be a huge change for me, since I was already blood tanking pre-patch. There might be new abilities, or name changes but it should be ok. With that said, I haven't built up the bravery or inclination to try tanking with her yet.

Frost Dual-Weild DPS
I just spec'd her into dual wield DPS yesterday. To be honest I really just like seeing a character go to town on a monster with two weapons. With 2pcT9 dps with a bunch of tanking gear, plus a tanking 1hander, I was pulling 2.5k DPS on a target dummy. Pretty low, but to be expected considering my gear and inexperience with the spec.

Waash Druid


To be perfectly honest Waash has spent the majority of the time creating Glyphs. Though I did get around to specing him back into tanking. I even tried tanking a few heroics. The biggest change? Swipe now has a 6sec CD. Thats an eternity for an ability that used to be spam'd with no cooldown. It makes getting AOE threat much much more involved. Now I still use swipe on every cooldown, but I have to be smarter when I use it. For example, during a pull I have to make sure that first swipe gets EVERY mob, so that I can get some initial threat. After that I'll throw a mangle on the first target, then tab-target a lacerate on each mob until swipe is back off CD. Eventually either every mob will have the complete set of debuffs or they'll be dead.
I'll mix in Maul if I'm falling behind in threat and/or I have plenty of rage.

Onaara Shaman


Probably the least affected toon. DPS is exactly the same as before. Healing did take some getting used to, but mostly the same spells, just different named. No more Lesser Healing Wave. Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave (new) have the same cast time, but different heal and mana costs. With the SP->Int conversion I have a huge mana pool now. I rarely have to drink, and even spamming chain heal barely dents the mana bar. This will probably change at 85, but at 73 its awesome.

Glyphs-mas


Even with the 24-hour late start, glyphs have been selling. I had about a guild tab full of icethorn going into the patch. This was by chance from when I used to do glyphs before my last hiatus. Those herbs came in handy. Once I got my auction addon working ( ZeroAuctions instead of QuickAuctions), I looked around. Most glyphs were going for 100+ some weren't even on the AH. I set my fallback to 200G ( just in case ) and made all the expensive glyphs I could. I chewed through those herbs in a few hours. Everything was selling. I made 8k that first night, which was nothing compared to the 20-30k other people were making that prepared.

I'm still creating glyphs, I predict that it'll still be easy profitable for another few days. Once most of the glyphs drop below the threshold I'll have to make a decision on whether I want to continue or just get out and enjoy my profits.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Paddling News

Winter Off-season has hit for paddling. It's hit pretty hard. Because of the weather, its hard to get out on the water more than once a week, sometimes none at all. There were some highlights though.

PIFA 2010

PIFA was a big success. It was my first time going. I stayed for all of the first day ( Saturday). The usual suspects were there, Fiance, Uncle, Auntie, Victor, Mica, Princess, etc. One of the Keiki's put on the gourd helmets, which helped to attract attention. MN was leading the charge getting everyone signed up for the intro paddle the following weekend. All in all we got about 6 pages of emails/info for people interested in trying it out that day. If we even get a percentage of that to show up at the intro-paddle its going to be huge. I heard that over the 2 days we got over 13 pages worth of emails.

Intro Paddle 10/02/2010

The most intro paddlers I've seen at one place ever. By last count there were 50 people there. Because of time constraints we didn't do a double-hull, just had all 4 going out constantly. There was rarely a time where a canoe was sitting on the beach. Fiance, and all the other steersmen were very busy that day. Uncle did his introduction speech and paddling basics. It was longer than normal, probably cause there were so many people that he put in quite a bit of culture into the course. There wasn't near enough Wa'a to take everyone out at once so people had to take turns. IKOCC provided seats 1 and 6, the rest were intro people.

True to Uncle's word, we were having a nice luau when a Regatta breaks out. Some of the intro paddlers, a group of 6 to be exact, wanted to go out again, this time racing. This started it off, soon every canoe was lining up and putting on a small sprint race. When I saw the 5 guys going out again, I grabbed Rog and Fiance and got a crew together to race against them. Needless to say we killed them, but the intro people in our canoe loved it.

I think we've stumbled into something to get people even more interested in joining the club, and racing in general. These little mock sprints are short enough ( and exciting enough) to get people going. But they're also short enough that they don't feel discouraged when they're being left behind. Something like deanza to the bowling pin and back would be wayyy too long and take too much time.